Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  I am thinking missing. Taken, by someone. Someone who knows they’re here. Someone who knows the story. I shake my head and run my fingers through my tangled hair, trying to clear my mind. I take two bottles of water from the minibar and shove my feet in my sneakers, vaguely aware of how ridiculous they will look with my dress, vaguely aware that this is absolutely beside the point. My last text to Sean appears before my eyes. Where are you? No answer …

  Perhaps two dozen people have assembled on the patio behind the main inn, their faces garish and strained in the powerful security lights that have replaced the festive torches that burned here just hours ago. Chloe and I are among the most ridiculous, but the competition is stiff. Fiona is wearing a trench coat belted over a slinky nightgown; the director’s gray hair is standing straight up, and his shoes are untied; other cast members still sport ravaged party makeup and suggestively disheveled clothes. The girls’ respective parents are wearing their hotel bathrobes and look oddly interchangeable and seriously befuddled; one of the mothers weeps quietly and steadily. Only Billy Pearson looks wide awake and as crisply dressed as ever, and he seems to be in charge. He’s throwing himself into the role, I find myself thinking, then reproach myself for the uncharitable thought. He can’t help acting; it doesn’t mean he isn’t sincere. He continues, his voice at once commanding and full of emotion. “We need to know if anyone else has any information that might help us: anything you saw or heard or noticed, even if it seemed totally irrelevant at the time.” No one says anything. Where are you? No answer.

  “Have the police been called?” I ask, eying the bleary-eyed rescue party dubiously.

  “They have not,” Billy tells me. “The parents want to wait until we are certain they’re actually missing. And chances are the police would consider it too early to act, anyway.” Everyone has seen enough cop shows to know that missing persons aren’t taken seriously for at least twenty-four hours, although this situation seems enough out of the ordinary to me to warrant bending the rules. I’m surprised at the parents; you’d think they would want the police involved right away. Why are they hesitating? I wonder. What are they thinking? What did my parents think when they noticed I was missing? How long did it take them to call the police? When did they start to be afraid? It seems odd that I never asked them. I suppose I still could. In the shadows, Billy looks more like Zed than ever. That he is coordinating the search, not necessitating it, sets off a strange series of ripples in my mind. Currents are clashing, roiling the surface. I wrench my gaze away from him before I can get sucked in, drawn down; this feels dangerous. Think, I order myself. Be rational. You’re known for it, Lois, deservedly or not. Calm, collected, sensible Lois.

  “Has everyone been accounted for?” I ask, perhaps too loudly. “All of the hotel staff, for instance?”

  “We can’t be sure,” Billy answers, sounding a little sheepish at having to admit a gap in his detective work. “We have the manager looking into it. But in the meantime…”

  “I have a dreadful sense about this,” Fiona pipes up, her voice deep and vibrating. “How many people know what this movie is about? Plenty, I imagine. This could be someone’s idea of a macabre joke, abducting the actresses playing the abductees, or it could be something even more twisted, more diabolical—”

  “For God’s sake, Fiona, don’t,” says Billy. Chloe has grabbed my arm, and in fact I, too, find Fiona’s words disturbing, though not for the same reasons as Billy. “Don’t be so melodramatic. There’s nothing to suggest anything of the kind. Their room is neat, there’s no sign of struggle, no sign of a break-in, no reports of strangers. We have no reason to suspect anything violent. All we know is that the girls aren’t in their rooms. And that their beds haven’t been slept in.”

  I picture the girls at the reception, doll-like in party frocks and age-appropriate flats, flitting in and out of the crowd, alternately descending on someone temporarily deserving of their attention and retreating to the periphery, whispering together, laughing at everything. I caught them guzzling champagne dregs once or twice. They had been very sweet to me: “Chloe didn’t tell us you were coming! She never said you were so pretty! Why didn’t you ask for a part in the movie? Because that would have been so awesome!” They looked happy, vibrant; they glowed with life. Could something really have happened to them? Surely not. But I glance toward the woods, a dark blank wall looming behind the bright lights of the inn, and shiver violently. Where are you?

