The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

  PENGUIN TEEN

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  First published 2017

  Copyright © MacKenzie Common, 2017

  Jacket design by Leah Springate

  Jacket images: (girl) honey_and_milk/Getty Images; (snow) Kichigin/Shutterstock.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Common, MacKenzie, author

   The lives of desperate girls / MacKenzie Common.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780143198710 (hardback).—ISBN 9780143198727 (epub)

   I. Title.

  PS8605.O5456L58 2017   jC813’.6   C2016-906905-2

                     C2016-906906-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956759

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  To my family, who taught me to keep an open mind and an open heart.

  And to Marlene Bird.

  I have never met you but I have never forgotten your story.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty–One

  Chapter Twenty–Two

  Chapter Twenty–Three

  Chapter Twenty–Four

  Chapter Twenty–Five

  Chapter Twenty–Six

  Chapter Twenty–Seven

  Chapter Twenty–Eight

  Chapter Twenty–Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty–One

  Chapter Thirty–Two

  Chapter Thirty–Three

  Chapter Thirty–Four

  Chapter Thirty–Five

  Chapter Thirty–Six

  Chapter Thirty–Seven

  Chapter Thirty–Eight

  Author Note

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  February 22, 2006

  I look back on February 22, 2006, as the day they found Helen, but that isn’t really true. You can’t find something if you were never looking for it. How could they care about Helen when a girl like Chloe, so pretty and white, had disappeared only three weeks earlier? The truth was that they didn’t find Helen on that snowy morning. They stumbled over her.

  I woke up early that day, eyes wide and staring at my bedroom ceiling. I had been dreaming of my best friend again. During the day I could distract myself, but at night, all I thought about was Chloe.

  The gray light that washed over my walls meant morning was breaking on the snow banks. Snow may prevent a winter night from ever really being dark, but it can blind you on a February morning. I lay there listening to my breath rasp against the edge of the duvet. I couldn’t sleep anymore, but I also couldn’t think of a single reason to get out of bed. The early morning kept the realities of Thunder Creek from unfurling across my consciousness. I wanted to savor that sleepy lack of awareness before I limped through another day, flinching every time someone said Chloe’s name.

  At that moment, I had no idea that a trapper named Guy Robideau and his eleven-year-old son Jamie were walking down a disused snowmobile trail on the outskirts of Thunder Creek to check their traplines. It had been an early morning, but they hoped to fill the empty space in the truck bed before the school bell rang. The pair were bundled up, the hoods of their winter jackets forcing them to pivot their torsos with every glance. That limited range of sight meant they didn’t see the snow-laden corpse until Guy stepped on her ankle.

  It must have looked just like any other snowdrift. Something to barrel over with the rubber-tipped, fleece-lined boots that were ugly but necessary in a Northern Ontario winter. However, when Guy put his foot down, he would have noticed that he had stepped on something more substantial than fresh powder. The snowfall the night before had covered Helen, enough to conceal her but not to bury her completely. From the moment Guy looked down, he would have understood exactly what lay beneath his feet.

  I hope the trapper sent his son back for the cell phone before he brushed the snow off the corpse’s face. I’d like to believe that the son never saw how grotesque Helen looked; the sight of her bare legs so wrong for a winter morning twenty degrees below freezing. The white snow obscured some of the violence wrought on Helen, but it didn’t cover up her brown skin. That shouldn’t matter, but it did.

  I got up around the time a police car drove out to inspect Helen’s body. I showered and wrapped myself in a towel just as they draped a cover over her naked form and carted her out of the woods. Her body would have swayed on the stretcher across the uneven trail packed down by police boots. I hope they wrapped her tightly, that they made a symbolic stand against the Canadian cold taking up residence beneath her skin. Keeping her warm would have shown that they didn’t see her as just another dead girl bound for a frozen grave and an ice-encrusted headstone.

  The investigators pored over her skin as I rubbed makeup on mine in the mirror over my desk. They photographed every bruise and cut as I applied layer after layer of foundation to obscure the spots on my face. Finally, they zipped a body bag up over her just as I closed a sweatshirt over my chest. When I was done, I stared at myself in the reflection. I was looking for some scar, some obvious sign that I was suffering on the inside.

  All I saw were the same gray-blue eyes that always met mine in the mirror. My grandmother was Dutch, and I knew that I looked like her—tall and pale, my body sturdy, as if destined for a life of farming. You might think I was lucky because so many girls wanted to be tall blondes. But they also wanted to be attractive, and I was undeniably plain. My face was bland and forgettable, the features average and everything so pale it was as if my colors had run in the wash. I was a glass of milk, a lump of potatoes, vanilla ice cream when you had thirty other flavors to try.

