The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  “Um, Batgirl?”

  Novalie nodded. “I like her too. I like her better as Oracle, though.”

  “Yeah,” Iris said, pretending she knew what that meant.

  Abigail bounced in front of the room wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt. “Today we’re going to talk about superheroes!” she proclaimed, as if that weren’t entirely obvious.

  “You should have Moon Girl,” Morgan said.

  “I don’t—who’s Moon Girl?”

  “Moon Girl is the smartest person in the whole Marvel Universe. She’s way smarter than Bruce Banner. She’s a nine-year-old black girl with glasses and she’s friends with a big dinosaur. I’m going to go as her for Halloween and bring a dinosaur stuffed animal.”

  “There’s a black-girl superhero?” Gabrielle asked.

  Morgan nodded enthusiastically.

  “Coooooooool.”

  “I should look that up, Morgan!” Abigail said brightly. “Thank you! Now—”

  “What about Batwoman?” Preeti asked.

  “Well, she’s right—”

  “That’s Batgirl!” Preeti said. “What about Batwoman?”

  “Or She-Hulk,” Morgan said.

  “Or Thor. Thor’s a woman now too,” Novalie added. “My brother’s mad about it, but he’s a big jerk.”

  “Superman’s in China,” added Preeti. “But he’s still a guy.”

  “Ms. Marvel’s Muslim!” Amma exclaimed.

  Abigail squinted at the girls as if they might be playing a trick on her. Her eyes fell on them each, one by one, and they just stared back expectantly. Except for Iris, who just shrugged.

  “Well,” Abigail said, clapping her hands together. “You guys sure know a lot about superheroes! That’s awesome! When I was a kid, we weren’t really supposed to like them.”

  “Why not?” Morgan asked.

  “Well, I mean, people thought they were for boys.”

  Preeti frowned. “Which boys?”

  “Just . . . boys. In general. Star Wars, too.”

  Hannah piped up now. “What about Rey?”

  “They didn’t have Rey back then. But they had Leia.”

  Hannah gasped. “General Leia!”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “So, what were you supposed to like?”

  “Um, princesses, mostly.”

  “Oh!” Morgan said. “Have you read Princeless? She’s a princess but kind of a superhero also. She’s black too,” she added to Gabrielle and Amma.

  “Princeless is great,” Preeti added.

  Iris could not follow the conversation, but she wrote the books down, for Lark’s sake.

  “Have you read Princess Academy?” Morgan asked. “It’s super feminist. My mom says so.”

  Hannah scrunched up her nose. “General Leia was a princess at first. So you can obviously like princesses and Star Wars.”

  “Well”—Abigail sputtered—“it was just different. Like toy shelves were either pink or blue, so there were toys for girls and toys for boys.”

  “My mom says pink used to be the color for boys,” Morgan said.

  “Also,” added Gabrielle, “why would you tell half your customers they shouldn’t buy your stuff? People weren’t very good at selling things.”

  All the girls nodded, and Iris nodded with them. This made sense to her.

  “Well,” said Preeti, “you still can’t find girls on superhero stuff. Black Widow’s never on Avenger stuff, and Wonder Woman isn’t on Justice League stuff. Except the Chobani yogurt tubes.”

  “Yeah,” said Hannah. “I got a whole set of Last Jedi figures for my birthday that didn’t have Rey in it. I wrote a letter to Target to complain.”

  “You can’t find Ms. Marvel on anything,” said Amma. “I would want all the Ms. Marvel things.”

  Iris watched her Awesome-mates. Even the girls who were quiet in this conversation were nodding along. All these girls were passionate about things. They knew things, things that other people cared about. What did Iris know? Besides collective nouns for animals, emergency symptoms, and presidential assassinations?

  “It’s because they think boys won’t buy it if there’s girls on it,” Morgan said.

  Gabrielle shrugged with the wisdom of a sixth grader. “Some boys make fun of stuff for being girly. And they tease boys who like that stuff. So being a girl is bad, apparently.”

  Morgan nodded solemnly. “My mom says that’s the patriarchy, and it hurts boys, too.”

  Abigail stood at the front of the room like she’d come in to give them all a lesson on the solar system and they’d invented their own rocket ship. “Well. It’s good you girls know so much about superheroes! I wasn’t expecting . . . so, I’m going to change plans a little. We’re going to start today with some journaling, and then we’ll do sharing. So, here’s your prompt: If you could have any superpower, what would it be, and why?”

  Iris deflated slowly. She should have seen this coming.

  “But, before we start,” Abigail chirped, “let’s make a list of superpowers.”

  Abigail went to the whiteboard while all the girls around Iris shouted out suggestions:

  Invisibility

  Strength

  Mind reading

  Flying

  Being stretchy

  Embiggening

  Ensmallening

  Speed

  Supersmarts

  Deadly throwing accuracy

  Turning into animals

  Beast mode

  Teleportation

  Jedi mind tricks

  Archery

  Fighting

  Time travel

  Interrogation

  Stealth

  It was something, watching all the girls together. There was a collective energy that kept building in the room, some invisible force connecting them. One girl would shout out a word and the others would look to her and grin. They didn’t need an invisible ball anymore.

