Spellbook of the Lost and Found - Hardcover

PROLOGUE

That night, everybody lost something.

Not everybody noticed.

It was a Saturday night on the cusp of summer and the air smelled like hot wood and burning rubber, like alcohol and spit, like sweat and tears. It was warm because of the bonfire in the middle of the field, and because of the stolen beers, the wine coolers bought with older siblings’ IDs, the vodka filched from stepparents’ liquor cabinets. There was the hint of a strange sound, that some thought might have been a trapped dog howling, but most decided was just in their imagination.

Some kept drinking, thinking this was just another night spent in a field at the edge of town, close to that invisible line where suburbs become countryside.

Some noticed without really understanding what they’d lost. Some kissed each other with cake on their tongues, rainbow icing dissolving between mouths to make new colors. Some took their schoolbooks and threw them on the bonfire, not caring that there were still two weeks before end-of-year exams.

Some turned around and went back home. Some forgot things they’d always known. Others stumbled, just for a moment, not knowing that they’d lost more than their step.

Some hung back, nervous, torn between edging closer to the fire and calling their parents to come get them. Some slipped small pills onto their tongues and swallowed them with soft drinks, the bubbles tickling their throats as it all went down. Some choked on cigarette smoke even though they’d been smoking for years. Some gripped others’ zippers in shivering fingers, lowered jeans or hitched up skirts. Others watched from the shadows.

By the time the fire had burned down to glowing ashes and a pile of charred wood, when everyone was dreaming deep in their own beds or lying through wine-stained teeth to their parents or getting sick in their best friends’ bathrooms or continuing the party in someone else’s house, apart from the few who’d passed out where they sat, there was nothing left in the field but the things we had lost.

OLIVE
Sunday, May 7th
Lost: Silver, star-shaped hair clip; jacket (light green, rip in one sleeve); flat silver shoe (right, scuffed at the toes)

Daylight is only just touching the tips of the trees when the bonfire goes out. I am leaning against a bale of hay upon which someone I don’t know is sleeping.

I roll my head over to look for Rose, who I was sure was sitting, legs splayed, on the ground beside me. The grass is mostly muck at this point, beaten down by many pairs of shoes and feet. My own feet—bare, the nails painted a shiny metallic green that doesn’t show up in the morning darkness—are dirty. So is the rest of me.

Rose isn’t here. I call out for her but nobody answers. Not that I expect she’ll be able to; sometime in the night she lost her voice from shouting over the music, from singing along to really bad songs and from all the crying.

Getting ready to go out last night, Rose told me, “Our plan for the evening is to get excessively drunk and then cry.” She swiped her lashes with another layer of mascara, which seemed fairly unwise, given the aforementioned plan.

“Can we make the crying optional?” I said. “My eyeliner’s really good right now.” It had taken me twenty minutes, six cotton swabs, and five tissues to get it even.

“Absolutely not.”

I sneaked a look at my best friend’s reflection. She blinked to dry her mascara. It gave her a deceptively innocent air.

“I don’t know why you want to go to this thing in the first place,” I said.

This thing was the town’s bonfire party. It’s held in May every year. Until midnight it’s filled with sugar-hyper children stuffed dangerously full of badly barbecued burgers threatening to throw up on the bouncy castle. Their parents bop self-consciously to decades-old pop music blaring from rented speakers while the teenagers—our classmates—sneak off to nearby fields to drink.

“I told you why I want to go,” Rose said. “I plan to get excessively drunk.”

“And then cry,” I reminded her.

“And then cry.”

“Well, you know what they say,” I said to the back of her head. “Be careful what you wish for.”

We slept in the field, which seemed like a good idea at the time. There is a growing chill despite the slowly rising sun and I don’t know if it means that a storm is coming or just that I’ve been in the same position for far too long. I’m beginning to lose all feeling in my right shoulder, the one propped on the prickly pile of hay.

When I look down, on one bare and dirty arm I see the words: If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found. They’re blurry because my eyes are blurry; it takes five blinks for me to make them out. They run from shoulder to wrist and seem to be written in my own wobbly handwriting, although I don’t remember writing them. When I lick a finger and rub at an n, it doesn’t smudge.

For about as long as we’ve been friends, Rose and I have written what we refer to as our mottos on each other’s arms. When we were younger, they were things like You are beautiful or Carpe diem. These days they’re in-jokes or particularly poignant quotes. We both got detention for a week last year because of our matching block capitals reading DO NO HARM BUT TAKE NO SHIT. I must have written this one during the party, although when or why, I have no idea.

