The American Girl (19 page)

AUGUST 6, 2015

I
struck out in the direction of the caves, the police lights fading behind me, along with the muttered insults of the two boys. The faint track through the trees was cluttered with fallen logs and slushy from the rain. Time and again, I pulled out my phone to look at the map. Reception was actually not bad and it reloaded quickly and neatly, telling me I was almost there.

A few steps from the caves, I stopped, some primal instinct telling me not to go any further. Not that I was frightened by the stories those boys had told me—the ghost stories were just ridiculous. I stood listening for the echo of footsteps, hearing nothing but the soughing of the trees. The moon shrugged off its mantle of cloud then and lit up the scene before me: two bottomless pits of eyes staring, the twin doorways of Les Yeux.

When my phone buzzed, I jumped. It was a message from Bill.

See the shit'
s hit the fan. Call me? Bx

For once, I did as he said.

“Hey, kiddo.” Bill's comfortable voice crackled in my ear.

“Hey.”

“You at the hotel?”

“The woods actually,” I said, looping the earpiece over my ear. “I think Quinn might have gone to the caves. Read the blog link I sent. It kind of explains it.”

“Yeah, I did. She had a tryst with Romeo there. So?”

“So she was checking how to get here on my phone.”

“She looked through your phone? Jesus, Molly.” He sighed.

“Why else do you think the shit's hit the fan?” I said angrily.

“Well . . . I mean, it kind of has in every way possible. The kid's gone, or taken, and it may or may not be your fault. And now I bet your cover's most likely blown.”

“I knew you could cheer me up, Bill.” I took the last few steps towards the staring eyes without thinking too hard. “It's so comforting the way you always see the glass half empty.”

He cleared his throat. “You mean there's a good side to this?”

“Hell to the no.”

“But you took it on yourself to go find this girl, anyway,” Bill said. “Despite the army of police already looking for her and the fact that she probably hates your guts?”

“I think I owe it to her, don't you?”

There was a long pause in which I could hear the cogs of Bill's mind turning. I walked a few steps inside the first chamber,
shining my flashlight on white spears of stalactites aimed at me from the roof of the cave. It smelled wet and tainted, as if something had spoiled.

I sighed. “Quinn's not here. I need to go deeper inside and look for her.” As soon as I said the words, I heard how foolhardy they sounded.

“What's that, kiddo? You're breaking up.” His voice crackled.

“Reception's fucked.”

“Make a video or something?” He sounded a million miles away.

“Okay.”

“I can watch it after you come back, see what goes down.”

“Just like the
Blair Witch Project
.”

“Eh?”

“Never mind.”

“If I don't hear from you in a couple hours, I'll call Cave Rescue.”

I dropped the call and made sure my little camera was switched on. It wouldn't be able to upload the feed to Bill right away, but at least if I died in here, maybe someone would eventually be able to work out how. Ahead of me was a narrow opening in the rock. I squeezed into it sideways, hearing the echo of my own footsteps as the darkness closed in on the space behind me. Rock scraped my back, pinched my elbows. The wind howled into the cave, high and weird as a cat's scream.

“For reference, this place is creepy as all fuck,” I told the camera, my nervous laugh ping-ponging around the tunnel, a rising cackle ushering me into the next chamber.

This tunnel was smaller and staler. Little rivulets ran around my feet, tributaries of some underground stream. Their music should have comforted me, but all it made me think about was how deep the caves went into the belly of the earth. From ahead came a tumble of stones, a sound like footsteps.

“Quinn?” My call echoed into the honeycomb of the next chamber.

The air around fell silent all of a sudden. I edged through the dark space that pushed back at me, scraping and biting. A tiny rockfall crumbled from the ceiling, jarred by my presence. I wiped the dust out of my eyes and pushed on. The rocks on either side caught hold of me. I couldn't move forward or back. I stopped and took a deep breath.
Calm the fuck down, Molly.
Words from Quinn's blog, not to mention my little chat with Freddie and Romuald, echoed in my mind—the cave's local reputation as a “keeper.” People who vanished here were rarely found.