  All but Iris, who had not figured out how to plug into this particular grid. So she sat at the table and copied down all the superpowers in a page in her notebook, as if record keeping were a job that everyone wanted her to do, as if she had a role in this at all.

  There were a lot of superpowers to be had in the world, a lot more than she’d even imagined. So, as the other girls started writing in their journals, Iris looked down the list and tried the powers on.

  It was obvious what Lark would pick: invisibility. Lark would be ecstatic if she could just go wherever she wanted without anyone paying any attention to her. She could sit in class without the ogre ever making her do math drills, and when it was time to give an oral report, no one would be able to find her. Maybe if she vomited in class the vomit would be invisible. Or, if it wasn’t, she could blame it on Tommy Whedon. And sometimes, if she felt like it, she could pretend to be a ghost and float things in the air and knock over trash cans and open and close doors. Lark would like that.

  And maybe while the rest of the class dissected owl pellets she could reassemble mouse skeletons. Probably nothing would put the ogre off the owl-pellet exercise like seeing the mice skeletons reassemble themselves.

  But Iris did not want to be invisible. She felt that way now, and she did not like it at all. Nor did she want to be able to read minds—that was the sort of thing that probably seemed like a good idea until you actually tried it. She did not want to fly in the air with a murder of crows and drop shiny things in people’s backyards. She did not want to embiggen, or become the size of a wasp. Sure, it would be nice to be supersmart, and interrogation powers might have their useful moments. But these things didn’t just happen to people in real life. Sure, there was Batman, who apparently became a superhero by being impossibly rich and working out a lot, but Iris didn’t think that happened to people in real life either, or more people would do it.

  She had other problems. She couldn’t go back in time and save Lark from vomiting, or keep Principal Peter from hiring the owl-pellet-loving teacher in the first place. S
he couldn’t protect her sister from the mortification that was surely burning her up while Iris sat here.

  Really, all she wanted was to be able to organize the world in a way that made sense, and that was not a superpower. Though it felt as impossible as one.

  They went around the table and the girls shouted out their answers—Amma, embiggening; Emily, beast mode; Gabrielle, flying; Hannah, flying; Morgan, supersmarts; Preeti, turn into a cat.

  Abigail said she wanted to be superstrong, strong enough to lift a truck, strong enough to lift all of them up if they needed. She winked, and the girls cringed at the metaphor.

  But when they got to Iris, she just shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “What did you write?”

  Just a list. “I didn’t, really.”

  “Okay, Iris. Novalie, what about you?”

  For a while, Abigail had been pushing her to try. Now it seemed even Abigail had given up. Even Abigail didn’t have that kind of superpower.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Reconstruction

  After Iris got home, she ran right up to Lark’s room, where it looked like a tiny tornado had hit the dollhouse world.

  “I threw up in class today,” Lark said when she entered. She didn’t even look at Iris.

  “I know,” Iris said.

  “In front of everyone.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know? Was everyone talking about it?”

  “No! I asked Jenny and Natalie on the bus, because Mom left me a note that you’d gone home sick, that’s all.”

  “Did they laugh?”

  Kind of? “No, definitely not.”

  “Everyone in class laughed. Except Mr. Hunt. He got all red and weird and sent me to the nurse’s office. Did they tell you what we had to do?”

  “Owl pellets.”

  “Do you know what those are?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Well, I didn’t know. I thought it was, like, owl food or something. So when I found out, I was like, I can’t do this; I’m going to have to pretend to be sick or something. But I couldn’t tell Mr. Hunt I was sick—what if he knew I was pretending and he got mad at me? So then I thought, you know what? I’m just going to do this. How gross can it be? And I’m standing there looking at this . . . thing, and I have my little knife, and everyone else is cutting into theirs and pulling out bones.”

  While Lark talked, Iris made her way over to Lark’s bed, grabbing Esmeralda and holding her tight.

  “And I can’t do it. I can’t put the knife in. And meanwhile all these skeletons of these poor animals are reconstructing themselves. People are, like, guessing what they have. A bunny! A frog! A mouse! And all I can think is that maybe the process will keep going and the animals will take on flesh and fur and come back to life and then I can open the window and send them all to freedom. And then Mr. Hunt says, ‘Lark, is there a problem?’ And everyone turns to look at me. Everyone. And Tommy says something about Crow Girl, I don’t even know what. So I just plunge my knife into the pellet and pull out this little bone and—”

  She mashed her lips together.

  “I tried. I did! But none of the other kids seemed to mind at all, like maybe they were grossed out at first but then they all kind of got into it. Like it was a game. Like a kit from the Science Museum, only it’s not a kit from the Science Museum at all. It was a real bone. It was so tiny.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Something’s wrong with me. Everyone else is fine. Everyone’s fine with the math drills and the mouse remains. But I’m not. I threw up in front of everyone.” Her eyes were red now.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you!” Iris’s voice had edges, and Lark blinked up at her. “There’s nothing wrong,” she repeated softly. “You thought it was gross and you got sick. It happens.”

  “Why does it only happen to me?”

