The Missing Season

by Gillian French

  Snorts. Somebody mimics, “But my mommy said,” whacking the boy who interrupted with a baseball cap.

  “He was folded in half.” Sage grips Trace’s forearm. “That’s what I heard.”

  “No.” Kincaid’s hands are tai chi slow. “Lengthwise.”

  “Stop.” Bree says it under her breath; I’m the only one who hears.

  “Ricky disappeared right around Halloween. That’s the pattern.” Kincaid skates a circuit around us, dismounts, and slaps the tail of the board so it pops into his hand again, all one smooth movement that I wish I could watch again frame by frame. “Truth. After, Ricky’s friends told everybody how they’d all gone out to the railroad bridge to smash pumpkins one night, and there was somebody hiding under there. Too dark to see, but they heard him, mumbling and yammering away.”

  Yip, yip, yip! I look up to see audience participation, lumbering shapes aping around the others, sounding like a zoo after hours—Ahhh-ah-ah-ah! Mwaaa-hoohoo!

  “Next time anybody saw Ricky, he was red guacamole.” Kincaid pauses, smiling faintly, but he’s not really seeing me now. “Ever since, Mumbler’s been around. Takes a bad kid every few years, always in October. Grown-ups have some bullshit excuse for what happened to them, but we know.”

  Nods pass around the circle. I watch for inside looks—they’ll drop the act when they see I’m not taken in—but the quiet drags on. “What’s the Mumbler look like?” I hold Kincaid’s gaze, willing him to let me in on this, let me prove I don’t scare easy. “So I’ll know him if I see him.”

  Kincaid looks to Trace, again with the smile that creases his eyes into merry slits, a kid showing his little sister where Mom hides the Christmas presents. “We can take you to him.”

  Four

  DAYLIGHT’S ALMOST GONE, stranding us in murky charcoal twilight that blurs perception in the woods. Pines press close, their smell sharp and cloying, and it’s too dark for this, but we’re going anyway, a small band of us, because the boys made the dare, and how could we respect ourselves in the morning without putting our heads in the same lion’s mouth?

  Kincaid’s down the trail somewhere, wearing his question-mark smile, sheer magnetism pulling me through the dark after him, my feet catching on unseen roots, risking a branch snapping back in my face. My hands imagine finding his shoulder blades, my fingertips exploring the rough wool of his coat, discovering what he smells like. Bree is here beside me, silent, and I wonder if she’s feeling half of what I’m feeling, even a quarter.

  A yell, and someone grabs us both. I’m so amped up that I scream, a real girly scream I didn’t know I had inside me. Humiliating. Bass laughter and a gust of Trace—draft horse sweat, shock of peppermint—as he shoulders between.

  “Asshole, how’d you get behind us?” Bree turns on her phone flashlight, shining it in his face.

  He winces. “Jesus. That’s not fair.” He grabs the phone, holding it easily out of her reach. “I don’t have a light.”

  “Give me my phone.”

  Giggle. “You get so mad.” He tosses; she fumbles; it lands on the ground. Not that Trace is there to see—he’s already barreling off, trying a leapfrog boost on the shoulders of a boy with hair spiking out from under a knit cap and drumsticks in his back pocket, who laughs, nearly falling.

  Bree wipes her phone on her fleece, swearing. “I am so buying a tranq gun and putting him down.”

  “Do you think they sell, like, extra-large-rhino strength?” I ask. We look at each other and laugh, and click, I fit a little more, in this night with these people, with Bree, whose humor is a little off, a little black like mine.

  This was a real trail system once. The phone flashlight catches an occasional stripe of blaze orange on a tree trunk, left by some Ranger Rick for wholesome hiker types, and there are offshoots everywhere, footpaths through the undergrowth beaten down by use. But there are bags of trash here and there, too, ditched by people who didn’t want to pay for a dump sticker. Bedsprings, wadded paper towels, beer cans scattered through the brush. Sage’s laughter carries back to us, and somebody’s singing, or calling out a rhyme.

  The stink is the first sign that we’ve arrived: a dark, sulfurous blossom that brings our hands to our noses. The trees have thinned out, and I catch glimpses of open area, dusky sky. This must be the marsh.