  “We’ve already checked every room in the inn, and we have someone going back over it and double-checking right now. What the rest of us are going to do is spread out and form a line and sweep the property,” Billy is saying. “Just like, you know, in the movies.” A few people laugh a little at this; the others shoot them disapproving glances. “If you don’t have a flashlight, make sure you stand between two people who do. This is how far apart we should be.” He uses the people closest to him to demonstrate. “If they are here, we will find them. And after we’ve done the grounds, we’ll move into the woods.” Here his voice trails off, and there’s an uncomfortable silence. Sweeping the well-kept grounds is one thing, but those dense woods are not going to give up their secrets easily—not to amateur detectives in plush white bathrobes, armed with nothing more than incipient hangovers and cell phones.

  We are swept forward with the search party. Automatically, my eyes scan the ground in front of us, as if the girls could possibly be crouching nearby in the midst of this racket. I’m using my phone as a flashlight but thinking that what I should really do is text Sean again. If only I could be sure that he was still in New York. Could I have underestimated him so badly? Is he really capable of such a terrible game? As yet he has done nothing violent, not that anyone knows of. He’s interested in pursuit, in information; he’s interested in control. He’s disturbing and disturbed; he’s decidedly creepy. But is he dangerous? Should I say something? Do something? My mind spins as we stumble along. There’s a bit of low chatter along the line, but most of us are searching in silence, straining our ears as well as our eyes. Don’t be missing, don’t be missing … I picture the girls arranged on the forest floor, blood drying on their neatly sliced throats; they look like the cover of one of the novels we read that summer. A knife glistening with red rests nearby, no doubt wiped clean of fingerprints.

  We have covered a broad swath of lawn when I feel Chloe tugging at my arm, pulling me back out of the light, away from the crowd. As the others surge forward, Chloe neatly separates us from them. No one appears to notice. “This is ridiculous,” she hisses. “I have a better idea. Follow me; I’ll explain when we get to your car.”

  I finally have to give voice to what I’m thinking, even though it can’t be true, if only because it’s very possible that Chloe is thinking it too. “It’s not Gary—not Sean, I mean,” I say, as much to myself as to Chloe, horrified by my slip. “It couldn’t be Sean, I just heard from him yesterday.” But where was he? He could have been anywhere. “It’s not him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I hear something like panic in my voice. But I’m right, I know I am. Sean isn’t in this story anymore; he’s shaping his own plot. He may do dreadful things; it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But not this one. History wouldn’t fold back on itself so neatly, so perversely. Life isn’t like that.

  Chloe, walking fast, turns and shoots me a strange look. “I don’t know who the hell Gary is, but you better hope this isn’t your little stalker friend. I think you should definitely fucking call him, though, don’t you? Just to see what he has to say? Anyway, I told you, I have an idea. I just don’t want to say anything yet. In case…” She sounds shaken. It’s rare for Carly—for Chloe. In a flash I remember standing in the rain, agreeing to climb in the backseat of Zed’s car, Carly May smiling mysteriously from the front seat. These girls would never do what we did. They’re wary; they know the world is dangerous. Which doesn’t mean … but I won’t put my fear into words. I won’t.

  I fumble with my phone as we hurry to
ward the parking lot. I jab a finger at Sean’s most recent text and press CALL. I lift the phone to my ear as it begins to ring. I already know he won’t answer, no matter where he is. He’ll see that it’s me, and he won’t answer. I end the call before I get transferred to voice mail.

  Chloe gives me directions without saying where we’re headed, but I recognize the way to the hunting lodge replica, where shooting is scheduled to begin tomorrow. I don’t ask questions; I just drive. Suddenly, without permission, Gary rears his head, and a new section of plot unfurls:

  Gary gets a job on the set of the movie the actress would be starring in if he weren’t holding her captive. He encounters two impossibly pretty young actresses and realizes that they are a better prize than the actual girls, now grown up, though of course he can’t release the actress and the professor because they can’t be trusted to keep quiet, and besides, shouldn’t they pay for what they’ve done? For robbing him of a father? But he wants the young girls too, so pretty, so sure of themselves. He makes a point of meeting them on the set, and they can barely conceal their indifference. As a random member of the crew, he ranks low in their world, it’s clear; who do they think they are? Someone needs to show them …

  “What are you thinking?” Chloe asks suddenly, breaking the spell. I shut Gary down, remind him he’s done, finished.

