The Missing Season

by Gillian French

  Cloudburst of giggles and whispers. Sage watches the hoodies go. “Damn. He’s not going to do wheelies outside your house anymore.”

  “I’ll live.” Bree looks at me, shrugs. “Aidan knows Sage goes out with Trace.”

  “And he knows Trace will stomp his ass if he messes with us.” Sage finishes her breakfast, brushes off her mittens as the bus turns into the drive. “So. Think he killed himself? Gavin?”

  Bree watches as the doors accordion open, the driver a stolid, humped shape swathed in a PDHS purple sateen baseball jacket. “I think he was killing himself for a long time.”

  I have the closest thing to an in-school Kincaid sighting yet. I’m using the old bathroom in the math-science wing, a place that feels left over from some 1950s incarnation of PDHS: metal trough sink with rust stains; a long mirror flecked with corrosion. I study my reflection as I wash my hands; after days of rinse-and-repeat shampooing, my hair looks less Christmas Barf and more My Little Pony. In a month, I may reach Cotton Candy in a Drainage Ditch.

  A teacher raises her voice in the hallway, followed by the unmistakable clack-rollll of a skateboard’s hard plastic wheels hitting the floor, heading in the direction of the steps down to the English wing and east exit. As I look over, a colorful distortion streams across the pebbled glass pane in the bathroom door; maybe the black, red, green, and yellow of a Baja backpack. Kincaid.

  I’m there in an instant, staring out into a now empty hallway, dappled with echoes like rings on a pond. Moments later, there comes the distant sound of a door closing.

  Old-man car is idling in the student lot as I’m swept outside in the rush after the final bell. A shave-and-a-haircut honk, flashing brights, wipers scraping over a dry windshield: Trace’s version of a subtle come-hither.

  I glance over at my bus, where kids are piling on fast—there won’t be any empty seats left soon—then jog over to the car. Trace hangs his arm out the window, beating a rhythm against the door with his hand, saluting in the side-view as other upperclassmen honk their horns and pull around us, yelling insults. Sage leans across Trace’s lap, waving me in.

  Giving Trace a suspicious look, I climb into the backseat, finding Bree, sitting with her feet pulled up to keep them clear of the fast-food takeout bags and soda bottles covering the floor. I fasten the heavy lap belt and settle back, looking at her across yards of tan upholstery. “You seem really far away.”

  We laugh as Trace cuts off a Prius and guns out of the lot before we get stuck behind the buses. His eyes find me in the rearview mirror. “What’s it gonna be, Clarabelle? Ass, gas, or grass? Nobody rides for free.”

  “I do,” says Bree.

  “Yeah, but I’m scared of you.” He honks again, throwing his hand out the window as we pass a group of kids walking home. “Okay. Quickie mart first to pick up ‘the goods.’” He lets go of the wheel to do air quotes.

  Sage snorts. “You are such a dork.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the ‘only one’ who ‘has connections’ to ‘get the merchandise’—”

  “Will you steer?” Bree waits until his hands are back at ten and two, then turns to me. “Sorry if we were downers this morning. With Gavin and everything.”

  “Hey, I asked. Not like I was expecting warm fuzzies.”

  “Damn it, you told her already?” Trace spins the search button on the radio, settles on some spit-spraying talk-show host having an aneurysm over tax hikes and the minimum wage. “I wanted to tell her.”

  I watch the town flow by like a strip of drab ribbon as we turn onto a side street: brick post office; a Chinese restaurant called Song’s Banquet, with sagging green awnings and a gold dragon over the door; a gas station with old-school pumps that scroll gallons and cents past you like a one-armed bandit. Lots of empty shop windows, apartment buildings papered with For Rent signs. When a mill goes under, it takes everything: jobs, money for schools, community stuff. What you’re left with is this, a slow evacuation, people moving on, looking for anything better.

  Trace pulls into the side lot of a run-down little convenience store on the far end of Main Street called D&M, parking beside a mud-splattered Blazer and saying under his breath, “Yesss. Owen. I heart you, bro.”

  You can see the mill from here, a gigantic battleship-gray complex sprawling along the Penobscot, only a few telltale signs to hint that it’s closed: no smoke from the stacks, parking lot a quarter full. Dad’s in there somewhere, piling steel and rebar to be carried upriver by barge to a scrapyard. Not breathing asbestos. They wouldn’t let that happen. Somebody must check.

