The Lost Coast Read online

  Haven watched videos of a band she didn’t really like on her phone so she’d be able to talk about them on Monday morning. If her friends quizzed her, she was ready. She did her homework and triple-checked the answers so nobody could say she wasn’t trying hard enough. Then she erased a few of the answers so Imogen couldn’t claim she was trying too hard. Right before Haven got into bed, she made a list of all the things she wished she had done instead and burned it with a single match.

  Imogen wandered in around two in the morning — pretty normal when Mom and Dad were gone. Haven woke up for a few hazy seconds and then fell back asleep. It was when she got up in the morning and found her sister with two dark but misty pieces of sea glass where her eyes used to be that things got interesting.

  The day after Imogen went missing, they waited like nervous little kids. They showed up to their classes and jobs, but inside, June was seven years old, hiding under the dining-room table next to a cherry-dark stain. Hawthorn was six, in the farthest corner of the hayloft, where the walls pinched down to a point. Rush was even younger, the taste of the word four as bitter as greens straight from the garden, so young that when she saw monsters, she didn’t bother asking if they were real. Lelia was older — fourteen — sitting at her mother’s side, holding her fingers below the white-tipped nails, afraid of the moment she let go.

  On the second day, Imogen hadn’t come back. The Grays stood outside her bedroom window, which had gone as empty-dark as she had.

  The next four days, they were a fever, rushing through the town. They visited each other on their breaks, biking along thin margins of mountain road. Rush drove her unfortunate car all over Tempest. They talked to Imogen’s parents, her sister. They tried to visit the hermit, but he wasn’t around — he’d probably gone on one of his backpacking trips to Mount Tam or Mirror Lake. They picked at the story of what happened before Imogen disappeared, because that story was a scab, and even though it hurt, they worried the edges, needing to see the bloody scrape beneath.

  On the sixth day, they knew Imogen wasn’t coming back without their help.

  On the sixth day, they took to the woods.

  Hawthorn told them to wear candle-flame colors. Clothes that swayed and beckoned and would call someone else like them closer. June showed up in a flimsy moth-white dress cut barely to the tops of her thighs, silver sparkling at her neck and wrists, everywhere her heart sang against her skin. One side of her thick dark hair was freshly shorn, and she kept touching it, remembering how Imogen had freehanded the razor over her scalp and then kissed the velvet patch when she was done. Lelia arrived on June’s arm, an unbreakable link. She was wearing boys’ dress shorts and nothing else. The rest of the Grays were so used to it that they didn’t blink. They did stop to compliment Lelia’s makeup, the rings of smoke around each eye that summoned gold from her green irises. Rush wore a yellow tank top and ancient jean shorts, the blue rubbed to bone-white strings. She didn’t feel like she’d been able to find the right outfit, but she couldn’t borrow from the rest of the Grays — they wore smaller sizes than she did. Only June had a few things that might fit her, and June’s style was very specific, spilling with ultra-femme flowers and prints. Rush had done the best she could with her limited wardrobe. Then she wrote the last twelve things Imogen had said to her on her body, in places the other Grays couldn’t see.

  Hawthorn gathered the Grays at the center of the clearing, around the mother tree. The tiger lily shade of her dress blazed against her dark skin, and everyone told her how good she looked. She decided not to mention that she’d borrowed the dress from Ora’s wash line. Sometimes Hawthorn felt as if all the best parts of her were borrowed from her mom, and it messed with her head.

  It was getting dark, and the Grays gathered in a circle like it was the most natural thing to do.

  “If we want Imogen back, we’ll need someone with a special ability,” Hawthorn said. “Scrying is too vague.” What she meant was that she’d been scrying for days, scrying until her mind folded over with pain and her eye muscles refused.

  “Did you try the trees?” Rush asked.

  Hawthorn nodded. She only scried patterns in the redwoods when nothing else worked. She didn’t want to take too much from their store of years and wisdom. But the bark had been stubborn. All it gave her was what she already knew — the shape of a girl, twisted, trapped.

