by Kim Savage
I sit up slowly, frowning. “Why would you say that?”
“Slow news cycle.” Ricker rushes over her words. “Or they might try to make a big deal out of the one-year anniversary. It’s less than two weeks away.”
“I’m aware.”
“You need to be prepared to reject them completely.”
“You make it sound as if I actually like the attention.”
“I simply want to be clear about where you should put your energy in the days ahead. The media is in the business of selling stories. Our business is healing you.”
I consider pointing out that, unlike the media, not one of the persons supposedly concerned with my healing has used the word brave to describe what I did. As in, Brave Teen Saves Friend, Brave Girl Fights Off Predator, or Lucky Teen Escapes Attacker Because of Brave Friend. Nor do they take advantage of the delightful wordplay my name affords: Meet Julia Spunk, a teen whose name suits her perfectly.
“If your business is healing me, then isn’t it in your interest that I stay broken?”
“Maybe I’m not being clear. I’m advising your mother that you should stay away from all press.”
Deep in my belly, the black thing shifts. “I can handle it,” I insist.
“When it comes to the press, it’s your mother’s job to handle it. I know it’s hard to hear this, but the work we have to do is here, in this room.” She sits back and sweeps her hand in front of her head—“Here”—and her chest—“And here.”
She’s losing my favor fast. I roll my eyes so hard I see stars. “We’re done, right?”
Ricker nods, tucking her lips. I scramble off the couch and yank my cuff down to cover the metal doorknob, one of many tricks for never being cold again. The door opens and there is Mom, a shudder through her springy, dark curls.
“I apologize! It was me knocking,” she calls to Ricker, then leans in and says in her shrink-shop undertone: “I need a few minutes to catch up with Dr. Ricker, and I wanted to make sure she had time for me before her next appointment.”
“Sorry I used every minute. I won’t do it again,” I say.
Her smile falls. “You can’t think I minded.”
“I didn’t. I was teasing.”
“Oh!” She reaches to smooth my hair, then stops. “I won’t be long.”
I watch Mom slide through the door, a sliver of a woman, birdlike, with a small head and hollow bones. I take over her chair, feeling ungainly, stretch my legs, and scan the room, daring someone to say something. A fat kid with emo hair and a mole on his cheek points his phone at my head and takes a photo.
“For real? I’m right here!” I lean over my knees. “I. Can. See. You.”
He jams the phone into his jacket and rises, shuffling over to a receptionist talking into a headpiece. He begs her for the men’s room key, which she shoves through a glass arch. The last thing I need is this loser posting my photo for his pals to ogle. I trail him into the bathroom and kick open the door.
“Give me your phone.”
“This is the men’s room, freak!”
The black thing in my belly flicks. “Give it or I’ll send that mole to the other side of your face.”
“Here.” He holds it up. “Look, I’m deleting it.”
I swipe the phone from his doughy hand and pitch it over the stall wall. His eyes widen at the porcelain clatter, followed by a plop.
“What the…?”
I harden my gut. “Now it’s deleted.”
His mouth opens and shuts soundlessly. Finally, he stalks into the stall, reappearing with his dripping phone. “What do you even care if I send your picture to a couple of my friends?” He pulls paper towels from the holder on the wall. “It’s not like your face isn’t going to be back all over the news by the end of the day.”
I remember Ricker’s weird warnings. What are she and this dork talking about? I squint at him.
He wraps his phone inside a mealy towel wad, shaking his head. “Who would ever guess that in person, you’d be such a bitch?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, if anything, I’d expect you’d be super happy. Grateful, even.”
“Grateful?” I hiss, my breath hot behind my teeth. “That’s rich.”
“Yeah, grateful. Most people would feel lucky they got out alive.”
I snort, an ugly noise that echoes off the stalls and lingers. “Thank you so much for putting everything into perspective for me, Moleman. What am I even seeing Elaine Ricker for? I could just come see you! But here’s the thing.” I poke his soft shoulder. “Dr. Ricker isn’t a fan of her patients showing up on the Internet. Pictures of them at her office and whatnot. It’s a violation of patient confidentiality. I wonder how she’ll take your little transgression. Drop you as a client, I imagine.”