  Trace gets into the Blazer’s backseat, emerging with a heavy paper bag. Catches us watching and does a Grinch tiptoe that gets even Bree laughing.

  He stashes the bag in the trunk before thumping back into the driver’s seat, texting somebody as he says, “We get pulled over, they can’t search the vehicle without cause. So don’t flash your piece at ’em, Bree-Bree.”

  She looks out the window. “As long as you hide the crack you’re obviously on.”

  We pull back onto Main Street and hang a right. Sage glances at him. “Uh, babe? Where are we going?”

  Trace starts whistling: loud, exactly on pitch, like somebody’s grandpa. The tune might even be “Moon River.”

  “Perfect Street. Am I right?” When he slides Sage a sidelong look, she sighs, folding her arms. “There’s no point.”

  “What? I want to take a nice drive through a nice neighborhood. Don’t you think that sounds nice?” But he’s distracted, focusing on our destination, what turns out to be a simple left onto an average street.

  The sign actually reads Prefect Street—but it is perfect, a slice of small-town Americana, oozing white clapboards and lemonade porches and two-car garages. Everybody has real curtains—no bedsheets or towels tacked up to block the light like you sometimes see in the Terraces. We’re all hushed as Trace rolls along at five miles per. No reason to hurry; the street’s dead. A few mom-mobiles in driveways, most everybody else at their nine-to-fiver, I guess, their kids at football or soccer practice.

  Sage presses the tip of her nose to the window. “I bet everybody here has a washer and dryer. No hauling laundry bags around.” Pause. “Bastards.”

  “You know who lives on this street?” Trace, suddenly incensed. “That toolbox Spicer. Assface Spicer.”

  “Good name,” I say. “‘I dub thee Assface.’”

  “Freakin’ chumbait turned me in for putting plastic wrap over the locker room toilets and making Nick Humboldt piss on his new Jordans. Goddamn it.”

  “Did you do it?” I say.

  “Obviously. But he didn’t have to say anything.” A long silence, broken again by Trace: “See, now, that is wrong.”

  We’ve come to a full stop in front of a house like the others, a small porch with rocking chairs, pots of mums. “You can’t put them out there naked.” He’s staring at the pumpkins on the steps, scraping his thumbnail musingly across his chin. “The whole point of pumpkins is making jack-o’-lanterns. The whole point of making jack-o’-lanterns is smashing them. What the hell’s the matter with these people?” He releases a pent-up breath. “I really want to steal one now.”

  Sage glances over, checks his expression, looks back at the houses with a soft laugh. “Mumbler’s gonna get ya.”

  “I’ll do it,” Bree says.

  “The Mumbler”—Trace cups the back of Sage’s neck, rubs the muscles there—“would pin a medal on me.”

  “I said, I’ll do it,” Bree says.

  Trace locks eyes with her in the rearview. Bree unbuckles her seat belt, shoves the straps aside. Drawing six guns.

  His gaze goes to the driveway: no car, but the garage door is closed. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s see it.”

  Bree shoves her door open, sprints around the tailgate, up the steps, and grabs the first pumpkin she sees. A second’s hesitation, then she bundles the other four into her arms, a huge load she can barely see over, almost dropping them as she runs for t
he car.

  I make room so she can spill into the backseat, pumpkins tumbling all over the floor as Trace stomps the gas and we sail off down the street, cab full of our disbelieving laughter. Bree’s pretty like I’ve never seen her, laughing so hard she can’t breathe, released.

  Eight

  IT’S WILD NIGHT, Thirsty Thursday, and the drinking starts as soon as we get to the skate park, tiny fifty-milliliter bottles of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky sold at a slight markup from Trace’s brown bag in exchange for crumpled ones and fives. Bottles vanish into pockets, cup easily inside hands, the bloodred demon on the label breathing flame down everyone’s throats but mine, so I’m digging in my backpack for change even though I know I’ve got supper with Dad in a few hours. Just want to blend, and it’s not like I’m planning on getting sloshed or anything.

  Bree gets two bottles on the house for her badassery with the pumpkins. Trace makes the story huge, larger than life, while Bree bites back a smile and shakes her head. We’re notorious, trumping the girlfriends and their bench; everybody can get behind bashing the Perfects on Prefect Street.