  “I even tried tea leaves,” Hawthorn said. The rest looked at each other in a way that meant So it’s really that bad. Hawthorn always said tea leaves were for old aunties and complete hacks.

  “How can she be gone?” Rush asked. “We should be able to find her.”

  Imogen had always burned in a way that was impossible to ignore. While the rest of the Grays learned the language of the world around them one word at a time, Imogen had been born fluent, raw magic spilling from her fingers, slipped into the long pauses between her smiles. Imogen could set a blue stone at a girl’s feet and she would find herself unable to stay away from the water. When Imogen went to the beach and sat with her knees gathered, no matter what the tide was supposed to be that day, the waves would reach for her.

  Imogen was powerful.

  More important, Imogen was theirs.

  “Maybe there’s someone at school who could help . . .” June said, breathless currents carrying her away from reality fast. The other Grays knew the truth about June. She was cursed with hope.

  “If there was anyone else like us at school, we’d know it by now,” Hawthorn said.

  “What if we’re ripping this new girl out of her life, though?” June asked with a shiver. “That feels wrong.”

  “The spell is for someone who wants to come,” Hawthorn said. They knew the rules of using magic. No harm was the first. Stealing a queer girl from a happy life might not have been a cut or a bruise, but it was definitely harm. “We need to cast wide. We don’t know how far away she is.”

  “What if we get, like, seventy of them?” June asked. “A whole army of new Grays?”

  “She isn’t a Gray,” Hawthorn said, her eyes as sharp as June’s athame, which June had brought, of course, the dark blade waiting in its engraved sheath inside her flowered canvas backpack. “We have the perfect number already. We just need Imogen back.” Hawthorn looked up at the trees, which turned pure black at night, as though they’d been gulping the darkness. “Let’s start climbing.”

  “You know that’s not happening,” Lelia said. “I don’t do up.”

  June was the one who’d gotten hurt, but Lelia was the one who had decided that meant no more climbing. The fear that everyone assumed June would feel had skipped over her like a stone and landed in Lelia’s heart.

  “I’ll do it,” June said, even though today was a six on the scale of one to barely walking. The pain in her leg had the cold, heartless glitter of snow. Hawthorn held out her hands and helped June to the lowest branch of a tree.

  Lelia looked up into the ragged dark, where the tops of the trees sawed into the moon-blue sky. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “We all need to do it or it doesn’t work,” Hawthorn said.

  “Whoever this girl is, we need to bring her here,” Rush said. “It makes sense for one person to draw the spell back down. Lelia can ground us.”

  Lelia tried to kiss Rush on the cheek, but Rush retreated quickly. The last person who had kissed her in any way — in every way — was Imogen. Rush needed to keep that feeling intact for as long as she could.

  Rush and Hawthorn and June climbed, while Lelia stayed on the ground, looking up at them, spinning in circles.

  “Pretty,” June said as Hawthorn tossed her a ribbon.

  “Rainbow silk?” Lelia called up. “Really?”

  “Spells are made of symbols,” Hawthorn said. “Symbols. Aren’t. Subtle.”

  June tried to toss the ribbon to Rush, but it fell short, rippling toward the ground. When June looked down, her right leg tingled — her nervous system sounding a warning. “On second thought, we could have done t
his without the climbing.”

  “Too easy,” Hawthorn said. “Don’t forget the second rule.”

  Lelia threw the ribbon up to Rush as they silently filled in the rule. The greater the risk, the stronger the magic. The Grays tossed and tossed the silk around the grove, asking a question with their bodies. Asking for a girl. Beckoning her closer.

  Calling out in a language only she would hear.

  Isit down, right where I was standing. I cross my legs, hiking wet canvas sneakers up until they imprint on my thighs.

  The girls watch me.

  My breath is rough, scattering memories.

  The feeling that California was the answer to a question no one had asked. The way I spread the candy-pastel map of the United States and picked Tempest in twenty seconds, without blinking. The trees, the trees, the trees. How they pulled me away from everything that made sense.

