The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  “I can’t find the”—she waved her hand around as if by disturbing the air the missing word would pop out—“electric bill.”

  “It will turn up,” Iris said brightly.

  “I just . . . I don’t know where anything is anymore.”

  Tell me about it, Iris thought.

  “Maybe whoever’s stealing stuff took it,” her mom muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, there’s some crime ring, people taking stuff from museums around here. It’s all over the news. I don’t seriously think they took my electric bill, though.”

  “Okay. Um, Mom, I want to talk to you.” Iris slid into a chair and looked up at her mother with her best serious expression. Their last serious conversation had gone so well, after all.

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Her mom glanced at the piles, and then sat at the breakfast table across from Iris, clearly giving her daughter her full attention, clearly banishing all thoughts of lost electric bills and the disasters they might portend. Iris had her best serious expression and her mom had her best listening expression, and there they were, both of them, doing their best. “What’s up?”

  “I think Lark should move to Ms. Shonubi’s class.”

  There. A practical solution to the problem. They had done their best, they had tried, but clearly it wasn’t working. Clearly it was a mistake. Lark getting sick in class proved that. Yes, it was terrible for Lark, but it had one positive benefit of showing their parents that this idea was a terrible mistake.

  Her mom blew air out of her mouth. “Honey. We talked about this.”

  “I know, but we should talk about it again. She doesn’t like Mr. Hunt.”

  “I understand that, but that’s not a good enough reason. It’s not even a month into the school year. Lark might like him just fine if she gives him a chance.”

  “That’s not going to work. She thinks he’s an ogre.”

  Her mom sat back and exhaled deeply, one of those cleansing breaths they tell you to take before standardized tests. “I wish I knew whether you meant literally or figuratively.”

  “You mean, whether she really thinks he’s an actual creature of myth, or whether she just thinks he acts like one?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think there’s a difference.”

  Mom just shook her head. “You guys and your stories.”

  Iris flushed. “I’m not making this up. And neither is Lark.”

  “It’s just the fourth week of school and you’ve decided your fifth-grade teacher is a monster.”

  “Not mine. Lark’s. She doesn’t like him. He makes her do math drills in front of the class.”

  Her mom tilted her head. “Sweetheart, I don’t think that makes someone an ogre. I think that’s just what teachers do.”

  “She threw up in class today!”

  “I know that. I went to pick her up, remember? But that’s hardly the teacher’s fault.”

  “She threw up because he made her do something that grossed her out. They were dissecting owl pellets.”

  “. . . Is that owl food?”

  “No.” Iris explained what they really were.

  “Oh. Well. Your sister is unusually sensitive to that kind of thing,” she said, looking vaguely grossed out herself. “But that doesn’t make the teacher an ogre. I’m guessing a lot of the students found it really interesting. Wouldn’t you?”

  “She doesn’t like him,” Iris repeated, ignoring her mother’s inarguably true statement.

  “Is this really about Mr. Hunt? I know it’s hard on you guys, being separated.”

  “No. I mean, yes, it’s hard. But . . . it’s not that.”

  “Look, things are tough on Lark. You and I know it. Living in the world’s going to be a little harder on her than it is on other people. But she still has to live in the world, you know? And not every teacher is going to be just right for her. Or for you.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Iris. Love. Do me a favor. I know you guys have a . . . flair for the dramatic. But could you just try to rein it in right now? I don’t think its going to be helpful for Lark this year. She needs to be practical. And so do you.”

  Iris swallowed. She was practical. That was the entirety of her personality. If she wasn’t practical, who was she?

  “Don’t get me wrong, I love how creative you girls are. Your imaginations are wonderful. But sometimes a teacher is just a teacher, doing his best. And Lark is going to be stressed and anxious without you there, and maybe it’s not the best thing to encourage her . . . flights of fancy. Maybe it’s better to just show her that things are . . . normal.”

  “Normal,” Iris repeated.

  “Yes, normal. Getting assignments you don’t like is normal. Getting a teacher you don’t connect with is normal. Getting sick in class. These things happen. It’s part of life and something we all have to deal with. Lark, too.”

  “But . . .” But what? But Lark was dealing with it. The point was she shouldn’t have to. The point was Lark wasn’t normal, and shouldn’t have to be. Lark was Lark. Didn’t anyone see that?

  Her mom reached across the table and took her hand. “My girl. I love how you take care of your sister. You are so brave and loving. But don’t forget to take care of yourself, too.”

  This was not the point at all. The point was Lark and how Mr. Hunt was not the right fit for Lark and wasn’t it important to try to find the right fit for your child’s emotional well-being and if maybe you had a teacher right down the hall who was the right fit and Mr. Hunt was the wrong fit then it was only logical to move Lark down said hall. It was only practical.

  “Please know your father and I would never make you two do something that we thought would be bad for you. And the decisions we make might not always make sense to you, but trust that it’s not because we don’t care or aren’t paying attention. We do care, and we are paying attention.” She looked down at the table. “Look, honey. We’re all going to have to pull together. All three of us. I’m trying, I am, but it’s hard without your father here. I’m on my own.”

