THE RETURN
LOLA was gone before she ever went missing. Mattie’s always known this, marrow-deep. Lola and her haunted cat-green eyes. Lola and her cloud of black hair, dense as night. Lola, the most beautiful person Mattie’s ever known: keeper of secrets, teller of stories, barrier between Mattie and the harsh unfeeling world.
That Lola was born with one foot out the door.
Even as a child, Mattie knew.
But what Mattie has still, will have forever, is the before time. Summer nights, the woods behind the house alive with coyotes singing down the moon. First a single yip, and then the chorus. The thrumming frogs in the neighbor’s pond falling silent. Windows open to the piney dark.
And Lola, slipping through Mattie’s bedroom door sometime before dawn silvers the edges of the mountains. Coming home in the thick wolf-hour dark from wherever it is she goes, smelling of cigarettes and vanilla and something sweetish and musky that Mattie will recognize years later as weed. Crawling into Mattie’s bed, under the covers, curling herself snail-tight against Mattie’s back, inhaling the hay-sweet warmth at the nape of Mattie’s neck. Whispering You know I’ll never leave you behind here when I go, Mats into Mattie’s sparrow-boned shoulders.
Mattie will carry that promise a lifetime long. Lola’s humid body, her hot, whiskey-scented breath. Her long arms flung out, her legs kicking restlessly as Mattie holds perfectly still so as not to disturb her.
Lola muttering in her sleep as the stars wink out one by one, the sky lightens, the sun climbs over the mountains to wheel its way through another day.
But no matter how hard Mattie fights to stay awake, to bind Lola to the real and breathing daylight world—in the harsh light of morning, Mattie wakes again alone, the night before as blurry and wondrous as a dream.
And then, five years ago: the morning Mattie woke and knew Lola was gone for good.
* * *
And now: The girl who came back yesterday, the girl who says she’s Lola, is somebody else.
It’s not possible.
But it’s true.
Lola’s mouth, but full of lies. Lola’s laugh refracted through another throat. Her eyes are the same green, but they’re layered with different secrets. Stories Lola never would have told.
Mattie knows where the girl detectives live, and Mattie is going to make them help.
Their addresses are online, pictures of their homes plastered across hateful troll-filled forums and comment-thronged web articles.
Pictures of the girls themselves: the tall one, all angles and elbows and disordered hair, head down and one bony arm thrown up as she tries to evade the cameras outside her apartment building. The pretty one, trying to hide her sweet face behind movie-star sunglasses, her bright gold hair stuffed under a hat.
They’re teenagers. They should be safe, their lives lived behind closed doors. But after what they did last year, they’re everywhere. There’s nowhere they can hide.
Mattie finds their class schedules—pathetically easy, since they all go to the same school. And then Mattie keeps looking, building a case. Finds their parents’ workplaces, the license plate number of the pretty one’s car. That’s easy. Anyone could do it.
But Mattie isn’t anyone. Mattie is patient, and persistent, and spends a lot of time alone online.
Mattie can find things no one else could.
The pretty one’s ex-boyfriend, on a basketball court in North Carolina.
The tall one’s girlfriend, smiling in the autumn sun on a leaf-strewn college lawn.
The cemetery in New York where her father is buried.
The cemetery in Mexico where her grandparents are buried.
Nobody in this world can keep a secret, if the right person knows how to look.
* * *
In the old Lola’s bedroom, the other Lola is singing. Mattie puts a few things in a backpack, pulls on warm clothes. Out the front door into the sheeting rain without a goodbye.
Mattie doesn’t talk to her.
* * *
In the old Lola’s bedroom, the new Lola hears Mattie leave. The new Lola watches Mattie trudging down the long driveway, head bent. A flash of unease crosses the new Lola’s perfect face.
Mattie doesn’t trust her.
Mattie has good reason not to trust her. She is a liar, and a thief, and a lot worse than that.
