The Missing Season Read online

  Dedication

  For Lucas

  Epigraph

  Traditional children’s rhyme, Hancock County, Maine

  Mumbler, Mumbler, in your bed,

  Mumbler, Mumbler, take your head,

  Eat your nose, gobble your toes,

  And bury you where the milkweed grows.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  About the Author

  Books by Gillian French

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  HOODIES COME OUT of the rain, four of them, coasting down the Birchwood Terraces slope on stunt bikes. Green hood leads, followed by blue, yellow, and white, their knees up around their ears, steering with one hand, letting the other dangle.

  My jacket’s zipped to my chin, but if I could, I’d pull my whole head inside, tortoise-style, and wait out this ritual. Got to wear the old stone face, though. Prove I’m hard.

  They hang a left, straying across both lanes toward the school-bus-stop shelter where I stand. Some of the other kids shift, tensing here beneath the corrugated plastic roof, where the sound of raindrops is amplified to a snare drum backbeat.

  Green Hood circles the shelter, gone, back, gone, back, the other hoodies trailing behind. Scoping the new-kid situation. I focus on the sign across the street, peeling and faded, welcoming people to the Birchwood Terraces development—Affordable Family Housing—ready to eat my ration of shit so they can forget about me.

  “Who’s that?” Green Hood says.

  “Dunno.” Blue Hood reappears.

  “Hey. Who are you?” Green Hood flashes by. “Hello-o-o? You speak-ay Engleesh?” Something bounces off my chest, and my gaze follows it to the mud. A balled-up gum wrapper. Back to the sign. Affordablefamilyhousing. Affordablefamilyhousing. I’m going to make it here. I am.

  “What’s up with her hair?” Blue.

  “Looks like Christmas barfed on her head.” Green.

  Laughter, from the hoodies and the other kids. Take it. Take it. My jaw clenches so tightly that the tendons jump in my neck.

  A girl speaks in a low monotone: “Aidan?”

  Green Hood puts his foot down to brake when he sees who’s talking.

  She stands to my right, tallish, rangy, wearing a charcoal-colored fleece, her blond hair in a brief ponytail. A middle-of-the-classroom type, average, nothing to see here. Only her gaze—shrewd, eyes a barely-there shade of gray—makes her something more. She twitches her head once. “No.”

  She could be telling a cat not to play with her shoelaces. I expect f-bombs, but Green Hood just sniffs, wipes his nose on his hand, and shoves off down the street, letting the rest of them play catch-up.

  She turns to me. “Goddamn hoodies make everybody look bad.” Her expression’s deadpan, a real stone face, not like the mask I wear. “We aren’t all assholes, I swear.”

  I don’t thank her—I can tell she wouldn’t like that—and I don’t ruin everything by saying that she should’ve let the ritual play out, that now they’ll only wait until they can get me alone. I search for chitchat. “They left fast. You must be scary.”

  A slight nod, no softening in her expression. “So, I’m Bree.” She points to the girl beside her. “That’s Sage.”

  Sage. A gymnast’s build, tortoiseshell glasses, her hair a lob ombré’d from deep brown to platinum. She wears trendy hot-girl clothes—skinny jeans, a lace-trim cami—and a flannel boyfriend shirt over it all. Boyfriend because it’s huge on her, maybe XL, in shades of brown and green, washed and worn to a soft patina.

  When Sage grins, it’s forthright, devilish. “How’re you liking the Terraces so far?”

  “It’s”—I scan the identical cube houses lining the cul-de-sac, shabby little three-family units, each with a shared parking area and a strip of backyard facing the woods—“very beige.”

  They laugh, a relief, but Bree’s gaze is still sharp. “Why’d you come here?”

  Typical accusatory question. One thing I’ve learned, moving from one dying town to the next: everybody in a place like this thinks they’re being held hostage. “My dad’s working the mill demolition.” Their dads are probably on unemployment, now that Pender isn’t making paper anymore.

  “Oh. The wicked-built guy with all the tats?” Bree bumps shoulders with Sage, says to me, “We were watching out the window when you moved in.”