  It’s tidal, this place, the water at low ebb, baring acres of muddy flats fringed by more pitch pines and mountain holly, wooded hills in silhouette against the sky. Footpaths wind down the weedy, crumbling embankment all the way to the flats, though I can’t imagine walking down there or why anyone would want to try.

  Bree says, “That’s one of the better ones,” pointing up.

  Above us, the ledge has turned to granite. A broad slab to our left is marked with hot-pink paint, old, faded by the elements. A three-foot-high anatomical picture of a heart, done with a brush, ventricles spurting fat drops of pink blood. The words beside it read Bury my heart at Mumbler’s marsh.

  Bree trains her phone on the embankment as we follow the sloping grade; the light catches more graffiti crisscrossing the rocks, more paintings, a few so good they must be by the same artist who drew the heart. An interpretation of The Scream with green pot leaves where the figure’s eyes should be; a jack-o’-lantern with a mouthful of vicious teeth and a rat lifting the lid by the stem, revealing a glimpse of a human brain inside. I want a closer look—but not badly enough to fall behind.

  Everyone’s gathered up ahead, multiple phones glowing in a vigil.

  Kincaid leans against the rock. He doesn’t hold a phone, so his face is lost, only a glimpse of his hair and the sinew of his neck visible as he inclines his head. “Here.”

  Everyone trains their phone on the rock face. What at first looked like a broad, shadowed crevice flattens, revealing a mural taller than any of us, maybe twelve feet high, black paint spread into a hulking silhouette.

  A hunched man—something like a man, anyway—in profile, stooping as if to pick up the whole wooded ledge. Only the slightest indication of a head, the hair wild. It’s the man’s hands that make me stare: squiggling, wriggling fingers like a nest of eels, each fingertip a ball of splattered, dripping paint, like the artist held the spray can in place and just blasted.

  Beside it, the message again, tall, spindly letters like I’d seen on the overpass. Fear Him.

  It takes me a second to find words. “Who did this?”

  “Nobody knows. Nobody’s supposed to know.” The smile in Kincaid’s voice is like an electrical current, raising fine hairs on my arms and neck, unseen coils warming to orange, then red. “Guerrilla art. Make your mark and bounce, right?” As he turns, that precious sliver of him vanishes into ink. It’s nearly full dark now, and the only bright spots are the faces of the people holding phones: Sage, Trace’s arm around her shoulders again; Bree; two girls who look like identical twins in combat boots and kohl liner; and the drumsticks boy, standing in a carolers’ semicircle on the path. “It’s a signpost.” Kincaid’s voice travels behind them, and I turn slowly, tracking him. “Here there be monsters.”

  “You think he lives in the marsh?”

  “Some people think so. Under the bridge, or in the woods. I say he burrows in the mud like a big-ass catfish. Hibernates eleven months out of the year, then hwwwaahh”—he makes a rushing, roaring sound, a whoosh of his arms ripping the air—“comes busting out in October, hunting kid meat.”

  Sage starts the song, spoken-word style, glancing at the others, and I recognize the rhyme I caught snatches of on the walk here: “Mumbler, Mumbler, in your bed.”

  Bree picks it up, holding Sage’s gaze as she sings: “Mumbler, Mumbler, take your head.”

  “Eat your nose—”

  “Gobble your toes—”

  All of them, in a chorus: “And bury you where the milkweed grows!” They laugh, whistling past the graveyard, all of them, but not Kincaid. He doesn’t laugh; he smiles. I can feel it.

  The name of the game is chase. I
have foggy memories of something like it from elementary school recess, boys and girls running after each other on the playground, exploring first crushes, any excuse to touch. This is that game on ’roids.

  First, the boys blow past us on the trail, taking off into the dark, whooping and yelling and being so ridiculous Bree and Sage and I collapse against one another with crazy giggles, even with the foul breath of that place at our backs, and the fact that I think none of us can get out of there fast enough. Then they swoop out at us again, no faces, just hands and warmth and boy-smell, somebody tickling my side, making me yell, “Hey!” face burning in the night and wondering, Who?

  “Oh, it is so on—” With a rebel yell, Sage charges the trees, swallowed up by the night, leaving us.