From the darkness beyond me, the footsteps sounded again, slower this time, their echo shaking dust from the rocks around me. They moved faster, lighter, scampering towards me, stopping inches away, around the corner where I could not see. My flashlight flickered. I gave it a whack, but it dropped down on the floor and rolled away. I was in total darkness. Shaking, I gripped the rocks in front of me and wiggled my hips, but the more I moved, the more I was trapped.

Something was moving into the tunnel towards me, scratching the walls, knocking off little pellets of rock. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, telling myself it was my imagination.

In the darkness, a hand grabbed mine.

“Fuck!” I tried to pull my hand away.

“Molly.” The whispered word echoed eerily. “I've got you.”

“Quinn?”

She didn't answer. Instead, she pulled me by the wrists with a strength that surprised me. She wrenched me free and I hurtled out like a greased pig, falling on top of her in a tumble of sweat and dust. For a moment, we just lay there, panting.

“I can see my flashlight.”

“Yeah,” she said, pushing me off her. She picked it up, screwing the bulb end on more firmly until it stopped flashing. The brightness was blinding.

“Hey, Quinn, I can't see.”

“Why are you here?”

“To help you.”

“Where's my phone?”

“I think the police have it.” I squeezed my eyes shut, shielding them with my hand. “Listen, I'm sorry. I just thought it might help them find the Blavettes.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you mad?”

“No . . . I just . . . something weird happened, a flashback or something. And then it was like I was sleepwalking. When I opened my eyes I was here.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.” She turned her eyes away.

“Well, can you get the flashlight out of my face?”

“Sorry.” She angled it down, casting elongated shadow-Mollys onto the cave wall. They looked like some kind of
grotesque cave painting. I struggled up, feeling bruised and old, but relieved that I'd found her and that she didn't seem to hate me.

I held out my hand to her. “Should we get out of here?”

Her mouth trembled at the corners. She blinked her eyes, closed them. “I . . .”

“Quinn?” I took a step nearer, clasping her hand in mine. “You're freezing.”

She backed away from me. “I remembered something.” The flashlight dropped with a clatter. She fell to her knees, her hands covering her face. “I think something terrible happened in here.”

I knelt in front of her, rescuing the flashlight before it rolled away.

Painted with watery light, she looked out of it, her eyes unfocused, face blank. “There was blood.” She scrubbed at her eyes, leaving raw, red tracks on her face.

I put my hand out to stop her. “Don't do that, sweetheart. You'll hurt yourself.”

Her hands fell, her eyes staring without seeming to see me. “He's still in here with us. He's still . . .”

“Who?”

She swallowed, a dry, clicking sound. Then, quick as whip, she was up, somehow far ahead of me, snaking into the next tunnel, out of sight.

Stumbling up, I ran after her, pushing through the tunnel ahead, ducking a millisecond before bashing my brains out on a long spoke of rock hanging down. I dodged around it, her foot
steps fading ahead of me. I entered the next chamber just in time to see her shadow slipping out of sight around a bend.

“Quinn, stop!” But she didn't stop, or answer me.

I sensed that she was somewhere else, driven by whatever horror movie was flickering in front of her eyes, driving her deeper into the earth. From ahead, I heard her words echoing—
blood, stop, don't
—as if she was narrating the moment of her trauma while she led me from chamber to chamber and into the belly of hell. I had the sick feeling that if she knew where we were before, she wouldn't know now, even if I did manage to catch her.

With every new turn, I tried to remember where we'd just been, blazing the trail like I did with my dad in the Maine woods, way back when. But the chambers, the tunnels, all looked the same to me and none of them were anything like the woods at home.