  I look up and find four faces waiting. Their names were embedded in the story they just told, and now I dig them out. June, Lelia, Hawthorn, Rush. Those words dissolve, and I’m left with just two.

  “The Grays,” I say. “Part of me thinks you must be playing a shitty trick, and the other part of me already knows that first part is wrong.”

  The girl with ripples of long dark hair — Rush — shifts between me and the rest of the group. She puts her hands on my shoulders. These girls, with their touching. I only touch people when there’s kissing involved. Anything else is off-limits. One of the unspoken rules. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  My brain clicks through answers. “Yes. No.”

  “You can hold both things at the same time,” Rush says. I watch her lips as she speaks — they’re expertly lined and painted this black-cherry color that I can almost taste. Her face is the perfect heart-shaped kind that pinches to the delicate point of her chin. Her hands and her body are round and soft-looking, but her voice has a sandy roughness to it. When she sang, her voice was different. Smoother. The difference between polished crystal and raw. “You won’t burst if you try to hold more truth,” she tells me. “We’re not riverbanks, right?”

  “Umm, okay. True.” This is starting to feel like a test I haven’t studied for, like the dream where I show up to take the SAT and all of the questions are in ancient Greek or the pages are blank but everyone else has the normal test and is busy filling it in.

  “You brought me here because your friend is missing?” I ask. Just to be clear.

  The Grays nod. But they’re not a matching set even when they’re doing the same thing. There are the obvious differences: the sizes and shapes of their bodies, from wisp-tiny Lelia to broad-shouldered June; Hawthorn, who is all dramatic angles, and Rush, who is big and made of bold curves. I think Rush and Lelia are both white, Lelia with a perfectly baked California tan and Rush on the pale side. Hawthorn is Black, and June — maybe Pacific Islander?

  And then there are their reactions to what I just said. June blinks at me, waiting and eager. Lelia’s fidgeting, her arms over her bare chest. Rush is clearly upset. Hawthorn studies her toenails in a way that tells me she wants this part to be over. Each one has a different feeling painted over her prettiness. They’re all beautiful, in ways that go all over the place, four different paths through the woods.

  And they leave a space, no matter where they’re standing or sitting, for the girl who’s not there.

  “You think I . . . can do something? To get her back?”

  “What kind of abilities do you have?” June asks, kneeling in front of me, then wincing like it was a bad idea.

  If they pulled me away from Michigan and replanted me here, I owe them. I grab around, wanting to offer them talents. “I have the ability to make most people in a small town uncomfortable. I’m good at surprising my parents . . . in a bad way. I disappear sometimes.” I pause before the last one, but I can’t see a reason to hold it back. “Also, I kiss a lot of people. Mostly girls.”

  June puts her hand up for a high five. I’ve never gotten this reaction before. Anger, yes. Silence filled with nervous blinking, yes. People trying way too hard to prove they’re okay with it, so hard they pretty much prove the opposite, yes.

  I tap my hand against hers.

  “That’s great for you,” Lelia says, brushing down the white tank top that she must have brought with her, even though it seems to have appeared from nowhere. “But I don’t see how it’s going to bring Imogen back.”

  “Danny is here for a reason,” Hawthorn says.

  I’m looking for a response — for a reason — when the trees start creaking. At first it’s a relief, because I don’t have to say anything. Then all at once the morning is filled with the hard press of wind and the groan, crack, wrench of trees. That sound of doors being flung open, fast and hard, and I’m not sure I want to know what’s on the other side.

  “This will pass,” Hawthorn says, but the wind doesn’t agree with her. It rages and stomps.

  Lelia shakes her head. “Blowing up the coast instead of down, too cold,” she mutters. The girls bind themselves to each other with nervous stares. Hawthorn reaches out her arms, and Lelia and Rush hold on to her. June sits back, stretching out her leg, breathing hard and leaning against Lelia.

  I stand up. Alone.

  The wind demands that I sit down. It grabs my dress in its fists. It snarls my hair, bludgeons my skin.

