Vanishing Point

Pulling Flowers From a Top Hat, Age 5

For the first two weeks of kindergarten, Reagan tells her classmates she has sticky venom palms and two invisible eye stalks sprouting from the top of her head because she is a goblin princess. Her mother the Queen sent her to this land of sky on a mission to save their dying kingdom, and this mission requires Reagan to climb the wrong way up the orange slide at recess and to collect chipped buttons and pastel paper-clips from the art bins during storytime. Her teacher, a woman shaped like the exasperated emperor penguin in Reagan's favorite zoology picture book, stands Reagan in the corner of the room beside a corkboard pinned with class art projects and slips a rubber band onto Reagan's wrist to indicate she has gotten a strike. Three strikes means no recess.

One day, as Reagan struggles across the monkey bars, a boy with a bowl-cut pulls her pants down to her ankles. A handful of nearby kids see it happen, and laugh and hoot as Reagan drops into the soft mulch. She is not so much afraid or hurt as she is surprised, but she begins to cry anyway because surprise can feel so much like fear at first. A girl in her class named Lucy comes up behind the boy who pantsed her and taps him on the shoulder. When he turns, she punches a palm-shaped rock into his face. When the rock meets bone, it's like a magic trick—crack and blood blossoms from his nose.

Lucy becomes a legend, the only girl in their class to go straight from zero to three strikes in one day. She is not allowed recess for the rest of the week. The boy doesn't get in trouble given “his broken nose is punishment enough,” but each time they see him on the playground, Lucy taps her nose and bares her teeth at him. Every recess, she and Lucy are goblin princess sisters who collect large rocks and feathers and paper clips to bury in the dirt under the jungle gym, sending the objects back to their real home in the land below the sun.

Lessons in Escapology, Age 12

Lucy declares that from now on, she will go by Luce, and flicks Reagan's neck every time she slips up. A new girl transfers into their homeroom, and Luce makes friends with her. Her name is Iris. During science class, Luce and Iris pass notes on Iris's lavender notebook paper, and Iris braids Luce a friendship bracelet. When Reagan pokes fun at the thin thread and plastic blue bead in the center, Luce tilts her head and says, “You're just jealous she didn't make you one too.”

Reagan is not jealous of Iris. She just doesn't understand why Luce wastes time on her. Iris is not like them. Reagan and Luce listen to heavy metal and pop-punk bands and steal eyeliner from their mothers and apply it in the bathroom each morning before school. This, Reagan decides, makes them radical and philosophical and smarter than the girls like Iris who wear Abercrombie and Fitch sweatpants and hoodies and listen to pop hits on 102.5 W-ORG.

“I miss when it was only us.”

“Learn how to share,” Luce says in such a way that Reagan knows the subject will not be tolerated again.

Every month, they use Microsoft Paint and Google images to create new covers for their spiral-bound notebooks. Iris makes hers with pictures of floppy-eared bunnies, yawning puppies, and Lisa Frank stickers she pilfers from her older sister. Reagan and Luce use pictures of their favorite anime characters and pop-punk bands of boys with swooping black bangs. Luce always adds the same grainy photo of Billy the Kid to the top right corner because she says Billy was her soulmate in another life.

“You can barely tell what he looks like,” Iris says, studying the printout. “His face is so so blurry. How do you even know?”

“I know.”

“He kind of looks like Jess from Gilmore Girls,” Reagan says, and this spurs debate about whether Dean or Jess is better for Rory. Iris always insists it's Dean, even though he's as boring as the school cafeteria mac and cheese.

Luce’s favorite trick is to disappear objects—quarters from ears, pencils, calculators.

They spend most days after school at Iris's house because she has the biggest bedroom and Iris's parents mostly leave them alone. This, Reagan has to admit, solves a problem she and Luce have had for years. Luce's parents work late and Reagan's mother isn't comfortable with Luce's older brother watching them. Reagan didn't like hosting because her parents helicoptered—her mom brought them snack plates full of apple slivers and oranges wedges and small clusters of grapes every hour because she “thought they might be hungry” when she was clearly just trying to check that they weren't calling boys or watching age-inappropriate TV shows.

At Luce's thirteenth birthday party, she receives a magic trick starter set, complete with linking rings, a deck of cards, a wand, a top hat, and a book of tricks. Reagan would have been personally devastated to receive something so lame in place of a video game or a band t-shirt, but Luce abandons her other gifts to tear open the box. She devours the first book within a week, then drags Reagan, groaning along, to the public library so she can borrow thick technical manuals with detailed illustrations. “I’m going to be the first famous girl magician,” Luce declares.

Suddenly, instead of watching Gilmore Girls, Reagan and Iris find themselves subjected to a show about Criss Angel performing magic tricks, and he replaces Billy the Kid on Luce's notebook covers. Luce's favorite trick is to disappear objects—quarters from ears, pencils, calculators. For a while, nothing Reagan or Iris own is safe from Luce's sleight of hand. Their mutual confusion at Luce's obsession settles their distaste for each other into an uneasy truce.

One Friday night, Luce convinces her mom to drop them off at the theater so they can catch the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie (“Will Turner is an epic babe,” Iris says. “He's a true gentleman.” “Barf,” says Reagan), on the condition that they will walk straight back to Iris's house after. On the walk back, as they debate what kind of boys can wear guy-liner attractively, a black SUV slows down beside them. The windows roll down to reveal a few college-age boys who shout “Jail-bait sluts!” and howl like wolves through the window. Luce flips them off as they speed by.

