BECCA TOOK PHOTOS for the yearbook every year, and you could always tell which ones were hers. Most of the other photos were posed or awkward, the lighting flat, the students interchangeable. Becca’s photos were different. She captured the longing of unrequited love in the way a girl stared across the classroom, her chin resting on her fist as she slumped over her desk. In the long, lean line of Anthony’s body, stretched out along the ground, the arc of the soccer ball unmistakable even in the still frame as he dove to meet it, she captured exultation and concentration. Becca had a way of making everyone feel seen.
It was remarkable, then, how little time anyone spent looking for her.
The official story is that she ran off with a boy. Zachary Kent. Bad news, according to my parents. He was older than her. My parents tried to forbid her from dating him—hated his pierced lip and dyed hair, the music he played, the car he drove. I only met him once, when I nearly ran into him and Becca coming out of the Half Moon Diner, his arm slung over Becca’s shoulders. Becca introduced him, but all he said to me was “Hey” before they got into his car and drove away. I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw the photo she took of him. One ankle over his knee, a notebook propped on his leg, his eyes squinting off into the distance.
It was the kind of photograph Becca loved the most. Peeling back the layers of a person bit by bit. Making a study of them. There was curiosity in that photo, but not love. No wild abandon. She might have left home, but it wouldn’t have been for him.
Yet they disappeared, and they disappeared together, and there had been all the fights with Mom and Dad—months of them, Becca alternating between giving them the silent treatment and screaming at them for being too controlling, while they managed to find fault in everything she did: hang out with Zachary, drop out of choir, steal away on her mysterious late-night trips she would never explain to any of us. So when she vanished, they looked for her, but not too hard; they didn’t think she wanted to be found.
I tried to tell them about the conversation I’d heard, and what Becca had said about the road—Lucy Gallows road, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. And my mother told one of her friends, and her friend’s daughter overheard, and suddenly the whole school seemed to know. That was how the rumor started—half rumor, half joke. The kind of nervous cruelty that kids spit out without thinking, to cover up their own uneasiness.
Lucy Gallows took Becca Donoghue into the woods, and never let her out again.
No one believed it, of course. It was all just a morbid joke. But Becca wasn’t the sort for jokes or urban legends. She believed. And that meant that either my sister was losing it, or I had to believe, too.
And so I started searching. For the road. For Lucy. For my sister. It never got me anywhere.
Until now.
By lunchtime the novelty of the messages has started to fade, but the whispers still drive me out of the cafeteria to the back steps, where I sit with my packed lunch, staring out over the back lot at the looming trees. A single crow sits in the high branches, riding the swaying of the wind.
The door behind me opens. The bird takes off. I shift to the side so whoever it is can get past, but they stay at the top of the steps. I turn, squinting. Vanessa stands there, her phone gripped in her hand, her backpack dangling off one shoulder. “Th-there you are,” she says.
“Um. Hi,” I say. “Can I help you with something?”
“Maybe,” she says. “Are you going to do it?”
“Do what?” I ask.
“P-play the game,” she says. “The whole thing. The road, and the k-key, and finding a p-p-partner.” Her stutter is pronounced, but she doesn’t fight it like she used to when we were younger, and it has its own relaxed flow to it. She likes to tell people it’s worth the wait to hear what she has to say.
“Why would I?”
“Because of Becca.”
She says Becca and not just your sister, and I think that’s the only reason I don’t leave right away. So few people say her name anymore. Like it’s bad luck. “You don’t really believe that stupid joke, do you? That Lucy Gallows took my sister?” I’m not even sure if I believe it.
“No. But you must be wondering if the t-texts have anything to do with her. With Becca.”
“Of course,” I snap. Her cheeks go red and she pushes up her glasses, which has the effect of half hiding her face behind her sweater sleeve. “Why do you care, anyway?”
“I d-don’t believe in ghosts,” Vanessa says. “But I like history. And mysteries. I want to know who wrote these. And what it’s supposed to mean. I thought, since you d-did all that research, you might know.”
“Oh.” There’s something wrong with me, since Becca vanished. If anyone so much as hints at what happened, I react like they’re attacking me. Even with my friends. Which is why I don’t have any left. “Here, sit down,” I say, gesturing for Vanessa to join me on the steps. She perches on the top step, a little above me.
“So, Lucy Gallows,” I say. “Real name Lucy Callow. Disappeared on April 19, 1953. Wednesday’s the anniversary. Her brother was arrested for her murder, but since they never found the body, they couldn’t really make a case and he was released. She was fifteen, not twelve, and she was a bridesmaid, not a flower girl, but otherwise the story’s pretty much what they say.”