He jabs his sausage finger in the air at me. “Oh man. Now I get it.”
“Sorry, too harsh? You prefer your abductees with cream and sugar?”
“You haven’t seen the news, have you?”
“I’ve been the news, Dough Boy. And I can tell you, it sucks. So no, I don’t watch much of it these days.”
The mole slides toward his ear in a sickening grin. “Then you don’t know about the body.”
* * *
The video is at the top of the WFYT Web site. I tap Play on my phone’s touchscreen. Hometown gal–slash–glamorous ladyanchor Paula Papademetriou ticks her voice down a notch, the way she does when she’s talking about Nor’easters, school shootings, and Liv and me: “A couple out walking their dog early this morning stumbled upon a body police believe to be eighteen-year-old Ana Alvarez, who went missing while jogging in the Sheepfold section of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in August of last year. Many are wondering about the involvement of a man arrested for an attack on two local girls in these same woods nearly one year ago.”
The cold and nausea come at once, like they sometimes do, and prickles erupt on my chest. I jam my phone deep in my pocket and take the back stairs one floor up, duck into the women’s room, and lock the door. I tug my cuffs down before pressing my palms against the chilly walls, and sway over the toilet, willing the black, or lunch, or anything to expel itself so I will feel better. Nothing comes.
Get ahold of yourself, Julia. A body in the woods is just another fact.
To normal people, researching facts about abductions, and then your own abduction, labels you all kinds of morbid. But research soothes me. The methodical ordering of gathered facts is a beautiful thing, especially when I order them in ways that make me feel safe. If I put my hand over my heart while I reread the facts I’ve collected in my Mead wide-ruled black marble composition notebook, my heart beats slower. I sway out of the bathroom and down the stairs, leaning outside Ricker’s waiting room. I slide down the wall. The carpet smells of cleaning chemicals and mud from shoes, but it’s not a totally unpleasant spot to sit. “You are good,” I whisper to myself, rubbing my knuckles across my chest with one hand and feeling through my messenger bag with the other. I touch my notebook’s hard taped spine, then a pencil. On a clean page, I draw a circle. Next to it, I draw a second overlapping circle of equal size.
My shoulders fall. I bury my head in the notebook, ignoring passing shins and murmurs.
In the the first circle, I write JULIA. In the second circle, I write LIV.
The seed shape in the middle stares back at me, no longer a seed, but the pupil of a cat’s eye. I draw a third circle above the first two, overlapping. It bisects the cat’s eye. Inside the third circle, I write BODY. The three of us share a space, the bisected cat’s eye, and it is small, but there’s still room to write.
I wriggle my hand into my pocket for my phone and click on Paula Papademetriou’s live feed. I’m too impatient to listen to her, though her perfect aubergine lipstick transfixes me for a second. Besides, I’m a faster reader than listener. In the transcripted story below, I scan for the word pit, but it’s not there. In Ionian Greek, the word zagre means a “pit for the capture of
live animals.” The important word here is live. You can debate back and forth whether it’s better to be killed or kept, but either way, a body popping up in the Sheepfold means old Zagreus was tweaking the mythology.
Liv is alive. I am alive. The body is irrelevant, Liv would say.
At the bottom of the page, I write PROBABILITY.
The probability of Liv and me stumbling across a deranged maniac in the woods was low: 1 out of 347,000. And stranger abductions are the most improbable, at 24% of all abductions, versus 49% by family members and 27% by acquaintances. So Liv’s right when she insists what happened in the woods was a fluke, just a forgettable, little thing.
But if Paula Papademetriou is right, and Donald Jessup killed before? That makes us part of a big thing.
After PROBABILITY, I add a question mark.
TWO
354 Days After the Woods
I am disappointing naked.
Since the woods, kids stare at my naked body parts, hoping to spot scars that will reveal the things Donald Jessup did to me. In gym, they stare at my arms and legs. I imagine it’s a letdown that the marks aren’t visible. But the real reason I prefer to dress in Sherpa layers is what I call cold-avoidance. For me, cold—the kind that slips down your collar and swirls down your spine like a frosty helix—is unstoppable. It sends me right back to the woods, and that can be inconvenient during, well, everything. In my first ten weeks back at school, I’ve concocted some excellent excuses to avoid changing into my standard-issue gym shorts and tee. Today, Ms. Dean isn’t having it, possibly because today’s excuse, Kuru disease, is found only among cannibals in remote New Guinea.
