Chapter 4 Above
Above
By the next morning, everyone at Franklin High has heard about Bryson Lee’s miraculous rescue, and the front office is buzzing with it.
Thankfully, interest in my role fades rapidly when my colleagues realize I wasn’t actually part of the team that found him, and by lunchtime, the drop--ins to my office for gossip have stopped completely.
Which is good, since taking time off for the search has left me a pile of tasks that include managing a helicopter parent who won’t stop calling about her son, despite the fact that he’s doing perfectly fine, and three others who won’t pick up the phone despite the fact that their kids won’t be graduating if they don’t get their acts together.
As I make calls, I scroll through Instagram on my phone. The school network blocks it, of course, so I’m going rogue and eating up data to snoop on my students. Three in particular. Meghan Vale’s friends.
I’ve got no real reason to think the beads have anything to do with Meghan.
I don’t even know if she ever had any or had heard the story—-it’s much less popular than it was when I was a student, after all.
But her name is lodged in my head. Last night, I found everything I could about her disappearance, which was basically nothing.
Not so much as a local article. The most substantive reporting was a post in a Facebook group for Franklin High parents.
Meghan Vale was last seen on the night of January 17 by her father, who reported that she took dinner into her room and didn’t come back out.
Which was, by the sound of it, far from atypical or alarming.
According to the comments on the Facebook post (admittedly not an unimpeachable source), she’d been threatening to run away for a while.
Some of her belongings were missing. It really looked like she’d followed through on her threats.
She was only a few months off from eighteen.
Not a prime candidate for an extensive police investigation.
Meghan herself didn’t have much of an online presence.
Not rare, exactly, but unusual in my experience.
Half the social issues I deal with are actually social media issues, with online arguments spilling into the halls.
Until the school banned phones entirely last year, kids would keep them in a death grip in case the social hierarchy updated via app during class.
It could be downright dangerous to be friendly to a newly exiled former queen bee after a second--period regime change conducted entirely on Snapchat.
But Meghan seemed to lurk at the edges of that ecosystem.
She has accounts, the same moody selfie uploaded to each, but didn’t post much.
Her Instagram is private, though, which made me wonder if it was her actual digital home base.
She has the usual fleet of courtesy followers.
Over the course of the evening, I managed to find three with whom she actually interacted with some regularity.
Alison Parker, Theresa Abbott, and Chloe Brittain.
Alison Parker’s feed is mostly earnestly terrible poetry that reminds me all too keenly of my own adolescent attempts.
Theresa Abbott favors selfies with her cat.
Chloe Brittain actually has a few photos of the three of them—-and one or two that include Meghan.
Meghan was a member of the group, but a peripheral one.
I search the photos for witch beads, but there are none on display.
Theresa Abbott and Chloe Brittain are on my roster, but I haven’t spoken much to them, which means they’re part of the vast middle of the pack—-the kids who aren’t flailing so badly that they need lots of extra support but aren’t distinguishing themselves enough to draw positive attention, either.
I try to remember what I know about them, but I just have an impression of dyed hair and disinterest.
I’m midway through leaving my thirtieth message on a parent’s voicemail with the desk phone and scrolling through Theresa Abbott’s feed when there’s a polite knock on the doorframe, and our new social studies teacher, Dev Khanna, pokes his head in with a little wave.
He balances rugged features and a thick black beard—-just starting to show a peppering of gray—-with fashion sense borrowed from stodgy college professors.
All his jackets have elbow patches, and he owns more than one pocket square. It works for him.
I quickly power off my phone and hold up a finger. “—-several options to make up those credits, but we need to begin as soon as possible. Thank you, and you can reach me here during school hours or by email at any time.” I hang up, and then drop my head in my hands and groan.
“Having a stimulating day as a valued member of the public schooling apparatus, are we?” Dev asks, with sincere if exaggerated sympathy.
As well as being new, Dev is one of the younger teachers at a school where most of the humanities department is determined to die with a dry--erase marker clamped in one wrinkled hand.
We’ve formed an instant bond over our cultural references coming from the same decade.
“Some days I feel like I’m making at least a little bit of a difference. This hasn’t been one of them,” I say.
