Lost Girl Found

Prologue

Beau

“We won! We won! We fucking did it!” My quarterback, Marcus, shouts, his fingers twining into the bars of my helmet’s face mask.

He’s shaking me and screaming wildly just as the rest of my teammates plow into us and we morph into a heaving huddle of dripping sweat and football pads.

A faceless form brings out the state trophy and shoves it into my hands.

It’s surprisingly heavy as I grip the square base covered in tiny plaques, each bearing the name of a winning team dating back decades. The shiny gold football atop it sends out a blast of light. Or maybe that’s just my imagination playing tricks on me under these Friday night lights.

Am I in shock?

I’m jostled, photographed, and pulled left and right. The cheers and marching band horn section are so loud that my ears ring. Four fucking years of hard work have finally paid off in my senior year. I’ll get to go off to college as a state champion. My cheeks ache from grinning.

Marcus handed off the ball to me with seconds on the clock, and I broke the ankles of three players on my back, juking left and right to dive over the line. The football touched the ground just as the whistle blew, giving us the win by a single point.

I scan the crowd in the bleachers. Everyone is on their feet, a teeming mass of maroon and white. But my eyes are peeled for a smudge of black. She would be seated, not cheering or screaming, her back to the wall. But she’d smile for me. Only for me.

I frown when I don’t spot her in her usual spot.

She’s never missed one of my games. Not since she moved in next door, midway through the seventh grade, and my mom invited her to ride her bike up the road to the pee-wee field.

The image of Gracyn Moreno straddling her bike, both feet flat on the ground, hands gripping her neon green handlebar tape, wind whipping her wavy brown hair like a victory flag behind her is ingrained in my memory.

That day, I ran faster than I ever had before.

“Your eyes are weird,” I’d gasped, heaving big breaths, palms on my knees. I still managed to stare up at her muddy green eyes, one pizza slice section of her left iris a dark brown.

“It’s called partial heterochromia. And it’s not weird. I’m just special.” She explained to my stupid ass so patiently, with only a slight eye roll.

I still picture her watching me when I need an extra little boost of energy on the field.

“You did amazing! I can’t believe it, Beau!” Paisley leads a group of cheerleaders in a circle around me as I try to leave the field, my eyes still scanning for Gracyn.

“It’s the first state championship for Cherry Hill since the 80s!” I can’t tell who said that, Molly or Patty.

“You’re coming to Paisley’s, right? For the afterparty?” Someone else chimes in.

“Have any of you seen Gracyn?” I ask, sweat drying uncomfortably on my skin. I need to get out of my gear and into the shower now that my adrenaline’s fading.

“Who?” Molly asks with a confused giggle. That’s right, Molly with the freckle face. Marcus, who’s both QB and a horndog, said her nipples were perfect circles of strawberry red.

“Beau, you’re coming over. You have to. Everyone will be there,” Paisley says, all of them ignoring my question. She grabs my free hand and tries to walk with me. I know she’s just hoping some camera will catch a photo of us together after the big game and print it somewhere.

“I dunno. Maybe. I’m looking for Gracyn.”

“Why would she be here? She has no school spirit,” Paisley mutters as I slide my fingers out of hers and shove them through my hair. My hair tie must’ve fallen out because it’s getting all in my eyes.

“She’s at every game,” I say, finally managing to break away from the crowd of cheerleaders and well-wishers and get my ass to the locker room. I’m the first one in; everyone else is milking the high of the win and lingering on the field.

Dropping my helmet to the ground, I tug off my jersey and padding.

I grab my cell phone from my bag, stretch my hamstrings, and sit on the long bench with a groan.

I fucking did it. Two-a-days in the drizzly rain, summer camps, spring trainings, private coaching, and practice, practice, practice, finally fucking got me here.

State champs. A full ride. The NFL sniffing at me.

But where the fuck is my best friend?

Did u see? I text.

Where are u? Meet me at my truck

I shower and put on black sweats, a white tee, and comfy sliders by the time the locker room fills with the rest of my boisterous teammates. Gracyn still hasn’t texted me back.

“Wanna ride together to Paisley’s? That way we can go ham. Chittering is the DD, since he’s a J-dub and all,” Marcus asks, clapping a hand on my shoulder as I stare at my phone.