The girls exchange looks, and Luce crosses her eyes at them, which sets them all to laughing. A few minutes later the same SUV drives by again. It draws level to them, the windows rolled up this time, keeps pace with them just long enough for Reagan to feel a small stab of worry. Then, the car accelerates and turns the next street corner. Iris laughs nervously and Luce tosses her head. “Let them look. It's not like they can do anything else.”

The girls fall into ease with the pinking sky. Iris says she thinks Elizabeth is her favorite character in the movie, and just as Reagan is about to protest, a honk comes from somewhere behind them. They turn to see the SUV again, and this time, Reagan thinks, let them look. She begins to smile, she begins to feel this thing she can later only call power unfold in her belly because she is young and long-limbed and beautiful and these men keep coming back to look at her, to see her, as if she is a grown woman. Then, she feels Iris jerk her hand, and then Reagan is running, they are all running, their hands linked, toward the gas station up the street. From inside, Reagan calls her mother to pick them up.

On the ride home Iris sits pale-faced with her hands clasped in her lap, and Luce does most of the talking, blathers about the movie, though Reagan's mother seems preoccupied and only occasionally hmmms as Luce gushes about Jack Sparrow. Reagan watches the streetlights blurring gold outside her window, the sky bluing to darkness behind them. She thinks of the way she smiled into the wind at the sight of that SUV, heard the whisper of beautiful in her mind, and she feels as if she's done something wrong.

The Ball Trick, Age 15

A week or so after school starts back up in the fall, Luce runs away for the third time. Luce has disappeared before—usually on some camping expedition in the woods. The first time was after Luce's mom found her Wiccan altar and accused her of practicing Satanism—but she’s never been gone for this long. Reagan and Iris text and text and Luce never responds. Luce's parents go to the police, who question Reagan and Iris. Do you know where she is? No. Did she mention anything out of the ordinary happening? No. Is there anyone who would want to hurt her? No, no, no.

Luce's parents put up missing person posters. The posters all use pictures of Luce that glaze her in sweetness. Luce, bare-faced and half-smiling on Christmas morning last year, posing with a silvery bow planted on her bedhead. It was around the time Luce's mother had strip-bleached Luce's hair because she had dyed it teal, after which Luce ran away from home for the second time. In the posters, her hair still holds a greenish tint around the bangs. This picture of Luce is posted on every street light, stapled to every telephone pole, pinned to the corkboard in the coffee shop where Luce works after school and in the gas station and the grocery store. Everywhere Reagan goes Luce smiles at her with every one of her bright white teeth until that Innocent Luce overlaps Reagan's Luce, and Reagan worries she'll forget Luce's real face.

Her Luce is a sneering animal-girl, and sometimes, even though Luce loves her and Iris, Luce can be cruel in a way this bare-faced Luce could never be.

Reagan's Luce wears black lipstick and paints each nail a different color. Reagan's Luce slips “grounding stones” into Reagan's pocket when Mercury goes into retrograde and plies Reagan and Iris with musty herbal teas that she brings to school in a comically large thermos. Reagan's Luce does not light up most rooms she walks into—she sharpens them. Her piercings, and metal-studded combat boots, and stick and poke tattoos make people nervous. There is nothing demure about her Luce. Her Luce is a sneering animal-girl, and sometimes, even though Luce loves her and Iris, Luce can be cruel in a way this bare-faced Luce could never be. Once, in middle school, Luce hid Reagan's tampons during a pool party until Reagan bled through her white bathing suit. She would not hand them over until Reagan called her mother, weeping, to take her home. All because Luce was jealous Reagan had started her period first.

For the week Luce is missing, Iris tenses every time someone says Luce's name. For the week Luce is missing, Reagan goes directly home from school, curls into a ball on her bed, and watches sitcoms on her laptop for so many hours that the characters weave into her dreams, until Ted from How I Met Your Mother narrates scenes of Luce running through dark alleys from knife-wielding shadows. In the late evenings, her mother climbs the stairs and sits beside Reagan, stroking her hair whenever Reagan begins to cry. Even Luce's brother comes home from college in the middle of the semester.

When Luce returns six days later, she tells them she went to a convention for magicians in Boston. “I couldn’t believe how lame it was. All these old guys kept asking if I was an assistant. As if. I’ll be the one holding the saw, thank you very much.” Luce says this as if it is meant to be funny, but she doesn’t smile. In fact, this will be the last time Luce mentions wanting to be a magician, and when Reagan asks her about it, months later, Luce will say that she prefers to take her magic without a side of sexism. She will not smile then, either.

When Iris and Reagan try to reason with her about disappearing, Luce shrugs them off. “My parents would've said no if I asked, and if I told you guys, Iris totally would've spilled the beans.” Despite her new shiny status of grounded until further notice, she leans coolly against her locker and extends a leg. She'd paid for the Boston trip by swiping her mom's debit card and withdrawing money from an ATM at the train station. “Her pin is my birthday. I had more than enough money.”