  “No shit. You get to call him daddy?” Sage cackles. “Luck-y. He could tuck me into bed anytime.” She sees me flinch, glances at Bree. “Too far?”

  Bree measures a half inch between thumb and forefinger as the school bus stops at the curb, all shrieking brakes and groaning hydraulics. We clomp on board into a funk of stale air, old vinyl, and spectral puke from bus rides past. I swing into the first empty seat. The girls choose the seat across the aisle. Bree raises her voice over the din: “What’s your name?”

  “Clara.”

  She considers. “How about Clarabelle?” She glances at Sage, who shrugs approval.

  I can’t tell if they’re joking. I look at the floor, Sage’s block-heel mules and Bree’s canvas sneakers together, my leopard-print skimmers keeping their distance.

  Pender District High is a cinder-block bunker with low, grimy windows that open on cranks, and rows of battered purple lockers. A mural of the sweater-wearing, steam-snorting mascot consumes the wall by the office, gift of the class of ’18. Go-o-o, Raging Elks.

  Bree and Sage are sucked away into the major artery of the place, and then there’s just me, Clara Morrison, Human Conversation Piece, the girl who’s starting school on a Friday, over a month late, with her hair a dye-kit disaster, a mess of reddish-green streaks in hair faded yellow with lightener. I pretend I can’t feel the eyes on me as I circulate through the usual manic pre-homeroom buzz, searching for room six so I can be marked present. In body, never in spirit.

  First-day highlight reel:

  Mr. Spille, second-period American history, is PDHS’s resident drunk teacher. Never straying far from his desk, he delivers his lecture to us on gusts of minty breath spray with base notes of bourbon. We learn about Harpers Ferry for fifteen minutes until an earnest-faced boy diverts him into a period-long conversation about the Patriots’ draft picks. I doodle in my notebook until the bell rings. It’s restful.

  Hot lunch is slices of anemic turkey, a scoop of instant potatoes with gravy, and green beans drowning in their own bodily fluids. Thank God I brown-bag it. I peel back the tinfoil on my sandwich, the crust an inch from my mouth when I notice the white specks. Bread’s gone bad.

  Someone put a sticker on my back. Elmo, holding a gold star, smiling gapingly, with the words Good Job! underneath. I have no idea how long it’s been there.

  My study hall is in Mrs. Klatts’s room, which has a western exposure, facing an overgrown field bleeding into woods. I’m about to open A Clockwork Orange—the rest of my junior English class has already read through p
age one hundred—when instinct flicks my ear, making me look up at the exact second Bree and Sage sprint across the field, legs pumping, heading for the cover of a single stand of yew trees.

  I glance at Klatts, buried in her planner, the bowed heads of the other kids. I’m the only one seeing this, at least in room twelve.

  Bree and Sage crouch out of sight, then pelt toward the woods. A moment later, they’re gone. I wait for teachers to give chase, for sirens and searchlights. Nothing. The clock over the whiteboard ticks on.

  I spend the rest of study hall with my chin resting on my folded arms, staring after them.

  Shocker: Bree and Sage don’t get on the bus at the end of the day.

  I slouch in my seat. Decompression. Or maybe decomposition? Gazing out the rain-speckled window, I register a transition from light to shadow as we drive beneath an overpass. That’s when I notice the writing.

  Four feet tall, somehow spray-painted across the underside of the pass; the tagger must’ve hung upside down from the girders like a bat. The message makes me turn even though it’s too late, we’re through, back in the gray light.

  The words said Fear Him.

  Two

  I’M OUTSIDE AND Ma’s in. From where I sit on the back stoop with A Clockwork Orange, I hear canned TV laughter, then silence; a song and a half from the radio before she shuts it off, too keyed up about her first day on the job to settle. Probably ironing her uniform shirt, one pink curler rolled into her bangs, reaching for a cup of coffee on the end table each time she checks out the window for Dad’s old Suburban pulling into the lot. He’s late, and she won’t leave until he’s here. She worries about me being alone in a new place.