  Iris could not talk. She just stared at the table.

  “Honey, I know you don’t understand, and I am sorry about that. Just concentrate on yourself. And with Lark”—her mom glanced out of the window for a second—“just don’t let your sister get so stuck in her head she gets lost there.”

  Iris had trouble doing her homework that night. Even the math problems didn’t seem to line up the way they usually did. Instead of answers following questions like clockwork, everything was like a question leading to more questions.

  Perhaps this was what it was like when you were not practical.

  There was something else, something sitting there in the back of her mind. She couldn’t figure out the shape of it, let alone what to call it, but it cast a long shadow over everything.

  So she threw down her pencil and went to check on Lark.

  Lark had been quiet during dinner, like she was still folding boxes in her head. And she looked slightly green, and rather like she should be sleeping as opposed to trying to set the world record for origami box folding. But she was not sleeping—she was still in front of her dollhouse. The attic room was completely filled with the bright yellow, purple, pink, green, red, and blue cubes, and dozens more spilled out over the table and the floor beneath. But against the ripped-out hull of the dollhouse attic, the colors looked sad somehow.

  Meanwhile, the Lark doll was sitting on a pile of boxes with her back turned, staring out the window, Baby Thing lying on a box next to her.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She took a break from going through the boxes.”

  “I can see that it would take a while. The family should maybe consider having a garage sale or something.”

  Lark grinned a little. “They hold on to a lot of stuff. No one else even comes up here.”

  “Did you figure out what she’s looking for?”

  Lark shook her head.

>   She worked for a while more while Iris sat and watched, and then it was time for bed, so Iris said she hoped her sister felt better; she said she was sorry about the owl pellets, she was sorry about the ogre; she said if anyone made fun of Lark, she—Iris—would personally lock them in the janitor’s closet. And not the one on the second floor, the one in the basement. Where no one could hear their screams.

  And still she sat there, watching Lark rearranging the boxes in the attic so they were organized by color while the little doll stared out into the sky and her mother’s words flew about the room:

  Don’t let your sister get so stuck in her head she gets lost there.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Meanwhile . . .

  The grand Minnesota Zoo sits in a suburb south of the Twin Cities. About twenty miles, as the crow flies.

  The Minnesota Zoo opened several decades ago, its founders having envisioned a new kind of zoo—no more animals trapped in small iron-and-concrete cages serving life sentences for the crime of being interesting, staring out at the families gaping back at them, waiting for the occasional little girl or boy with a big heart who would look into their eyes and see the sadness there and take a little bit of it away with them.

  No more of that. This would be a new zoo, one where animals had room to roam, one where they lived—not in cages, but in carefully constructed habitats, scrupulous facsimiles of their natural environments, the next best thing to actually being there.

  I have to say, they did a good job.

  Here the animals had space; here they had grass and trees and water; here they were separated from people by glass partitions or simple fences instead of cages. Here a state-of-the-art monorail transported visitors across the nearly five hundred acres of land. It was revolutionary, and soon other zoos around the country decided that there were other options for their animals besides close quarters and misery.

  Today the Minnesota Zoo is a leader in conservation, working to save endangered rhinos, wolf pups, Asian wild horses. Prize exhibits include the African penguins, the Amur tigers, the Canada lynx, and of course the rare and wonderful beluga whales—Peanut and Aphrodite.

  The zoo is usually crowded in September, and if you want to be near the whales when no one else is, you need to be at the gates at eight a.m. with the school groups in their matching T-shirts and the parents with strollers.

  So on this morning no one was at the top of the tank to see the man clutching a large brown briefcase as he stared down into the pool watching Peanut and Aphrodite swim. And they missed quite a sight. For the man placed the briefcase on the concrete, opened it up, and pulled out three items not normally found in your average briefcase: a pair of industrial gloves, a tightly sealed mason jar filled with some kind of shimmering light, and a foot-long walleye.

  Quickly he put the gloves on, careful to tuck them under his sleeves, opened the mason jar, delicately rubbed the contents on the walleye, then dangled the now-shimmering fish over the tank.

  The white whales had already had their seven a.m. breakfasts of herring and smelt, as they did every day, and they normally would not eat again until lunch. But Peanut was not going to say no to a good snack if offered. So, as it had been trained to do for years, it rose up out of the water and gulped down the fish, Aphrodite—more wary, perhaps, of the change in routine—lingering underneath.

  If anyone human had been watching, it would have seemed like time stopped for a moment. The whale was perfectly still, mouth around the fish. Then the man leaned forward and placed his hand on the whale’s smooth head.

  And in a blink, the whale was gone.

  Just gone.

  But if anyone had been looking carefully—anyone besides me, that is—they would have seen the man place a long white figurine in his briefcase, snap it shut, and stroll away from the whale tank.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Fortress of Solitude

  The plan was that Lark would stay home from school for two days to “recover.” No one specified whether it was her health or her dignity that needed recovery. Whichever it was, Lark looked like she needed it. She looked like a plant someone had forgotten to water.