  Her eyes were looking up at Iris desperately, as if Iris could give her an answer and make it all okay.

  Iris swallowed. “It happens to you,” she said, talking slowly, “because most people look at a bone and see a bone. You see the whole story.”

  It was true. Lark saw backward in time—the beginning, the middle, and the terrible end. Everything had flesh, everything had feelings, everything had a story, and she felt for everything. Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived in a field. And then the owl came. The end.

  Iris sat down next to her sister and Lark tucked her head into her shoulder. They fit like this. After a moment, she put her hand on Lark’s knee and tapped three times on her leg. It was their code for something, something like I am here or I love you or Iris and Lark, or something that was a combination of all those things.

  Lark exhaled loudly and then tapped three times back.

  “So . . . what are you doing?” Iris asked, nodding to the dollhouse. It was undergoing major renovations. The whole family was sprawled on the floor and Lark had taken apart the campfire room in the attic. That room had been there the longest of any of them, and Iris could not help but feel a twinge. She’d liked roasting marshmallows on the moon.

  Lark sat up. “I’m making boxes,” she said, motioning to the origami pile.

  “For what?”

  “It’s an attic, isn’t it? This is where they keep things.”

  Iris shifted. Lark had not made rooms like normal rooms in some time.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things they want to put away.”

  “. . . Like what?”

  “Just things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Things that go in brightly colored boxes. You know.”

  She did not. “What about the family?”

  “I think they should each be in their own rooms.”

  “The girls, too?”

  “They have to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone decided it was supposed to be this way, that’s why. Someone made a decision and now everyone’s just locked in their own room and they can’t get out and find each other. They should never have split up in the first place.”

  “What about Baby Thing?”

  “Except Baby Thing. Baby Thing stays with the Lark doll so she can watch over it.”

  It wasn’t the first time Lark had done something like this. For a while last year the dad character had been strapped on a table in a mad-scientist room, next to a duct-tape mummy-cyborg, which was also strapped to a table. Each had a tiny tinfoil cap strapped to his head, and the caps were connected to each other by a wire. Making it easier, Lark explained, for the brain to travel directly from the dad figure to the cyborg-mummy figure once the mad scientist flipped the switch.

  “Did I do something?” their dad had asked when he saw it.

  “Never open the door to strangers,” Lark had responded darkly.

  Now Lark picked up the Iris doll and considered her. “At first I was going to put you in the bird room so you could fly. But then I realized you should probably be in the armory.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “I trust you the most with the weapons. Mom will be onstage with the chickens. Dad . . . maybe a picnic in the bear habitat.”

  “That might be dangerous.”

  “Well, you know Dad. He probably wouldn’t notice the bears.”

  “Don’t you think he’d be in the disco room?”

  Lark smiled a little. “He wishes. That’s why he is trapped.”

  “And what about you?” Iris said, picking up the Lark doll.

  “I’m not sure yet. I think she’s in the attic.”

  The attic was bare now—all signs of the moon and the starry black night were gone. All that was left were bits of paper and paint and drops of glitter here and there, the ruins of the former landscape.

  With a thoughtful frown Lark stared into the attic, considering. Then she started placing the little origami boxes in th
ere, strange bursts of bright clean color against the postapocalyptic room

  “Aren’t you going to decorate the room first?”

  “No, I’m just going to leave it like this.”

  “But it looks . . .” What? Not just bare. It looked ruined. Lonely.

  “I know,” said Lark. “But it’s the attic. That’s how attics look.”

  “Well, then, shouldn’t the boxes be more broken down?” Something about the bright colors of the origami papers made it all look worse.

  “No,” Lark said. “This is what I want.”

  And that was the end of that. Lark never minded when Iris gave suggestions, because Iris never minded when Lark didn’t take them, and Iris never demanded to know why. Their parents always wanted Lark to explain why she’d put the chicken on the stage or the dog in the cat room or pasted a whole hallway entirely in cotton, and sometimes she had an explanation—because she’s doing a one-chicken show—and sometimes she didn’t. Or, Iris suspected, she had an explanation, but not one that could be explained. The dog was in the cat room because it felt right to Lark to do it that way, and that was all that really mattered.

  “So why are you—she—in the attic?”

  “She’s looking for something.”

  “In the boxes?”

  Lark scrunched up her face. “I don’t know yet. Probably.”

  There were times when Iris and Lark knew exactly what the other was thinking; there were times they talked in secret languages that no one else knew. And there were times where it seemed like they didn’t speak the same language at all.

  “I’m sorry about school,” Iris said.

  Lark nodded slightly. “Me too.”

  Iris watched her sister fill the attic with brightly colored origami boxes, and after a while Lark’s face relaxed and her eyes cleared and her cheeks dimmed from red to pink. She sucked on her bottom lip as she carefully folded paper into perfect little boxes—she did it so swiftly and elegantly, like it was what the paper wanted to be most in the world and all she had to do was help it get there—and then put boxes in the attic, moved them around, and took them out again.

  It seemed like it was going to take a while.

  So Iris went downstairs to find her mom frantically searching through piles of paper in the kitchen. There had been a lot of frantic searching for things since their dad had left.