  The only thing that made me look different was my thick layer of freckles. I was coated in a snowstorm of specks when most people never had more than a flurry. I hated the way the freckles looked like some sort of creeping skin disease, an infection that would eventually consume everything.

  I looked down and realized that I was clutching my hairbrush so hard that my knuckles had gone white. I shook my head and grabbed my jacket and school bag. I checked one last time to make sure the mitten was still under my pillow; I wanted to keep it safe. Then I shut my bedroom door, trying to resist the urge to lie back down on the mattress.
Now that I was out of bed, I just had to get through the rest of the day. Then, finally, I could go back to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  My mom had already left for work when I came downstairs. She worked as a waitress at an all-night diner. It was a hard way to earn a living, but she had been there for ages and she liked the people. Still, I knew she wanted better than waitressing for me. I’d felt the weight of her expectations settle on me when I started high school. It was as if we were in a relay race and she was barreling up behind me, waiting for me to take the baton and go farther than she could. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the kind of exceptional kid who beat the odds. If you asked me what I liked doing, I could tell you a lot of things. But if you asked me what I was good at doing, what I was better at than even the tiny proportion of the world that was in my high school, I would be at a loss.

  Chloe wasn’t like that. She was creative and great at singing and acting. Her grades were average, but teachers always told her that she was very intelligent and just needed to apply herself. That assurance was enough for her, knowing that someday she would pull back the curtain and reveal the brain she’d hidden behind the apathy of a teenage girl. Chloe always understood that high school would end, and when it did, being smart would no longer be grounds for judgment.

  —

  I was six years old the first time I met Chloe Shaughnessy, just after her family moved to Thunder Creek from Toronto. Her father had retired from his Bay Street finance job, intending to spend more time with his family and write. I don’t think he ever actually succeeded at either.

  Chloe had started school a week late. Our new shoes were already scuffed by the time the teacher ushered her into our classroom. Chloe was delicate-looking, with porcelain skin and shiny sable braids. However, she was doing her best impression of a tough girl, flouncing across the room with her hands on her hips. But I remember how she gnawed on her lower lip. I always liked that vulnerability in Chloe. She tried to hide it but it shone through the cracks, winking briefly in unguarded moments.

  At recess, I walked right up to Chloe as she sat on a swing. She was ignoring everyone, pretending not to care that she was playing alone.

  “Hi, I’m Jenny Parker. I like your jacket,” I said. Her windbreaker was teal, with pink bunnies populating its nylon expanse.

  Chloe narrowed her eyes and slowly examined me up and down. She had to crane her head because I was already considerably taller than her. I could only imagine what she saw; ratty blond pigtails, freckles everywhere, the ragged edges of my thrift-store jeans. Her eyes finally stopped on my fingers, coated in the glitter nail polish that I had begged my mother for in the drug store.

  I felt awkward standing there allowing myself to be judged. Chloe sat on the swing like a princess, her feet a few inches off the ground. What was I thinking, trying to be friends with her? She was a pretty little girl from the city and I couldn’t be anything farther from that.

  Then, suddenly, Chloe smiled and her whole face changed. Her green eyes shone, and I felt strangely happy that I had made her smile.

  “I’m Chloe, and I like your nail polish!” she said. “My mom won’t let me wear it.” Her exasperated tone indicated that this was a grave injustice over which countless whining campaigns had been waged.

  “I bet she will soon,” I said, sitting on the neighboring swing.

  And we’ve been best friends ever since. Or at least we were until three weeks ago, when Chloe went missing and I was the last person to have seen her.

  —

  I climbed into my secondhand Chevy Malibu and started the engine. I had bought it in September, and it still amazed me how working with my mom at the diner all summer could have produced something as liberating as a car. Over time, I had grown less enamored with the responsibility of driving, but passing my old school bus still gave me a jolt of smug superiority.

  I cautiously pulled out of my housing complex onto the main road. A gray sky was draped over the garish fast-food signs that dotted the street. I could tell by the clouds that more snow was on the way. The dirty sign announcing that I lived in “Birch-Bark Village” was already half obscured by it. I had always hated the dinginess of that sign, but the one welcoming people to our town was even worse. I cringed every time I passed it and read “Thunder Creek: Come for a Visit, Stay for a Lifetime.” They may have meant it as a promise, but to me, it sounded more like a threat.

  I watched a lot of TV shows set in exotic places like California and New York. I saw girls standing in ocean-facing kitchens with perfectly tousled “bed hair.” I saw other girls in loft apartments drinking coffee and talking about the latest gallery opening. Television taught me that there were only a few places on earth that mattered, and they were nowhere near my hometown.