  “Oh … I thought for a minute I had an idea for my novel.” For an irrational instant, I fear that Chloe can see inside my head, watch me spinning stories out of this crisis. I blunder on: “It’s nothing. It won’t work; I just remembered something else. Never mind.” I have abandoned the novel, written it off, left it behind. Gary released his prisoners and went home, fizzled into nothingness. The fact that this slipped my mind so easily disturbs me. Carly is gazing at me with peculiar intensity, I realize. The road is so dark that I am reluctant to take my eyes from it, but I glance quickly at her, wanting to read her. She is giving me a hard, hard look, so hard it feels like a blow.

  “You’re using this, aren’t you?”

  Using what, I don’t say. I know what she means. It is always a mistake to underestimate Chloe. “Not exactly,” I say. I want to say more, to excuse myself, to explain that I changed my mind, stopped just in time—but I don’t. I let my answer hang in the air. This is, after all, the thing that lies between us: my telling of the story. Our story. Making it mine.

  “It’s a sequel,” she says. “Right? Isn’t that what you told me yesterday?”

  “Yes, in a way. It picks up the story years later, though. Or it was going to, but I—”

  She interrupts. “So it’s just lies, then. Since there is no real story years later, right?”

  “Well, fiction,” I say, but not defensively. If she is punishing me, I have a strange feeling that I deserve it. Guilty. “Not lies, really. Just fiction.”

  “Except for the bits that are true.”

  “Yes. There are also some true bits. And … some sort of true bits,” I add, thinking uncomfortably of Sean and the period during which I cast him as the son, the period when I created Gary. It’s a dim and disturbing memory, as if it’s someone else’s: a dream sequence in a movie.

  “That’s fucked-up,” says Chloe. “People say actors are fucked-up, but that’s really fucked-up. You use people.” Something horrid drips from her voice.

  “Maybe,” I say. “That’s one way to look at it, I guess. But … it doesn’t hurt them, does it?”

  I have slowed down by now, looking for the little dirt road, easy to miss in the dark, though the construction crew has erected posts with reflectors on either side. “Kill the lights,” hisses Chloe, ignoring my question. “Drive past.” I obey, parking a little way down, as I did on my first visit. It’s very different in the dark. “Get out quietly,” she says. “My theory, if you haven’t guessed, is that the girls are here. If your little friend hasn’t taken a road trip, that is.” Surely she wouldn’t speak so flippantly if she thought it might be true. Surely it isn’t true. But the knife incident was more than forty-eight hours ago. He’s been on the run since then. That’s more than enough time to … to get anywhere, really.

  The girls, Chloe keeps saying. Not my girls or Gary’s girls; not Callie and Hannah, not Lois and Carly May. Real girls, getting paid to pretend to be Carly and me at twelve. Real girls who have—impossibly or inevitably—gone missing in the middle of the night. In this strange place, surrounded by woods.

  We use our flashlight apps to provide illumination as we double back along the road, make our way down the driveway, and approach the cabin. The pine needles and soft ground muffle our footsteps; we don’t have to try to be quiet. Only our breathing seems loud. All around us swell the nighttime woods noises. Our lights catch eerily green patches of grass, slivers of rough bark, tiny bright eyes deep in the trees. I steal a look upward, needing to check the present against my memory, to see which is more real. The stars are thick and deep here, as they are in the Adirondacks.

  “I don’t see a car anywhere, do you?” Chloe whispers.

  “Maybe around back. But … who do you think has them? I mean, who brought them here?” I’m not sure now whether Chloe thinks they’re here of their own volition or not. Her mind is dark to me. I feel very Lois, and very alone.

  “They’re thirteen and resourceful. They’re pissed off because Billy Pearson has been paying less attention to them since his wife and kid got here. I can think of lots of ways they could get their hands on a car if they really wanted. That’s what I hope, anyway. Otherwise…”

  She doesn’t have to say what otherwise is. Otherwise is unspeakable.

