The Lost Girl, Page 2

  They did not look at each other while he disappeared back into the store, door chimes singing, or while they crossed the street back to the library, where their bikes were parked, or while they tucked their library books into their backpacks and unchained the bikes. But when they mounted the bikes, Iris’s eyes caught Lark’s. Lark’s eyes went big, as if to take in the great magnitude of the weirdness they’d just experienced; then her mouth twitched, and the whole right side of her face squished together in a showy wink.

  As they rode away, Iris let out the laugh she’d been suppressing, and Lark laughed too, and the sound seemed to release something into the air, like a flock of birds bursting up from the ground and filling the sky.

  And so I followed.

  Chapter Two

  Good Intentions

  The Maguire house sat on a tree-lined street about twelve blocks from the library, and over the years Iris and Lark had learned the absolute best route to get back and forth, avoiding the crosswalk at Forty-Fourth Street where the drivers never actually stop, the postapocalyptically cracked sidewalks of Washburn, and, for coming back home, the excessive incline of Forty-Sixth Street. On this August day the girls’ bikes followed the same tracks home, lined as they were with years of Iris’s and Lark’s histories. The closer they got to their home the thicker the world was with their pasts, and by the time they parked their bikes in the garage their stories were scattered everywhere, ripe for the collecting.

  Today they were coming home to a slightly changed household. Their father had just left for six months in England, where his company was sending him for reasons the girls did not entirely understand. It seemed to Iris far more efficient to ask people actually from England to work in England, but her dad said large companies rarely did things that made sense to rational people.

  Things were going to change now, their parents had said, at least for a little while, but the girls were going into fifth grade in a couple of weeks and they could handle it. Their mom would be working later, which meant that she couldn’t be there when they came home from school anymore, and she’d been littering the house with catalogs and website printouts for after-school activities for them, things with dubious names like Mad Scientists Club and We Heart Nature. Iris and Lark had been politely ignoring the whole thing. It seemed best for everyone involved.

  But that wouldn’t start until school began. For now, their mom was still home in the afternoons and when they walked in they could hear her on the second floor.

  There was no time for small talk. Lark’s eyes had grown wide and she was gazing at her sister. Are you going to check the mail?

  Yes. Yes, she was.

  “It’s here,” Iris called, as she peered out the front window.

  From the kitchen, Lark made a noise that was something like choking and something like squeaking. The letters from Barnhill Elementary were right on top, one addressed to her, one to Lark.

  Closing her eyes, Iris made a silent wish. No Mr. Miller. The haunted-tree man would be bad, because Lark was scared of him already.

  And another:

  No Mrs. Scott. She was no better, because she would make it hard for Iris to stand up for her sister.

  And another:

  No Ms. Urban replacement.

  That was the worst possibility. That person would be completely unknown. There was little Iris hated more than the completely unknown, and while normally Lark built herself elaborate homes there, when she was nervous about something her imagination and the complete unknown didn’t exactly mix well.

  Wishes made, Iris went into the kitchen, where Lark was sitting at the kitchen table, fiddling with the moon charm on her bracelet.

  This was their tradition. Each took her envelope, and they sat across from each other at the kitchen table, as they did every year. And as they did every year, Iris solemnly opened hers first: kindergarten, Ms. Ruby; first grade, Ms. Gratton-Parker; second grade, Ms. Jonas; third grade, Ms. Roy; fourth grade, Mr. Anderson. Then Lark opened hers and affirmed that destiny. Iris always thought it was nice that they got two versions of the letter in case there was some kind of clerical error.

  Iris spent a lot of her life making sure there were no clerical errors.

  Now Iris opened her envelope carefully, so as not to rip the contents. She unfolded the letter and gasped with relief.

  “Ms. Shonubi!” she proclaimed, beaming like the sun.

  Angelic Ms. Shonubi. Soft-edged and warm-eyed and probably smelled like flowers, though Iris had never actually confirmed that.

  Iris grinned at her sister, who looked like she’d been wearing something way too tight for months and had just removed it.

  Eyes shining, Lark’s hand fell away from her bracelet charm. As she did every year, she ripped open her envelope, ready to confirm, ready to put the future in boldface. She unfolded her sheet and her face froze.

  “What?” Iris asked.

  “Mr. Hunt,” she whispered.

  The girls stared at each other.

  One moment. Two. Then:

  “Mom!” Iris yelled.

  It was a mistake, that was all. The girls had been in the same class for five years, because everyone understood that they needed to be together. Of course they needed to be together. Of course Iris needed Lark, and more pressingly, Lark needed Iris. Lark wasn’t like other people, and she needed her sister to keep her from cracking.

  Who had distracted her in third grade when Leila Mason hit her head on the monkey bars and blood poured down her face like someone had installed a blood faucet on her forehead? Iris. When Leo Sullivan had taken to pretending to be a zombie and jumping around corners at them shouting “BRAINS,” who had told him she’d lock him in the haunted janitor’s closet if he ever did it to Lark? Iris. This was the way things worked.

