The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  “Can’t you just buy a real compass?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She nodded toward the bowl. The needle was still quivering on its axis, as if searching for something.

  The man’s face scrunched up. “Well, that is an adorable whimsy. A compass! I never! Children are so imaginative.”

  “That’s not a compass?”

  “No! What an absurd idea!”

  Iris straightened. “That is how you make a compass. I’ve done it!”

  “Oh, I’m sure.”

  “I have! You magnetize the needle! It’s science!”

  “Right, of course. Science.”

  Iris’s mouth opened and closed a few times. “You don’t believe me?” she finally said.

  “Oh, naturally I do. Yes, you made a compass! With science! Brava!”

  He didn’t believe her. That was clear. Iris gaped at him. She didn’t know which was more angering: that he didn’t believe her or that he didn’t know anything about science.

  “So . . . what is that, then, if it’s not a compass?”

  “It’s magic, of course!” he said. And then covered his mouth with his hands dramatically. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Iris threw up her hands. “All right!” It was definitely time to go home. She opened the door, the chimes singing, and added, “I hope you find Alice, whoever she is.”

  The man glanced down at the not-compass. “As do I.”

  Iris’s sojourn to the antique store hadn’t satisfied her curiosity at all, but at least now, finally, something interesting had happened to her, something she could share with her sister that wasn’t gray mush and uncomfortable seats.

  And so, that night the girls sat on Lark’s bed, while Iris fiddled with Esmeralda’s tail and told her story.

  “Remember the antique store?”

  “Oh, the one with the chalkboard sign? ‘We Are Here’?”

  “That one. Well, the sign’s changed. I saw it leaving the library today. It says ‘Alice, Where Are You?’”

  Lark sat back against the wall. “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “That is not a good sign for a business either.”

  “I know.”

  “I wonder what it means.”

  “Well, I went in and asked.”

  Lark grinned. “Of course you did.”

  “And that weird guy was in there. And he wouldn’t tell me! He asked me how I knew about Alice.”

  “Um, because it was on the sign?”

  “Yeah! That’s what I said. He acted like I’d invaded his privacy or something.”

  “Iris, I feel the antique-store guy may be a touch odd.”

  “He was also doing the compass experiment—you know with the water bowl and the needle? Except he insisted it wasn’t the compass experiment and he has never heard of the compass experiment.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “He told me it was magic.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. There’s a bunch of creepy dolls in the shop, so I really hope they aren’t magic too.”

  “Creepy, like how creepy? Creepy like they might be watching, or creepy like they might come alive and kill us all?”

  Iris considered. “Somewhere in between, I think. Like they might be watching us and considering whether or not they want to kill us all.”

  “They have to wait and see how we act. Whether we’re worth saving—”

  “Or not.” Iris added darkly. “So, what about art club? How was it?”

  “Not bad, actually. We talked about a real painting for a while. Ms. Messner showed us all the things it was doing with light and everything. And look”—Lark grabbed a framed photo of the two of them at Valleyfair—“art has positive and negative space, right? Positive space is the focus and negative space is the background. So in this picture we’re the positive space and everything around us is negative space.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “But the negative space is part of the art too. So we’re going to do projects with negative space this week.”

  “. . . I don’t know what that means.”

  Lark giggled. “Me neither!”

  “So who’s in the class? Are they okay?”

  “Um . . .” Lark bit her lip. “It’s fine. The Naomis are in there. Dexter. Not Tommy! And um . . . other kids? I wasn’t really paying attention to them. What about Camp Awesome? Did you figure out what it was for, exactly?”

  Iris sighed epically. “I’m not sure it’s for anything. I mean, we have journals, that’s all I know. So we’re going to spend each day journaling.”

  She hit the verb-made-out-of-a-noun a little hard, but Lark did not react. Lark was used to making things out of other things.

  “Can’t you do that at home?”

  “I don’t know.” Iris pulled at a thread coming out of the owl’s eye. “Apparently it’s more awesome to do it in a group. Today we just decorated the journals.”

  Lark sat up, face bright and open. “Ooooh, what did you do?”

  “Um, nothing.”

  “Iris!”

  “I couldn’t think of anything! There were all these glue sticks. It was a lot of pressure.”

  “We could do it now.”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  “Why not? I have stuff.” She spread her arms out to indicate the entire room, possibly the world.

  Iris opened her eyes wide in mock surprise. “What? You have art stuff?”

  Lark poked her. “Come on, let’s do it.”

  “I just don’t feel like it.”

  “Boring.” But she didn’t ask again, as Iris knew she wouldn’t. “So what about the other girls? Are they nice?”

  “I don’t think they like me.”

  “Iris . . .”

  “I mean it.”

  “Did you talk about assassinations again?”

  Now it was Iris’s turn to laugh. “Not this time. “

  Lark wrinkled her nose. “Mr. Hunt would probably love it if you did that. I think he really likes murder-related stuff.”