“You could have answered our texts. You could have told me, at least,” Reagan snaps, and Iris makes a small noise in her throat, like a rabbit lifted by its ears, as if what Reagan said had hurt her, as if she assumed herself closer to Luce than Reagan. Reagan glances at her stricken face and decides Iris deserves this hurt for making such stupid assumptions. “You could have told me.”

“That's the meanest thing I could've done to you.” Luce smiles lazily, then stretches her back by throwing her arms up into the air. The gesture looks too casual as if Luce is enjoying herself. Reagan looks to Iris to see if she noticed it too, but Iris is picking the polish off her nails.

 “To let me know you weren't dead?”

“Telling you to keep it a secret while everyone else is freaking out about me? That'd be pretty unfair, wouldn't it?”

“But you won't do it again,” Reagan says, and it is as if Luce takes this as a challenge. She never tells anyone when she disappears, which she does, often. Luce turns off her read receipts, turns off her location services—the point, she says, is to be untraceable. Each time she does, Reagan suffers a little more, feels Luce slipping a little further away from her. This will be the time, Reagan thinks, that something happens to her. But like the lady in the box trick, Luce always reappears, a day later, a week later, grinning, as if to say, “It's all just a little show, darling. Don't tell me you bought it?”

Tugging at the Linking Rings, Age 16

After a late semester basketball game, a group of senior boys gang-rape a freshman girl in the choir room. Reagan hears the rumors, but she doesn't pay much attention until after the boys are expelled. The girl transfers to a high school across town.

Years later, it will surprise Reagan that she doesn't remember ever discussing the rape with Iris or Luce. She remembers the teachers looking over the students in the cafeteria at lunch, their eyes sleepless and their mouths tight. She remembers sitting outside the door of her algebra class and struggling to find x on her homework before the bell rang, and overhearing a few boys talking about the girl. She remembers one of them saying that the girl cried rape only after her parents found out, how typical that is of girls. She remembers how her skin prickled, how she'd put an earbud in so she could block them out and finish her homework. She remembers that Iris stayed home with the flu that week. She remembers she and Luce sitting in front of their lockers at lunch listening to Mayday Parade and Escape the Fate on Luce's iPod, one earbud per girl, and whispering about which boys in their chemistry class might ask them to prom. But though she will try, Reagan cannot remember the girl's name. What concerns could have been more pressing, could have outweighed this fear and proximity? How narrow was her world that news like this did not overpower her?

After the school board officially confirms “the incident,” Reagan's mother picks her up midway through the school day. On the way home, Reagan asks if they can get fast food for lunch. She means to lighten the mood because Reagan's mother despises fast food. She insists that fast food is unhealthy, cardboard poison, and will make Reagan fat, which her mother only worries about because she wants Reagan to have a long, healthy, happy life. It is an ongoing joke between them, how her mother will groan with whining exasperation every time Reagan asks for McDonald's. But her mom only nods, smiles a little and pulls into the drive-thru. They eat their fries in the parking lot in silence, the salt sitting heavy on Reagan's tongue. The rest of the ride home, she watches her mother's knuckles ball around the steering wheel. Each time her mother catches Reagan's eye, she flinches and looks away before smiling.

When they get home, Reagan's mother tells her to take a seat on the couch. They sit facing each other, and Reagan worries her mother plans to do something drastic and meddling—punish her for what those boys had done, restrict her comings and goings in the name of safety. Instead, her mother tells Reagan that it is important she listens. “I didn't know if I should tell you this, but with what happened to that poor girl—” Her mother cuts off, shakes her head. “You need to be careful.”

Reagan's mother knew a girl who was raped in college. The man who did it was a stranger. She did not remember his face. She suspected the man roofied her, or perhaps that he hit her in the head with something. She later found out she'd had a concussion. She'd woken up in a parking lot downtown, with her underwear pulled down around her knees.

“Did the police catch him?” Reagan asks.

No. Of course not. The girl never reported it.

“Why not?”

Reagan's mother doesn't answer—she sighs and passes a hand over her face. She stays like that for a long time, hunched over with her face in her hands, and Reagan sits across from her, wanting to hold her, wanting to reach out, but she cannot move. She sits so straight, her back hurts, the condensation of the drink cup pooling in her palms.

Finally, Reagan's mother lifts her head, and redness rims her eyes. She looks at Reagan desperately, as if Reagan must take something away from this story that her mother cannot bring herself to say. “Because she thought they wouldn't believe her.” After a moment, her mother says, as if she doesn't feel it entirely true, “It was a different time then.”

... even after she’s finished it and moved on to true crime, she carries the serial killer book in her backpack like a rabbit’s foot.

For weeks after, Reagan feels unsettled. Whenever she feels the questions bubble up inside her like a scream, she lays down on her bed with her laptop, hugs her raggedy-limbed childhood fox to her chin, and watches crime shows. It begins with Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for the simple reason that by watching it, she can feel the world grow safer around her. At the end of each episode, Benson and Stabler catch the bad guy, he is sentenced, and the dead girl or the raped girl gets her justice. When Reagan runs out of SVU, she branches out to whatever she can find and Netflix provides like a magician pulling handkerchief after handkerchief from his pockets. Her favorite ends up being a crime show that analyzes the behavior of serial killers, and she buys a book from Barnes and Noble about real-life ones. The book has a black cover with white and red lettering, and for weeks, even after she's finished it and moved on to true crime, she carries the serial killer book in her backpack like a rabbit's foot.

