The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  “Yeah, well . . . is this one okay?” She pulled out a dark blue T-shirt.

  “I’ve got some striped leggings that go with that.” Lark had many varieties of striped leggings, but few that would go with something as muted as dark blue. Not that matching was necessarily Lark’s thing.

  “No. I’ll just wear some plain ones. Thanks.”

  Iris frowned. “Do you have plain leggings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  When they went downstairs to get breakfast, their mom was staring at an article in the newspaper as if the letters on the page had come to life and started doing a jig.

  “What is it?” Iris asked.

  “Oh! Sorry, I didn’t hear you. It’s just some thieves have been stealing stuff from local museums. It’s bizarre.”

  “Maybe they have my bracelet,” Lark grumbled.

  Her mom looked them both up and down. “Is there any reason you both are dressing like you’re going to a funeral?”

  Iris raised her eyebrows. Do you really want me to answer that?

  “Never mind. You guys get your breakfast, and we’ll go in ten minutes.”

  Neither girl’s wardrobe got any brighter over the course of the week. Lark kept fishing things out of Iris’s closet, because apparently Iris was the go-to-girl in the family for boring clothes.

  It was fine. Iris’s class was fine. Ms. Shonubi was nice. The other kids were fine. But it all felt so empty, and still she could not get comfortable anywhere.

  “You’re really twitchy this year,” Mira commented on Friday.

  “I guess,” Iris said.

  “I don’t remember you being so twitchy last year.”

  “The chair’s uncomfortable,” Iris said.

  “You were twitchy in art. And music.”

  “Those chairs were uncomfortable too.”

  “Maybe you have back problems,” Jin offered. “My mom has back problems and has a special pillow to sit on. You could bring a special pillow with you?”

  “My dad has back problems too, so he uses one of those standing desks at work,” said Oliver. “Maybe you could use a standing desk?”

  “Yoga’s really helpful too,” said Mira.

  “And Pilates,” Oliver added. “My dad loves Pilates. He says it builds his core muscles.”

  “There’s no such thing as core muscles,” Mira said.

  “There are! They’re around the stomach and back and stuff.”

  “I am pretty sure you are making that up.”

  “Am not!”

  Iris stuck her chin in her hand and tried to hold still. There is nothing to make you more twitchy than a group of people talking about how twitchy you are, and Iris suddenly felt like she was made of worms.

  “Do you want me to ask my mom where she got her pillow?” Jin asked. “It’s a good temporary solution while you work on your core muscles.”

  Mira rolled her eyes. “Come on. Everyone’s getting in line.”

  Ms. Shonubi’s class had specialists after lunch every day, meaning that on successive days that week Iris had gotten to enjoy the confused looks on the faces of the music teacher, the drama teacher, and the art teacher at seeing her by herself, without a Lark in sight. I know, she wanted to tell them. I don’t get it either.

  Iris felt even more useless in these classes than she usually did. If her separation from her sister was supposed to bring out some previously undiscovered talent in playing the glockenspiel or using watercolors, it had not, at least not that first week.

  But on Friday they had the first meeting of media, and that was the one class where Iris didn’t feel completely useless. Maybe that was because the media specialist, Mr. Ntaba, was the only specialist who never had trouble telling the girls apart. (The music teacher had taken to calling them both Maguire just to avoid any errors, while all the other kids got to have first names.)

  This year he sat them all down and cleared his throat and launched into the speech he gave on the first day of school every year, and for a few minutes Iris did not feel twitchy.

  “The library,” he explained to them, “might look ordinary to you, but that, my children, is just a facade to fool the board so they don’t cut my budget. And they would do that if they knew the truth: this is a magical land where every one of you can find exactly the book you need at any given time—even if you don’t know you need it. Every one of you can find the book that will change your life.”

  In kindergarten, Iris had taken all his words to be exactly true—maybe not that the library was magic, exactly, but that it was something like magic. What year was it when she knew that such things didn’t exist? She couldn’t remember. But still, it was nice to sit here and listen to him talk and believe it again for a little while.

  “Someday this year you might feel some odd tugging at the center of your chest and you will find yourself standing among the shelves of this here library for reasons you barely understand, and all you have to do is say, ‘Mr. Ntaba, I am looking for the book that could change my life,’ and I will find that book for you. I am your fairy godmother, but with books.” He said this line every year, and no one ever laughed at it, not even Dexter Atwood.

  But really, that was exactly what Mr. Ntaba was. At least for Iris. One morning in third grade she’d felt some odd tugging at the center of her chest and found herself standing among the shelves of the media center. She did not say, “Mr. Ntaba, I am looking for the book that could change my life,” because even in third grade she was not the sort of person who said that kind of thing. But he handed her a book nonetheless:

  Amazing but True: Facts to Astonish You

  “Here,” he said to her. “Iris Maguire, you look like a girl who could use some astonishment.”

  Somehow he knew that Iris was not someone to be astonished by tales of great quests or mythological creatures or even wizard school. She pored over the book and found herself . . . maybe not astonished, but certainly intrigued. And that was good enough.