  It was the first she’d mentioned her new teacher since the previous week, and Iris hadn’t asked about him. It was so unfair that she got the nice teacher and Lark was stuck with someone who scared her so much she couldn’t even come up with any hobbies—Iris couldn’t bring herself to mention it.

  “Is he still being an ogre?”

  “Yes. I have to give a book report next week.”

  “Out loud?”

  Lark nodded.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Lark liked books, but she did not like talking about them in front of the class. Or about anything else. She turned bright red and looked at the floor and her voice got quieter and quieter and she seemed to shrink down into a miniature Lark, one who was way too tiny to give book reports or even attend school safely. It is hard to watch your sister shrink. By winter last year Mr. Anderson had started to forget to call on her on oral report days. Oh, Lark, we ran out of time! Just give me a written report.

  “He’s so loud, too. His voice is like—” She threw her hands out in the air. “And we started doing math drills. Like we all stand up and he throws problems at us and if we get them wrong we have to sit and the person who’s left standing wins. So we’re supposed to want to win, like that’s motivating. I don’t want to win! I don’t want to play. I don’t see how doing math while someone yells at you is an important skill.” While Lark talked, her cheeks were getting redder and redder. “And everyone else likes him fine. Tommy Whedon loves him. Tommy wins math drills.”

  “Tommy Whedon,” proclaimed Iris, “is a blowfish.”

  A slow grin spread across Lark’s face. “I thought he was a mole rat.”

  “He’s both. He’s a blowfish and a mole rat. He’s a blowrat. Is he bothering you?”

  “Not really.” Lark glanced at her sister. “You’re not going to, like, do anything, are you?”

  “Not if he’s not bothering you. The good thing is,
if Mr. Hunt is really an ogre and he collects your heart, Mom and Dad are going to be really sorry.”

  Lark sighed ruefully. “That’s comforting, anyway.”

  “We tried to tell them. But they didn’t listen. And now . . .”

  Lark slid down to the dollhouse and picked up one of the girl figures from her moon campfire.

  “Mom, Dad,” she said, waving the doll around. “My fifth-grade teacher is an ogre.”

  Iris slid down next to her and picked up the other girl doll. “I told you. I told you Principal Peter didn’t do a background check.”

  Lark cleared her throat and picked up the mom doll. “Now, girls. Don’t let your imaginations get control of you.”

  “You know these girls and their imaginations!” said the dad doll, in Lark’s other hand. “Well! I’m off to London!”

  Iris laughed. The real Iris, not the doll.

  “Bye, honey,” said Lark/Mom. “Oh, girls. Monsters aren’t real. That’s very silly. Now excuse me. I need to go do something in the spider room.” And the mom doll trotted down the stairs and headed for the haunted room.

  “But,” the Lark doll called after her, “what if he takes my heart?”

  At this, Iris put her doll down and looked her sister in the eye.

  “He can’t take your heart,” she said firmly. “You’re Lark Maguire. You’re the girl who defeats the ogres.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Meanwhile . . .

  In the heart of Minneapolis, just off of downtown, sits one of the preeminent contemporary art museums in the country. It began as a room in the mansion of lumber baron T. B. Walker, which he designed in order to make the best pieces of his substantial art collection open to the public, and then he expanded it to fourteen rooms, and then eventually he built his own museum.

  That, too, was the sort of thing very rich people did back then.

  Eventually the museum devoted itself to preserving and creating modern art—not just painting and sculpture, but performance and film. And then the head of the Walker Art Center decided to expand the gallery to the outdoors, where art and weather could interact over Minnesota’s changing seasons, where people could interact with art, where kids could climb on sculptures and birds could perch atop them and dogs could frolic around them. Now the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is home to more than forty outdoor sculptures across eleven acres, but the most famous one had been there from the beginning.

  The sculptor Claes Oldenburg liked spoons. And really giant sculptures. And so when he was commissioned to make a fountain sculpture for the garden, he planned one of a giant spoon stretching over a small pond.

  His wife, Coojse van Bruggen, looked at the plan and said, “Needs fruit.” And thus Spoonbridge and Cherry was born.

  The spoon with the cherry perched atop its bowl became the iconic symbol of Minneapolis. Its value was astonishing. Not that anyone could ever sell it. Not that anyone could ever steal it.

  How could you? It in itself was the size of a giant truck, weighing about seven thousand pounds. You would need trucks, cranes, a crew of people to move it. And the garden was under constant video surveillance.

  On the night the sculpture disappeared, the video showed a man entering the garden, a small briefcase at his side. Then the video skipped, and when the image clarified, all that could be seen was the small pool.

  Spoonbridge and Cherry was gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Parts of Speech

  So, all too quickly, the school year settled into its inevitable rhythm, and what had once been inconceivable soon became everyday reality. For Iris, the very structure of the school day—once comforting—felt oppressive. Every day would be like this. Reading. Gym. Math. Lunch. Specials. Science. Social studies. Bus. Camp Awesome. None of it with Lark. All of it feeling like she was this weird twitchy ghost.

