Laurel 

Sunday, May 7th

Found: Old red leather-bound notebook, thin and worn, secured by a black rubber band; ripped-up pages out of three lost diaries

We went to the party because our diaries went missing.

Holly’s disappeared first. Then Ash’s. I only thought to look for mine when five pages torn from Holly’s showed up in Trina McEown’s hands on Monday morning. And if there’s one place you don’t want to find your diary, it’s in Trina McEown’s hands.

You’d think at our age we’d be too old for gossip and giggling. But Trina stood up on a desk in the middle of the classroom as we were packing away after math and read excerpts to the class. She only stopped when Ash got on the desk with her, red curls flying, and punched her so hard, her nose bled.

We tried to explain, me and Holly, that a bloody nose is nothing compared to your every secret hemorrhaging like a torn artery, spoken in somebody else’s voice, but Mr. Murphy despises both metaphors and emotions, so Ash was suspended and Trina was excused from homework for the day.

That’s when it started.

We sat in Holly’s bedroom and I stroked her hair while she cried and Ash inspected her bruised knuckles. She wears them now like a badge of pride.

“I don’t see why you care so much, Holly,” Ash said. “I wouldn’t, if it were me.”

I stroked and stroked Holly’s hair, long and blond, blond and long and soft under my fingers like my whispered hush. I wanted to say, “It’s okay,” but it wasn’t, not really. There are things you tell a diary that nobody else should know. Not your best friends. Not your favorite sister. Not a classroom full of staring eyes and leering, open mouths.

“They pretend they never think those kinds of things themselves,” Ash said scornfully. “Like they never have sex dreams. Like they don’t have bodies that bloat and bleed. Like they never question the world around them or their own sanity.”

Holly cried so hard, her quilt was soaked with it, salt water in every seam.

“I’ll bet half the girls in that classroom masturbate. And all of the boys.” Ash snorted. “They’re just a bunch of repressed hypocrites.”

Holly sobbed into her hands and rivers ran between her palms. Tears dripped from the bed onto the floor. Pat, pat, pat into the carpet.

“Everybody’s parents fight. Everybody lies. No one knows what they’re doing in this bloody life.” Ash clenched her fists.

I whispered, “Hush, hush.” The carpet was sodden with Holly’s tears. The force of her crying raised the bed and set it bobbing. The bedroom became a little lake. Folders full of school notes, pencils and hair clips, books and tissues and childhood bears floated in it. I held her hair so as not to fall in. Blond and long, long and blond and beaded with salty tears.

“I’d punch her again if I could,” Ash said. “I will. Next time I see her nasty face. I’ll break her fucking nose next time.”

“Hush,” I said to Holly. “You’ll do no such thing,” I said to Ash. “If you get expelled, it’s just the two of us against the rest of them.” Together we are a three-headed dog, facing an army of hundreds of staring eyes and leering, open mouths. Without Ash, we’ve lost our fangs. “It’s hard enough in school already.”

Ash had the courtesy to look abashed. She leaned back on her elbows on Holly’s bed and said, “Then you’ll have to hold me back at the party on Saturday, because with a few beers in me who knows what I’ll do.”

“I don’t want to go to the party, Laurel,” Holly said to me in a whisper. “I don’t want to go anywhere they’ll be.”

“They’re everywhere, I’m afraid,” I said softly, braiding her hair, threading the tears into the braids like pearls. “In a place like this, there’s nowhere to hide.”

“So we won’t hide,” Ash said loudly, and she stood up on the bed, her school shoes scuffing the quilt. She stamped and said, “We won’t fucking hide. Who cares? We’ll go to the party like everybody else, Cinderella; we’ll be the belles of the fucking ball.”

The town bonfire party is hardly a ball. It’s more of an embarrassment. But there is always precious little supervision and often unattended coolers filled with beer. The adults either turn a blind eye or they don’t even notice.

Holly’s tears slowed to a trickle.

“Think about it,” I said. Holly had until Saturday to decide. “We’ll be right there with you.”

I didn’t say that the reason I wanted to go was very similar to Ash’s. I didn’t want to punch Trina; don’t get me wrong. But I did want to know how she got Holly’s diary. I wanted to know what she’d done with the pages she hadn’t torn out. And if she didn’t give them back, well, maybe I could do with a bruised knuckle or two.

That night I tore my room apart. I called Ash around eleven. “My diary’s missing, too,” I said.

She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t been able to find mine since the weekend,” she said.