“Would a burrito of frankly terrifying size help at all?” He holds up a familiar paper bag. “Chicken, pinto beans, all the fixings, as spicy as they’re legally allowed to make it, if I remember your order correctly.”
“Are you trying to bribe me? You should be aware that I have literally no power or influence,” I say.
“Yes, I am trying to bribe you, but we can discuss that after you’ve eaten the burrito and thus become indebted to me for life,” he says.
I chuckle. “Well, you are a hero. I forgot my lunch. I was going to have to eat in the cafeteria.”
“You always forget your lunch after you’ve been off rescuing children and kittens or whatever it is you do,” he says.
I raise an eyebrow. “How would you know that? You’ve been here like two weeks.”
“Four months!”
“Hadn’t noticed.” I smirk at him. He puts a hand to his heart, wounded. I wave him into a chair, and we divvy up salsa and piles of napkins.
“I heard you were out there,” he says. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” I say honestly. I pick at the foil on my burrito. “It’s . . . private. Kind of. I don’t like the attention.”
“Then I won’t ask,” Dev says, and though I can see the curiosity in his eyes, he doesn’t press.
I roll a piece of foil into a little ball on the desk. “I did get a gun pointed at me,” I say.
“Holy shit. What? Are you okay?” he asks immediately, freezing in the act of uncapping a tiny container of salsa.
“Still breathing. Probably need therapy, but who has the time?” I say blithely, and bite into my burrito. My mouth fills with the delectable taste of cheap street food. “Things just taste better when they come out of a truck,” I note around a full mouth.
“And you have sour cream on your cheek,” he says, holding out a flimsy square of paper napkin.
“Thanks.” I wipe away the offending cream and consider Dev. He started midyear, but he did overlap with Meghan by a few weeks. “Random question. Did you have Meghan Vale in any of your classes?”
“Meghan? Yeah, third period,” he says. “Poor girl.”
“Why do you say that? Was something going on?” I ask.
“Must have been, right? If she ran away, I mean.”
“And you think she did?”
He pauses, looking at me like he’s trying to figure out what my angle is.
“Meghan was only in my class for a few weeks. She was always pretty quiet. Decent student, when she showed up. Good grades, when she bothered to turn things in. She was artistic. Had a real eye for photography. I told her she should talk to Mr. Christiansen about entering the art show. She’s not one of yours, though, is she? Alphabetically speaking.”
Most of the students are divvied up based on the first letter of their last name. I’m the custodian to the first third of the alphabet, which Dev clearly knows. I brush past the subject. “One more question. Did you ever see her with witch beads?” I ask.
“What now?” he asks, clearly baffled.
“Oh, right. You’re new,” I say.
“A stranger. An interloper in your lands,” he confirms.
“It would be a short string of beads. Usually just the cheap ones from craft stores. White. Six of them.”
“Wait, this is that weird girl--cult thing,” Dev says, snapping his fingers and pointing at me. “Jenny something.”
“Red--Hands,” I supply. “So you have heard of it.”
“I listened to the podcast,” he says. I stare at him blankly. “It was about the only thing I’d heard about Franklin before I moved here. This podcast I listen to did an episode about the story, trying to track down the origins and the way it’s shaped the town, that kind of thing.”
“What podcast was this?” I ask.
“The Darker Half? It’s mostly a true crime show, but they were doing a Halloween episode.
It’s good, if you’re into true crime. Which I am, more than I should probably admit.
But it’s one of those shows that makes you feel deep and intellectual instead of just ghoulish.
Though to be clear, I listen to both,” Dev says, then dips his head to get a better angle on his burrito.
I jot the name down in my notebook. “I think it started when I was a kid,” I say, sitting back in my chair. “I mean, the story is that Jenny’s been around since the 1800s, but I’m pretty sure she’s a modern invention.”
“But does that make her any less real?” Dev says, ticking a finger toward me. “Sorry, force of habit. We do a unit on urban legends as cultural record.”
“Are you asking if there’s really a witch out in the woods who will take a payment in teeth and/or plastic beads to wreak vengeance on cheating boyfriends?” I ask.
“No, I’m asking if you think there’s real power in a town’s shared mythology including a witch in the woods who holds abusive men accountable,” Dev shoots back.