I feel my front pocket for my phone, the phone we take turns carrying in case someone gets hurt and we need help. Then I remember: my phone is cracked.
She’s been my best friend since she gave me her cherry cola ChapStick in the sixth grade.
If I grab the scruff of his jacket and yank, I might move him, a little, maybe. Just enough so Liv can roll and run. We can run.
I step closer. A light flickers in his eyes. Greedy. He wants us both, but he can’t hold two of us. He imagines we’ll fight.
Liv’s eyes flit over my face. Pleading.
ChapStick.
I rush him.
My fingertips graze his jacket as a glove clamps down on my ankle. I fall. My ankle snaps. The pain fills every space in my body. I hear someone howling. Me.
I turn my head. The view is different from the forest floor.
Liv rolls and scrambles to her feet. Liv is a powder-blue smudge, running and falling and running, until the crashing fades.
The man stands over me, smiling. He has small teeth like a child.
“You’ll do.”
ONE
353 Days After the Woods
Statistically speaking, girls like me don’t come back when guys like Donald Jessup take us.
According to my research, in 88.5% of all abductions, the kid is killed within the first four hours. In 76% of those cases, it’s within the first two hours. So when they found me alive after nearly two days, the reporters called it a miracle.
They liked it even better when they found out Donald Jessup didn’t want me at first. He wanted Liv. But I took her place. Not only did they have a miracle, they had a martyr. In the eleven months since the abduction, more than half of the Shiverton Star’s stories (so, thirty-two of them) have been about us. And Paula Papademetriou, who lives right here in Shiverton and anchors the evening WFYT News, still won’t leave us alone.
Liv says we must move on.
It had rained a lot that November, and everyone’s basement got water, and the high school gym flooded. The track warped in places where the water underneath forced it up, so the track team had to run in a pack all over town. Off hours and against coaches’ rules, we trained in the woods.
I think Liv reminded Donald Jessup of a deer, all knees and angles and big brown eyes. In his sick mind he thought he was the Greek hunter-god Zagreus, his avatar in Prey, which he played 24/7 in his mother’s house. Zagreus is the ancient Greek word for a hunter. My theory is Donald Jessup couldn’t get enough of virtual Prey and decided to bring the action to life.
Liv doesn’t let on that she used to be a bit of a gamer. Liv would never cop to knowing more about Prey than I do. It doesn’t fit the perfect-girl image, the maintenance of which is her mother Deborah’s full-time job. What little I know about Prey comes from my research—research that Liv wants me to stop. If Liv had her way, I’d have spent the last eleven months forgetting the woods ever happened.
Dr. Ricker, on the other hand, wants me to remember. Ricker is my new therapist, for better or for worse. The jury’s still out on that one. Mom secured my first appointment the day we got home from the Berkshires. The trip started out as “a little time off” and lasted through the second half of sophomore year and the whole summer. I felt like one of those nervous Victorian ladies hustled by my mother to the English countryside for a rest cure. Less than a week after the woods, and as soon as the cops gave us permission, Professor Mom announced a sabbatical, pulled me out of school, and closed up the house. We hightailed it out of Shiverton in time for Thanksgiving for two at the vacation home I hadn’t seen since I was nine due to Mom’s workaholic tendencies. Mom said holing up 135 miles away from Shiverton would allow the media frenzy to die down. Also, it would give me time to get myself together: stop melting down at the sight of trees and such (for the record, Western Mass was the last place I should have been. So. Many. Trees.). But clearly it was a reflexive act. She was verging on a breakdown of her own, and needed to feel I was safe. After a while, between the homeschooling and our mutual lack of any friends, I actually looked forward to my visits with Patty Petty, RN, MS, CSW. Dr. Petty (Call me Patty!) was supposed to cleanse me of the trauma that I don’t totally remember. Her expertise is expressive arts therapy, which involved staging interpretative dances of my feelings about Donald Jessup (I refused). We mostly ended up making masks out of paper and chicken wire, and drawing in what she called my art journal. I went along with it, mainly because Mom, in a weak moment during one of my crying jags, gave me her word this would be the extent of my therapy. But her word is weak. Because here I sit, as I have for all of September and October, on Elaine Ricker’s cliché of a couch, deciding how to screw with today’s template for Fixing Julia.