  Did you know hippo sweat is red? Did you know cows kill more people every year than sharks? Did you know that the smallest mammal in the world is called the bumblebee bat, and is about the size of a half-dollar coin?

  With Mr. Ntaba’s help she went through various phases. Weird animal facts. Collective nouns. Even accidental inventions. Play-Doh was invented by a scientist trying to make a wallpaper cleaner! Someone once tried to create a new soda and then left it outside with the stirring stick in it and invented Popsicles! And of course presidential pets. Did you know Thomas Jefferson had two pet bears that he kept on the White House lawn? That Theodore Roosevelt’s son put a pony in the White House elevator? That Benjamin Harrison once chased his pet goat, Old Whiskers, down Pennsylvania Avenue?

  On the second day of fourth grade Mr. Anderson asked the class to contribute topics and a list of possible answers for a trivia game. Other kids came up with things like Dog Breeds, and Spider-Man Enemies, and Things I Am Allergic To. When Mr. Anderson got to Iris’s sheet, his white eyebrows went up, he cleared his throat, and then he read, “Presidential Assassination Attempts.”

  That was before Iris understood that there is a difference between the things you have in your head and the things you present to the world—that sometimes you have to fit yourself into certain shapes, ones other people can easily name.

  But none of that mattered when it was just you and a book. Today, when her classmates were browsing the shelves, Mr. Ntaba asked Iris, as he sometimes did, “Have you found it yet?”

  He meant something to astonish her. And she certainly had been astonished of late, but not in the way he meant.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “But we will, Iris. Do not doubt my powers.”

  “I don’t.”

  “In the meantime, if you see anything astonishing, let me know, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He studied her for a moment. “I saw your sister earlier. Is this the first time you guys haven’t been in
the same class?”

  She swallowed. “Yeah. It’s weird.”

  “Do you know why that happened?”

  “Principal Peter thinks we need to grow as individuals or something.”

  “I see. And do you agree with him? That you need to grow as individuals?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think I have just the thing.” He disappeared for a moment and then came back with a big bright picture book. “It’s about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Supreme Court justice. She disagrees with people all the time.”

  The book was called I Dissent. Iris flipped it open and saw the text RUTH HAS DISAGREED, DISAPPROVED, AND DIFFERED.

  “This looks good,” she said, heading for a chair.

  “Iris, wait.” He leaned in. “I know it’s going to be lonely for you without Lark. But you can do it, okay?”

  Iris stopped. And swallowed. She was not twitching at all; she was utterly still.

  Lonely. It was the word her father had used, and she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. It was a feeling, she realized, that she’d never really had before. It was the sort of feeling that belonged to people in books and movies, not a real-life feeling.

  But that was before, when she and Lark didn’t have separate classes, separate activities. When she lived constantly on two planes—the one with everyone else, and the one hidden underneath it where she and Lark lived together.

  Lonely.

  Iris looked at the floor and blinked once, twice. Everything blurred. Then she swallowed again and looked back up at Mr. Ntaba.

  “I will,” she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Crow Girl, Take One

  The giant crow continued to linger near their house. Lark, who was always too busy with the world inside her head to notice anything on the outside, did not notice, but Iris did. She kept meaning to point it out to Lark, but she never quite did.

  And I knew why.

  Once, when the girls were seven and heading to the car, Lark stumbled and dropped some crackers. That was Lark for you—she never seemed to quite see any of the things that were right in front of her face. She stumbled and she spilled and things flew everywhere, always.

  But because it was Lark, when she stumbled and spilled, magic happened.

  As the girls were heading for the car, a crow swooped down and ate the crackers. While Iris and her dad backed away, Lark just stood there and watched the bird alight and pick at the crumbs, and sometimes the crow looked up and eyed her right back. Friend or foe?

  Lark was a friend, of course. And the next day she brought some Cheerios with her and accidentally trailed them all the way to the car. Two crows were there in an instant, taking turns so one could eat the Cheerios while the other observed the family.

  They must have liked what they saw, for Lark kept dropping her snacks and the crows kept coming. This went on for a year, and soon the crows were flocking around Lark whenever she left the house.

  They ignored Iris. They were not ever confused over which girl was which. Yes, crows can pick out faces—but they can see beneath the surface of things.

  The girls were identical, but not the same.

  After that, the crows started to leave presents in return.

  One day Lark found a small silver washer by the birdbath.

  A few days later, a screw.

  After that, the tab from a pop can.

  Seven-year-old Iris was suspicious. What were these crows doing? Why would they leave her sister these things? Did normal crows act this way? How did you know if a crow was abnormal?

  And normal or abnormal, what did they want from her sister?

  So Iris did what she did. She researched crows. And she discovered that crows are incredibly smart, that some of them even use tools. She discovered that they like shiny things, and that sometimes they bring these shiny things as gifts for people. These things were normal.

  She also discovered that in some cultures, crows are considered a bad omen. And, as if to make that point even more clear, she discovered that the collective noun for crows is a murder.

  Now, crows are much-misunderstood creatures. Humans, as a rule, are suspicious of things they do not understand, and crows are much smarter than anyone would like them to be. When your whole self-identity is wrapped up in being the species that can use tools, you don’t really like it when you find out some bird is way ahead of you.