When she confesses this to Iris and Luce, Iris tells her she's lost it. “That's so creepy! Don't you realize this stuff actually happened, you sicko?”

Luce puts a hand on Iris's shoulder, cutting her off mid-rant. “I get it. It's like a talisman, right? The more you know, the safer you are.”

“Exactly like a talisman.” It isn't, but Reagan nods anyway because she doesn't yet know how to explain, even to herself, why she reads the passages about the cautious dead girls again and again—the ones who always lock their doors and never drink and go to church every Sunday. She can't articulate yet that it makes her feel safer to know nothing she does will make her entirely safe.

Catching Bullets with Your Teeth, Age 18

Reagan and Iris end up at the same college and make the reluctant decision to room together because they don't know anyone else. It is easier than Reagan expected it would be to live with Iris. Iris keeps her side of the room tidy, takes calls from her mother outside the door, wears headphones when she listens to music. She learns that Iris wears red lipstick to appear presentable on mornings she's too lazy to shower, that she sleep-talks in long lucid-seeming rants, that Iris is more tolerable when Reagan is not competing with her for Luce's attention. They go to dinner together most nights, but during the day, they run in different circles.

This development delights Luce, who, much to the dismay of her parents, has taken the year off to bartend. “I knew you two would get along eventually,” Luce likes to say, says more times than Reagan is comfortable with. Iris smiles without teeth and looks away from Reagan. Reagan feels the old jealousy balling up in her chest again. Luce calls them every night and they put her on speakerphone so they can all watch sitcoms together, using Reagan's un-lofted bed as a couch. During their first midterm, Luce sends each of them a care package with their favorite candy, soda, coffee grounds, string lights, and a handwritten note filled with small doodles of the three of them holding hands and covered in flowers. When they ask Luce what she's up to, if she's going to come to college next year, Luce rolls her eyes and says, “I think some kindergarteners have a better sense of what they want to be when they grow up. What’s the point of wasting tuition?”

A week or so before Thanksgiving break, Reagan and Iris get invited to their first frat party, which has a tropical theme. Reagan borrows a floral jumpsuit from Iris and accessorizes with a new pair of earrings. They dangle past her chin, thin gold chains weighted down with small glass stones. When Reagan studies herself in the mirror and turns her head, the earrings catch the light. “Those earrings draw attention to your lipstick,” Iris says and this makes Reagan feel beautiful.

At the party, they drink their first lukewarm beers from blue Solo cups and Iris moues over the color. In one corner of the room, a group of guys in Hawaiian shirts plays flippy cup with the acidity of losing gamblers. This living room looks like their dorm—the same cheap plastic blinds bent at odd angles near the middle. Off-white painted walls, the same orange and purple patterned couches as every common room. “The movies lied to us,” Reagan shouts over the too-loud thump of the rap music. “Parties are boring.”

They look to Reagan like an offering on an altar.

Iris gets caught in a conversation with a sorority girl she knows from her composition class, and Reagan excuses herself to find a bathroom. When she rounds the corner, she sees one of the frat boys walking down the hall toward her. She gives him a polite smile of acknowledgment because he is one of the party's hosts. He smiles back, and, as Reagan angles herself to the side to let him pass her, he reaches a hand up as if he's going to wave. Instead, his hand grasps her shoulder and pulls her forward. As she trips toward him, she thinks of her mother sitting on the couch in the living room with her fast-food cup held between her knees, and Reagan tries to put her hands up. She moves too slowly. His tongue invades her mouth, and his breath is sour-sick with liquor. Then, he pulls away. He takes a step back, wipes his mouth on his forearm, and then he actually bows to her. He bends down smiling as if he is waiting for applause. Reagan stares at him, her hands still mid-air to shove him away. He straightens, still smiling and continues back down the hallway to rejoin the party.

In the bathroom, Reagan studies her face in the cloudy mirror: her dangly earrings, her smeared lipstick, the eyeliner starting to blur the corners of her eyes. She wants to rub the lipstick off but there's no toilet paper roll in the holder and the only cloth is a bleach-stained rag balled underneath the scuzzy doorstop. She wants to splash cold water on her face, but she does not want to ruin her makeup. She decides her ears look swollen, that the earrings probably aren't clean metal. She takes the earrings off and places them on the sink between a crusted dab of toothpaste and the empty hand-soap bottle. On the porcelain, the green stones of the earrings draw all the attention from the light, glittering and refracting. They look to Reagan like an offering on an altar.

She will retell this incident later to Iris and Luce as if it is a funny story. Because it is a funny story. The frat boy had bowed to her, and then he kept walking down the hallway. This is what makes it a funny story—the fact he kept walking. She can retell it with drama, slow it down and extend the pauses when she delivers the finale. She can act out the bow he gave her, exaggerate the sauntering jaunt of his step because nothing happened. Not really. Luce laughs with her, but Iris stays silent, her eyes staring somewhere beyond Reagan's left shoulder.

