I’ve had enough stargazing. I hold my hand out. “Give me the damned keys,” I say. Justine is reaching into her pocket when, over her shoulder, I see a shadow detach itself from a tree and slouch toward the cabin. I blink. My eyes are caked with mascara and interrupted sleep, after all. They make their own shadows.
Is that a shadow?
“Lois.” My hand has already shot out, grasped her tiny wrist. “Lois!” I lower my voice. The girls stop chattering, lean into each other. Lois turns slowly, follows my gaze. I see the shadow again, slinking along the side of the house. Moving in our direction. Zed, I think for one crazy moment. Looking for us.
Then Lois screams. Long and shrill, like someone else’s voice has invaded her throat, and someone else’s fear, because the Lois I know has never been afraid of anything, much less some stupid shadow. Lois’s scream slices through skin, veins, echoes through my heart. The girls, clutching each other, eyes wide and baffled, duck behind me. The shadow freezes.
When Lois stops screaming, the air still rings. Metal on metal, as if the night is sharp. She wrenches her arm free and steps away from me, toward the cabin. “Sean,” she says, her voice shaky but restored to its usual octave.
Not Zed, not a shadow. Lois’s fucking stalker. And she’s walking toward him, red dress and smeared makeup garish in the moonlight, like she belongs on a movie set. Which this is.
What the hell is she doing?
I lean down to Justine and Natasha, whose faces are pale with fright. “Go to the car.” My voice comes out a low growl. “Call Billy, call your parents. Run. Now.” They go, arm in arm, long legs flying behind them.
I start across the lawn after Lois, who is moving like a sleepwalker, slowly and steadily. “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she says to the shadow, as if this is a perfectly normal conversation in the middle of the day. “How did you do it?” She sounds almost impressed.
“Got your credit card number off your computer. And your whole itinerary. And I followed those stupid girls. Wasn’t exactly challenging.” It’s a young man’s voice, tight and peevish and smug. “I could tell you didn’t take me seriously. I was sick of it.”
“That’s not true,” Lois begins, and then in the distance I hear a car door shut. The stalker hears it too; he jumps and emerges swiftly from the heavy darkness around the lodge. To me he looks slight, unremarkable. Something glitters, though, in his hand.
“Sean!” says Lois, her voice sharp. “They’re not part of this.”
The girls. I dart forward to intercept him, place myself squarely in Sean’s path. I’ll keep them safe, says some crazy voice in my head. I can’t quite make out his face, but I can see that he’s nothing like Zed. I can still feel the shiver of senseless hope that shot through me. Sorrow and loss, hardly faded after eighteen years. But there’s no echo of Zed here, no trace. How could Lois ever have thought so?
Sean pulls up short when he sees me. “Yeah, but she is,” he says. “Carly May Smith!” Shockingly, he sticks out a hand—not the one that glitters—as if we’re going to be fucking properly introduced. I back away, and he laughs, dark and unhinged, arm returning to his side. “I can see Professor Lonsdale has told you all about me.”
“The police are looking for you, Sean,” Lois says calmly. “If you turn yourself in, you won’t be in much trouble. But they know where you are. And the knife isn’t going to help your cause, believe me.”
What if we had fled when Lois screamed? Could we have gotten away? Too late. For a second I think I hear something behind me. A voice? A rustle of clothing? But no, nothing. Wishful thinking. Escape and rescue seem equally unlikely.
“Maybe we should go sit down,” Lois proposes. “On the porch, maybe? We’ve all had a long day.” Her matter-of-factness should be reassuring, but it’s having the opposite effect. Now I want to scream. I’ve watched enough crime shows to know what she’s doing: she wants to keep him talking until someone comes. Fictional psychopaths always want to stand around and tell you their goddamned story before they shoot you or stab you or slice parts of you off or whatever. Right now my faith in fictional psychopaths is a little shaky. Besides, there are always exceptions, even on TV: the guy in Criminal Exploits just slit my throat with no warning, for instance. It can happen. And I can discern the contours of Sean’s knife now: it’s long, curved, cruel-looking. It’s not an ordinary knife. It’s a very, very serious knife.
But Lois is already putting her suggestion in motion. She’s stepping up onto the porch. She finds the outside light next to the front door, lowers herself into an Adirondack chair, stretches her legs out. “Just like your book,” Sean says, and they exchange a look. I feel strangely excluded, as if they’re in on this together. Has she lost it? I wonder suddenly. All this time I’ve been thinking that Lois was mildly off-kilter but basically sane. Maybe she’s actually out of her fucking mind.
Sean follows Lois onto the porch and produces a roll of duct tape from the deep pocket of what I can see now is an extremely shabby trench coat. My first thought is that wardrobe could have come up with something a little more original. Then I think I must be as goddamned crazy as Lois.
But he’s not going to tie her up, and he’s sure as hell not getting me in one of those chairs, fancy knife or no. “Jesus,” I hear myself explode. “You’re going to tape her to a freaking Adirondack chair? I don’t think so.” I lurch forward. I have no plan, but I have my eye on the knife. Isn’t this what Mandy would do? I’m taller than he is and very possibly stronger. I can see his face now; it’s sprinkled with acne, fine-boned, sun-deprived. And scared to death: I see fear cross his features like an eclipse and marvel at his reaction to my attack. Then I am being shoved aside, hands grabbing my waist, digging into my ribs—and now it’s my turn to scream, unthinking, until I see that it’s Billy pushing past me, grabbing Sean, wresting the knife from his grip, forcing his hands behind his back. “Tear me a piece,” he orders, tossing the duct tape to Lois. She pulls out a length of tape, tears it with her teeth, hands it to Billy, who looks more Zed-like than ever. After a few repetitions Sean’s wrists are secured behind his back and his ankles looped together.
