The Lost Girls

by Sonia Hartl

  No matter what I said, she was fully prepared to not believe me. The best way to go about it would be to explain what he would do without explaining what he would do, which would require some delicate wording. “He’ll try to change you.”

  Wow. That was so vague and not at all helpful, I almost impressed myself.

  “Good thing I could use a change.” The bell rang, and she yanked her backpack over her shoulder, leaving me behind without a backward glance.

  So that went well.

  Not that I could blame her. My best friend had tried to warn me about Elton, and I hadn’t listened. No way would I have listened to a stranger, especially not another girl. I’d been trained at way too early an age to view girls as competition and boys as the prize to be won.

  It took thirty-plus years of living with a perpetual boy to understand they weren’t that much of a prize to begin with.

  The rest of the class filed out before I’d found my bearings again. I had no backpack, making it even more obvious I wasn’t a student here. But Rose told me to act like I belonged, and they’d believe it. Any other alternative was too ridiculous to entertain.

  As I moved past Mr. Stockard’s desk, I could feel his eyes on me. My shoulders scrunched with each passing step. “Harriet, a moment if you please,” he said.

  My nerves hummed as I turned, my expression utterly still as I kept my gaze at my toes, fearing that a flicker of recognition I couldn’t control would give me away. He reached into his desk and pulled out a copy of Sweet Valley High #3: Playing with Fire. The exact same book he gave me over thirty-four years ago. He slid it across his desk with an encouraging nod.

  My fingers shook as I pushed it back at him. “That book is a little old, don’t you think?”

  “Some books are timeless.” He sat back in his chair with his fingers steepled over his stomach. “Don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose. But that one doesn’t seem like my style.”

  When he didn’t say anything, just stared at me as if patiently waiting for an answer to a question, like this was still 1987, and I was still his student, I turned around. I didn’t need to stay here. Maybe I could find Parker and try to talk some sense into her again.

  Mr. Stockard’s ancient and unoiled chair squeaked as he stood. “Holly.”

  On instinct, I spun around at my name and swore under my breath.

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t remember? Christ, I’m not that old.” He gestured for me to take a seat at the desk directly in front of his. When I shifted toward the door, he let out a long-winded sigh. “I’m not going to hurt you, or even tell anyone who you really are, least of all because it would likely have me committed. I just want to talk.”

  “Okay.” I slowly lowered to the seat in front of him. “Just so you know, if you’re still pushing Sweet Valley on the kids, I think you’re way past due to update your reading list.”

  He let out a humorless laugh. “I pulled that one out of the attic when I saw Elton’s face in the halls at the start of the year. I figured it was only a matter of time before you’d be along, eventually, when

  I saw another girl who didn’t look like she belonged in this century, and who made me extremely uncomfortable when I got near her. The same feeling I got from Elton all those years ago. The same feeling I now get from you, a girl I taught thirty-four years ago, but who somehow still looks like she’s sixteen.”

  “Is that what you want to talk about? To gloat about how you’d been right?” I frowned as I ran my finger over a divot in the desk. “You must know we’re not together anymore.”

  “I want you to be careful.” The sincerity in his expression took me aback. A shadow of the teacher he’d been showed through, before life and monotony had beat him into whatever he was now. “You were one of the brightest students I had the pleasure of teaching in those early days. Back when I believed that anything I did would make a difference.” He hung his head. “Anyway, those days are over, I understand that. But I mourned you when you died the first time. Please don’t do so again anytime soon.”

  I gave him a strained smile. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t die easily.”

  As I left his classroom and roamed the now empty halls, I let my mind wander back to classes with Mr. Stockard in his prime, the counsel he’d given me on more than one occasion, and the warnings he’d tried to issue about Elton. I wrapped a fist around the memories and held them to my heart. I could now count three people who had cared.

  Three times more than I thought I’d had when I’d gone.

  Chapter Five

  It had been decades since I’d wandered these halls, yet I could still find my way to the lunchroom. Parker and Elton probably took their lunches outside or off campus, but it was a place to start. I turned a corner in the hall and a door shot open. Someone grabbed my arm, pulling me inside. Before I could scream, they clamped a hand over my mouth.

  “It’s me,” Rose said. She stood inside a darkened and empty classroom that held only a scarred wooden desk, a whiteboard, and gray walls. “Where have you been?”

  “Ida told me to follow Parker to class.”

  “And?” Rose leaned toward me a bit, anticipation vibrating off her skin.

  “I’m in.”

  After what Elton had said about me, and the way I’d been able to evaluate our relationship outside his influence, I likely would’ve eventually agreed to Rose and Ida’s plans to kill him, anyway. It was the only way to be completely free of him. I told myself that Parker wouldn’t have any bearing on my decision, but when I saw flashes of myself in her, I understood why Rose and Ida wanted us to meet. She was one of us. A lost girl who still had time to find herself, and she deserved the chance we never got.

  Rose blew out a breath. “You have no idea how happy that makes me. We need you.”

  “Don’t get too excited. I had no instruction on what to do with Parker—thanks. Now she doesn’t trust me, either.” I felt a twinge of regret and brushed it off. I liked Parker. Ida and Rose had been correct in having me meet her, but she was still one of the living. I didn’t need her to like me or want to be my friend. I just needed to keep her alive.

