“C’mon then.” Eileen hooked her arm through mine and drew me out of the room. As always, her easy camaraderie felt both comforting and exhilarating.
I hadn’t kept Kyra a secret from the others on purpose; it just happened. I came to St. James thinking that I would be treated with the same hostility that Lost Creek shows newcomers, but the girls accepted me without question. It was easy to belong here. And I could start fresh, without the burden of who I was in Lost, where everyone knew me and had known me since birth. Everyone here was new, and every day felt like an adventure. I didn’t want to lose that high. So I let myself get swept away by life at St. James, with its clearer borders and softer rules. Far away from Kyra.
With a whisper of guilt, I closed the door behind me.
A New Lost
When I step out of the post office, I find that Lost Creek has come to life. The shadows in the windows are gone. People are walking into the grocery store and running errands. I push my hands into my pockets and head to the far side of the building.
A mural covers the entire wall, depicting the Alaskan landscape in the brightest spring colors. A brilliant red sun. Azure sky. Magenta flowers. Neon green pine trees. The Gates of the Arctic National Park, with its snowcapped peaks, is in the distance. A river of multicolored envelopes streams from the upper-right corner to the bottom left. The painting is quintessentially Kyra.
It must have taken her days, if not longer. There is so much detail, and the more I look, the more I see. Piper and Tobias, standing in front of their grandmother’s post office. A smiling Sam. Mrs. Robinson’s gardens. A brightly colored Lost. An airplane at the strip. But also fully functional mines, with tall machinery on the hillside, surrounded by acres of blackened, industrial land.
My heart pounds. With trembling fingers, I trace the footpaths to White Wolf Lake, where I find the shadow under the ice.
Everywhere I turn, Kyra has left signs pointing to her death, well before she died. She knew what was going to happen. She told everyone. And no one made a move to stop her. She foresaw, so they…let it happen?
I can’t bear to look at this mural any longer. I turn to the street. Lost Creek doesn’t have a church, but everyone looks as if they’re going to one anyway. On their parkas and winter coats, they all wear ribbons, the same black and magenta as the ribbons tied to their houses.
And their voices swirl around me.
You never cared enough.
You were never her friend.
The faces of friends morph into strangers and enemies. Why is my coming to say goodbye a bad thing? When did I become a threat? I don’t understand, but I shrink away all the same.
Tomorrow, they’ll pay their respects to a girl they never knew, a girl who somehow managed to find a central place in their lives.
Three men turn on to Main—Mr. H, Mr. Sarin, and Sheriff Flynn. None of them are dressed in black, but Mr. H wears his grief in the lines of his face and the hunch of his shoulders. Each has a salmonberry flower pinned to his coat. I shrink back into the shadows and listen as they pass by. They still talk about mining and investments and minerals, about renewing the future of Lost Creek, as a matter of prosperity.
And in the town where nothing ever changes, everything is changing.
It’s for the better, I can almost hear Mrs. Morden say. These changes give Lost a future. And she’s right.
New industry would mean a boost for everyone. The grocery store could expand. People could renovate instead of simply freshening their houses with paint, fixing broken roofs, putting away funds for hard times and once-faraway dreams.
But at what cost?
This change would be as sudden as a thunderstorm, and in Alaska, thunderstorms are rare and violent.
I turn, and my gaze meets Sam Flynn’s. He leans against a building across the street, and he stares at me but makes no move to come closer. We were friendly, once. Not friends, exactly, but close nonetheless. Now…
Now I am lost too.
Happily Sometimes
Nine Months Before
We danced on the ice.
It was shortly before breakup in the spring, when the Lyrid meteor shower lit up the sky. I’d been tracking meteor predictions, and when I told Kyra the peak night for viewing was supposed to be almost moonless, she decided we needed a celebration. On the nights when she couldn’t paint and she wandered beyond the borders of Lost, she would gather flower petals to strew across town or try to build a bonfire to watch the fire dance. That night, she wanted to be the one dancing.
“The night is so dark,” she said. “What if there is no dawn, and winter never ends? I want to take advantage of each and every moment.”
“I think we can safely assume that the sun will rise in the morning, even if we don’t see it.”
The corner of her mouth crept up. “How can you know for sure?”
“I don’t. But science does. So I trust that it will. And besides, with the Lyrids tonight, the darker the night sky is, the better our chance of seeing shooting stars,” I told her.
So we sneaked out of the cabin when the Lyra constellation peeked out over the horizon, shortly before dawn, and walked onto the frozen surface of White Wolf Lake. I’d bundled up in my winter coat and extra scarves because the wind was fierce, but Kyra went out in a loose coat with pink flowers in her hair. The salmonberry bushes had started blossoming a few days ago, peeking out of the slowly melting snow, but where she’d picked fresh flowers in the middle of the night was beyond me. Wonder always followed Kyra like a curious pup, and I’d stopped questioning it long ago.
“So how do you want to celebrate?” I asked.
Kyra walked toward a clear spot near the lake’s edge. The ice was still dark and thick but had started showing its first cracks. The surface reflected the skies above. A gust of wind swirled around us, whipping up the last of the snow cover. Kyra spread her arms wide and spun. “With stories, of course.”
“You’ll freeze to death. Zip up your coat,” I said, and I tossed her the extra scarves I’d snatched from her room.
She rolled her eyes with a smile. And when she pulled me between the stars that shined on the ice, her hands were warm around mine. “Grandfather always said that stories are the heartbeat of the world, especially in Alaska. Stories shape us. They give meaning to the harshest winters and the longest summers.”
Even though Kyra’s family had been in Lost Creek since the town’s beginnings, her grandfather had been an outsider at first. As a folklorist, he used to travel around to listen to and record the stories of the Koyukon Athabascan and the I?upiat, the Yupik and the Haida. Though he had shared countless stories with Kyra, she would never share them with me. She said they hadn’t been his stories to begin with, and the only way to understand those narratives was to respect and know the people they belonged to.
“Then what stories will you tell?” I asked.
“Ours. Lost Creek is full of stories too. Stories of love and secrets. Of friendship and survival. Of hate.” She swallowed hard, as if thinking of a particular story. After a moment’s pause, she said, “We live and create our own stories. The story of Sam, the sheriff’s son who never smiles. The story of a haunted post office. The stories in the games your brother designs. The story of you and me and all of us on this stolen land. Don’t you think our stories are what make us human?”
I mostly kept my eyes trained on the northeast, so I wouldn’t miss the meteors, but at that remark, I turned back to her. “Wouldn’t you prefer happier stories? Happily ever afters?”