Now You See Me, Now I'm Gone, Age 19

Later, Reagan will remember the Hallow as the smell of grave dirt. She will remember the rustle of the wind combing leaves through the long grass and the thickets of wildflowers, the feral children of the funeral flowers that had once been left on the gravestones. She will remember the mile-long hike through the woods, the smell of bug spray heady on her sticky skin. She will remember the greenish light filtering through the forest canopy, the kneeling statue of an inky-dark hooded angel and the warmth of its oxidized bronze wing cupped in her palm. She remembers Luce bending over the gravestones in the far left, pointing at Prosper Sykes, Forsaken Hyde, Humiliation Wyatt while Iris knelt with a printout of funerary art tracking the occurrence of death heads. But mostly, Reagan remembers how the Hallow belonged to them, in the way a place can only belong to you when you're nineteen and you have too much time on your hands and too much parental supervision after being off without it in college-land.

Luce had started calling it the Hallow as a play off of hallowed ground. She was the one who found the graveyard, on one of her nature hikes around the Carter Reserve back in the spring, and so Luce got to name it. But if the Hallow ever had a proper name, the kind of thing a town prints on maps, Reagan never found it. Reagan checks the archives herself, not because it would have changed anything—they still would have gone to the Hallow, no matter who it belonged to, and they still would have called it the Hallow, no matter what its actual name—but because it feels important to Reagan to know its history before them. As if knowing what it had been would tighten their hold on it. But for all the hours Reagan spends sneezing dust in the basement of Town Hall, she doesn't find a graveyard in the forest marked on any of the town maps or microfiche.

“For all we know, the Hallow could have sprouted out of the forest floor like some weird flower.” Reagan tells this to Iris and Luce over coffee that afternoon because she thinks they will find it as interesting as she does. They get their cups to go so they can wander through the mall. Luce wants to buy a maxi-dress, something with a thigh slit to show off her new tattoo, an alchemical symbol for personal transformation to compliment her tattoos of runes for psychic intuition and wisdom.

“Maybe it never had a name.” Iris pauses to touch a tie-dye dress hung on a sales rack, a sunset-hued incense shop kind of dress that only Iris could wear beautifully. Sometimes, Reagan wants to pluck out Iris's eyelashes, so she will not look so much like a doe, will not be quite so beautiful. “No roads go back that way. Things only really get named if they're car-accessible.” This is stupider than Iris's usual drivel. After all, places had names long before cars came along, and while the Hallow is forgotten-old, it is not eldritch-old.

“There we go.” Luce's dark eyes glimmer a warning to Reagan, who'd been about to correct Iris. Luce gives the smallest shake of her head, the ghost of a gesture Reagan may not have caught if she didn't know Luce's gestures quite so well. “A perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Reagan follows Luce's nod and only then does Reagan notice how pale Iris has become, how her hands shake on her coffee cup so small bubbles of cream blister up through the mouth of the lid. Iris is knock on wood and carry rabbit's feet superstitious. She would never go back to the Hallow again if Reagan didn't swallow her tongue and nod along. “Yeah. Of course. And hey, if no one else knows it exists, that makes it a pretty safe place. It's remote enough that it's an unlikely abduction location. Maybe a body dump location, but that's also unlikely.”

Reagan means this to be comforting but Iris does not look comforted. Luce arches an eyebrow at her, the you aren't helping look. She's recently dyed her hair six different colors in Reagan's dorm bathroom, which she calls “oil slick,” and penciled her eyebrows in black. They are sharp as calligraphy on her pale skin. “What a relief?” Luce laughs. “Sometimes, Reagan, you are the most morbid person I know.”

“Which probably makes me the safest person you know,” Reagan shoots back.

“Are we still going to the Hallow after this?” Iris lifts the tie-dye dress from the rack and holds it up to Luce's torso. The dress will drown her in swatches of fabric and still be too modest. Reagan shakes her head. “What? It's a great color.”

“No thigh slit though.” Luce pushes the dress away with the tips of her fingers barely touching the hanger. She reaches back to pull her hair into a ponytail, and the studded curve of her ear glitters in the fluorescent lighting. She looks to Reagan. “What do you think? Is our spooky little graveyard going to give us a body?”

“Shut up,” Iris says. “Let's try the next shop.”

In the months to follow, Reagan will try to remember what they'd done at the Hallow that day, but the memory never clarifies. Had Luce's older brother bought them booze? Had Iris packed sunscreen in her tote? Was that the day Luce climbed the willow tree to read until Reagan stamped her feet in worry that the branch might break, or was that a different time? Had Luce changed into the thigh slit dress? Reagan couldn't remember. She hadn't known that visit would be important, and the details of it smear across all her other memories of the Hallow, all the other days they spent there. It will bother her, that she cannot remember the last hours she spends with Luce, that the last memory she can summon is of Luce standing in front of a mirror, modeling a gray jersey maxi-dress, kicking her leg out and laughing like a woman dancing on a stage.

For the first week after Luce disappears, Iris and Reagan visit the Hallow daily. It is only natural, Reagan supposes, that they keep returning to Luce's favorite place, again and again, all summer, like untethered planets spinning out in the vacuum she left.

They sit between the gravestones touching knees, trading sips of cinnamon whiskey or lukewarm beer—whatever they manage to scavenge from their parent's liquor cabinets. They spend most of the day taking rubbings of the stones or weeding the graves or playing the boardgames Iris insists on bringing in oversized totes that they have to take turns lugging along the trail. But at some point, inevitably, the sun tilts and stretches the shadows of the branches against their laps, and one of them, usually Reagan, will look up and say, “I wonder what she's doing right now.”