  I understood why there was nothing like Thunder Creek on TV. There was no fantasy in an impoverished town in Northern Ontario. Admittedly, the wilderness around Thunder Creek was beautiful (especially if you were from down south), but the city was nothing special. The view from my kitchen was of a scrubby backyard, a peeling fence and the top of a garbage can just visible above the snowdrifts. Beyond our fence was another house, which was so close that as a kid I had the hyper-aware feeling that I was playing on a stage. I spent a lot of time back there trying to analyze whether how I played seemed “normal” to them, the invisible eyes. Not that people bothered to watch each other in my neighborhood. Everyone had their own problems to deal with, and the infidelity and romance that happened around here made you want to look away, not look closer. It all revealed too much about the fallible, low side of human nature.

  The whole city was built to be functional, except for a pocket of upper-class housing along the lake and a neighborhood of professional families perched on top of Blueberry Hill. Those beautiful houses were exceptions in Thunder Creek, where most buildings were short and squat, hunkered down against the barrage of winter winds. Chloe lived up there in a huge house with a hot tub.

  The people of Thunder Creek looked equally utilitarian. Their wardrobes adhered to the drab uniforms of the working poor. People my age wore cheap jeans and hoodies to school, clothes that began to fray and stretch on the short journey from hanger to register. The girls pulled their bushy hair back into ponytails and didn’t bother with lip gloss unless there was a school dance. Kids would buy a new ski jacket and wear it every day for the next three years. I always recognized my friends first by their jackets, before their faces even registered. A friend’s coat was an indelible part of them, like their eye color or smile.

  But Chloe was different, and not just because she had money, or because her mom took her shopping in Toronto. It was more that Chloe refused to be normal. She had such an aversion to blending in that if everyone in school started wearing her usual leopard-print jackets and red lipstick, Chloe probably would have bought a gray hoodie.

  My best friend had an amazing wardrobe of sixties dresses, denim cut-offs and crop tops. She spent her free time combing Internet sites and the local Value Village for inspiration. It hurt me to think of her carefully curated collection hanging forlorn in her closet. I imagined that somehow the colors would seem muted, the patterns metamorphosed into incoherent splotches. They couldn’t have looked so special without Chloe inhabiting them. I felt the same way about the mitten, but it still seemed to have a bit of her magic left. I had knitted Chloe a set of mittens a few years ago when I was going through a short-lived knitting phase. I had found one after her disappearance, but I was still looking for the other. Finding that second mitten mattered a lot, probably more than I could explain.

  I pulled up to my school and took a deep breath, inhaling the stale but warm air blasting from the car heater. I told myself that at the end of the next breath, I would get out of the car, but I couldn’t make myself move. My school was built in the sixties to push the baby boomers through to jobs in forestry and mining, to lives lived less than thirty blocks from this building. My mother had gone here, and it was likely that my childre
n would go here someday as well. The thought of that continuity was more depressing than comforting.

  Finally, after I couldn’t wait any longer, I got out and trudged through the brown slush in the parking lot. My backpack hung from my rounded shoulders like a deflated balloon.

  I walked down the warm hallway, ignoring all of the people standing at their lockers and sneaking looks at me over their friends’ shoulders. I could hear their whispers run down the hall like faucets switching on.

  “Isn’t that—”

  “Last person who saw her.”

  “Why isn’t she—”

  “She must know…”

  It was that final comment that had reverberated in the last three weeks, echoed by parents, the school, the police. Everyone was gentle at first, but within days they became frustrated and accusing: “You must know something…you were her best friend…surely…something.”

  “Hey, Jenny,” Taylor Sullivan said, looking uncertain as she walked up to me. I could feel Taylor’s nervousness, as if she suspected that I would contaminate her with loss.

  Taylor wasn’t my friend. In the last year all she had ever brought was bad news delivered with a sticky smile. Taylor was the person at your birthday party who gave you bath gel as a gift, a practical but impersonal present. A shower set implied that the giver didn’t know anything about you but at least assumed you washed. We had been friends when we were kids, but by middle school we had drifted as far apart as was possible in the close quarters of Thunder Creek. Taylor and I had rarely talked before Chloe disappeared, and we certainly hadn’t talked after.

  “Hey, Taylor,” I said, knowing that I should try harder to be social. I smiled, but it felt strange, as if I was mechanically pulling the corners of my mouth up to unveil teeth.

  “Did you hear? They found a body in the woods this morning,” Taylor said, flicking her honey-colored hair back with satisfaction. She loved to be the person who delivered the headlines.

  My blood went cold. I actually felt my knees shake as I stared into Taylor’s wide blue eyes, which were locked onto my face to gauge my reaction. Was it finally over?