“I heard him coming,” Lois explains to me, squeezing Billy’s hand. “In case you were thinking I was completely insane.” She grips the broad arms of her chair and pushes herself up to standing. “These are wrong, aren’t they?” she says, looking down at the chairs. “It’s not like my book at all. Ours were nicer.”
Lois
It feels like forever until we’re in my rental car and I’m driving back to the inn, after the police and the parents and the endless questions. In the rearview mirror I see the faintest glow in the sky behind us—not the sunrise but its promise.
“The police will be coming for us,” I’d said as I stepped off the porch, like stepping off that other porch so long ago. “For Sean,” I corrected myself, though no one seemed to have been listening to me. They hauled Sean away, and I was glad. But what would he do with the scripts I’d so recklessly fed him, blindly driven by my own inarticulate ghosts? Ghosts: Grafology, gemelliparous, galanty. Gegenschein, gilderoy, gorsoon.
Beside me, Carly leans back, lets her head roll to the side, mouth hanging slightly open. Chloe, I mean. She would hate to be seen this way, but I am reassured by her vulnerability, by her unprettiness, however fleeting. (Unprettiness: Not a word. Ughten, uvelloid, unberufen. Upaithric.)
You are the sun … We’ve been orbiting an absence, a mystery, an unnamed threat, Chloe and I. I don’t think it’s a mistake, the movie that begins filming tomorrow—this oblique, fictional reenactment of our past. Once we’ve collapsed the past and the present, the truth and the fictions, we will peel the layers apart, organize the pieces, and put ourselves back together. More or less.
Chloe stirs. She isn’t sleeping, after all. She turns her head away from me, toward the window, and in the still dark car, lit only by the dashboard controls, I already feel the weight of whatever she’s about to say.
“Would he have hurt us eventually?” she asks quietly, her voice almost without inflection, making the words as neutral as words can ever be. “Do you think? Killed us, I mean?”
Although she could mean Sean, I know she doesn’t. She means Zed. It has taken us a long time to ask that question aloud; almost twenty years. But I find that I don’t even have to think about the answer.
“He would have had to, wouldn’t he? Because what he wanted was impossible. He would have had to kill us to keep us. Like ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ He gave that to us to read, remember? The man who strangles his lover with her own hair?” I shiver. “‘And all night long we have not stirred…’”
“What did he want? I’m guessing you think you have that figured out?”
I don’t like the bitterness that has crept into her voice, but I understand it.
“He was lonely? He was bored? The world disappointed him? He feared female sexuality? He wanted to save his sister; he wanted to keep us pure because he couldn’t protect her. He loved—”
“No, God, stop,” Chloe says. “I take it back. I don’t want to put it into words. It’s better without words. I don’t mean you’re wrong, it’s just—”
“I know. Exactly. Better not to say.” I know that is what she wants to hear. But I’ll never believe it. I think the words are necessary. Why else did I write the book, after all?
“I still don’t think he meant to hurt us, though,” Chloe pushes on, not able to let it drop.
“Well, not in the way that he did.” I slow for a small dark animal crossing the road. A raccoon; the headlights catch its eyes. “I don’t think he had really thought very much about how we would feel. He was thinking about himself. He was quite selfish, in a way.” We’ve never criticized him before, not out loud. We both laugh uncomfortably at the absurdity of suggesting that a kidnapper of young girls might—just might—have been a little selfish.
“Yeah,” Chloe echoes, “just a little selfish. He never meant to break our hearts.”
“Never.” Because we didn’t escape injury, after all: we were far from unscathed. Our frail, ridiculous, twelve-year-old hearts. Some things you can’t put back together again, ever.
The woods rise darkly on either side of the road. I remind myself yet again that they are not our woods. Their secrets have nothing to do with us. The stars are the same, but as morning nears, they’re fading. Stars: sacring, scelestic, scialytic, scintillescent, scripturient, soliform, somniate.
Yes, Zed, I know what these words mean. Sacring: consecration. Scelestic: wicked. Scialytic: banishing shadows. Scintillescent: twinkling, obviously. Like stars. Scripturient, a good one: possessing a violent urge to write. Soliform: like a sun, sunlike. Somniate: to dream. Syzygy.
It’s not hard to wrest meaning from those words.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAGGIE MITCHELL has published short fiction in a number of literary magazines, including the New Ohio Review, American Literary Review, and Green Mountains Review. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Georgia with her husband and cats. This is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Henry Holt and Company ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
About the Author
Copyright
PRETTY IS. Copyright © 2015 by Maggie Mitchell. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover photos: forest © Debra Fedchin/Arcangel Images; cabin © Giorgio Fochesato/Getty Images; girl (left) © Jacob Sjoman Svensson/Getty Images; girl (right) © Hans Neleman/Getty Images
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mitchell, Maggie.
Pretty is: a novel / Maggie Mitchell.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62779-148-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62779-149-6 (electronic book) 1. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 2. Women college teachers—Fiction. 3. Actresses—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.I8585P84 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014044393
e-ISBN 978-1-62779-149-6
First Edition: July 2015
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Pretty Is: A Novel Page 30
