Dark and Shallow Lies
Ginny Myers Sain
The last time I saw my best friend, she called me a pathetic liar and then she punched me in the mouth. The shock of it almost kept me from feeling anything until it was over. And I had no idea what Elora was thinking in that last moment. Because she didn’t say. And I’m not a mind reader.
Honey is. My mother was. I guess. All the women in my family, right up to me.
But not me.
I’m thinking of that night last summer as I stand on the front porch of the Mystic Rose and stare at Elora’s missing poster, trying to catch my breath. I’m wondering why they chose that picture. The one with her eyes half-closed. She hated that picture.
Jesus.
She hates that picture.
I’ve been steeling myself for this moment since I got that phone call back in February. Trying to imagine what it would be like to come home and step off the boat into a La Cachette without Elora. And I knew it would be bad. But I hadn’t been prepared for the poster.
The words MISSING GIRL printed in red caps.
The sheriff’s phone number.
My chest tightens. I drop my backpack to sink down and sit on the front steps so I can pull myself together. Clear my head of that weird flash that hit me out of nowhere.
Elora running from someone.
Being chased through the rain.
Swallowed up by the dark.
A few seconds to shake off that terror. Her terror. That’s all I need. Then surely I’ll be able to breathe again.
The screen door slams, and I hear footsteps on the porch behind me. It’s Evie. “Hey, Grey.” She perches beside me on the steps, like a bird, and offers me half a stick of gum dug out of the pocket of her cutoff shorts. “Miss Roselyn said you was comin’ this mornin’. You just get in?”
La Cachette, Louisiana, is the self-proclaimed “Psychic Capital of the World,” so I always find it odd that every summer visit starts with people firing off questions they should already know the answers to.
How was school dis year?
Still makin’ good grades?
Gotcha a boyfriend yet?
“Yeah.” I unwrap Evie’s offering and nod toward the backpack at my feet. “Got off the mail boat a few minutes ago.” The gum’s a little stale, and I wonder how long she’s been carrying it around.
“We didn’t know if you’d come this year . . .” Evie’s voice trails off, and she glances at the curling edges of the MISSING poster. At the picture in the center. Half-closed eyes and a long dark ponytail. That bright blue tank top with the faded yellow stars. And a knock-you-on-your-ass smile.
Elora.
“She’s my best friend,” I say. “My –” But I can’t choke out the words.
“Your twin flame,” Evie finishes for me, and I nod. She settles on to the step and slips her hand into mine. “So you had to come.”
Evie’s gentle sweetness is as familiar as the worn smoothness of the porch step. And the smell of the river. I’m glad she was the first one to find me.
Sweat stings the corners of my eyes, and I pull up the collar of my T-shirt to dab it away. Barely eight thirty in the morning and already a million degrees with 500 percent humidity. I lived down here full-time till I was almost nine years old, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but it always takes me a while to reacclimate after spending the school year up in Arkansas with my dad. I mean, it’s hot there, too . . . but not like this.
Nowhere is hot like this. Or wet like this. Spending the summer in La Cachette is like living inside someone’s mouth for three months out of the year.
I pull my eyes away from Elora’s picture in time to watch the back half of a big black snake disappear into a clump of tall sedge grass beyond the boardwalk. It’s too far away to say for sure if it’s a moccasin. But I figure it probably is. That thick body gives it away. And I know they’re always out there, sliding back and forth beneath our feet like the slow roll of the tides. Every once in a while, one of them finds its way up on to the boardwalk and into someone’s house, where it meets its doom at the business end of a long-handled hoe. Or a shovel.
I don’t like to think about the snake, or where it might be heading, but it’s better than staring at that poster while the words missing girl burn deep into my brain.
“You okay, Grey?” Evie asks. She’s twisting a strand of almost-white-blonde hair around one finger.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just weird, you know? Everything’s different –”
“And nothing’s different,” she finishes.
And that’s it exactly.
Evie reaches down to scratch at a bug bite on one bare foot, and I can’t help noticing how long her legs have gotten since last summer. Plus, she’s gotten boobs. She’s finally growing up.
Evie turned sixteen last September, the youngest of us all . . . but not by much.
People down here call us the Summer Children. We started our lives as a complete set.
Ten. The most perfect number. The number of divine harmony. The number at the heart of the universe. Ten commandments. Ten plagues of Egypt.
Ten babies born to eight different families.
A real population boom for little bitty La Cachette. One hundred tiny fingers and one hundred tiny toes. All of us arriving that same year, between the vernal equinox in March and the autumnal equinox in September.