  Bree links her arm through mine. “This way. Hurry—”

  I can barely see my feet hitting the overgrown side trail, but Bree holds her phone out and we glue together, stumbling and laughing, hearts pounding so hard it seems like they must echo through the woods, giving us away as we hear what sounds like the boys ahead. Bree switches off her phone, and we blitz attack with a scream.

  Bree’s braver, colliding with someone, while I waver in the dark, breathing hard, wanting Kincaid but hearing Trace instead—“Body slam! Body slam! Ohhh”— and a mad crunching of dried leaves and brush.

  “Bree?” My voice sounds shrill, and I fumble for my phone, are you okay on the tip of my tongue, but thank God it never escapes because I hear her swear, half laughing, to my left, which gets me laughing, too, and the danger is fun again.

  She takes my offer of a hand-up, wiping her face with her sleeve. She says, “Let’s kick their asses,” and we’re off down the trail, witches on broomsticks, propelling down a tree tunnel faster than we have any right, faster than our feet could ever take us.

  Five

  TURNS OUT THERE’S truth to Ma’s old love songs. She listens to weird stuff, the Ladies of Country Gold, hits from the 1960s and ’70s—think beehive hairdos and snap shirts, all about standing by your man even though he cheats and drinks and shot your old yeller dog. If my dad tried anything like that, she’d kill him.

  But right now, I’m in touch with some of those clichés. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, up half the night trying to calm the thrumming energy in my limbs—kicking off the covers, pulling them back—can’t stop seeing him, remembering five hot pinpoints tickling my side, wondering if it was Kincaid’s hand doing the climbing.

  Still caught in the cyclone of last night, I don’t really mind getting up for school today, taking a couple bites of generic frosted wheat squares before pushing the bowl away, watching Ma use her reflection in the microwave door to fluff and spray her bangs. Her work schedule is all over the place: a morning here, three nights there. The usual: her managers know she’s desperate for hours, so they drop her into whatever sucky shifts need coverage.

  “So, I’m on eleven to seven. Probably be late if I’m working with the same little peckerwood as last night—you know I counted the drawer and mopped by myself while he hid out back sexting his girlfriend?” I snort, and she looks over, gaze trailing to the floor as she opens that ultra-sweet coffee creamer she loves, one of the few splurges on our grocery list. “Make sure you’ve got your key on you, okay?” Longer pause. “You and Dad will have to figure out supper.”

  “It’s all good.”

  Ma gives me a narrow-eyed look from the counter, watching me put on my sweater. “It is, huh?”

  I tug my hair free of my collar, focusing on the door. Talking about boys isn’t something Ma and I have ever really done—frankly, there’s never been a need, since my longest relationship to date lasted three days (freshman year, with a kid who I’m pretty sure only got the nerve to ask me out once he heard I was moving away at the end of the week)—and it feels awkward now, not something I’m quite ready for. “What, I can’t be an optimist for one day?”

  “You?” She follows me, standing on the top step, watching me take the steps with more spring than I should, aiming for the corner of the building, where I can disappear from her view. “Not likely.”

  In the parking area, a black Jeep pulls into the spot beside Mom’s RAV4, stopping so abruptly that it rocks on its springs, black fuzzy dice swinging from the rearview. A tall, thin woman with ash-blond hair climbs out, wearing a cracked leather jacket and jeans so tight you could probably trace the lines of her underwear, assuming she’s wearing any. I can’t help staring, and she turns her head to look at me as we pass, her eyes lost behind round retro shades, perfect circles of darkness carved from her face. I look down fast, then glance back at her once I think it’s safe.

  She takes the steps to Bree’s apartment and unlocks the door gingerly, hesitating a moment before going inside, like she’s afraid of waking someone, even though both girls would be at the bus stop by now. Bree’s mom, just getting in.

  It’s against the rules to sit three to a seat, but the bus driver’s locked in rage blackout mode and doesn’t pay us any mind, too busy bellowing at the freshmen pelting each other with spitballs and bitten-off pencil erasers. Having a place to sit, where you’re expected—this, I could get used to.