Iris, her cheeks flushed from the booze, tips back into the grass and tucks back her hair so it won't dip into the wildflowers past the edge of her towel. She does not like laying directly on the dirt. “She ran away with a vampire she met picking up frozen peas at Kroger.”

“His convertible broke down right off the road and he came in to get a popsicle while he waited for the tow.”

“He fell in love with her at first sight, so he mesmerized her with his vampy powers. She forgot all about the frozen peas and all about us and she ran away with him.”

She would have told them they were no better than frightened little rabbits hopping at the wind.

If Luce knew Reagan and Iris told these kinds of stories about her, she would have tipped her head back and laughed hard enough to shame the sun out of the sky. She would have told them they were no better than frightened little rabbits hopping at the wind. But this game is the only safe way Iris and Reagan have found to talk about Luce when she's gone from them. Anything else—wondering what she might think of a particular rubbing or a memory of her getting trashed on this brand of whiskey on prom night—felt like it would endanger her. Like speaking of her missing would let in the possibility of the real and dangerous world where she might not come back.

So Reagan says, “He lives somewhere like Boston or Salem.” They are the likeliest places Luce would've run to. She'd always wanted to live somewhere glamorous, somewhere with people, Reagan, people living their lives. “He feeds her eclairs and caramels all day to sweeten her blood and at night they go to art galas and she wears dresses that would make Dita Von Tesse blush.”

“And when he drinks her blood, there's a chemical in his saliva that makes her forget she had a life before him.” Iris reaches out and touches Reagan's elbow. Reagan has cried too many times before at this part of the game. The touch says Luce would call when she could. The touch promises Luce is okay.

“So she can always be happy and he can have her all to himself.”

“And wherever Luce is, let her be happy.” It is always Iris who says it, every time. Let her be happy, and then the game ends. “Amen.”

“Amen.”

As the week stretches to two, their stories grow wilder. Perhaps she has been abducted by aliens; she has been initiated into a coven of witches with healing powers who demand a year and a day of isolated study; perhaps she has found fairyland in a cave in the forest and is training to be a Seelie knight or a fairy midwife. By week three, they are so sick with fear that the game loses all its power.

Instead, Reagan begins checking the National Missing and Unidentified Subject database. There are 146 entries for Massachusetts alone, and as Reagan scrolls, her eyes water. Black text on white stripes and each white stripe, a life with a vanishing point, a place where life has severed into empty space.

Date of Last Contact: 11/14/2007. Last Name: Alvarez. First Name: Michael. Age: 4. City: New Bedford.

She looks for patterns, wisps of victimology—any other 17 to 22-year-old girls who'd gone missing from their area. Runaways are one of the most at-risk groups for crime, second only to prostitutes. Most serial killers start by picking victims no one will notice missing. Statistically, Luce should be safe from serial killers. Statistically, the Midwest and the South have far more serial killers than New England.

Date of Last Contact: 6/09/1999. Last Name: Borden. First Name: Christina. Age: 22. City: Amherst.

She wishes the database provided picture entries. For each girl in the age range, Reagan searches through Facebook, tapping through each boxy profile picture, narrowing by city, matching them to the missing posters she pulls from Google. When love and prayers posts and pleas to come home fill a page, Reagan knows she's found the missing girl. But Reagan doesn't find many such profiles. Either the disappearance pre-dates Facebook, or their Facebooks have been deactivated. So far, none of the girls in the right age range look like Luce. This is a good sign. It means there isn't a pattern, that there isn't a physical type. Though she's checked every day for the last two weeks, Reagan searches again “Active serial killers in New England” just to be sure.

Date of Last Contact: 1/18/2002. Last Name: Bowen. First Name: Cynthia. Age: 31. City: Holbrook.

Cynthia Vigil was the name of the Toy Box Killer's last victim. The Toy Box Killer was one of those that targeted prostitutes. He and his girlfriend tortured the women, sometimes for months at a time, in a trailer in the backyard that they’d soundproofed. Cynthia had escaped by stabbing the girlfriend in the neck with an icepick and running down the road wearing nothing but a collar and dragging a six-foot padlocked chain. Two cars drove past her without stopping. Reagan tries to picture Cynthia running through the darkness, the headlights of cars which bring her hopes of safety and the despair when the cars don't stop, and instead, she sees Luce, scrambling under the weight of that chain, screaming with eyeliner running down her face, the palmistry tattoo on her ribcage heaving like the hand is trying to grasp her.

Reagan slams the laptop shut, and shoves herself away from her desk. She will not think of Luce that way.

“She's fine.” Reagan feels the way the words fill the air. She cannot stop shaking, so she repeats it again and again until her breathing evens, until she can see Luce like she was the day Iris held a sunset-coloured dress up to her and Luce did not buy it because it did not have a thigh slit. Until Reagan stops seeing the database entries flashing behind her eyes each time, she closes them.

The Mentalist, Age 19

The fourth week without Luce brings a muggy kind of heat that makes the air impatient for rain. On the drive to the woods, Iris drums her fingers on the steering wheel, fiddles with the volume of the radio, opens and closes the window. When they park, Iris passes a tote filled with a few glass bottles of fruit-flavoured soda and a number of sad, mayo-soaked sandwiches to Reagan before she stomps off ahead down the forest path. In the Hallow, they make a half-hearted attempt to take some grave rubbings, but within twenty minutes the humidity chases them out into the shade of the big green willow beside the angel statue. The willow is the only place that offers some semblance of shelter in the graveyard, and as summer drags on, they need it more and more. Even so, this summer, Reagan sprouts with freckles, her skin warming to gold. This summer is the healthiest Reagan will ever be again.