Liv warned me that my crazy clothes only fuel the gossip. Gossip, I will add, that doesn’t seem to plague Liv. You’d think she’d get her share of stares, though I guess because she never took a break from school, and maybe because she wasn’t actually abducted, she never generated my brand of buzz.
Lucky for me, something else has everyone’s attention.
A bustle near the bleachers. Kellan MacDougall is getting shoved by his hockey pals into a pretty freshman. He shoves them back. The girl giggles, knuckles pressed against her upper lip. Kellan barely makes eye contact with her, twisting the toe of his sneaker like he’s grinding something into the parquet. She puffs her chest and tips her chin, spilling flat-ironed hair down her back. Her cheek is the color of a pink apple. Kellan’s a player; he even hooked up with Liv at a party the weekend before the woods, then never spoke to her again. It had to be awkward for him when his detective dad was assigned our case.
Kellan spies me as I end my walk to the door marked GIRLS. I hold his stare, making my eyes vacant. Apple Face follows his gaze, her eyes lashy Os. He’s probably thinking we have some connection because his dad captured my abductor. Those days were smeary. I didn’t deny myself hits off the morphine pump meant for my ankle. By the time my head cleared, I was settled in my ivory tower on Mount Greylock, and Detective MacDougall had made his career by locking up Donald Jessup. I wonder how he felt when Donald Jessup killed himself by swallowing a pen spring in jail.
I lean my shoulder against the door with the GIRLS sign. GIRLS are flouncing creatures with satin bows in their hair who circle maypoles and use their eyelashes to charm—a luxury for people who assume other people won’t hurt them. I have let my charm shrivel. GIRLS are weightless, without black things in their bellies that coil and spring. Apple Face is a GIRL. Somehow, Liv is still a GIRL.
The door moves beneath my shoulder. I fall into Liv, pulling the door open from inside.
“I’ve been looking for you!” she says, stepping back and tugging her shirt down over her flat belly.
“Just giving the fans something to stare at,” I say, righting myself.
“You skipped lunch.”
“Not exactly. I had a strategically timed guidance office appointment–cum–wellness check-in.”
Liv smiles. “I’m familiar. But you’re going to have to face lunch someday. Like, tomorrow.” She parts a pack of wispy, wan girls—friends of my next-door neighbor, Alice Mincus—and stakes out a corner. They change clothes and tie their sneakers fast. I try to decide if it’s Liv they’re intimidated by or my weird factor, but Liv seems not to notice either way. When the last few scatter, she circles the locker room, yanking back shower curtains and checking under stalls. I watch, mystified. Liv usually pooh-poohs my paranoia, but here she is, feeding it. It’s like a minivindication. Satisfied there are no spies, she turns to me.
“They found a dead girl in the woods,” she says.
“I know. My mother told me last night.” After Moleman did. But no sense mentioning that.
“You knew? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I figured your mom talked to you about it.” As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize how ridiculous that sounds. If Liv glosses over what happened, Deborah Lapin shellacs it. Being preyed upon by a man who played dress-up in the woods is not in line with the image she has cast for Liv. “I mean, I was trying to be better. More like you. Not get hung up on the past,” I add. That last line is a direct quote from one of our weekly e-mails while I was in the Berkshires, the ones that kept me sane and tethered to reality. While Patty Petty said let it all hang out, Liv gave me permission—really, more of a directive—to let it go.
Liv brushes her hair back roughly behind one ear. It’s Liv’s hair, cornsilk-fine and aggressively highlighted, that guys always notice first. That and her boobs, full-blown by sixth grade. “I think that’s great,” she says, her eyes skipping around the room. “Moving forward and all.”
“Right? Ricker wants me to do hypnosis. She says unlocking my repressed memories is the way to heal. But then she avoids answering questions that might actually help me heal. To me that’s a contradiction. It’s like she wants me on one path: hers.”
Liv slides her jaw from side to side.
