Chapter 11 #2
I opened them and looked in the mirror she held up to my face, and for the briefest moment, past the makeup or perhaps because of it, I saw Adeline staring back at me.
It took me a few blinks to realize I was looking at myself, and it was the first and only time I’d ever thought we’d looked alike.
Not because of our features but because I saw in my eyes the light that I only ever found in hers.
I saw, when I looked at myself, everything that she was and everything she’d hoped I would be.
We drove for a few hours more. The sun set, and in the blue of the dusk, I spotted the first lights of the festival.
It took shape behind a pall of salt dust kicked up by the tires of the trucks and vans that drove alongside us.
From a distance, it looked like an overgrown carnival, a mirage of lights winking on the horizon.
Someone opened the windows of the RV to let in the sound of music.
And I could feel it then, this thrumming energy coming off the festival in waves.
All those souls thronging together in the clouds of salt dust. The lives yet to be claimed.
We parked in a camp lit up with achingly bright neon lights.
The girls wore their festival outfits, which could be summarized as a more elaborate, racier iteration of their regular clothes.
Peasant skirts with the hems hiked up at the hipbones, held in place with safety pins.
Rhinestones affixed with eyelash glue to blushed cheeks.
Fishnets and feathers and damp hair spray-dyed into blacks and reds to match Iona’s makeup.
Skye and Chloe had made us all friendship bracelets to exchange with other festivalgoers that night.
It was so easy to imagine Adeline standing among them. She lived for nights like this one, and I felt sad she wasn’t there and guilty because I was. I felt like I’d stolen this life from her, this moment in time that should’ve been hers.
Shiloh climbed out of her truck. She faltered when she saw me with my painted face, dressed in the clothes Chloe picked for me. She gazed at me with a kind of reluctance—arms folded tight over her chest, eyes narrowed—as if she were staring directly into the sun. Like it hurt to look at me.
I waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, her gaze sliding over me to the other girls, I felt small and stupid. I wanted to backtrack to the RV bathroom, scrub my face clean of the makeup, but instead, I squared my shoulders and resisted the urge.
“It’s a big festival, so we need to split up,” said Shiloh. She held an old hatbox in one hand, and she pulled off the top to reveal the cell phones within, which she began to distribute. She didn’t give me mine, and with some resentment, I wondered if she didn’t trust me with it.
Once all the phones had been passed around, Shiloh fired off a text to the group: the selfie of a dark-haired girl our age, her hair drawn up into a tight bun at the top of her head, all the would-be flyaways gelled into place.
It was just a headshot, but at the bottom of the picture, I could see that she was wearing some type of white leotard. I guessed she was a dancer.
Jasmine Wu. Our target.
My stomach clenched.
Shiloh slipped her own phone into her pocket. “If you spot her, message the group. Then Roslyn will take her life, per Death’s orders.”
Skye raised her hand. “What about…fun?”
Shiloh looked less than impressed. “Fun?”
Skye nodded, looking a little annoyed. “I mean, we spent hours getting dressed up and Iona did such a good job with our makeup. Shouldn’t we at least enjoy ourselves a little bit? See and be seen?”
I couldn’t help but think she was right, looking at all of them.
Skye wore a monochromatic mod dress from Flower Children, with white platform go-go boots that made her almost as tall as me.
Her makeup was like that of a mime: pale face, painted-on brows, and black teardrops beneath both eyes.
Chloe had teased her hair at the roots so that it was nearly double its normal size.
She wore cotton bloomers for pants with knee-high socks, kitten- heel sandals, and a corset top, which would’ve looked terrible if I were wearing it.
But somehow it was chic on her. Iona was equally breathtaking.
Despite the fact that she’d spent the bulk of her time doing makeup for everyone else, her outfit was impeccable: a sequined minidress paired with an oversized pearl choker wrapped all the way up her neck.
Naomi—dressed in a long silk skirt that brushed the ground paired with a puff-sleeve blouse that I’m fairly certain was from the Victorian era—sported a darker and more dramatic iteration of her usual makeup look, the blue shadow extending out to her temples and across the bridge of her nose.
Iona had drawn black diamonds over both of her eyes, and her lips and cheeks were powdered pale, so she looked almost like a painted corpse.
It seemed a waste of effort, and, frankly, beauty, for them to spend all night searching for someone who was doomed to die anyway.
“I mean, we came all the way here.” To my surprise, Naomi, typically one of the more practical girls in the group, backed up Skye. “There’s the light shows and a Ferris wheel, performances on the main stage, and—”
“And a really weird tent with a bunch of naked people,” said Riley, and after a few horrified glances her way, she added a defensive “Just saying.”