  The girls sat on the couch in the living room, clutching their letters while their mom pulled up a chair, lips pressed together as if to crush something. Her laptop perched on the desk containing their dad’s smiling face beaming in all the way from London.

  “Okay,” said their mom, speaking in soothing tones. “So, the school believes it is in your best interest to be in different classrooms next year.”

  “You knew?” Iris breathed.

  “. . . We discussed it,” said their father.

  “With the school. You can’t discuss things with schools. Schools are buildings.”

  “We discussed it with Principal Peter,” their mother said.

  “And you told him it was a terrible idea,” Iris proclaimed.

  “The school believes that you two need to learn to adapt to being on your own. It’s middle school next year, and you won’t be together—”

  “Says who?” said Iris.

  “You’ve been together every year until now,” said her father. “Don’t you think it might be time to try something new?”

  “No, we don’t!”

  “We just want you to try being apart,” interjected their mom. “Just try it.”

  “Besides,” their dad added in his best dad-joke voice, “shouldn’t we give the teachers a break? Together, you guys are a lot.”

  The girls’ jaws hung open. This was not the time for dad jokes. This was not the time for any kind of jokes. The fact that their father thought that it was the time for dad jokes just showed how little he comprehended the situation.

  Lark was wide-eyed and white-faced and clearly immobilized by the absurdity of what had happened, so Iris pushed herself up and barreled forward. “No! We’re not going to do it. We don’t want to be independent. We don’t want to try something new. We’re just fine! Plus—”

  Plus what? Plus what, Iris? Plus something. Their mom wouldn’t interrupt if she just kept talking, and her dad—well, the volume wasn’t that high on the laptop. If she just kept talking, maybe the right thing to say would come out eventually, and then her parents would call the school and make this okay and everyone could pretend like it didn’t happen.

  “Plus . . . Principal Pe
ter didn’t even ask us! You can’t just make decisions about us without asking us! We’re eleven! We’re not little kids. He could have called us in and said, ‘Lark! Iris! Do you think you guys need to learn to adapt to being on your own?’ And we’d have said, ‘No! No, no, that’s a ridiculous idea! A terrible idea!’”

  Next to her, Lark focused her attention on the bracelet on her wrist. Iris could feel her trembling.

  “We don’t even know who Mr. Hunt is!” Iris went on. Was she shouting? She might be shouting. “I’ve never heard of him. He’s new! He could be a horrible teacher. Principal Peter could have gotten a head injury or something and started hiring terrible people and making other awful decisions, like putting us in different classes. Head injuries are really serious, you know!”

  Her mom put her hand up. “Iris,” she said. “That’s enough. Principal Peter has not had a head injury.”

  “But—”

  “It’s my turn to talk, Iris. Not everything we do is going to make sense to you. We get that. But everyone has your best interests at heart. Your father and I especially.”

  “If you care about our best interests, why didn’t you ask us?”

  “We’ve heard you out—”

  “No, you haven’t! You pretended to listen! But you’d already made up your minds!” She snatched Lark’s letter out of her sister’s hand and held them both up.

  Her mother’s lips disappeared so all that was left was one tight hard line. Her father’s head bobbed out of the laptop screen. Because he could just escape: he could move slightly to the right and no longer be present, no longer have to confront the reality of what he’d done.

  A tornado of words and feelings was whirling around Iris’s head, picking up everything in its path and tossing it around so Iris could barely see straight. She opened her mouth to let some of it escape—something, anything.

  And then Lark spoke, her voice a whisper.

  “Please don’t do this.”

  The line collapsed. The lips reappeared, setting in a frown and then pressing together.

  Their father’s head reappeared, and he and their mother exchanged a glance that crossed a whole ocean.

  Silence. Both girls moved to the edge of the couch as one. The tornado hummed in Iris’s ears.

  “I’m sorry,” their mother said quietly. “This is the way things are going to be.”

  Chapter Three

  The Way Things Were

  Here, another story for you:

  Once upon a time there were two sisters, twins, who came into the world looking just the same. Some said it was luck, some said it was fate, but Iris knew the truth: they were caused by a hiccup in development, something that happens three times out of every thousand births. One egg splits into two. Two babies with identical DNA.

  Presto.

  Another hiccup: two babies are hard for one womb to hold, and though they still weren’t due for ten weeks, the baby girls decided they’d be better off on the outside than in. Anyway, they had a whole world to discover.

  So after they were born, three-pound Lark and three-and-a-half-pound Iris shared a room in the neonatal intensive-care unit, all tubes and tape and tissue-paper skin, while Lark learned to breathe on her own. This was a skill Iris already had—somehow she had learned something important and not taught it to her sister. It was a mistake she’d never make again.

  When their parents told them the story of their early births, they said the girls had been placed side by side in the NICU; the doctors had said it was better for them, that twins in the NICU had better outcomes when they were together.

  Iris had always taken this literally—yes, of course they were together in one strange little plastic box, she somehow already a little stronger and a little more able to be in the world than her sister. Yes, of course she kept her tiny preemie fingers curled around Lark’s tinier ones, letting her sister feel the rise and fall of her chest. You can do it, just like that: breathe, breathe.