“I’m pretty sure Ricker got a call about the body right in the middle of our session yesterday. She tried to pretend it was her daughter, but I knew something was up,” I say. “So do you think Donald Jessup killed that other girl?”
Liv’s face goes dark. After the woods, my mother spun into action, jetting me out of town and hooking me up with Patty Petty, then Ricker. Deborah’s sole effort at supporting Liv was dragging her to speak with a local priest exactly once before signing herself into Valium rehab. I can be bitter about my forced removal, but at least what my mother did was in the realm of appropriate reactions for a mother.
Of course Deborah isn’t a mother, but a hedgewitch.
“How are things with your mo—”
“Eighteen is hardly a girl,” Liv says suddenly. “She was old enough to vote.”
“Everyone out!” Ms. Dean booms as she rounds the corner, sporting an unfortunate choppy new haircut. She stops short and knits her brows, making a lumbering mental calculation. I imagine she’s recalling what she learned during meetings of the school’s Incident Management Team.
“Are you ladies okay? Do you need, um, support?” she says.
“We are so okay!” Liv says, already out the door when Ms. Dean plants her ham-hand on my shoulder.
“You’re not dressed.” In her other hand is a balled-up pair of jersey-style Shiverton shorts and a T-shirt, my punishment for wearing jeans to gym. I accept them as Ms. Dean says that while she respects my need for time to readjust, there are no exceptions to the sweats rule. She’s a softie for anyone with issues, always letting the cutters wear long sleeves to hide their razor scars. Still, I give her a nice piece of cold back, waiting until she leaves to drop my sweatercoat with a thump. Next, I shimmy out of my hoodie, unzip my fly, and yank off my jeans. A Henley button-down is the last layer standing before bra and bare skin. The locker room might be warm, but the gym is a drafty space with exposed beams that stretch to the ceiling like ribs. I tear the Henley over my head and wriggle into my shorts and extra-large tee. My white legs and arms make me look spectral. The Shiverton High girls’
locker room is exactly the same as when it was built in the 1960s, with its faint smell of mildew and decades of bad energy that lingers. Echoes of teasing banging around lockers, inadequacies stuck inside mirrors. Special pains inflicted by GIRLS onto GIRLS. But I’m not a GIRL anymore. I shake my hair out, press my lips together, and stride out, hand on belly, willing my serpentine friend—the black thing in my gut that Liv doesn’t have and doesn’t need, but I do—to rise and get me through this, the real, indoor, after-the-woods world.
Ms. Dean nods as I join the far end of the line for stretches. Liv has been absorbed among the slouchy-loud girls. I will not be absorbed. She smiles at me, hard and tight. I smile back anemically, hugging my elbows and rocking slightly, just enough to feel better and not look catatonic.
So. Cold.
My hands float up and bat at my ears, burning, as though I am outside, in the woods, but I’m not, I’m in the gym, with its faint smell of mold from last year’s flood, and still the snowy flash spreads until the gym is white. The smell of night air and woodsmoke blooms around me. Now the rush, the sensation of plunging down a hole. I’m going and I can’t stop.
What Ricker doesn’t know is that I don’t need hypnosis. Not when there’s a trigger.
* * *
The joint shakes in his hand as he winds it. His tongue flashes to lick the paper. It falls in his lap.
“Shhhit!” His hands flutter.
“Are you okay?” I say. Begging, reasoning, and crying haven’t worked. Empathy is the only thing I haven’t tried.
“Been off-line too—too long—long,” he stammers, patting his lap. “In the six hours I sleep sleepy-time raiders plunder my camps, destroy my weapons, and take my prey. I set traps, everything, but nothing does any good. I hardly have any girls left. What’s gonna happen when I’m gone for days? Can’t play 24/7, I just can’t. How’m I gonna get ahead after this? Phew, there it is.” He lights the fat white pupa at his lips, a flame dancing at his trembling fingers, his inhalation like a long sip of water.
I take tiny breaths. Being a pot virgin, I have no idea if just being near the smoke will make me high, and the thought of losing my wits terrifies me. I wiggle away from the downwind. The movement triggers pain in my ankle, and I cry out. He looks at me quizzically.
