Reese
“Where are you going?” Emily asks. It’s a few minutes later. She stands in the dumpy kitchen, wiping everything down with
Lysol wipes because she won’t let our bags of food touch anything that hasn’t been cleaned, and for once, I don’t disagree.
I stare at her for half a second. She’s still sad from what happened with Nolan before. Her eyes are dull and she looks tired,
which maybe she is, or maybe she’s just sad. He’s upstairs in the room they’re supposed to share, with the door closed, and
I think how lonely it must be being Emily.
“For a walk,” I say, reaching for the door handle.
“I don’t want you going for a walk alone.”
“Why not? What do you think’s going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know, but we just got here. You don’t know your way around yet. You might get lost.”
“I won’t get lost.”
“Take Wyatt and Mae with you then.”
“Why? So we can all get lost?” I sigh when she says nothing. “Do I have to? I just want to be alone for like five minutes.”
“Yes,” she says, “you have to.”
I throw my hands up in the air, calling for Wyatt and Mae.
Mae is upstairs, but Wyatt is outside, taking practice swings at nothing with his four-hundred-dollar baseball bat (if I never have to hear about its light weight or alloy barrel again, I’ll be thrilled).
They take forever to get ready so that by the time Mae’s shoes are on, Wyatt’s bat is set safely inside and we’re finally ready to leave, there’s no use looking for the boy I saw before because he’s gone.
“Keep an eye on Mae, Reese. Don’t let her wander off,” Emily says as we leave.
“Where do you guys want to go?” I ask them.
Mae doesn’t care, but Wyatt wants to go back to the lodge, which is the place where we checked in to the resort and got our
keys, because there were arcade games there that he wants to play. I say fine, whatever. I don’t care, so long as Emily and
Nolan aren’t there.
It’s a short walk to the lodge from our cottage. The path there is no different than the trail that goes from our cottage
toward the lake. In fact, it’s probably the exact same worn-down path that goes across this whole stupid resort with little
wooden arrows saying stuff like Lodge and Pool, so that, contrary to what Emily thinks, you’d have to be an actual idiot to get lost.
When we get there, there is a man standing outside the lodge entrance, smoking as we approach with his eyes on me; if Skylar
were here, she’d tell him to take a picture because it lasts longer. Skylar always knows what to say in situations like these.
Me? Not so much. Instead, his staring makes me self-conscious, and I think about what Emily said before. Is that what you want people to think? That you’re a slut? I adjust my shirt, avoiding eye contact as the man barely steps out of the way to make room for us to pass. He takes a long
drag from his cigarette, almost blowing the smoke in my face before letting his eyes drift to Mae, who’s fallen behind Wyatt
and me. As I watch, he takes in the thin, bare legs that stick out from beneath her denim overalls, one strap too big so that
it slips to her upper arm. “Hurry up, slowpoke,” I say to her, seeing her spaced out, kicking up rocks and dirt with the toe
of her gym shoes.
“You walk too fast,” she whines.
“You walk too slow. Hurry up.”
I make Mae go inside before me, praying to God this creep doesn’t follow us in and that he’s not still here when we leave.
Inside the lodge, slot machines and arcade games line a wall, which Wyatt takes immediately off for, leaving Mae and me behind.
Mae spots the DVD rentals and asks if we can get one. I have three dollars in my pocket and so I say fine, whatever, if she
gets Emily to pay me back, because they cost a dollar each and I’m not a bank.
“Why do you call her that?” Mae asks.
“Call her what?”
“Emily.”
“Why not? It’s her name, isn’t it?”
“Her name is Mom.”
I roll my eyes. I don’t call them Emily and Nolan to their faces. Not anymore, not after Emily told me it was a “sign of disrespect”
and that I was “devaluing her authority.” Now I just think it and say it behind her back, because that’s what Skylar does,
she calls her mom Caroline, like they’re friends.
I watch as Mae wanders away to peruse the infinitesimal selection of DVDs, which look like they were made before I was born, while Wyatt feeds quarters into some arcade game, feeding his own gambling habit.
He’s gotten into trouble for it before: for online gambling, for stealing Emily and Nolan’s credit card for things like buying loot boxes and other in-game purchases, for racking up debt on fantasy football.
I don’t know how he got around the whole legal-gambling-age thing, but he did.
When they caught him, they took away his phone and computer for a month and made him do chores to pay back the money he stole, which was in the thousands.
They think it solved the problem. It didn’t.
Instead, Wyatt started selling his old Pokémon cards and Grandma’s antique silverware (she’s not dead, not yet, but she’s getting ready for it, offloading things she no longer needs) that Emily keeps in a bin in the basement for cash to gamble with, but they haven’t noticed and I’m not going to be the one to tell them because if I did, Wyatt would murder me in my sleep.
I wander aimlessly, killing time. The lodge is a dive. Kids walk around barefoot and wet, like they’ve just come from the
pool or beach. There are giant taxidermy fish on the walls beside neon Budweiser signs. There is a sign for some missing girl.
I go to the sign and read it, seeing that the girl was four foot ten and ninety pounds when she went missing. She was last
seen riding her bike home from a friend’s house almost five years ago, which tells me the odds of her still being alive are
slim to none. There is a Facebook page to find her, Help Find Kylie Matthews. The sign asks for anyone with information to call the police or visit the Facebook page. Mae sees me looking at the sign
and comes over to ask, “Who’s that?” about the girl, and I say it’s no one.
“It doesn’t look like no one,” she says, and I roll my eyes. “Then who’s that?” she asks, pointing to another picture beside
the first one, on the same sign.
“Same girl,” I say because it’s an age-progressed picture.
“No it’s not,” Mae says, giving me a look like I’m dumb.
“Yes it is. That’s her before,” I say, motioning at the first picture. “And that’s what she’d look like now if—” I start to
say, moving my finger to the next picture and wondering what it would be like for her family to see her grow up in pictures
but not real life.
“If what?” Mae asks when I cut my words short, not wanting to say to her: if she’s not dead, because I don’t want to scare her, for one, and because she’d probably say something to Emily and then I’d get in trouble
for talking about dead girls.
“Did you find a movie yet?” I ask instead.
She hasn’t. Mae runs away, and I go to the other side of the room, where there is a coin-operated pool table with torn felt where a couple kids play while their parents sit at the long wooden bar with mugs of beer, getting drunk, having fun.
I doubt they get out much if they think this place is fun.
It’s dim in the lodge. The walls and floor are wood, and the only lights look like they’ve been here since 1970, which they probably have.
They’re covered in dust and grease and give off a nearly nonexistent amount of dull, yellow light.
I take a picture of the stuffed fish for posterity’s sake (hashtag worst vacation ever) and am feeling sorry for myself again—wishing I was anywhere but here—when I see him through the small window on the other side of the lodge, the boy I saw earlier walking in the woods, and from the minute I see him, everything changes.
My heart catches. All of a sudden, my body feels lighter, like I’m floating. I lose track of time, tuning out the rest of
the world—the music, the people at the bar, the smell of fried fish, Wyatt, Mae—so that it’s only me and him.
I forget all about what Emily said about keeping an eye on Mae.