We came to a different sort of chamber: large and high ceilinged. I heard its dimensions in the echo of my footsteps before I saw them lit by the flashlight. It was a great, red, domed cathedral of a chamber, hung with fine-spun chandeliers of stalactites. I swept the flashlight beam over it. Quinn had stopped in the middle of the chamber, barely seeming to breathe. Her eyes were fixed on something in the corner. It looked like a bundle of pale, dirty rags. I flicked my flashlight over them.

The rags moved—a faint rustling quiver of movement. Under the beam of light, they unfurled like a moth's wings, a pale shape turned upwards, a sliver of moon—a face shrouded by short dark hair, smeared with dirt or blood, so that it was hard to see
whether the person was a girl or a boy, a child or an adult. Eyes swiveled towards me, dark orbs bouncing the flashlight's glow back. It was then that I recognized her from the pictures: Noémie Blavette.

Slowly, the dark eyes turned around, taking in me, the flashlight, turning until they came to rest on Quinn. Noémie's mouth dropped open. She screamed. Quinn, jolted from her own trance, moved towards the girl with her hands outstretched, but the closer Quinn moved towards Noémie, the louder she shrieked, until, when they were inches apart, she leaped up, her starved bones of arms outstretched, her mouth wide. She bared her teeth and scratched at Quinn. Quinn grabbed her wrists.

Noémie fought, fierce with rage and fear, her chin juddering senselessly up and down as she screamed the same words over and over again.

“Murderer!”

JULY 21, 2015

Blog Entry

Time for today's traumafest, guys. Worse trauma.
The
actual worst. Like I can't even . . . yada yada. It was déjà vu all over again when I woke to the chimes of the being-shaken-by-someone alarm clock, someone screaming my name, and I was miles away, dreaming about a drama-free day, like fat-free yogurt.

“I'm tired, Noé.” I sighed, lids so heavy I'd need to physically pry them open. My neck ached from the place the belt dug in.

“Quinn, get up.” The voice was sharp, insistent, and not Noémie.

My eyes opened a crack. Émilie's face hovered over me, skin pale and tight, mouth a ghoulish rictus. “What is happening, Quinn?” At this point, her nails started digging into me.

Sweat flooded my pits like a kid about to get grounded for
a zillion years, like the time I smoked pot in the locker room and Mr. Edison found me, like when the police came after Mom . . . My bladder was achingly full. My mouth was dry. Her hands were hurting me. I was scared, then furious.
How dare she wake me this way?

“Take your hands off me,” I said, my voice icy.

Her lips quivered. Close up, I saw her sun-damaged skin, the gray in her hair, the dry white flakes on her lips. “You come here. You sit at my table, sleep under my roof, take trips with my family. You come like any other exchange, carefree, ignorant. And then like a snake, you abuse my own children under my roof.”

I caught her wrist just before she could scratch me with her long plastic paste-ons. If I'd sunk to her level, I could've pulled one off. Instead, I gripped her wrists hard and with muscles bulked by years of handstands and volleyball and parallel bars, I twisted the skin just enough to make her let go.

“How dare you manhandle me,” she shrieked, leaping up.

“How dare you barge in here and pin me to the bed and make false accusations?” I shouted back. She was blocking my way out of the bed, so I sat up against the bedstead, clutching the covers around my breasts.

“I assure you, they are not
false
accusations,” she sneered, her mouth an evil grimace. “Romuald's mother has been to see me about the car crash last night. I have spoken already to my daughter and she has told me all that happened, that it was
all
your fault. She is younger than you by over a year, Quinn. You are a bad influence and I want you out!”

My head reeled. “Bad influence? You've got to be kidding me. Noémie is six months younger than me, and Raphael is eighteen months older. What they do is their business. You may treat them like they're six years old, but—”

The back of her hand stopped me short. My hand flew to my mouth. I tasted metal. My eyes burned. I didn't cry, though, or give in. I can be a bitch, too, sometimes. “You know what Noémie and I did last night? We got away from you! I'm sorry you're lonely and poor, relying on rich visitors to support you. But if people are paying you for the privilege, newsflash, lady, you can't just come into their room and harass them. Also, keeping your kids prisoners won't stop them from running away and leaving you like your husband did.”