Reagan lays her head back on the willow's trunk. She runs her fingers in a spiral through the loose dirt between the exposed roots that push into the small of her back. Above her, Iris snaps out a worn beach towel with more force than Reagan thinks necessary. “Alright,” Reagan says. “What's bothering you?”

This summer Reagan has noticed Iris needs to be given permission to talk about her feelings as if offering them freely might be construed as some kind of trespass. Iris shakes her head, but she stands above the splayed towel, kicking at the grass with one flip-flop. “I hate that statue.”

Reagan rolls her eyes. “The angel? Really?” Her thick hood makes her seem less grieving than powerful. As if by hiding the angel's face under the cowl, the sculptor had made her a Valkyrie, some winged warrior demanding God return the dearly departed to earth, where they belonged. “I kind of like her.”

“I wish we could get rid of it.”

There are things Iris should fear, the Ed Kempers and Ted Bundys of the world, the real monsters that go bump in the night. The angel, Reagan thinks, as the annoyance sears up from her belly, is not one of them. “Unless that statue comes to life and snaps you up into a grave, you've got nothing to be afraid of.”

“I'm not afraid of her.” Iris leans over to pass Reagan a bottle of soda. The glass warms Reagan's palms and she sets the bottle beside her hip. Iris sits on the towel, then bends at the waist to clasp her ankles in her palms. “I'm just—oh never mind.”

For a long time, there is only the staccato of a nearby woodpecker and the hum of the wind. The ground is warm beneath her, the air like a blanket, and Reagan could almost fall asleep like this. Then Iris says, “Cassie Doyle got into a car accident a few days ago.”

Reagan sits up so abruptly the willow's bark catches her hair and she flinches as some straggling pieces stay behind in the trunk. “What?”

“It was in the paper this morning. Front page.”

It takes Reagan a moment to place Cassie as a girl a year under them in school. A nice girl, quiet, pretty in an ordinary way that goes mostly unnoticed. Iris had been in debate with her, Reagan remembers, though Reagan never knew Cassie much beyond a face glimpsed in passing in the hallway.

“This article makes it sound like she was drunk driving. And it's full of all these quotes from random assholes about underage drinking, and how irresponsible she was, and how she could have hurt someone, and how lucky that she only hurt herself. She's so lucky that she only broke a couple of ribs.” Iris sits huddled over herself, an arm around her middle, her pale hair lifting and falling in the breeze, and this curling should make her look small, but it doesn't. Iris looks like she's holding herself back as if she's holding back so much anger that if Reagan were to touch her, Iris's skin would sizzle. “Thing is though, Cassie wasn't drunk. She had half a beer at a party. She got into an accident because she popped a flat in the middle of a turn and spun out.”

Iris goes quiet, and Reagan doesn't really know what to say to that. Reagan nestles herself against the trunk so she can face Iris. She settles on, “That's pretty fucked up.”

“Have you noticed,” Iris speaks as if she is shifting her words through a sieve. “That no one cares that Luce is missing?”

There was something about his fear that felt too palpable, too private to approach.

Reagan's first instinct is to deny it. To say, no, that's not true. To say that she saw Luce's older brother putting up flyers the other day, looking hollowed out and tired. That she had wanted to go and put her arms around him and tell him they would find her, and to ask about the investigation. But she hadn't done that, had she? There was something about his fear that felt too palpable, too private to approach. “It's Luce we're talking about. She's fine. She blitzed off again and forgot to tell us. That's all.”

“She's never been gone weeks before.” Iris does not look at her. Instead, she speaks down to her hands, as if her hands had the power to pull Luce out of the willow trunk.

“She'll have a good reason.” Reagan reaches for her soda bottle and unscrews the cap. The carbonation brings tears to her eyes and the sweetener sticks in her throat, thickening her tongue. “She's fine.”

Iris exhales hard in a bark that cannot quite be called a laugh, and when she tips her head up to look at Reagan, her pupils are tight with anger. “You want to know why they aren't talking about it, Reagan? The reason they'll write articles about Cassie fucking Doyle drinking half a beer and getting into a fender bender but they won't write shit about Luce? Because it isn't interesting when girls like Luce go missing.”

“What do you mean, girls like Luce?”

Iris stares at her for a long moment, her face caught between surprise and something Reagan will only later be able to identify as pity. “If you don't know yet,” she says. “Then God help you.”

Later, Reagan will wait for the reporters to ask her for an interview. She will practice what she would answer if they asked her about all the occult stuff, about the magic. It wasn't exactly a secret that Luce was into witchcraft: she wore a pentacle ring on her middle finger, and she openly read books with titles like The Shamanic Tarot or The Magic of the Dark Goddess even though she was often scolded by middle-aged women who spotted her. As far as she would explain it to Reagan, her witchcraft seemed like a secular version of Wicca. “All the juicy magic bits, and none of the kink,” Luce once told her. “Gerald Gardner may have been super into BDSM, but I'm not sold on the transcendental qualities of scourging.”