  “Danny,” June says, her voice half-eaten by a gust. “Where are you going?”

  “Stay with us,” Hawthorn calls. Not an invitation. An order.

  But I’m walking too fast for their words to snare me. I fight against the wind, throw my whole body into resisting it. It dies, and I stumble. The woods go back to normal so suddenly that I wonder if the wind was invented.

  The silence of the early morning makes itself whole again, like cracked ice freezing over smooth or bones knitting clean. The trees, no longer wavering, reach up tall and straight. Fog stands around them like trapped breath.

  So much fog that I am close before I see.

  Lying there is a boy.

  He is pinned to the ground, a sharp branch through his chest. It must have been taken by the wind, falling hard, fast. I walk closer, in a brain-fog as thick as the one swirling around me. I keep moving until the details are too much, and my feet put a stop to it. There is bark shattered at the edges of the branch where it pierced him, blood weighing down the fabric of his T-shirt.

  “Sebastian.” His name comes out quick and broken. I want to be wrong. But those are his smile muscles gone slack. His long neck, thrown back, sunshine touching it softly, the way I almost did.

  The way I didn’t. Because I felt something bad coming, stepping on our heels.

  The Grays catch up, leaving a space between themselves and Sebastian. They rake in breath, grab for each other’s hands.

  “How . . . ?” I ask, one word standing in for a hundred variations on the same question. How did this happen? Where did that branch come from? How could this be possible, when I was up a tree with him less than an hour ago?

  “That wind did it,” Lelia says. “And that wind was not normal.”

  Hawthorn tugs sharply at Lelia’s wrist, and Lelia shuts up.

  “What is that branch?” I ask.

  “Widowmaker,” Rush whispers.

  I walk the rest of the way over to Sebastian, slowly. I kneel next to him. I don’t look too closely at his chest. Instead, I focus on his eyes, as if they might snap open at any second. I lean over his lips, waiting for a breath to bring my hope back to life.

  Nobody really knew the boy who got impaled, so nobody can get their hands around the fact that he’s dead. Instead, everyone spends Monday morning unsettled in their auditorium seats. The principal gives a short, dumb speech. “We are all devastated by the loss of a student who should have been with us today.” The sentences are empty boxes where details about the boy should go. It’s like burying a casket without a body in it, which the students of Tempest know something about.

  “Sebastian DeAure
li will be missed,” the principal promises. But most of the students never met Sebastian. He was like them, but he wasn’t one of them.

  Both those facts are unnerving.

  The bell rings, the recorded sound fuzzy. The students get up, most of them gathering armloads of books for their classes and going about their normal day as if that will save them from having to think about a dead classmate. Some skip classes to smoke smudgy-sweet pot and make out in the scruff of woods past the soccer field. For others, gossip is the only cure.

  One girl leans toward another at their lockers in the concrete shade and says, “The weird girls found him.”

  “Of course they did.” The second girl vines her body against her boyfriend’s side.

  “Nobody could make a redwood tree lose a branch and hit that kid,” the boyfriend says, trying to sound reasonable.

  The first girl closes her locker with a metallic snap. “Yeah. But.” They all know that something strange happened in the woods; they just don’t know how to talk about it. Silence spreads like blood, warm and sticky, until everyone turns away from the dying conversation.

  It started in darkness, long nights with my eyes pressed closed. I whispered that I belonged here, alone in my narrow bed in our narrow town.

  I told myself out loud, so I would believe it.

  On the worst nights, I would get out of bed and walk the hallway to the kitchen, and sometimes open the back door and take a few steps outside. My feet told me all about the differences between worn carpet, chilled tile, living earth. I looked out into the darkness of the backyard, and it matched the darkness in my head. When I went back to bed, my legs twitched and my thoughts writhed and I had to sleep with ten blankets on top of my chest to hold me down.

  Mom called my dad and said that I was turning into someone who couldn’t bear to stay still, like him. They went on a few dates right after college, but it never turned into love and marriage. It dead-ended in me.