? ? ?
The first day Lizzie was missing, everyone talked about the disappearance without actually knowing the facts. By the time the final bell rang, I’d heard more about Lizzie Lovett than I had since we were in school together. Which I guess worked out, because no one talked to me about the dance.
I walked home from school, because I hadn’t been able to find my car keys that morning. Also because my Volkswagen Rabbit was making huffing noises again. Someday, it’ll explode while I’m driving, and my mom will tell people, “I told Hawthorn not to get that old car. I told her we’d buy her something nicer like we did for her brother, but she just never listens,” and then the last thing people will ever think about me is that I’m stubborn and made stupid mistakes.
I could have taken the school bus home, but I consider that a last resort. Being in a cramped space with lots of people who all have something to talk about with each other while you’re sitting there alone is totally awkward. Also, there are no seat belts on the bus, which has never made sense to me.
Luckily, I don’t live far from Griffin Mills High School. In a place as small as the Mills, nothing is very far from anything else. Really, the town is just a bigger version of high school, which is just a bigger version of the bus. Lots of people packed together for their entire lives, all having things to do and people to talk to, and if you’re not a part of it, you feel totally broken.
My family should have lived in Pittsburgh. My dad drives forty-five minutes to get there five days a week. Wouldn’t it be better to live closer to the place he worked? My parents were pretty opposed to the idea though. My mom had all this stuff to say about a “better quality of life” and whatnot. A better quality of life for her, I guess. Not for me. If I’d grown up in a big city, everything could have been different.
Cities let you blend in. There are so many people that it doesn’t matter if you’re weird or if no one likes you, because there’s probably someone even worse off. And if you’re really lucky, you might even meet people who are weird in the exact same way you are and feel like you’ve finally found a place where you fit in.
There was no chance of that happening in Griffin Mills. I was convinced there was a secret factory somewhere in town, spitting out people from a mold. And I came out defective.
But I only had one more year, and then I could go far away from the Mills. Not that I’d actually made any plans yet.
The walk home mostly takes me through residential areas. The houses close to school are ancient—crumbling Victorians with wraparound porches and turrets that look out on the Ohio River. It used to be where the rich people lived, but that was a long time ago. The farther you go west, the newer the Mills gets. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhoods end, and there’s only dense woods and occasional farms.
My house is near the edge of town. It’s a typical 1950s house, two stories with white siding and dark-blue trim. The street it’s on, the street I’ve lived on for my entire life, dead-ends in a patch of woods. There are no fences in my neighborhood, just trees separating one house from another. It makes the area seem more isolated than it is but not as isolated as one of those old farmhouses. Which is a good thing. I know what sort of stuff can happen at a lonely farmhouse in the middle of the night. I read In Cold Blood for freshman English.
At home, I found my mom and Rush sitting in front of the TV, watching a local news station.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Not yet,” my mom said. “The search party is still out.”
I tossed my backpack on the floor and sat in an armchair, my legs dangling over the side. “She couldn’t have gotten that far. I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with someone exceptionally bright.”
“Hawthorn,” my mom said with her warning tone.
“Lizzie’s mom is about to talk,” Rush said. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up enough to drown me out.
I hadn’t planned on watching the news with my family. I didn’t really want to spend my afternoon watching Lizzie Lovett’s mom cry on TV and ask for help finding her daughter, or wait for updates radioed in from the search party. But it’s not like I had much else going on. And besides, I was mildly curious.
Chapter 3
Freshman Year