Shiloh ignored them. “We’re on a deadline. Roslyn has to prove herself in three weeks, or else—”
Skye fished a tube of lip gloss from her pocket, applied it over her black lipstick. “We’re screwed?”
“Essentially. So let’s try to stay on task for once. We’ll split into three groups to cover more ground. Chloe, you stay here at camp and let us know if you see anything.”
I immediately gravitated toward Skye and Naomi, but Shiloh called my name before I had the chance to partner with them. “Roslyn, you’re with me.”
The girls spread out to varying corners of the festival.
Skye unsurprisingly made a beeline for the main stage, Naomi trailing after her to make sure she didn’t get into too much trouble.
Riley and Iona found their way to a ring of lit circus tents on the north edge of the festival, where the crowds were thinner.
Night fell. Shiloh and I walked through the Gallery of Lights, a bright display of sculptures wrapped in neon and fiber optics.
There were life-size elephants and a to-scale rendering of Michelangelo’s David that burned so brightly against the black of the night that my eyes watered a little when I stared up at it.
“How has it been for you?” Shiloh asked as we wove through crowds of concertgoers with wide and dilated eyes, their faces and limbs painted with bright streaks of glowing paint. “Do you regret coming with us? Now that you know what we are?”
“I don’t regret anything.” I kicked up dust with my boots.
They were heavy but comfortable, and I was grateful for whoever it was that had broken them in so thoroughly.
I suspected that I had a long night, with lots of walking, ahead of me still.
“I thought I might, after Stewart. But…” I trailed off, not sure how to put into words what I was thinking.
“You were right about me, when you said I was lost.”
“Roslyn, I didn’t mean to—”
I waved her off. “It’s fine. Really. I think I needed to hear that. I knew it already, how dead I felt, but when you said it…I don’t know. It woke me up a bit, I guess. Made me realize that I have things to do and live for.”
Shiloh risked a glance at me, that question apparent in her eyes again. “Like what?”
“Like…finding out what happened to Adeline.”
Shiloh nodded, and a silence followed that she didn’t fill.
So I did. “Why do you think she left the group and came home? If you had to guess.”
“I don’t know.” Shiloh paused to stare up at a fiber optic sculpture of a two-headed woman, her splayed hands grasping at the sky. “Maybe…she missed you.”
I laughed aloud at that. “Fat chance. She barely even spoke to me that summer.”
“Weird. When she was with us, she talked about you all the time.”
That came as a surprise. But then…Adeline had all these faces she wore around other people.
Different facets of herself that she swapped in and out at will.
She was good at being whoever she needed to be to win people over.
Maybe, with Shiloh and the girls, she’d wanted to play the part of the caring older sister.
That made sense, given the nature of their group.
“Did you miss her?”
Shiloh’s question was strange enough to make me stop dead. “I mean, she was my sister.”
“I know she was your sister. I asked if you missed her when she was traveling with us.”
I felt the back of my neck warm with shame.
Because the reality was that I hadn’t. Secretly, I had been relieved when Adeline had left that summer.
She’d been in one of her bad ways prior to going, and she’d cast a long shadow across the house, draped it like a smothering blanket over everyone so that it was almost hard to breathe around her.
What little I deduced, from her sullen silences and her listlessness, was that she felt deprived of the life she was meant to be living.
A life that she’d attained upon meeting the girls—perhaps the life she felt she was destined for.
Which then begged the question: Why would she ever leave them?
Why would she ever come back to the tiny town she hated so much, to a sister who was so unlike her, when she’d found freedom with the girls?
I didn’t understand it, and Shiloh’s half answer hadn’t gotten me any closer to the truth.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was hiding something. They all were.
And I needed to find out what.
We kept walking, searching for Jasmine. Somewhere along the way, Shiloh stopped to buy a beer, stepping into line at a small bar on wheels.
It took me by surprise. Of all the girls, Shiloh seemed the most devoted to the work they did for Death.
When I’d realized she’d be my partner for the night, I’d given up on any thin hopes of exploring the festival.
But Shiloh relaxed during our time together.
Maybe being away from the chaos of the other girls had eased her.
As we made our way toward the main stage, the crowds thickened on all sides, and Shiloh grabbed my hand to keep us from being parted. She guided us through the crowd, but when we emerged on the other side of it, she still kept hold of my hand, her fingers slotting into the spaces between mine.
I faltered. “Shiloh, listen, I—”
The crowds parted, and I saw her.
A girl in platform heels, jumping to the music at the risk of breaking her ankles.
She was dressed like an angel, in a white fringe dress with feathered wings and a twisted wire halo that slid askew as she danced.
She had an upturned nose dotted with rhinestone freckles.
Her lips were full and lined dark, and she had purple contacts in her eyes that made them look overlarge and almost eerily doll-like.
Jasmine Wu.