  “Give it time.” Rose patted my arm. “She’ll come around.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  Rose studied me for a few beats, her gray eyes darkening to the color of choppy lake water. I could see her mentally weighing how much to tell me. “Then we’ll have to act faster.”

  I didn’t appreciate the secrets or coded language. If she truly needed me to finish Elton, she owed me the full story. “When are you going to tell me everything?”

  “As soon as I know everything. No sense in making you worry over theories.” When I crossed my arms with a huff, she squeezed my shoulder. “Ida has Frankie right now. If she’s successful with him, we’ll have more information today.”

  “I want to know everything or I’m out.”

  “Understood. I promise you the full story once we return home.” Rose hopped up on the desk, crossed her legs, and leaned back on her hands. “How does it feel being back here?”

  “I don’t like it.” I pulled on the cap sleeves of my dress, as if the fabric was trying to squeeze the life out of me. “It feels wrong. Like we shouldn’t be here.”

  I couldn’t explain the sensation that had been scratching at me since we walked through these doors, similar to the way my skin used to feel after a sunburn, tight and itchy. At first, I thought it was old memories, a sense of mourning for my previous life. But that wasn’t it. This wasn’t an emotion I could put my finger on. It was more like being shoved in a thousand directions at once.

  Rose held my gaze, the decades passing like shadows in her eyes. “It’s time.”

  I looked around. “It’s time for what?”

  She shook her head, her shoulders bowing under the weight of whatever she’d been carrying for nearly seventy years. “It’s time that makes us feel wrong in this place. It pushes at us, tries to push u
s out, because it knows we don’t belong here.”

  “We don’t belong anywhere.”

  Her explanation didn’t satisfy me. I didn’t feel like this anywhere else. Walking the streets of the town where I grew up should’ve pushed at me the same way, if time truly wanted to punish me for existing at this age in this decade.

  “It’s this place in particular.” Rose swept her hand out. “It’s as connected to us as we are to it. It’s where Elton crossed that line. Where we became something other, but still what we had been before. Time doesn’t like it. It disrupts the natural order of things.”

  “Then why does he come back here? Why this school?”

  “It’s a ritual.” Rose turned toward the window, where a thin stream of light broke through the heavy dust. “Before the school was built in 1943, a general store stood on this land. Owned by Ida’s family. She’d been working the night Elton came for her.”

  I ignored the shiver that crept down my spine. “Aren’t rituals for serial killers?”

  Rose raised an eyebrow. “Is that a serious question?”

  When I didn’t say anything, she pointed between us. Two of the three girls he’d already killed, on the same ground where he was grooming the fourth. He didn’t even need to take a bone or a piece of jewelry to tuck away in a dark corner. He’d made us into living trophies.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Are we just going to wait around here for Ida?”

  “You can go if you want.” She waved me toward the door. “Parker takes her lunch outside, under the oak tree. You can try talking to her again.” I had turned to go when she stopped me. “It’s hard for me too. Being here.”

  “Do you feel like you’re standing still?” I asked.

  “No,” she whispered. “I feel like I’m falling behind.”

  I nodded and left the classroom. As I closed the door, I turned those words over in my mind. Every second that ticked by widened the gap between us and everything else, creating a black hole that swallowed the place we should’ve occupied in this world. That pocket of time was where I stored all my regrets. I had enough to rip a hole in the universe.

  At the back of the school, I pushed against the door and stepped outside. Breathing became so much easier once I got outside those walls. I followed an invisible path to the tree on muscle memory alone. It shouldn’t have bothered me that Parker took her lunch under the same tree where I used to sit, but I couldn’t not notice how the parallels kept stacking up between us. It made me nearly as uncomfortable as walking the halls of my old school.

  The sleeve of Parker’s navy, gray, and red sweater stuck out from the other side of the oak’s trunk. I hesitated before I approached her. She was alone, but I didn’t want her to blow me off again, even if no one was around to see it. For some reason, in the span of just one class, her opinion had become very important to me. A ridiculous notion I internally squashed. I just felt sorry for her because she’d gotten caught in Elton’s web, that was all.

  She looked up as I approached, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Stalking me now?”

  I let out a strangled laugh that came out more like gurgle. “You wish.”

  “Do I?” The teasing in her voice made me recall the sensation of blushing, though that wasn’t something I could physically do anymore. Fortunately.

  “Is it okay if I sit with you?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not like I’ve got dozens of friends forming an orderly queue.”

  I sat in the cool grass with my legs crossed at the ankles. I tilted my face toward the sun. Thirty-four years ago, I sat under this same oak, under this same sun, and dreamed of the day I could leave this place behind. I thought I’d really start living my life and never look back. Yet here I was: same age, same school, same insecurities.

  “This used to be my favorite spot,” I said. “I think because I could act like I was rejecting the lunchroom before anyone in the lunchroom could reject me.”

  Parker narrowed her eyes. “I thought you didn’t go to this school.”