My head feels fuzzy. With a wince and a sigh, I drag myself out of the last dregs of drunkenness and shakily stand up.

I take stock: I am missing a shoe (the other is half buried in the muck beside me) and my jacket. My dress is covered in grass stains and smells distinctly of vodka. I have the beginnings of an epic headache forming and I seem to have lost my best friend.

“Rose!” I call. “Rose?”

The boy on the hay bale twitches in his sleep.

“Hey,” I say to him loudly. I poke his shoulder when he doesn’t wake up. “Hey!”

The boy opens one eye and grunts. He has dirty-blond hair, a stubbly chin, and an eyebrow piercing. I vaguely remember dancing with him last night. He squints at me.

“Olivia?” he says hesitantly.

“Olive.” I have absolutely no idea what his name is. “Have you seen my friend?”

“Roisín?” he says in the tone of someone who isn’t sure he’s saying the right thing.

“Rose.”

“Olive,” he says, sitting up slowly. “Rose.”

“Yes,” I say impatiently. He’s clearly still very drunk. “Yes, Rose, have you seen her?”

“She was crying?”

I pick up my shoe and shove it on my foot, figuring that one shoe is still better than none. “I know. That was our plan for the evening. Did you see where she went?”

“Your plan?”

I scan the field for any sight of her. There’s a blue denim jacket crumpled up on the ground not far away. I take it because I’m beginning to feel very cold.

Pale blue light spills over the trees and into the field. My phone is dead so I don’t know what time it is, but it’s probably close to six a.m.

I start to make my way toward the road. The boy on the hay bale calls out to me. “Can I’ve another kiss before you go?”

I look back at him and make a face. Another kiss? “Not a chance.”

“See you around?”

I shake my head and walk away quickly. Most of my memories of last night seem to have disappeared with Rose.

I make my way around the field, scanning the faces of the sleepers (trying to keep my eyes averted from the ones who clearly aren’t sleeping). It doesn’t take long; she isn’t here. I glance behind me and see that the boy on the hay bale appears to have disappeared, probably slumped on the grass. I am the only person standing.

I turn around in a circle, taking in the stone wall and the tangle of bushes surrounding the field, the fence near the empty road on the other side, the small line of trees separating this field from the next one.

There’s someone there, almost hidden between two spindly pines, staring at me.

It’s a boy. He’s wearing a flat cap and an old, holey sweater that might be green or black—it’s hard to tell in the shadows. He has a lot of brown, curly hair under that awful hat and is wearing thick, black-framed glasses. He has a hundred freckles on his skin and a guitar slung over his back. He looks like a cross between a farmer and a teenage Victorian chimney sweep. He is unmistakably beautiful.

Before I have time to break his gaze, he turns and walks away and I lose him between the trees.

I look down at myself, at my dirty dress and borrowed denim jacket, at my one bare foot and my grass-stained legs. I could be Cinderella, if Cinderella was a short, chubby, hung­over seventeen-year-old with smudged makeup and tangled hair. And, while I’m very glad that I don’t have a dead father and an evil stepmother, I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to explain my current state to my parents when I get home. I try in vain to smooth the creases out of my dress and reach into the bird’s nest of my hair to pin it back with the silver, star-shaped hair clip I tied it up with yesterday, but either my tangles have eaten it or I lost it sometime in the night.

My bike is where I left it, chained to the fence by the side of the road, but it takes me several tries to unlock it because my hands don’t seem to want to work properly and my brain feels increasingly like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. When I clamber on, my bare foot sticks uncomfortably to the pedal.

I pass a grand total of three cars and one tractor on the road into town. The clouds above me are getting very gray, almost as if the dawn has changed its mind and wants to revert back to night. My dress blows up in the breeze, but there’s no one around to see, so I keep both hands on the handlebars and try to ride steadily. Under the sleeve of my borrowed denim jacket I can see the tail end of the sentence written there: You’ll never be found.

It comes back to me in a flash. Rose in my bedroom last night, staring at her reflection in my vanity mirror while pouring generous measures of cheap vodka into a bottle of Diet Coke.

She said, “If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.”

We’d drunk a fair amount of the vodka already and her words were slightly slurred.