The new Lola has no plans to go anywhere, now that she’s here.
In the old Lola’s life.
With the old Lola’s new credit card in her wallet.
The old Lola’s mother in her pocket.
The old Lola’s brother willing, at least for now, to believe her.
Mattie will have to be persuaded.
* * *
But that’s a problem for tomorrow.
For today, the new Lola sits on the old Lola’s bed. She pulls the old Lola’s diary out of the old Lola’s dresser drawer.
Five years that diary lay concealed, undiscovered by the old Lola’s own family.
Five minutes the new Lola had stood in the old Lola’s room. Looking at the pictures on her walls: gloom, gloom, and more gloom. The clothes on her hangers: black, black, and more black. The books on her shelves: Kurt Cobain: Journals. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters.
This girl kept a diary; there’s no doubt about that.
I’m here, thought the new Lola. I’m her. Where did I hide it?
Her eyes had landed on the heating vent, held to the wall with a single loose screw that came away with a twist of her hand.
That was all it took to give her the old Lola’s memories.
As if it were her fate to come here, to be this girl.
No fate but what we make, the other Lola thinks.
It’s hard to have much pity for that missing girl, who sat in this princess’s jewel box of a room, in this palace of a house, and chose to wrap herself up in darkness. But the void the old Lola left is a blank place, a workshop, an open door.
And now?
It’s easy enough to come back. To walk into this house and see where the old Lola failed. Where her edges didn’t fit. To smooth herself into a shape that slots into the void the old Lola left, and then remake it. A gentler, more pliable version of the girl who left for good all those years ago. A light, gentle Lola whose mother will want to keep her, not hide her away in shame.
The new Lola has valuable skills. She can feign softness, hiding what’s hard beneath. She can smile sweetly. She can ask for nothing in a way that makes other people want to give, and give, and give.
It’s easier than you think to be a girl everyone wants to love.
All you have to do is lie.
The old Lola’s mother is so overjoyed to have the daughter she always wanted that she asks no questions.
The old Lola’s brother—he’s not so convinced. There’s something reserved about him, a thread she’ll have to unspool to keep herself safe.
And Mattie will be a problem.
But the new Lola didn’t get to where she is without taking a few risks.
Settling in, the new Lola opens to the first page of the old Lola’s diary. Humming “Heart-Shaped Box” to herself, she begins to read.
DAY 0: FRIDAY
THE UNINVITED GUEST
DESPITE her singular accomplishments in the field of cold-case resolution, Cameron P. Muñoz, ex–teen podcaster extraordinaire, nationally recognized amateur sleuth, and locator of the most famous missing girl in Washington State, would herself admit she’s not the most perceptive person in the world.
But even she knows that someone’s following her home from school.
She refused a ride home from her best friend and fellow onetime investigator, Blair—a refusal she’s already regretting, as the looming December clouds are threatening downpour.
And now she’s got a stalker.
Again.
Great.
In the first months after Cam and Blair broke their small hometown’s legendary missing-girl story, reporters clouded around them like a swarm of summer gnats. Cameramen set up camp in Blair’s cul-de-sac. Journalists lurked in the bushes outside Cam’s apartment.
Both of them had to change their phone numbers.
Both of them had to change their phone numbers again.
Because everybody was calling: journalists, pundits, talk-show hosts. People from the internet who wanted their story, wanted their methods, or wanted them dead. Cam learned quickly to stop googling her own name, out of sheer horror at what she found: page after page of threats and recriminations and theories and lies.
you are o ugly how do you look at yourselves
if u hate the cops so much dont bother calling them when i rape u
shld both just die so i don’t have to listen to them talk anymore wtf
Obviously, these idiots should have considered the possibility that one of the I-5 corridor’s many serial offenders is responsible for this heinous crime
verbal diarea,worthless. why do u hate white people anyway racist bitchs
Et cetera, and much worse.
Like, a lot worse.
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