  Their mom was going to work from home in the mornings, but she needed to be at work in the afternoons, so Lark would go into the office with her and read and do homework, and perhaps with a couple of days of quiet all the uneasy things inside her would settle, and Lark would unwither.

  Perhaps.

  As for Iris, when she got to school she stalked around the fifth-grade wing listening for whispers of her sister’s name. Gossip always skittered around the school like spiders: you needed to stomp on them early before they mutated and took over the whole place.

  But she was too late. It seemed like all the fifth graders were stopping to ask Iris if Lark was okay, and in Iris’s agitated state it was impossible to tell who meant it and who was snickering behind their concerned masks. Everyone was talking about Lark, and no one seemed to be talking about the ogre who had caused this whole event. No one was talking about the barbaric practice of making elementary schoolers piece together regurgitated prey.

  So Iris was already in a black mood when she went into her classroom, and of course the kids in there immediately pounced on her as if she were the prey.

  “Is Lark okay?”

  “I heard she projectile vomited!”

  “I heard she turned green.”

  Iris stuck her head in the air. “She’s fine, thank you,” she said as primly as possible. “People don’t actually turn green, you know.” Lark had been a little green-tinged, but that was different.

  Summoning as much dignity as she could, she set herself down at her desk, where her pod mates were eyeing her like she herself might regurgitate prey at any moment.

  “So, did you, like, feel it when she threw up?” Jin asked.

  Iris glared at him.

  “Jin.” Mira said. “This is not the time.”

  He sunk in his chair. “I—just wondering—”

  “No!” Mira said. “Does she look like she wants to talk about psychic powers? I’m sure this was very stressful for her.”

  “Vomiting can be a reaction to stress, you know,” Oliver said. “Maybe Lark was under stress.”

  “She should try chamomile tea,” Mira said.

  “Is that a pet-psychic thing?” Jin asked.

  “Chamomile,” pronounced Oliver, “is a plant.”

  “It’s a person thing. My mom makes tea. It helps me when I’m stressed.”

  Jin rolled his eyes. “What could you possible be stressed about? You’re a girl.”

  Mira and Iris both turned on him. “What?”

  “Girls aren’t stressed!” said Jin.

  Oliver shook his head solemnly. “That’s not true. My sister is the most stressed-out person you’ll ever meet in your life. She’s more stressed out than Superman.”

  “Why would Superman be stressed out?” Mira asked. “He’s Superman.”

  “Superman,” Oliver said, “is always stressed. About everything. I think he has an anxiety disorder.”

  “He’s got a point,” Jin said. “You don’t go hang out in a palace made of ice called the Fortress of Solitude because you feel really chill about things.”

  “Ha!” Oliver said. “Chill!”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mira said. “My aunt sees pets with anxiety disorders all the time and they’re nothing like Superman.”

  “That,” Oliver said, “is a logical fallacy.”

  “You’re a logical fallacy!” Mira snapped. “You guys are being insensitive. Again.” She turned to Iris. “Is Lark okay?”

  And now they were all looking at her not like she was a curiosity, not like they might snicker as soon as she turned around, but like they cared.

  Iris blinked. “She’s not really. She’s super embarrassed.” Normally she would have lied and said Lark was fine, why wouldn’t she be fine? But somehow in the face of all of this pod sympathy, she couldn’t m
anage to lie. “Everyone laughed at her,” she added quietly.

  Mira exhaled. “Those jerks.”

  Jin shook his head slowly. “People are awful.”

  “The worst,” Oliver agreed. “Repugnant.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Thursday, I think.” Though Lark had an oral report scheduled for Thursday and would probably do everything in her power to stay home.

  “We should do something nice for her,” Mira declared.

  “I agree,” proclaimed Oliver. “I don’t know her, but you’re our pod mate, and Lark is your sister, so she’s like our sister. Our pod sister. And you know what they say?”

  “What?”

  “Always stand behind your pod sister.”

  “Superman would,” Jin agreed.

  Iris didn’t know what to say. No one had ever really taken her side before, other than Lark herself.

  Just then Ms. Shonubi called Iris’s name. There, standing in the doorway, was the ogre.

  “Iris,” Mr. Hunt said after she followed him into the hallway, “I wanted to know how your sister was.”

  Iris gave him her best haughty look. “She’s . . . recovering.”

  “Good. That was . . . I’m very sorry that happened to her. Anyway, I know she won’t be back for a couple of days. I wanted to give you her homework so she doesn’t worry about getting behind. There’s an astronomy project due Thursday, but she knows about that.”

  He was acting very nice, a fact Iris tried hard not to acknowledge in any way. “Okay.”

  “Is she all right? Lark?”

  “I’m sure she’ll be okay. Eventually.”

  “I see. Well, please tell her I hope she’s feeling better.” He shifted, looking as uncomfortable as Iris felt. “I . . . ,” he started, scratching his face. Iris waited. “Yes, I hope she’s feeling better.”

  He was very nervous, for an ogre.

  Now that Lark was with their mom, there was no reason for Iris to go home right after camp, no reason at all for her to stay away from Treasure Hunters and the old books and the small pocket away from time. And the sign, still there.