Luce read Tarot and lit incense and meditated. Sometimes, she played with Ouija boards. Sometimes she burned candles and put essential oils in her baths and left pennies on graves as offerings to the dead. No more mysterious than lighting a votive candle or whatever the hell Catholics did with their rosaries, but witchcraft had a way of blowing out of proportion. Take the Satanic Panic of the '80s and '90s. Even though the satanic cult terror had been thoroughly debunked in the mid-nineties, how many films and books and TV shows about murderous occult groups got made every year? Reagan worries that the reporters will take Luce's witchcraft and turn it into something dirty about her, the way they had with Cassie Doyle's half a beer.

“It's a nature religion,” Reagan may have said. “It had nothing to do with Satanism. It had nothing to do with cults. That isn't why this happened to her. You're asking the wrong questions.”

The reporters never ask, though, because there are no reporters. There is only a wild girl that everyone expected to go missing. Just another runaway. Just another girl who got, in the eyes of the world, exactly what she deserved.

The Mis-Made Girl, Age 19

At the end of June, a pair of hikers find Luce in a gully, miles deep into the woods, up near Whale's Jaw. Their dog had tugged free of its leash and the hikers chased it down the slope, found her there, tripped over her, half-covered by the leaves. Even now, Reagan cannot bear to think of Luce as her body, the body, a body.

Luce had died over a week after she'd gone missing—she'd been held at a secondary location, had been sexually assaulted prior to her death. Her hands had been tied with strips of cotton torn from a t-shirt, no DNA found on it. The cause of death was a gunshot to the back of the head. Reagan learns this from an article on the front page of the town newspaper beside an unsmiling picture of Luce with the wind blowing hair across her face. “Runaway Found Murdered,” the article is called. The article ends with a list of safety precautions women can take when traveling alone. The police have no suspects. They do not think it is serial. The funeral, obviously, is closed casket.

When Reagan reads the article, she thinks that most killers use guns. Statistically, it is 21 percent more common than strangling. She knows axing is more popular than smothering with a pillow or burning a victim alive. She knows that more than half of all murder victims are under the age of 30, and for weeks, the number 11 will echo in her mind as she wonders if another 11 years would have made a difference. If another 11 years could have kept Luce safe. For the rest of her life, 11 will be her lucky number.

Reagan expects the girls they went to high school with to post fond memories, to call Luce a light gone out of the world too soon, to say they will miss her. But the posts never come, and as Reagan stares at Luce's nearly-empty Facebook wall, Reagan closes her other hand around her throat and curls her fingers into the meat of her neck, digging in until she can count her heartbeats against her palm.

Luce's parents ask her to speak at the memorial, and Reagan cannot say no. Reagan shakes through her whole eulogy, nails pressing crescents into her palms—she wants to say, one week. She was held for one week, she was alive for one whole week, and someone should have been looking for her. Reagan should have been looking for her.

And because she cannot say this to Luce's sedated parents, Reagan instead tells the story of how she met Luce, the bowl-cut boy who pantsed her on the playground, the way Luce had turned his face into a magic trick, how Luce had loved magic tricks. She says the clichés that would have been true for a different sort of girl as if they could protect Luce. She says, “It still seems impossible that this could have happened to her,” and “Luce was the kindest person I've ever met.” Later, she will think of this eulogy as a betrayal.

... both of them, girls who have breathed fear in so deep that, even now, even in loss like this, they cannot cry.

When Reagan finishes speaking, she sits down beside Iris. Reagan links their hands into a white tightness until her fingers feel as if they will never unclench. Iris does not cry, but Reagan watches the muscles in Iris's jaw twitching, the rawness around her eyes as she stares at the wreath hung above the dark wood casket. Reagan wonders how she has never noticed before how alike she and Iris are, both of them, girls who have breathed fear in so deep that, even now, even in loss like this, they cannot cry. If it were Iris in the casket, and Luce holding her hand, Reagan thinks Luce would cry. Reagan would have to hold her, to stifle Luce's sobs in the black cotton of her cardigan, to feel the shape of Luce's whole-again skull in her hands. If it were Iris, her Facebook would be memorialized with love from strangers. If it were Iris, there would be more than an article in the town paper. How did Reagan never notice before how much she loved Iris? She wonders if she's ever seen Iris cry, and she cannot remember.

In the graveyard, a proper graveyard with neat white capped stones and a manicured lawn, in a graveyard unlike the Hallow, as the casket descends into the ground, there is a hysteric moment when Reagan believes it is all a trick. A magician will step out from behind a tombstone and open the coffin. Luce will sit up and dust the mortician's powder off herself. She will be alive and whole like a woman on stage who'd been sawed in half, and the magician will take her hand and help her climb up onto the trimmed lawn. They will raise their interlocked fingers into the air and Luce will say, “Oh my darlings, it was just a trick. Don't tell me you actually believed it?”

But the coffin lowers, and lowers, and then rests at the bottom of the hole, and Luce is still dead. Dirt clots thunk against the casket, and Luce is still dead. The magician takes a bow with his bloody saw, and Luce is still dead. The trick of it is that it isn’t a trick at all, that it was never meant to be. The stage lights flicker off, and still, the audience stands, and claps, and claps, and claps.

Author photo by Paulius Musteikis.