  Sage produces essentials—lip gloss, a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans—and we rotate them, Bree talking rapid-fire, everything good between us now that we’re a team, raiders of the dark, the wildness of last night mingling like some exotic perfume, and I know exactly what I’m going to do at school today, exactly who I’ll be hunting the halls for: “—and he doesn’t have a girlfriend, I’m sure of it, because the girl everyone said was his girlfriend doesn’t come around anymore, and he never talks about her—”

  “Ask Annaliese.” Sage jots digits on math homework, signs her name in giant, swirly letters. She doesn’t wear the flannel shirt today; Trace must’ve reclaimed it. “They talk sometimes. She’d know.”

  “She hates me. All those girls do. Which is fine.” I catch Sage’s tolerant eye roll as Bree crunches the last bean in her molars, flicks the bag to the floor. “I followed him once.” My attention jerks back, and Bree smiles, a slow expression. “From the skate park.”

  Sage angles herself against the window. “How did I not hear about this?”

  “Because I didn’t tell you. It was this summer. One of the times you went in the woods with Trace.” Hint of accusation. “Figured, why not.” Bree sinks back against the seat, watching her own reflection in the bus driver’s circular spy mirror mounted up front, her lashes lowered. “It started raining, like this warm rain, and everybody left. But he stayed. He was soaked, all his clothes and everything, streams running off his hair. Then he skated down Maple. Just coasting, you know?”

  “What’s his house like?” I picture a split-level ranch, struggling flower garden out front, maybe a gnome or a plaster angel by the steps.

  “Never found out. He turned right onto Summer, picked up his board, and cut through somebody’s backyard. There’s a path worn through there, like kids do it all the time. When I came out on the other side of the garage, he was gone.”

  Sage snorts. “He saw you stalking him and gave your ass the slip.”

  “He didn’t see. Nobody did.” Bree pauses, biting her lip, then seems to come back to us. “Anyhow. Zero intel collected, other than he lives close.” A slap across Sage’s bare arm, startling her. “Don’t you dare tell Trace.”

  “Like I would.” Sage settles back, saying under her breath, “Even though he could just tell us where—”

  “No. Let’s find out on our own.” I look between them. “We must get this information.”

  Bree nods. “Must.”

  “So, he didn’t grow up with you guys?”

  “He moved here . . . four years ago?”

  Sage thinks. “More like three. He’s older. A senior.”

  “Is Kincaid his first name or his last?”

  Bree grins. “I’m not sure. Even the teachers call him that.”

  “That’s so weird.”

&nbs
p; “I know.” And we’re giddy.

  There’s a soft sniff behind us. Bree stiffens, rises to look over the back of the seat, ignoring the driver’s voice, worn to sandpaper, face front face front. “How long have you been back there?”

  “Just a couple seconds.” Hazel’s defensive. I look around the edge of the seat and find her pinned by Bree’s stare, a blue-mascaraed friend seated beside her, smiling nervously around a nibbled hangnail. “We didn’t hear anything.”

  “Then how do you know there was anything to hear?” Without breaking eye contact, Bree slides slowly back onto our seat. “Curiosity killed the cat, Hazel Mae.”

  “Satisfaction brought him back.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  In the school hallway, congestion, suffocation. Bree and Sage pair off against the masses, already in private conversation, not needing me now, and I want so badly to follow. The words I should’ve said on the bus—Will you cut again today?—Are you going to the skate park?—and most definitely Take me with you—sit on my tongue like something Ma would’ve forced me to eat as a little kid—creamed spinach, cauliflower—bringing tears to my eyes and bitterness to my mouth because I won’t swallow them. I’ll just walk around like this all day, tongue-tied.

  I’m called in for the usual guidance office meet-and-greet first thing. After two days without a summons, I thought I’d gotten out of it. Guidance is a closet-size space reserved for someone named Mrs. Mac, according to the bright quilted sign hanging from a tack on the door. I knock, hear a muffled reply.

  Inside is lamplit—a Tiffany-style stained-glass number on the filing cabinet used in favor of the overhead light—and there are enough potted plants and climbing vines to give the room a cool, shadowed feel.

  She’s too big for the room, the woman sitting at the desk, though a large part of it may be her hair, a platinum-blond cloud framing a plump face behind pearlized glasses. She beams at me. “Clara! Has to be Clara Morrison. I know everybody around here, but you’re a new one on me.” She takes off the glasses and waves me in, adjusting her position at the cluttered desk. “Please, come right in, take a seat.”