“At this rate,” I said to her, “the only thing we’ll lose tonight is the contents of our stomachs.”

My prediction was accurate: Another flash of memory has me bent over a hay bale, throwing up some unholy mixture of slightly Diet Coke–flavored vodka and the barbecued hot dogs that we all ate on sticks, posing for pictures, holding the phallic meat like rude children. My stomach lurches at the thought and I have to pull over to the side of the road to retch again.

If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.

I cling to the low stone wall by the side of the road like a lifeboat, and sigh. Without warning, it begins to rain. Fat drops fall on the mess of my hair, darken my jacket, hit the dry roadside like cartoon tears. Splat. I have to blink them out of my eyelashes. I sigh again and drag my bike from the ditch.

I ride home through pounding rain and with a pounding headache. Maybe it’s that I drank too much and remember too little about last night. Maybe it’s that Rose left without me. Maybe it’s what the blond-haired boy said about another kiss. Maybe it’s the beautiful boy I saw at the edge of the field, looking like he’d lost something. But I feel like I might have lost something myself, and I have no idea what it is.

LAUREL
Sunday, May 7th
Found: Old red leather-bound notebook, thin and worn, secured by a black rubber band; ripped-up pages out of three lost diaries

We went to the party because our diaries went missing.

Holly’s disappeared first. Then Ash’s. I only thought to look for mine when five pages torn from Holly’s showed up in Trina McEown’s hands on Monday morning. And if there’s one place you don’t want to find your diary, it’s in Trina McEown’s hands.

You’d think at our age we’d be too old for gossip and giggling. But Trina stood up on a desk in the middle of the classroom as we were packing away after math and read excerpts to the class. She only stopped when Ash got on the desk with her, red curls flying, and punched her so hard, her nose bled.

We tried to explain, me and Holly, that a bloody nose is nothing compared to your every secret hemorrhaging like a torn artery, spoken in somebody else’s voice, but Mr. Murphy despises both metaphors and emotions, so Ash was suspended and Trina was excused from homework for the day.

That’s when it started.

We sat in Holly’s bedroom and I stroked her hair while she cried and Ash inspected her bruised knuckles. She wears them now like a badge of pride.

“I don’t see why you care so much, Holly,” Ash said. “I wouldn’t, if it were me.”

I stroked and stroked Holly’s hair, long and blond, blond and long and soft under my fingers like my whispered hush. I wanted to say, “It’s okay,” but it wasn’t, not really. There are things you tell a diary that nobody else should know. Not your best friends. Not your favorite sister. Not a classroom full of staring eyes and leering, open mouths.

“They pretend they never think those kinds of things themselves,” Ash said scornfully. “Like they never have sex dreams. Like they don’t have bodies that bloat and bleed. Like they never question the world around them or their own sanity.”

Holly cried so hard, her quilt was soaked with it, salt water in every seam.

“I’ll bet half the girls in that classroom masturbate. And all of the boys.” Ash snorted. “They’re just a bunch of repressed hypocrites.”

Holly sobbed into her hands and rivers ran between her palms. Tears dripped from the bed onto the floor. Pat, pat, pat into the carpet.

“Everybody’s parents fight. Everybody lies. No one knows what they’re doing in this bloody life.” Ash clenched her fists.

I whispered, “Hush, hush.” The carpet was sodden with Holly’s tears. The force of her crying raised the bed and set it bobbing. The bedroom became a little lake. Folders full of school notes, pencils and hair clips, books and tissues and childhood bears floated in it. I held her hair so as not to fall in. Blond and long, long and blond and beaded with salty tears.

“I’d punch her again if I could,” Ash said. “I will. Next time I see her nasty face. I’ll break her fucking nose next time.”

“Hush,” I said to Holly. “You’ll do no such thing,” I said to Ash. “If you get expelled, it’s just the two of us against the rest of them.” Together we are a three-headed dog, facing an army of hundreds of staring eyes and leering, open mouths. Without Ash, we’ve lost our fangs. “It’s hard enough in school already.”

Ash had the courtesy to look abashed. She leaned back on her elbows on Holly’s bed and said, “Then you’ll have to hold me back at the party on Saturday, because with a few beers in me who knows what I’ll do.”

“I don’t want to go to the party, Laurel,” Holly said to me in a whisper. “I don’t want to go anywhere they’ll be.”

“They’re everywhere, I’m afraid,” I said softly, braiding her hair, ...