Serena
Every bad idea starts out as a good idea. Especially when you’re a teenager. The worst of ideas seem like brilliant plans when you’re sixteen.
Milo and I had been firm friends for around four years by then.
I’d fully embraced my Emo phase and had ditched my preppy look to slouch around in baggy shorts, checked shirts over skinny vests and Converse.
My hair had grown out, but I still refused to wear it long and kept it in a shaggy bob à la Debbie Harry.
Mom had moaned and cajoled but eventually accepted it.
Then, as was her way, she found a way to twist my teenage rebellion to her own needs.
‘We’re going to call it “the modern face of Serenity”,’ she had proclaimed when I came home from school one day to find her sitting in the living room with one of the Conservators – a large guy called Johnson Green.
He often came round to talk to Mom about town events.
Occasionally, I wondered if he and Mom were ‘doing it’.
But then, Green usually brought his weird son, Owen, with him, so maybe not.
‘The Conservators love it,’ Green had boomed. He’d spread out his hands like he was unveiling a poster. ‘“The progressive face of a progressive town.”’
Mom had clapped. Owen had pulled a huge booger out of his nose and eaten it. I’d inwardly groaned and stomped off to my bedroom.
Milo, for his part, had shot up. He was still skinny but now towered over me at six foot three.
In contrast to my shorter hair, he had let his blond crew cut grow long, almost to his shoulders.
He had also finally lost his eyepatch and swapped his thick glasses for contacts.
He looked good in a quirky, odd kind of way.
For me, his change in stature and appearance hadn’t changed how I saw him – he was still the weird little kid who wanted to swap sandwiches. Geeky, odd Milo.
We hung out a lot in the library after school.
Most of the other kids went to the diner or the park.
Also, it meant neither of us had to go home.
By this point, we both knew a bit more about each other’s home lives.
Milo knew my mom was overbearing and possessive (and didn’t think he was good enough for her daughter).
I knew that Milo’s mom was a religious nutjob.
I’d met her once and was in no hurry to repeat the experience.
Although, as it turned out, I’d meet her again before everything went bad. And she was no small part of that.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are lots of moving parts to this story and it’s important I tell you them in order, so you can see how it all played out. How all those random conversations and decisions led me to where I am now.
We always sat in the study section, tucked in a dusty corner partially hidden behind a rack of reference books that nobody ever seemed to check out.
Not many people came to the library to study or read.
Not even old folk. It was usually empty except for us and the equally dusty and half-deaf librarian, Miss Gale.
Occasionally, she would stop by, glasses dangling from her crinkled neck, smile and ask us how our studies were going.
We answered politely and made up some shit up about English or History or something.
She never noticed that we barely opened our books.
Or if we did, we never turned the pages.
The day that Milo showed me the maps we were relaxed, lounging in our seats, just talking crap about this and that.
The conversation ebbed and flowed in that random way it does between close friends.
Maybe we did do a bit of studying in between.
We had an English assignment to finish. I can’t quite remember because memory itself is fallible.
All I know is somehow the conversation turned to people at school, like it often did. Milo may have been an outsider, but, like he told me the first day we met, he was good at watching. He knew everything about everyone.
‘You know, it’s Lucy Bennett’s sweet sixteenth next month?’
Lucy Bennett was the school mean girl. Blonde – tick. Tan – tick. Cheerleader – tick. It’s funny, you think those girls don’t really exist outside of movies, but they do, or at least, here in Serenity Falls, they certainly did.
Lucy hated me, always had. Milo theorized it was because she was jealous.
She would have loved to be ‘the face of Serenity’.
It was one status tick box she didn’t have, and it drove her mad.
That was why she and her clique had come down so hard on me.
Plus, he said: ‘Objectively, you’re prettier than she is. ’
‘Right.’ I had rolled my eyes.
‘It’s true. Beneath the hairspray and foundation, she’s not all that. You don’t need anything to make you beautiful.’
I think I might have blushed and then elbowed him hard in the ribs. ‘So, I guess our invites to the party got lost in the post?’
‘Yeah, ’course.’
I chewed on the lid of my pen, pondering. ‘I wonder what she’ll do. Hire a yacht and throw a bash on the lake? Maybe book the whole hotel. I mean, there’ll be a stretch limo, right?’
‘Probably. But here’s the thing—’ Milo leaned forward. ‘I also heard Lucy boasting about how she’s going to hold a secret party out at Harold’s cabin.’