“And the game is that stupid thing everyone played when we were little kids,” Vanessa says.
“Not exactly,” I say. “You’ve played it?”
“Sure. When I was, l-like, eight,” she says.
“Me too,” I say. With Anthony. Standing at the end of the road into the woods, on either side of the median line. Hold hands. Close your eyes. Take thirteen steps. Supposedly, this summons the specter of Lucy Gallows to walk beside you.
“Did anything happen?” Vanessa asks, leaning forward.
“Of course not.” There are two ways the game “works”: either you’re young and imaginative enough that you conjure the brush of a breeze into the brush of Lucy Gallows’s hand, the skittering of leaves into her footsteps, the creak of trees into her spectral cries—or you have friends sneaking up behind you to mess with you. Similarly, there are two kinds of people who play the game: kids young enough to still believe in magic, and teenagers trying to impress crushes.
“But you said n-not exactly. So what’s different?”
“There’s an older version,” I say. “Or a different one, at least. You’re still supposed to have a partner and take thirteen steps, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Lucy. It’s supposed to summon the road—or it’s how you get down the road, or something. The road has seven gates. If you get through them all, you get—something. Like a wish. That story is older than the Lucy Gallows story—older than Lucy Callow. Some people say she might have known the story, and that’s why she got on the road when it appeared.”
“Some people?” Vanessa asks, eyebrows raised.
“Ms. Evans,” I clarify. The town librarian was the same age as Lucy when she went missing, and she was my best source for all game-related lore. For a while, a seventy-eight-year-old woman was the person I talked to the most.
“I’ve never heard of that part of the g-game,” Vanessa says, pushing up her glasses with the side of her thumb.
“It got dropped at some point, I guess,” I say. “Maybe in the eighties when those kids went missing?”
“I thought that was a rumor,” Vanessa says. “Satanic p-p-panic and stuff. Those kids just ran away.”
“That’s what everyone decided,” I reply, voice flat. Vanessa bites her lip, her eyes dancing away from mine. I guess I’m officially Trauma Girl, with the black clothes and the antisocial reputation to match. I’ve gotten used to that particular reaction, since I refuse to politely pretend Becca never existed.
Vanessa clears her throat. “So you need a partner,” she says. “And a key?”
That’s the part that made my stomach lurch, when I saw the message. Because I’ve never mentioned the keys. I’ve never heard anyone but Becca talk about them. The only place I’ve seen them mentioned, other than that overheard conversation, is her notebook, left behind when she vanished. “The keys open the gates. They have to be your keys. They connect you to the gates—to the road. I think.” Becca’s notes were vague on that front.
“So all that’s l-left is finding the road,” Vanessa says. “The one just off Cartwright?”
“That’s where people play the game, but the spot where Lucy’s brother claimed he saw her was actually, like, five miles west of there,” I say.
“Is there a road there?”
“Well, no,” I say, shrugging. “But there wouldn’t be, if it was a ghostly apparition, would there? Except when Lucy’s out haunting.” I keep my voice casual, like there isn’t a hand tightening around my throat with every word. Because if I was normal, if I had moved on and let go of this fanciful coping strategy, as my mother once suggested, none of this would bother me.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Vanessa reminds me. “Do you?”
I pick at the crust of my sandwich. I want to say no, but it isn’t exactly true anymore. I have reasons to believe. Because of Becca, and because—
It’s just not a simple answer anymore.
She tucks her hands under her thighs on either side. “I want to t-try. The g-game and the road and everything.”
“Why?” I ask. “If you don’t believe in any of it?”
“I want to know for sure.”
“Are you asking me if I’ll be your partner?” I ask, half hoping she is.
“N-no. I already have one. Sorry,” she says, cheeks beet red now. “Thanks for your help.”
“Yeah,” I say as she hurriedly stands up. “No problem.”
She’s already disappearing back inside.
I take my phone out of my backpack and unlock it. The text message is already on the screen, waiting for me. A road, a partner, a key. And two days to find them, if you want to play.
Do I?
I remember that door slamming shut, Becca’s unreadable expression. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t say anything. Not for days. Not until it was obvious that she wasn’t coming home.
The casual answer I gave Vanessa was true—there isn’t a road at that spot in the forest. What I didn’t say was that I went there a dozen times in the months after Becca disappeared. I’ve wandered through the woods and called her name. Lucy’s, too. No one has ever answered.
But what if I just had the wrong day? Becca went missing in April. It’s April again now.
I don’t believe in ghosts, not exactly. But I don’t believe Becca is dead, either. Which means she’s out there, and no one is looking for her but me.