  I faked choking while I scrambled to form a coherent excuse. It had been so long since I’d attempted casual conversation with anyone, my brain-to-mouth filter was a little rusty. “I don’t, but I used to. Years ago. But not that many years ago. Like, last year.”

  That rip in the universe was welcome to come along and swallow me whole now.

  “Last year, huh? Why do I think you’re lying to me?” Her nose scrunched as she eyed me with less trust than I had in my old motel’s “clean bedding policy.”

  “Do you really want the answer to that?” I held her gaze, daring her to push it. I had no idea if I’d tell her the truth or give her another vague nonresponse, but I wanted her to think about it. If she questioned me, maybe she’d also question Elton.

  She stared at me, not blinking. Eventually, she turned her head. “Not really. But just so you know, it’s strange how you, Rose, and Ida hang around here when you don’t actually go to this school, and you’re going to get found out if you keep it up.”

  It looked like we were just going to avoid sticky ground. Probably for the best. I plucked at a blade of grass, weaving it between my fingers. Everything inside me had gotten tangled up. I wanted to be truthful with her, for her own good, but at the same time, I didn’t know if I could trust her. She certainly didn’t trust me.

  “I don’t plan on spending a lot of time here.” I paused. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “I guess.” She pulled out her earbuds. “No guarantee I’ll answer.”

  “What do you see in Elton?” I knew what I’d seen in him, but Parker seemed self-aware enough. He didn’t like girls who knew themselves. It took away the sense of control he relished. “Please don’t tell me it’s because he’s hot.”

  “That’s a nice bonus.” She smiled to herself. “But it’s not just that. He asks me questions. He understands my problems. He listens.”

  “Yeah.” I thought back to all the times I’d felt alone, and Elton made sure he positioned himself as the caring boyfriend, the only one who got me. “He’s good at that.”

  “Did you two date or something?” Parker jutted her chin like she was prepared to dismiss me as the bitter ex. And maybe I was. But she still didn’t tell me to leave.

  “We did. That was also a long time ago.” The memory of his car kicking up dust as he peeled out of the Quick Stop without me burned in my mind. That was going to be Parker’s future if she let him in. Endless towns with no roots or purpose. Aimlessly wandering at the whims of someone else, with no hope of ever building something for herself. It left a sour taste in my mouth all over again. “I’m not interested in breaking you up so I can have him for myself, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I know, you want me to be safe.” She air-quoted the last word. “I already got the same speech from Rose and Ida. I don’t know where the three of you came from or what kind of game you’re playing, but leave me out of it. I already have enough to deal with on my own.”

  Continuing to warn her about Elton up front clearly wasn’t going to do any good, so I switched topics. “My mom had a lot of shitty boyfriends too.”

  “I don’t even know why I told you that.” She turned her head, gazing out at the open field where a couple of people kicked a soccer ball around. “That’s not how I typically go around introducing myself to people, in case you were wondering.”

  She sat up a little straighter. It reminded me of the first time Stacey sat with me in the lunchroom, despite warnings from other people. When I wanted someone to talk to but couldn’t admit I wanted someone to talk to. The only form of self-preservation I had at the time was to act like I didn’t need anyone so they couldn’t weaponize my loneliness. But when Stacey offered me friendship, it made me realize just how desperately I’d been in need of it.

  “I didn’t have the luxury of choosing with whom to share my family shit,” I said. “The entire school knew, thanks to her preferred choice in partners.”

&n
bsp; “Who were her preferred partners?” Her eyes widened with interest. “Hit men and murderers? Circus clowns?”

  I snorted. If only. “No. She liked the fathers of my classmates.”

  “Ouch. Married fathers?”

  “No.” I wish they had been married. Then she would’ve had to keep herself a secret. “She used me to bait their ex-wives.”

  The memory of it curdled in my gut. Most of the time, my mom acted like I was part of the living room furniture or a plant she needed to water. There, but not relevant. Until she needed to put on a show. In second grade, she made Cindy Wharton’s father hoist me up and carry me on his shoulders at the county fair, right as we passed Cindy and her mom in line for the Ferris wheel. In fourth grade, she dragged Derek Milford’s father to my Little League game, even though Derek was playing two fields over. If we had lived together in the age of social media, she would’ve posed us all in matching sweaters in front of a rotting barn, and every Instagram photo would’ve gotten the Juno filter with the hashtags #blessed and #lovemylife.

  Sixth grade was the last time I tried to get involved in extracurriculars. The night my mom brought her boyfriend, Megan Bear’s father, to my school play. She bought flowers and had him present them to me after the curtain fell, all while keeping one evil eye on his ex-wife, who had been there to support Megan. I’d never forget the devastation on Megan’s face as she watched her father swing me up in his arms with a bouquet of roses. As if he had come specifically to see me. The nobody child of his new girlfriend.

  I spent my entire childhood being a pawn in her one-up games. She didn’t care about my play. Whenever I asked her to run lines with me, she was too busy. If I needed a ride home from rehearsal, she sent her boyfriend to pick me up. When I brought home tickets, she said she wouldn’t be able to make it. She didn’t take a scrap of interest in that play until she found the program I left on the dining-room table, when she noticed Megan would also be performing and found an opportunity to rub in her status as Current Girlfriend.