I expected a bitchy retort, a mean comeback, but when her hand dropped from her face I saw she was crying hard. She spun around, walked into the door, almost fell over, then ran to her room and slammed the door hard.

After a minute, Noémie poked her head around the door, her face red from crying. “Quinn, I'm sorry. I couldn't keep something like that a secret from my own mom. I had to tell her.”

“Yeah,” I say, “apparently you had to blame it on me, too.”

Okay, well, maybe it didn't go down quite as hard-core as that. And maybe I was trying to make myself sound a little tougher to impress you, channeling my inner Philip Marlowe. Maybe I even cried . . . whatever. It's dark by the time thirst gets the better of me and I go downstairs, tiptoeing around the house like a trespasser.

I needn't have worried: no one there. The lights are off and
the house is silent except for the cicadas whispering under their breath in the garden. I stumble around, groping for the light, find a tumbler, run myself a glass of water and glug it down, feeling like someone who's just done something actually hard like cross a desert or something, as opposed to hiding in their room all day.

Next, a cigarette. I walk through the porch door, making sure it doesn't slam behind me. The night is tar black, starless. So different from the starry starry night when Raphael first kissed me. I light up and look down at my dusty flip-flops, my toenails with their grown-out blue polish. Anything to not remember how good everything was for a moment, before it got fucked up.

It's when I go inside that I see the envelope on the table with my name on it. My hands shake as I open it up and see the English words written in French handwriting. Before I even read them I know what they say. It's politely worded enough, offering me the name of several local hotels I can arrange to stay in until I manage to book a flight back, as well as the number of the friend's house that Émilie and Noémie have gone to stay in until I do, in case of emergencies.

Kennedy and I text it out and my sense of shivery outrage fades a little. I tell her I'm leaving France. Correction: I've been asked to leave. She texts back,
Y
ay!
She'll see me that much sooner, adding that for what it's worth, the Blavettes sound majorly douchey and Émilie is clearly a psycho-bitch on wheels. Also that next time (if there is a next time) maybe I should consider not sleeping with a member of the host family three
months into my stay. And finally, for the record: three weeks does not true love make.
Don't be blond,
Q, Srsly.
Also, she's met a really hot guy called Indigo and he's perfect for me, will be good for me. Plus, major emotional triage session at Boston Tea Company the second my plane lands. When I read that last part, I have a little cry.

So it's all fine and clear in my head. I start packing. I feel strangely calm. Then I hear the front door open, boots striking the stairs. As suddenly as he left, there he is again in my doorway, his dark eyes taking in my tears, my half-packed bag. He's back because he misses me and there's rain in his hair, rain beading his lips and eyelashes. He kisses me and I smell the road on his skin, gasoline, and hot leatherette. We kiss and I think it will go on forever. We undress, not for sex, just so that he can feel me naked against him. He traces his finger over my neck and back in slow circles and writes his name along the bruise on my collarbone.

I tell him what happened, fearing his reaction when I say how I fought with his mom, but he just keeps stroking my neck. For all the strength Kennedy gave me over the phone, for all that she is the one person in the world who loves me for who I am and is one hundred percent right about everything, I forget every word she said, because when his skin is pressed on my skin all I can smell, feel, think is him. The shutters are open and the stars have come out. We hold hands and watch the dog star burn.

“Quinn, je t'aime,”
he says.

“Hmm?” I know perfectly well what he said, but I need to hear it again.

He bites my ear. “I think I'm falling in love with you.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper, biting my lip.

He pulls me closer into him. “
Dieu
, I love you as much as I hate my mom and sister. Don't worry. We'll find a way to hurt them back for being so mean to you.”