  Ma’s ringtone sounds. A minute later, the screen door creaks open on its metal arm. “He’s on his way.” Another creak as she shifts her weight, gauging me. “Think you can handle taking the meat loaf out when the timer goes off?”

  “I’ll give it my all.”

  Her foot meets the top of my butt, bump. “Miserable brat.” She wedges in beside me, smelling like that vanilla perfume she asks me to get her for her birthday every year because it’s cheap and easy to find. “School so bad you can’t talk about it?”

  I glance over; she hasn’t asked all afternoon, not even when we ate microwave popcorn and watched the end of a cooking show together. On the other side of the Terraces, a kid screams in play. I swear I’ve been here before. Not Birchwood Terraces, exactly, but other developments like it, named after the trees cut down to build the place: Oakfield, Elm Park, Spruce Way. We’ve moved three times in four years, and twice when I was in elementary school, following Dad’s construction work, but somehow, we always end up right here.

  “Figured I’d let you bring it up.” She waits. “Let me guess. Waterboarding. The rack.”

  I shrug. “Your words, not mine.”

  She studies me, then A Clockwork Orange, and exhales. “Try, Clara. That’s all a smart girl like you has to do. If I’d brought home grades like yours, think I’d be hanging around here? Hell no. I’d be in Paris or someplace, getting waited on.” Paris is the dream, so far away and impossible that she can imagine anything there, any kind of life. She gives my hair the side-eye, maybe waiting for it to leap like a tarantula. It was supposed to be a pastel rainbow: the picture on the dye kit showed a sexy, up-for-anything girl with a sleek bob of teal, pink, and baby blue. I wanted to be that girl. Self-reinvention in six easy steps. I bought it on the sly with the birthday money my grandma mailed me, lightened and dyed on the second-to-last day before we left our old apartment. If Ma’s hurt that I did it while she was at work, fumbling with instructions and bottles and alligator clips, she hasn’t let on. “How’d your new look go over?”

  “Does Christmas Barf mean anything to you?” She snorts, ducks her head to her knees, and laughs down at her toes. I can’t help laughing, too, even though it won’t be funny the next time I run into the hoodies. “Right. Mock me. Maybe tomorrow you can come to school and pants me in the cafeteria.”

  Dad’s coming up the walk from the parking lot to the back stoop now, carrying his lunch cooler. His boots are heavy, steel-toed, his jeans coated in pale dust, the powdered remains of walls and foundations. Maybe asbestos. You never know what’s lurking inside these paper mills that have been standing for fifty, sixty years. It’s a long day, driving a forklift, shifting scrap. He shoots a finger-gun at me, and I flop against the railing, hand to my shoulder, a game so old I could play my part in my sleep. He blows invisible smoke from his fingertip. “Deadeye.”

  “Just a flesh wound.”

  Ma smiles as he kisses her head. Then he flips the curler, saying, “This is nice.”

  “Oh God.” She pulls it out, hurriedly fluffing her bangs. Ma’s got great hair, thick, black, and shiny, her Italian heritage showing through; if I took after her, I’d never even look at a box of dye. Pre−Christmas Barf, mine was a dead-mouse shade of brown, same as Dad’s, which is probably why he keeps it buzzed short. So, this is me—pale-ish, medium-ish, a face that never launched any ships. But I’m good at bullshitting an English theme. And I make a bitchin’ ham and cheese on moldy rye.

  Ma runs inside, comes out heaving her big purse over her shoulder, every zipper jangling with rings and pulls. “Wish me luck.”

  “Luck,” Dad and I say in a monotone. Ma’s new job is cashiering at a truck stop out by the interstate in Brewer. She’ll hate it in a week. Who wouldn’t?

  Dad showers, dresses in his around-the-house sweats and Dropkick Murphys tee, joins me at the table. We eat the meat loaf; smothered in ketchup, it’s not too bad. “Should probably keep unpacking,” he says around a sip of Shipyard.

