There was no chance of that happening in Griffin Mills. I was convinced there was a secret factory somewhere in town, spitting out people from a mold. And I came out defective.
But I only had one more year, and then I could go far away from the Mills. Not that I’d actually made any plans yet.
The walk home mostly takes me through residential areas. The houses close to school are ancient—crumbling Victorians with wraparound porches and turrets that look out on the Ohio River. It used to be where the rich people lived, but that was a long time ago. The farther you go west, the newer the Mills gets. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhoods end, and there’s only dense woods and occasional farms.
My house is near the edge of town. It’s a typical 1950s house, two stories with white siding and dark-blue trim. The street it’s on, the street I’ve lived on for my entire life, dead-ends in a patch of woods. There are no fences in my neighborhood, just trees separating one house from another. It makes the area seem more isolated than it is but not as isolated as one of those old farmhouses. Which is a good thing. I know what sort of stuff can happen at a lonely farmhouse in the middle of the night. I read In Cold Blood for freshman English.
At home, I found my mom and Rush sitting in front of the TV, watching a local news station.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Not yet,” my mom said. “The search party is still out.”
I tossed my backpack on the floor and sat in an armchair, my legs dangling over the side. “She couldn’t have gotten that far. I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with someone exceptionally bright.”
“Hawthorn,” my mom said with her warning tone.
“Lizzie’s mom is about to talk,” Rush said. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up enough to drown me out.
I hadn’t planned on watching the news with my family. I didn’t really want to spend my afternoon watching Lizzie Lovett’s mom cry on TV and ask for help finding her daughter, or wait for updates radioed in from the search party. But it’s not like I had much else going on. And besides, I was mildly curious.
Chapter 3
Freshman Year
I couldn’t sleep that night, which is something that happens more often than I’d like. How it usually goes is I’m tired and lay down, but suddenly, my mind is racing, so I go over everything that happened during the day and all the ways it could have happened better than it actually did.
On the first night Lizzie Lovett was missing, I gave up on sleep pretty fast. I got out of bed and climbed onto the bench in front of my window. There aren’t any streetlights in my neighborhood, but the moon was full, so I could see clearly. Not that anything was happening outside. Was everyone in all the other houses asleep, or did some of them have insomnia too? I bet Lizzie was sleeping like a baby, wherever she was.
It was annoying, the way my thoughts kept returning to Lizzie. She had enough people obsessing over her. I didn’t need to add to the Lizzie worship. But the more I tried to push her out of my mind, the more impossible it became. Stuff I hadn’t thought about for years kept popping into my head.
Like the first time I saw her.
It was a pretty weird thing to remember, but I did. I was in sixth grade, and my parents forced me to go to one of Rush’s freshman football games. I thought it unfair, because he never had to attend any of my activities. But when I brought that up, Rush was like, “What am I supposed to do, sit there and watch you read?”
At the game, Lizzie was cheerleading, and she wasn’t very good. Her jumps and tumbles were sloppy. Once, she forgot the entire second half of a cheer. But even though she sucked, everyone was watching her. You had to watch her. She was so pretty and loud and happy that it didn’t matter how much she screwed up. There wasn’t one other girl in the stadium who had as much charisma as Lizzie Lovett.
The other cheerleaders were looking at each other instead of at the crowd, trying to stay in sync. Every time there was a break, a bunch of them pulled out compacts and checked their hair and makeup. They were so obviously worrying what people thought of them. What made Lizzie different was that she didn’t care. She was grinning and having fun. She was happy.
Instead of paying attention to the game that night, my eyes were on Lizzie Lovett as she smiled and laughed and joked with her friends. And I wanted what she had. I wanted her charisma. I wanted to be that comfortable in my own skin. I wanted to have a high school experience that was as much fun as hers seemed to be.
Clearly, we don’t always get what we wish for.
Lizzie and I didn’t talk until a few years later, when I was a freshman. It was so early in the year that I still hadn’t memorized my locker combination—though I seemed to be the only one in school having that particular struggle.
I also seemed to be the only person who had no friends.
Everyone else was excited about being in high school and embarking on a new journey and all that, but I was pretty depressed. Not only because no one would talk to me, but because I was starting to realize being in high school didn’t actually make you any smarter or cooler than you were in eighth grade. You were the same person, just in a new environment where you didn’t know the rules.
On the very worst day of my freshman year, I hid in the gym’s locker room during lunch period. I hadn’t expected anyone to be there. I certainly didn’t think Lizzie Lovett would be sitting on one of the benches, talking on her cell phone. But there she was.
I instantly felt awkward, like I was interrupting a private moment. Which meant the polite thing would be to turn around and leave. Except I was already halfway down the bank of lockers when I noticed her, and running away would probably have made me seem even more awkward.