“Did she?”
“Sort of. They were all camping here, surfing, but they didn’t know her know her, other than sleeping in the tunnel for a couple weeks. Goldilocks left for the gas station by the freeway one night. If she wanted a snack it would have been the only place open late. Blondie never saw her come back. I got excited and said we should tell the police. I’d call them and they’d talk to her. She lunged and pinned me.” I pointed to the wall. “It was a pocketknife or glass.” I raised my sleeve to reveal a fine white line, three inches long, on my shoulder. “She said she knew where I lived. Bullshit, but I was gullible. She said I needed to shut up or she’d make it worse than a scratch on the shoulder.”
The girl, she’d pounced like a wild animal, desperation curling her lips away from her yellowed teeth. The rattle of a growl in her throat as her blade seared my skin.
Once the afternoon in the tunnel tumbled free, it dug its elbow into my chest, stung the scar on my shoulder. My only cigarette burned my lungs.
“You were twelve. You were scared. It’s okay that you didn’t tell anyone,” Harry said.
I’d run through the tunnel, grasping my shoulder. The girls had returned to the fire. I sprinted by like a kid escaping a monster’s den.
“She was more scared than me,” I said. “They all were. Of the cops. Of everyone, maybe. Just a bunch of girls with nowhere to go that was their own. Not like us. Nice parents and the barn and one another. I was too stupid to even ask Blondie if she knew the girl’s real name.” We sat without talking for a time. I listened to Harry’s steady breath; with each one, I leaned a hair closer to him. “Harry? How do you handle not knowing who hurt your dad?”
“I don’t. Handle it, that is.” He ran his hands over his head, hooked them on the back of his neck, and sighed heavily. “The police failed—didn’t even try, like with Goldilocks. My dad walks with a cane and everyone acts like it was a practical joke gone wrong. Bunch of kids on campus screwing around. Unintentional. It wasn’t.” Harry’s dad spent over a year in physical therapy, but the limp would be permanent. I knew Harry thought about the attack often, though he didn’t let on.
I felt a dark mood crushing us both. I sprang out of the seat. “C’mon, let’s go find fun. Let’s have our Slumber Fest.”
“Sure.” He stood and followed me out of the passenger car, but the weight of what we both knew didn’t lift. I was suddenly wary of us sleeping in the tunnel. What did we know about the people who could be drawn in by the smoke and light of bonfires? Really, what did anyone know about anyone? Because even though I was twelve when I learned that Goldilocks had been camping in the tunnel, I wasn’t too young to understand its significance. The true weight of that afternoon laid in the realization that she’d been walking around my hometown when she met her end. It was the same sort of knowledge Harry had to live with, accepting that someone had hurt his father, a someone who Harry likely bagged groceries for.
The police and the mayor were adamant that one of two scenarios had played out. I knew them both to be impossible. Goldilocks wasn’t killed in another town. Over the hills. Some depressing place. Inland. She wasn’t dumped on the rock because her killer was trying to leave her far from his home—his because, come on, I was a realist. And I sat with those girls. Took a puff off their cigarette. I didn’t believe it was fear of getting caught for hurting Goldilocks that had Blondie trembling as she cut me. She wasn’t a killer; just a cornered girl. Goldilocks wasn’t the victim of some band of lost girls and their twisted games.
She was right here, on our side of the hills, surfing by day, soaking up the sun on our beach, camping by night in an abandoned tunnel, crowding around a bonfire. A girl out for adventure. She was exactly like me.
10
Not all secrets liberate the teller.
By sharing with Harry that afternoon in the Ghost Tunnel, I had excavated memories that had been buried. Freed, they hovered over me, just like Goldilocks’s death had for weeks after finding her. They were storm clouds reminding me that life wasn’t a grand game. Death was present. Possible.
The rock had taught us many things. Its first lesson was to ask questions; wonder about mysteries; look to the sky. Its second lesson, taught by Goldilocks, was that mysteries are not always magical, they’re terrifying.
Graham, Viv, and I had planned to submit college applications early in the autumn, right after they became available. We even convinced Harry that he might as well apply to his dream schools, in case any of them offered the financial aid he needed. This gutless enthusiasm to be good little girls and boys getting into college early had since worn away for me. I wanted to go, still; I just couldn’t focus on the task long enough to start my applications.
When, on the Sunday after Slumber Fest, the four of us sat on the floor of my bedroom, all supposedly busy on our personal statements, I searched for Goldilocks.
This habit of mine was old. Its roots grew around that secret afternoon spent in the Ghost Tunnel. It was also not the only habit to sprout from that day.
When I’d arrived home that afternoon from the tunnel, T-shirt stuck in my congealing blood, I sketched Goldilocks from memory. I gagged on the metallic stink in my mouth from running too hard, too far. My nose ran and dripped. The pressure built in my throat as I tried to catch my breath. Her face took form at the tip of my pencil.
At the time it was a compulsion. Draw her. Look at her face. She was real. For the few days between my visit to the tunnel and when the photo of the crime scene was finally published in the newspaper, those drawings had purpose. I compared her face with the others. They made my search possible.
My laptop became a window into the world of lost girls.
For months, almost a year, I clicked through the photos of missing girls in the privacy of my bedroom. The authorities in most places made it easy. Photos were uploaded into searchable databases immediately. Those cops wanted their cases solved.
It was a simple task: appraise one, tap for the next. Seventh grade sped by. Luke McHale never invited Viv to join his lunch circle of eighth graders. I thought a lot about Denton saying the girl was asking for it. The only person I’d identified with a connection to the girl had given me an ugly scar on my shoulder. Maybe Goldilocks was the same kind of girl? One who’d lose it and cut you?
I knew even as a stupid little kid that no girl, not even one who cuts you, deserves to be hurt, dead, given wings.