  But no. When their dad put together that photo album and they saw the pictures for the first time, they discovered their parents had been characteristically imprecise in their language. They were in two plastic boxes, side by side. There were no tiny preemie hands reaching for each other, no breathing lessons, no assurances. “We meant you two were in the same private berth,” their mother explained. “Right next to each other, side by side. You can’t put preemies together in the same crib!”

  Iris was skeptical. The doctors had said it: they had better outcomes when they were together.

  Perhaps that was why it took Lark so long to learn to breathe, why Iris was ready to go home a month before Lark was. Apparently Iris spent that month pronouncing her displeasure to the world; her parents thought she was colicky, but as soon as her sister came home—six pounds, with working lungs—she was happy again.

  “You were a whole different baby all of a sudden,” their mom said with a smile.

  “Thank goodness,” their dad said, with a different kind of smile.

  After that, the girls stayed together.

  Their parents said they were talking before they could talk, chatting away in some strange babble that no one else could parse but that each of them seemed to understand perfectly. “I was afraid you’d never speak Other People words,” their mom always told them every time she told the story. “You didn’t seem to need to. You could understand each other; that was all that mattered.”

  Lark picked up Other People words first; Iris was slower to adapt and seemed suspicious of the entire concept.

  “It didn’t matter,” their mother told them, every time. “Even when you spoke Other People words, you were still really only speaking to each other. Always in your own little world.”

  As they grew up, other children revolved in and out of their lives. There was a little girl next door with a sandbox in the shape of a frog and a mother who overflowed with laughter and grape juice; there were two girls in preschool who liked to pretend they were twins too—they were most certainly not, but Iris and Lark let them pretend, to be kind. There was Maria in kindergarten, who always wanted to do dance recitals, and Gracie in second grade, who bragged to everyone that she was closer to Lark than to Iris.

  In the end it was not worth it. After the grape-juice girl, everyone else seemed to want something from them, whether it was to exploit their obvious appeal as backup dancers (a matching set), or to borrow their status as semi-celebrities (for everyone knew about the identical twins), or to be the one who finally broke them apart (for some people were just that way). As if that could happen.

  Who is the grape-juice girl, and who is the one with the chisel behind her back? You cannot always tell. So Iris and Lark responded by floating away, orbiting around each other, a binary star.

  None of that saved them from the adults, who stared at them like everything was suddenly a little off, as if they might be dreaming, as if the ground had just tilted three degrees—and they made everything inside Iris tilt too. When that happens to you enough, you start walking around feeling like you are perpetually three degrees off from everyone else.

  People asked them the strangest questions: Which one of you is the good one? Which one of you is the smart one? Who is faster, stronger, sweeter, who gets good grades, who is a good little girl? Who is (ha-ha-ha) prettier?

  Which one of you is the girl and which is the copy?

  In the end, the adults were just like the chisel girls—so fascinated by what made them different from each other, slicing off little bits of each girl and comparing them. As if dividing them was what made them interesting, what gave them meaning.

  It wasn’t.

  The story always went one way, and the moral of the story was clear:

  They had better outcomes when they were together.

  Chapter Four

  The Way Things Are Going to Be

  After the ill-fated meeting with their mom and their dad’s digital head the girls huddled in Lark’s room, trying to figure out what in the
world had just happened.

  Iris and Lark always hung out there, though Iris’s room was always clean and organized, and therefore navigating through it wasn’t a health-and-safety hazard. Getting to Lark’s bed meant traversing a jungle of Lark’s things—library books, bits and pieces of her various collections, bookstore books, stuffed animals, drawings, half-finished Rainbow Loom puppets and knitted scarves, plastic boxes of various sizes designed to help her keep her room clean, leggings and T-shirts and socks, stuffed animals, scrap paper, pens and markers of various colors and functions, and half-completed projects and supplies for her life’s work: the dollhouse.

  When the girls were seven, their parents had given them a fancy old-fashioned dollhouse complete with a family of four—a father, a mother, a girl, and a genderless baby the girls named Baby Thing. The girls shared a room then, and when they moved to the new house the dollhouse went into Lark’s room and Iris kept the salamander cage (and with it Slimey the salamander—may she rest in peace). And Lark started to renovate the dollhouse one room at a time because, as she put it, dolls shouldn’t have to have old-people furniture.

  Then one day Lark decided it would be nice if the doll family could go swimming, so she began to turn the baby’s room into a beach, complete with glued-on sand and a gel ocean.

  Now the house looked like the set for someone’s very weird dreams. It consisted of a room wallpapered in watercolor sky with a flock of origami birds dangling from the ceiling; an armory with tinfoil swords and shields; a haunted guest bedroom with spiders and felt ghosts; a bear habitat; a disco room; and a stage with velvet curtains framing one solitary plastic chicken in soliloquy. The family of five (they’d added one identical girl doll because the best families have identical twins in them) sat in the former attic nursery roasting mini marshmallows over a campfire on the surface of the moon, Baby Thing parked at Doll Lark’s feet.