  “Probably.” We glance at the stacks of beat-up cardboard boxes in the living room—the U-Haul box guarantee says they’ll survive four moves, and it looks like only just—then we each go for another slice of loaf.

  Packing sucks, but unpacking is the worst. It’s basically life’s way of saying, hey, in case you were hoping for a fresh start, here are your scratchy bath towels and the lamp nobody likes, to remind you how impossible that is. Unless you’ve got a million dollars. And a Milton Bradley Facial Reconstruction Kit for Beginners.

  After clearing the table, I return to the stoop with my book. I’m a big reader, total escape artist, but this time, it’s a prop; I haven’t cracked the cover yet. I’m waiting for somebody, testing a theory. If Bree and Sage watched us unload the Penske truck, one of them must live close, with a view of the paved walkway and parking lot. From what I’ve seen, nobody uses their street entrances here. The real living’s done out back, where the woods wait beyond the neighbors’ charcoal grills and plastic playhouses. Dense woods, mostly pitch pines, those trees that don’t seem to be able to sustain their own limbs, multiple amputees with black, scabrous bark.

  Ten minutes later, Bree proves me right, walking between our house and the one next door. From this angle, she looks spare, straight up and down, a raw frame bulked with loose clothing. She senses me and stops dead, glancing over. I’d been mentally rehearsing what I would say, but now I just stare back at her, gripping my book.

  She comes over to the edge of our unit’s walkway. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I haven’t been able to get the sight of her and Sage escaping into the woods out of my head. That was almost five hours ago. Wonder what that’s like, having a partner in crime. Mine’s been mostly a solo act so far. Not by choice. It’s just tough to commit while wondering if you’ll even be around long enough for these people to sign your yearbook. I never quite fit in our last town, Astley, over in Western Maine; I tried the no-friends thing there, and I’m here to tell you, it sucks. The label of Desperate Loner Chick holds zero mystique. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” Matter-of-factly. A pause. “What’d you think of school?”

  I copy her deadpan expression. “Nonstop thrill ride.” She laughs; it’s a good laugh, unexpected, a little harsh. “I didn’t see you.” Such a liar.

&nbs
p; “Then it’s working. I strive for invisibility.” She glances at our door. “Are you locked out?”

  “No. My dad’s in there.”

  Bree steps back. Silence. “Well. Come over, if you want. My mom isn’t home.”

  She says it like, we have cookies. This is what I wanted—I think. To know more. To make it here. My stomach knots up anyway as I rap on our door, calling, “Be right back,” to Dad, who’s probably already dozing off on the futon—we do that, buy a Walmart futon when we move in, dumpster it when we move out—his feet propped on a box, TV whispering like the ocean in a conch shell.

  Bree lives right next door, 8A, which has a window facing the side of our building, a perfect clone of hers—single-story, a back stoop for each of the three apartments it contains. She pulls a key from the little hip pocket of her jeans and lets us in.

  Every light is on. Techno’s pumping. Somebody’s left their hot-pink Asics on the welcome mat and Bree sideswipes them without even looking. The kitchen’s identical to ours—bottom-of-the-line appliances, patterned linoleum, frosted ceiling fixture—but the surfaces are stacked with catalogs and unopened bills, the fridge collaged with alphabet magnets and school photos. Lots of life accumulated here. In the living room, a girl in yoga pants does the stanky leg, her back to us, following some dance routine on TV, so deafened by the music that she doesn’t hear us come in. As we head down the hallway, she pops, locks, drops it, and says, “Ow.”

  Bree’s bedroom is the same one I chose, end of the hall, left of the master; her window is the one that looks out on our stoop. I’m caught off guard by her slate-blue walls. Dad says you’re not supposed to paint a rental. Compared to the rest of the place, her room is a tidy, muted oasis: ecru curtains and bedspread, blue throw pillows, a shag rug tossed down over the ugly high-traffic carpeting, stack of novels on the nightstand. She perches on the bed, shows a flicker of impatience when I don’t sit right away, and pats the spot beside her. I sit, feeling stupid. “Saw you reading the book for Hyde’s class,” she says. “What’s it about?”