  Crows remember things. And not just the things that happened to them—generations of crows have been known to avoid a spot where one crow was killed. For some reason, people find that unsettling.

  If you cross one crow, another will hear about it. People call this gossip. But is it gossip if one member of a flock warns her fellows that someone is dangerous?

  Is it?

  Still, for Iris, none of it boded well.

  So she told Lark. Bad omens! Freaky memories! A murder!

  Lark thought it was cool.

  She started collecting the gifts, though Iris did not think she should bring them inside. They were garbage, probably full of germs. Who knew where those things had been? But Lark only laughed. Maybe these things were garbage once, but to the crows they were treasure, and now they were treasure to her, too. She put each gift in a plastic bag and labeled it with the date and location, and kept the whole thing in a big plastic snap case under her bed. Sometimes she sorted them by date, sometimes by their location in the yard, sometimes by size. “Look,” she’d giggle, “now I’m the organized one!”

  As they grew older, Iris stopped being scared that the crows were up to something nefarious—omens were not real, of course, and one should not read too much into collective nouns. And yet, somewhere in the back of her head, some suspicion lingered.

  And if Iris was suspicious of the crows, they seemed even more suspicious back. Like they knew she didn’t like them, and they hated her now, and would hate her for generations to come.

  Once, Lark tried to get Iris out to feed the crows with her. “Let them see you doing it! They’ll think you’re on their side, then.”

  Iris was not sure if that was something she wanted them to think. “They won’t like me.”

  “They’ll like you if you feed them,” Lark assured her.

  “I don’t think so. I think their hatred for me transcends snacks.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “I don’t see the point.”

  “Just . . . try, Iris? Please?”

  Fine. It was important to Lark that Iris and her bad-omen murder of crows got along. So she went into the backyard and spread peanuts around the birdbath.

  “Look at me! I’m a friend of the birds!”

  “Iris, don’t be sarcastic. They won’t like it.”

  It was nowhere in any of the information that crows were particularly earnest. In fact, Iris was quite sure they were not.

  But still, it was important to Lark, so Iris fed the crows with her for a week. Apparently, they did not like sarcasm. They continued to ignore Iris’s existence, which was fine with her. She was happy to ignore them, too.

  But they loved Lark.

  Crows like shiny things.

  Now Lark’s collection had dozens and dozens of items in it: buttons and bits of glass, a Barbie-sized glass slipper, paper clips and fishhooks, little stones and shells, silver necklace clasps, broken light-bulb pieces, a little ring, a blaster from an unspecified action figure, a crystal Lego, unidentifiable metal thingies, and even a small pebble shaped like a heart.

  In fourth grade Mr. Anderson had had them do show-and-tell. Usually Lark tried to avoid it, as she did not like either showing or telling. But then she got the idea that if she brought in her crow collection, she wouldn’t be so scared.

  And when she got up to show her treasure chest, for once she didn’t shrink in front of the class. She didn’t exactly grow, either—she still didn’t look at anyone, was still hard to hear—but this time it didn’t seem like it was because she was terrified, but just that she was complet
ely absorbed in the collection. She stood and talked about crows and showed her favorite gifts and told everyone how crows were so much smarter than everyone thought, how they told one another about danger, how they remembered for generations. She wasn’t shrinking at all; she was herself. And for a moment Iris found herself slightly fond of the crows.

  But something happened. Something popped in Tommy Whedon’s mind and he murmured, “Freak.” And everyone around him laughed. Both things hit Iris at once—the insult and the laughter. And then she saw them both hit her sister.

  There is a special talent that some kids have to whisper things that every kid in the class can hear but the teacher can’t. It is a strange ability, and it’s hard to imagine how it’s really useful in the broader world, but if you are a mean kid in a fourth-grade classroom, it is everything. Tommy Whedon had this talent.

  Mr. Anderson did not hear a thing, but Lark did, and red spread across her cheeks like a plague and she closed the plastic box holding her treasure and withered.

  What was Iris to do? On the one hand, her sister was in distress, and she should comfort her. On the other hand, the person who’d caused her this distress was sitting two rows behind her.

  Iris spun her head around and snapped, “You’re a mole rat, Tommy.”

  But Iris did not have Tommy’s magical ability, and kind Mr. Anderson heard, and looked at her as if she had disappointed him. And at recess Tommy told Iris she was nasty and ugly and bossy and no one liked her, and Lark didn’t talk for the rest of the day. Somehow their parents got wind of the “mole rat” comment and Iris got a talking-to about name calling. Meanwhile people whispered Freak and Crow Girl at Lark for the rest of the year.

  Iris blamed the crows.

  That weekend, a crow left a small silver charm shaped like a moon right next to the birdbath. Lark put it on a string and wore it on her wrist for weeks; eventually her parents bought her a little chain for it so she could keep wearing it.

  “This means I’m Crow Girl,” Lark said to Iris. “But it’s a secret.”

  Now the collection was under the bed, safe from other people’s eyes. But the crows hadn’t left anything since the silver moon. Lark still left food and checked the yard faithfully, because she was faithful, even if crows were not.