  Kincaid is here, doing his pendulum thing on the half-pipe, hair and baggy jeans and wallet chain rising and slapping like sailcloth. He slows to listen to our story, then hops off his board, waiting until the rest of the crowd has bought their demons to get one for himself.

  Kincaid looks at Bree. “You stole pumpkins?” Sheer delight sounds so cornball, but his voice is full of it. Bree reddens and glances down. “Can I see?”

  Trace opens his car door, showing him the backseat. When Kincaid straightens up from the cab, he’s wiping his mouth on his hand, post−Fireball nip. “How the hell did you carry all those?”

  Bree shrugs. “Wasn’t that hard.” At least this time she lets her expression warm a little, like a smile could happen. I don’t get it; when Kincaid’s around, my insides throw a holiday, big-city Chinatown-style, all swirling colors and lights and firecrackers. I can’t even hide it. At this point, her crush must be nearly dead inside that killing jar, twitching. Going dark.

  I slap my pile of coins into Trace’s hand. “One, please.”

  He gives a mock-solemn shake of his head. “Weak, Clarabelle. So weak.” I feel like an ass, but at least the focus has shifted my way instead of hovering between Bree and Kincaid, who’s probably wondering why the Pumpkin Thief hates him so much.

  I glance at the street, then crack the seal on my bottle, hoping no one will be able to tell that I’ve only ever tried sips of my parents’ beer and wine before. I’ve overheard so much party bragging at the schools I’ve gone to—who got wasted, who got laid, whose parents don’t have the slightest clue—that it feels like about damn time I make a story of my own. The first swallow leaves a trail of fire down my throat, a taste like Red Hots and rubbing alcohol. I wince, but nobody’s looking—the boys are unloading the pumpkins, lining them up on the car roof according to size.

  Trace takes out his folding clip knife, opens the serrated blade. “This sucker’s mine.” Thok, drives it up to the hilt in the biggest pumpkin, splattering juice.

  They’re hack-and-slash jobs, the five jack-o’-lanterns staring back at us. Eight of us went into the trees to carve, with only two knives between us—Trace’s and Moon’s—so a lot was done by hand, cringing as we tossed away slimy, stringy guts, clearing gristle and seeds from eye sockets and gap-toothed grins until they leer or wink or make O’s of surprise.

  We’re all buzzed, and it’s nice. Nobody’s reeling around, barfing, like so many of these stories end. I drained my bottle, even though it was gross, and now I’m wrapped in a warm, cinnamon-hazy quilt, layers of downy filler insulating my brain against things like awkwardness and worry—making this possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. Giggling with Bree and Sage, flicking seeds at the boys, whispering about Kincaid, how cute it is that he takes his pumpkin carving so seriously, making a way better face than any of us, full of character, with a nose and eyebrows and everything, smoothing the edges with his fingertips.

  Trace snaps a slim branch off an oak and whittles one end into a point, stabbing it through the bottom of a jack-o’-lantern, hefting it over his head. “Check it out. Vlad the Impaler, Vegetable Edition.”

  Kincaid grins slowly. “Staked on the castle gate as a warning to other gourds.”

  “Obey or—be carved with a kitty-cat face? Holy lameness, Ivy.” Trace aims a kick at her creation, whiffing just a few inches shy. “That’s not scary.”

  “So?” She cradles it to her, stroking the lid. “Black cats are totally Halloween-y.”

  Kincaid stands. “We need candles.” Is it me, or do his hand gestures get even more floaty and trippy when he’s been drinking? He takes nips when I’m not looking, always slipping the bottle away just as I turn. “We’ll need light on our pilgrimage.”

  Pilgrimage? Bree, Sage, and I burst out laughing, Sage flops onto her back in the dead leaves to catch her breath, saying, “Where are we going?”

  Kincaid’s watching me. And like that, I know.

  We wait until around five thirty—twilight—to start our journey. Almost everybody from the skate park joins us. One of the holdout girlfriends, abandoned on her bench, calls, “It’s too early for jack-o’-lanterns,” but we ignore her.

  Because the boys are coming with us.

  The last bit of orange sunset peeks through knotted tree branches as Trace leads the way with Sage and the Jack on a Stick, its mouth glowing with a key-chain flashlight I had in my backpack. The rest of the jack-o’-lanterns are dark, cradled in our arms, grinning secretively down at the path.