In our three separate houses, we confronted our parents, we yelled at our siblings, but nobody confessed. I still can’t quite imagine Trina McEown or any of her cronies somehow sneaking into our houses and taking our things, but I don’t see how there could be another explanation. We only know that our diaries have disappeared and pages of Holly’s turned up in hostile hands, that Trina and her friends, or somebody else, have read the missing pages, have torn out entire weeks of our lives to keep like butterflies pinned to a wall somewhere.

I want to know where.

Then we found the spellbook. It was like it’d been waiting for us. Like it knew we’d need it.

I say we found it, but really it was Holly. We were on our way to the lake after school on Friday. Ash, still suspended, joined us outside town and we walked past her house, to where the forest gets thick and dark. It was warm—hot, even—but something in the air felt like rain. On either side of the road there were scraggly trees, tumbledown walls with gaps in the stone like missing teeth, green fields turning yellow under this unlikely heat.

We swung our sweaters like skipping ropes, holding the ends of the sleeves and jumping over the body, singing mindless children’s songs. Ash rolled her T-shirt up to make a bikini top and Holly and I quickly followed suit, unbuttoning the bottom of our school shirts and tying the ends in a knot under our breasts. Our bellies white as the undersides of fish, blinding in the sunshine they hadn’t seen since last summer. We imagined what the teachers would say if they saw us now, bare-bellied and skipping with our ugly school sweaters, kneesocks peeled off and stuffed in our schoolbags.

Holly was more cheerful that afternoon. With Ash at our side, we were a three-headed dog once again. We walked so close together, our hair started to tangle. Brown, blond, and red.

Holly wanted to climb trees. She’s always seemed a little younger than me and Ash, even though we’re all the same age. Maybe the skipping made her think of childhood. Or maybe she was trying to become a kid again, to exorcise words spoken aloud about period cramps and fighting parents, about positioning the spray of the showerhead just so between her legs.

We stopped at the giant oak tree in the fork in the road. We clambered from branch to branch, scratching our arms and legs and leaving sap stains on our bellies. Ash is arguably the bravest of us, but Holly climbed the highest. That’s where she found the spellbook: caught between two branches like it’d been left there by a bird.

She called out, “Laurel! Ash!” and dropped it down to us: a small, slim notebook, red and leather-bound, secured by a rubber band. Holly came down and we sat beneath the branches to read it. The first page said only SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND, like a title.

You can’t not read on with a title like that.

We didn’t recognize the handwriting, but Holly said she thought it looked familiar. On every other page were prayers to Saint Anthony, suggestions of offerings to the goddess Mnemosyne, a map to the river Lethe: findings and forgettings. Stuck to the blank pages in between were things that made the spellbook creak at the seams. Prayer cards and candy wrappers with strange symbols on them. Foreign coins. Pressed leaves and strips of bark covered in straight cuts like ogham stones. Or scars.

The spell was on the very first page: a calling for the lost to be found.

We wanted our diaries found. So Holly suggested we try it.

At first it was like a recipe: gathering moss and branches, raiding our cupboards for olive oil, slipping saints medals out of our nanas’ wallets, rooting through the Christmas boxes in the attic, looking for silver string. It was silly and secret and made us feel like kids making mud pies. None of us took it seriously, not even Holly.

By Saturday we had all the ingredients except for the waters of Lethe.

Ash was frustrated. “What does that even mean?”

“We learned about it in Classics,” Holly told her. “Remember? The Lethe is one of the five rivers in the Greek underworld.”

“So we’re unlikely to find any of its waters in Balmallen, County Mayo,” I said.

But then we found some of Mags’s poteen, a can accidentally left at the back door of Maguire’s pub (although Ash, reading this now over my shoulder, would like me to note that Mags rarely does things by accident; Ash sees conspiracies between the trees).

“We can use this instead,” Holly breathed, showing us the spell again. “See? It says poteen can be used as a substitute. It’s got to be hand-distilled—which Mags’s stuff is—and, if anyone infuses her poteen with ancient magic, it’s Mags.”

So we took some of Mags’s poteen to the town bonfire party. We sneaked away from the crowds and slipped into the woods. We cut our fingers and drank the burning alcohol and wrote out our losses on the branches of trees.

And that’s when the weirdness started.

Moss became fur became dead animals on the floor of the forest. The trees became the spaces between the trees. We three held hands and made noises that weren’t words, but that Holly said later were a calling. A calling for the lost to be found.

We came to in the morning, beside the giant oak at the fork in the road, each of us with scraped knees and bloody noses, tied together with silver string.

And, all around us, our missing diary pages covered the ground like a blanket of snow. In the field in the distance, the bonfire was still burning.