  Mostly she tried not to talk to anyone, as there didn’t seem to be anything worth saying, and weird twitchy ghosts did not talk. But she couldn’t always help it. For instance, each day right before lunch they had Pod Time, which involved some sort of discussion or activity with your pod—the collective noun for students in a cluster of desks in Ms. Shonubi’s room. Today in Pod Time everyone was supposed to name a place they wanted to visit and tell the group why. This would, Iris suspected, be one of those assignments that seemed innocent on its face but would eventually lead to some kind of Pod-based project involving poster board and glue sticks and uncomfortable conversations about who should do the lettering and Iris having to find a way to correct people when they got the state flower wrong without them thinking she was a know-it-all, or, worse, ignoring her and getting the state flower wrong anyway, and either way someone telling her she was too bossy. Because you just can’t win with group projects.

  But, for now, Jin was explaining how much he wanted to go to Orlando to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and ride on the Incredible Hulk Coaster, and Mira said that her grandparents wintered down there, by which she meant they spent winters down there so consistently that it was a verb, and so Iris surreptitiously got out her Awesome journal and flipped open to the verb page and added:

  Wintering

  She bit her lip and studied the list. Snippets from her dad’s work calls ran through the back of her head. The calls were way too boring to pay attention to and tended to be conducted in a language that sounded like English but none of the words were used in the right way. But now those words had a use:

  Incentivizing

  Workshopping

  Bucketizing

  “What are you doing?” Oliver asked.

  “Me?” Iris looked up. “Nothing.”

  “This is Pod Time!” Mira said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be writing things down.”

  Meanwhile, Oliver had leaned all the way over and was reading her journal. “‘Crafting,’” he read. “Actually, that’s not a made-up verb. It’s a verb already. To craft: to make something with care and skill.”

  Iris narrowed her eyes. “What, do you read the dictionary for fun?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway,” she said, straightening, “I know it’s a verb like that. But not like Abig—not like this girl was using it. She meant crafting, like doing crafts. There’s already a way of saying that.” He looked at her blankly. “Doing crafts!”

  He frowned. “But if you’re making those crafts with care and skill—”

  “No! It doesn’t work like that. In the world of actual words used in the actual right way you don’t say ‘I crafted’ and leave it at that. You have to craft something.”

  “Guys,” Mira whispered.

  “Oh.” Oliver adjusted his bow tie sagaciously. “It’s a transitive verb and they’re making it intransitive. You should put an asterisk by that one, like—” He reached for her journal.

  “Hey,” she said, sweeping the journal shut. “That’s private!”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Your list of made-up verbs and one transitive verb used incorrectly is private?”

  “Guys!” Mira’s voice was a hiss now. “We’re supposed to be discussing places! Also you guys are being really really boring.”

  “Maybe you could go to a dictionary theme park,” Jin added.

  Mira snorted. “Grammar World!”

  “There could be a haunted house with whiches,” Jin said, giggling. “Get it? Not witches, but whiches?”

  “That would be Homophone World,” Oliver corrected.

  “You could ride the train at the Railroad Conjunction!” Mira said.

  “Yeah, the but train,” Jin said.

  Iris tapped her foot on the floor. She did not want to go to a dictionary theme park. And she certainly did not want to go anywhere with Oliver, who would probably put asterisks on the rides and explain that they were not really roller coasters but intransitive coasters, whatever that meant.

  If Lark had been there she could have tapped a message to her about the whole conversation and Lark would have rolled her ey
es in solidarity. Or, Lark would have tapped out her own syntax puns that were way better than these, and Iris could have rolled her eyes in solidarity. But now she had to sit and suffer in silence, both actual and figurative.

  If someone annoys you in class but your sister isn’t there to tell about it, did it really happen?

  “How’s it going over there?” Ms. Shonubi called.

  “Fine!” Mira said, glaring at them. “What about you, Iris?” she said pointedly. “Where would you want to go?”

  With a sigh, Iris closed her journal. “Um, London, I guess.”

  “London, England?” Oliver asked.

  “Obviously. Is there another one?”

  “There’s one in Canada. And Ohio. I also read atlases for fun.”

  (What Oliver said was true. Iris looked up other Londons later and made a list in her Awesome book. There were also ones in South America and Africa and all over the United States, including a London in California that wasn’t a town but rather a “census-designated place,” whatever that meant. Like, there’s a guy out there who looks at a map and says, I hereby designate this a place! And all the other areas of the map are like, Can we be places too? And the guy says, Nope, sorry. Maybe someday, if you dream.)

  “Well,” Iris said, “I mean London, England. My dad’s living there right now.”

  Jin’s eyes went big. “Your parents got divorced?”

  Iris blinked. “No.”

  “Are they getting divorced?”

  “No, he’s just working there for a while. Then he’s coming back.”

  Iris glared at Jin. Her parents weren’t getting divorced. It was just her dad’s job. He was coming back. When their parents had sat them down to tell them that this was happening, that he was just going to be out of the country for a few months and it was just part of his job and it would go by so fast and he would call them every day and be home before they knew it, they’d talked quickly and brightly and confidently, words tumbling out of their mouths like polished stones.