  “Call him,” Bree says to me, almost done with her second demon. She drinks like you’d expect, fast, direct, swallowing like it’s an assignment. “You won’t have reception in a second. Tell him you’re hanging with Sage and me and you’ll be a little late.”

  My phone feels heavy in my pocket. “Well, I’m supposed to make supper tonight. My mom’s working.” Given that Dad always gets out late, I’ve got maybe half an hour before I need to be home. Kincaid said it takes a while to reach the railroad bridge, like over twenty minutes.

  “You want to go home smelling like alcohol?” She finishes the bottle, flips it into the bushes, her face angled away from me. “He’s an adult, isn’t he? I think he can cook his own frozen pizza.” Feels my look, relaxes her tone a bit. “I mean, right?”

  I make the call, the boy in front of me giving me this dirty look, like I’m the only one here with parents who expect them to check in sometimes. Dad’s voice mail saves me, his message crackly and distant, barely reaching me out here, like I’m launching off in a lunar probe or something. I keep my voice as low as I can, hoping he won’t pick up on my buzz. “So, I’ll be home by nine . . . hope that’s okay”—pause, feel Bree listening—“love you, see ya.” End call. We always say I love you—on the phone, before bed; Ma’s really big on that. I don’t care how babyish Mr. Staring Problem thinks it is.

  Bree looks straight ahead as I tuck my phone away, holding our jack-o’-lantern in my other arm. My hands still radiate that gone-over-pumpkin stink, no matter how many times I wipe them on the grass. “Do you know how to make GIFs?” Maybe not the best icebreaker ever, but I need to say something to melt whatever’s frozen into the space between us just now. “Because we need one of Kincaid’s smile. The eye-crinkle thing? So we can watch it on repeat.”

  The corner of her mouth moves. We’re okay. I think.

  Our group passes through the marsh, where the sky opens up to our right, the horizon streaked with lavender and flame. The giant Mumbler mural—Fear Him—lies in wait, fingers lashing across the rock, face a maddening blank. The path slopes down, growing wetter, muckier, shoulder-high cattails everywhere, flower spikes gone to seed like heavy lumps of brownish wool.

  It takes fifteen minutes of following the footpath along the circumference of the marsh, hopping puddles, skirting places where the salt tide rises over the trail, until we’re hiking,
up, up, into the trees, people complaining about tired legs and sore feet, spitting out their cigarettes or Juicy Fruit.

  Then the bridge is there, three arches in silhouette against the vibrant sky.

  I follow the rest of them over the rusty railroad tracks leading to it, where the ties have crumbled into loose chunks. The bridge is made of stone—I didn’t expect that—big granite blocks spanning a seventy-foot space between landmasses, where water streams through the dark arch tunnels, churning yellow foam.

  There’s a steel guardrail along either side, a small concession to anybody crossing on foot. The gaps between posts are so wide anybody but maybe Trace would tumble right through if they lost their footing.

  It’s more than a bridge, though: it’s a shrine. Candles have been burned all down the length of the stone ledge on either side, streaks of wax hardened into shiny pools that splinter at the pressure of a foot. Broken beer-bottle glass here and there, and lots of candy wrappers, some stuck in the wax, others scattering in the breeze. The graffiti here is different—sexual, ultra-graphic. Guy parts, girl parts, scrawled requests for things, one picture that looks like it was drawn by a fourth grader copying from Hustler. I ask, “When was the last time a train ran through here?” just so nobody catches me blushing.

  Kincaid tucks his pumpkin under one arm and leans on the railing. “Maybe twenty years ago. Before the state turned this into protected land. People used it as an excuse for what happened to Ricky, so it must’ve been running back then.”

  Trace lays his pike down and sweeps Sage off her feet, spinning her, making her shriek. “Time to check out the ol’ swimming hole!”

  When he sets her down, she smacks him across the chest. “Dick! Don’t do that!”

  “Come on, like I’d really let go.”

  “Uh, yeah, you really would.”

  He palms the top of her head, pulling her against him in a hug. “I’m not going to throw you down there with the ghost of Ricky Sartain, all gutted and ripped up—” He laughs as she beats him; then he calls in a falsetto, “Helll-ooo, Mumbler? Hungry, dawg? Got something for you—” With his free hand, he grabs Moon by the back of the neck, mimes heaving him over the side. Both boys bust up laughing, throwing punches at each other, shoving.