My eyebrows shot up. Every town has a creepy, deserted house. A building with a macabre history that everyone says is haunted; somewhere kids are told to avoid and teenagers dare each other to visit.
In Serenity Falls, it was Harold’s cabin. Pretty much every kid in school had a story about it, something passed down by older siblings. It was an urban legend. And like most urban legends, there were so many conflicting stories that it was hard to know what was true and what was bullshit.
‘For real?’ I asked Milo now. ‘She knows the way?’
Plenty of kids boasted about going out on a boat and finding the derelict property. Funnily enough, every single story described the cabin in a different way, in a slightly different location. That’s how I knew most of them were crap.
‘She thinks she does,’ Milo said. ‘But they won’t make it. They’ll go the wrong way, get lost and then go get shitfaced in the park and lie to everyone about what a cool, creepy time they had.’
I’d given him a quizzical look. ‘How are you so sure they won’t find it? I mean, if the place even exists and hasn’t fallen down by now.’
Milo smiled, and I’d like to say that I had a shiver of premonition. A bad feeling. A fleeting shimmy of ice down my spine. But I didn’t. There was nothing. Even when he delivered his coup de grace:
‘Because everyone is looking in the wrong place.’
‘What? How d’you know?’
He reached into his backpack and took out a book. It was A4-sized, like the textbooks we got at school, but it looked ancient. The dust jacket was faded and torn, the spine literally coming apart at the seams. I could just make out the title: Serenity Falls – Geographical Guide.
‘Looks riveting,’ I said as he put it down on the table.
‘It is. It contains town plans and maps of Serenity when the town was built.’
He opened the book and pushed back in a couple of pages that were slipping out.
‘Here.’ He jabbed his finger at a map spread over two pages.
I wasn’t too good with maps, but even I could make out downtown, the green of the park and the blue area of the lake.
‘This is an original map of the town, the park and lake area.’
‘It doesn’t even have the hotel on it.’
‘No, that was built a year or so later. Now’ – he took a pen and leaned closer over the map – ‘most stories about the cabin mention a narrow, twisty river that flows out of the lake going north. You can see here that there’s a larger tributary that flows into the lake and two narrow rivers that flow out, but this is the only one that twists in the right direction.
He points at it. ‘The cabin is supposed to be quite a way along, which would put it about here.’ He makes a cross on the map.
He pulled another book from his backpack. It looked newer. The title read: A Guide to Serenity Falls.
‘This has the most up-to-date map of Serenity Falls.’
He opened the guide to a fold-out map and placed it next to the older map.
‘Here’s how they show the lake now.’
I looked between them. The difference was obvious. In the later version the lake was smaller, only one tributary ran in, and one ran out into the woods.
‘This could just be a less detailed version,’ I said.
Milo shook his head. ‘I walked around the lake and took some photographs. You can see from certain markers that the lake has shrunk. It’s a part man-made, part natural process. I mean, it’s still a big, deep lake. But the wetlands are essentially less wet.’
‘Meaning?’
His smile widened. ‘Going by the newer map, the only river north of the lake is this one.’ He pointed at the only significant blue line on the map.
‘Most people believe that Harold’s cabin lies somewhere along here.
But it’s the wrong river. The right one has dried up.
Look, I made a tracing of the old map so you can see. ’
He produced a piece of tracing paper and laid it over the newer map. He had marked out the lake and the rivers and put a cross where he thought the cabin was.
I looked between the two maps. He was right. The X was way off the remaining river.
He gestured at the map again. ‘So, to reach the cabin you’d need to take a boat out to about here on the remaining river.
There’s possibly still a smaller branch off that.
But then, you’d have to head off on foot for about a mile or two.
I mean, it might be swampy, but it’s the only way. ’ He smiled triumphantly and sat back.
I stared at him. ‘How long have you been looking into this?’
He shrugged. ‘A couple of weeks. I was just curious.’
‘Where did you even find these maps?’
‘The new one you can get in the gift shop. The old one was hidden right behind a ton of other geography books here in the library.’
‘And you never mentioned it to me?’ I couldn’t quite disguise the note of hurt in my voice. Milo and I were supposed to share everything. No secrets.
He had the grace to look sheepish. ‘I thought you might think it was boring.’
‘The map stuff, definitely. But the fact you might know where Harold’s cabin is, now that is interesting.’
We looked at each other, the idea hanging between us. I think it was me who spoke first, but I might be wrong. We all like to be the stars of our own story. I guess it doesn’t really matter. One of us was going to say it eventually:
‘So, you want to try and find it?’