  “Shh!” she says suddenly. “Listen.” I listen. I hear nothing and everything: wind and insects and small hidden animals. Breath. My breath and Carly’s. And … just maybe …

  I am considering the possibility that I hear more human breath than two people can account for when someone grabs us from behind, arms locking around our waists with a suddenness that stops my breath cold. And then for a second I am back there, in the Adirondacks, and I have been hiding, and Carly has found me, and Zed is waiting for us on the porch … And at the same time it’s Sean, I can smell him, and he has a knife, I can feel the blade pressing—

  I am about to yell, I think, when I hear a giggle, and then another giggle, and then two dimly outlined forms are running in circles around us, their voices joining in a giddy chorus: “Did you hear us? Did we scare you? What were you thinking when we came up behind you? How did you find us? What are you wearing? Are you pissed off? Does anyone else know? Are they worried? Are we in trouble? We just wanted to see it at night … to be alone here, without a million people around, and lights … because that’s what it’s like for our characters, right? We felt like we needed to know what it was really like … We thought it would help us understand…” Our phone beams carve them into fragments, flickers of long hair, pale skin, triumphant smiles, tight jeans. For a second I see them as girls in a kaleidoscope, geometrically fractured, beautiful in every new configuration. I’m dizzy with anger and relief. They’re just pretty girls. Just pretty, pretty girls, sure the world is theirs to command, never dreaming that danger is real, that …

  “Well, did it?” Chloe finally asks when their voices trail off. “Help you understand?”

  “It did,” one of them says, her voice suddenly serious and subdued. “It’s actually really amazing out here, in this totally weird kind of way.”

  “And kind of beautiful,” says the other one. Natasha, the me-girl. “I mean, have you looked up at the stars? I’ve never seen so many. I swear I didn’t know there even were so many.”

  Their city-girl stupidity about the stars grates on my frayed-to-the-limit nerves. Their laughter feels like a dismissal of what happened to Carly and me; it cancels out the pure gladness I should be feeling. I find myself looking past them, peering hopelessly into the darkness, and realize with a start that I am looking for Zed, waiting for him to emerge from the shadows and announce that the game is up. �
�Time for bed,” he’ll say. “Inside, quick. Brush your teeth before you turn into pumpkins.” As if we’re children. The past is collapsing into the present. Of course we’re not children. Of course Zed is not here. You are the earth, Carly, and Lois, you’re the moon. But only if the sun is there to anchor us in space, to preserve our delicate alignment. Otherwise, what are we, what can we hope to be?

  Now that Justine and Natasha’s chattering has quieted, replaced by a curiously reverent stillness, I find myself impressed almost in spite of myself by their uneasy grasp of the mystery around us. Their sense of wonder. Maybe there is hope that they will take my lies and make them true, take my truths and turn them into lovely fictions. We all stand in the dark for a moment, looking upward, before Carly clicks her phone back on. “All right, girls,” she says. “Next thing you know, we’ll be lying in the grass and discussing the goddamned constellations, and this isn’t that kind of movie. I need to call Billy and your parents and try to get your little asses out of trouble. Whose car did you take?” Chloe has turned matter-of-fact and practical all of a sudden, and it strikes me that she is essentially playing Mandy, though a version of Mandy infused with a bit of her own worldly vulgarity. It occurs to me, too, that in playing Mandy she gets a chance to love Zed one more time, safely and from a distance—and to lose him again, too. Zed, embodied by Billy, no doubt closely observed by a vigilant Fiona … I wonder if I want to stay. I wonder if I can bear to watch.

  The girls confess at last that they bribed one of the prep cooks to let them use his car. “Will he get in trouble?” they demand anxiously, and I’m glad that they can think of someone other than themselves. “It wasn’t his fault, really. We were very persuasive.” They look at each other conspiratorially, reveling in the strangeness of their ability to make men do their bidding.

  Chloe

  Now that the girls are safe, I’m cold, damp, exhausted, and free to be pissed off at them. Shooting starts tomorrow, and no one will have slept. At their age it won’t matter, but I’ll wake up with an extra decade carved in my face if I don’t get the minimum hours of unconsciousness. They’re laughing now, oblivious to the fact that they have actually scared the absolute shit out of everyone. I want to knock their pretty heads together.