“He’s Mormon, not Jehovah’s Witness,” I correct his dumbass. “And no, I need to find Gracyn first. I’ll probably just meet you there.”

“That girl isn’t gonna come to a party,” Marcus says, his voice getting all deep and rumbly like he’s gonna impart some fucking wisdom on me.

“Beau. Listen, bro. After this year, you’ll be gone.

Playing college ball. I heard Gracyn is failing every single one of her classes. She’s not even gonna graduate.”

“That’s none of your fucking business,” I snap, jerking my shoulder so his hand falls off me. “Her mom’s a bitch. She’s having a hard time.”

Gracyn’s smile was big and warm all through middle school, her left canine slightly askew.

Sure, she was shy, but not with me. We’d meet at the line of azalea bushes that separated her house from mine every day after school.

We snuck junk food to share, and I talked about football, and she listened.

Then she talked about the fantasy books she was reading and the world she was building in her head, and I listened.

When high school started, she drew inward even more.

She kept to herself at school, whispering for me to go and hang with my teammates whenever I tried to talk to her or sit with her at lunch.

But after school, we still met, and it was always the same.

We hung out until my parents or hers called us in for dinner.

In ninth grade, she dyed her glossy brown hair pitch black.

Her mom and stepdad Peter were fighting by then.

Sometimes I could hear their shouts from my bed.

My mom had a talk with me about how all households were different and that not every family was like ours.

Not everybody had the resources we did or the good examples she and my dad had from their parents.

Gracyn was just as pretty with jet-black hair, and she told me she liked it better that way.

It was her hair anyway; what was I supposed to do?

Tell her to leave it brown because I liked how, when she leaned against the oak tree in my backyard, she blended in and it was like nature’s camouflage? It was her hair, not mine.

Her clothes started getting baggier. Thrift store denim and torn band t-shirts, all of them so faded black they were gray, except along the seams where the color stayed dark.

She traced a coal liner around her olive green eyes, but it just made the dark brown slice of her left iris stand out more.

She was the opposite of every girl in school and even more striking to me.

No one dared bully her, not when they knew the captain of the football team would pound their ass into the ground if they did.

My chest feels tight, and it’s not from the game I just played.

It’s from the worry in Marcus’s eyes and the uneasiness I’ve felt for months now.

Gracyn is pulling away from me and not always meeting me after school, even though the Paisleys, Mollys, and Pollys would kill to live next door to me.

Instead, she’s been out looking for shitty part-time jobs at head shops and gas stations within a bus-ride distance.

Her hair was getting stringier and greasier, the ends frayed, as if she wasn’t washing it often enough.

“You know I’m taking you with me when I make it big, Cyn,” I told her when I found her sitting huddled next to the azaleas one day after practice, a battered paperback in her hands. “We’ll be roommates. In Chicago, or Miami, or whatever city I play for.”

“You won’t want me then, Beau,” she’d whispered so softly. Her lips were a pale petal pink, bloodless.

“Tell me what’s wrong? Is it your mom again? Is it Pasty Pete?” She half-snorted at my nickname for her stepdad.

“I hate her. I hate him. I hate her for marrying him, and forcing me to live here,” Gracyn whispered into the darkness. The ache of hurt I felt at her words was new. What about me? If she weren’t here, we wouldn’t be best friends.

“It’s worth it, though, right? To be here with me?

” I tried not to let her see how she sliced me to my core.

I firmed up, sucked in air and blinked away uneasiness.

The lifetime of self-confidence that was instilled in me quickly took hold.

A lifetime of Mama Bradley shouting my praises from the sidelines.

Of my dad telling every person who comes in to buy insurance that his son is gonna go pro someday.

A lifetime of coaches lining up to work with me, teammates vying to toss me the ball, and girls fawning over every muscle and posting about my ass in those pants on social media.

Gracyn sat silently for a beat. Then I saw the shadow of her former smile, the softening around her mouth.

The matte stare of her odd eyes. She looked right at me; the way she gifts her full attention only to me is one of the reasons I think of her non-stop.

In a world where I already feel special all the time, Gracyn somehow makes me feel extra-special.

Everybody else is easy. But she doesn’t give anyone else her time or attention.

That warm, twinkly gaze. It’s for me and me alone.

She nodded. Was it with sadness? I didn’t see it then.