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chitown-tea · 5 years

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Girls of Summer

by Elton Saint James

Summers in the South feel especially lazy because of the acute heat of longer days and shorter muggy nights. Daddy always said nothing good came from those smoldering months when all of us kids were out of school. We spent our days in a daze, wandering around the neighborhood, dragging our feet as the heat rolled off of the black asphalt roads. The older we got, the more trouble we wanted to get into. We longed for nights spent down on Blackwater River, cans of warm beer in our hands, boys with thick accents trying to get us to go skinny dipping. It was out of our reach, though, being only fifteen that summer. “That summer” being the one when all of those girls went missing. It wasn’t a quick thing, either. One by one, they marched into the woods along our small town and were never heard from again. It was a mystery that even our heroic sheriff-elect couldn’t solve, despite the panic of the taxpayers. “We’re following every path possible to find these girls, we want them home safe.” He had said at one of those press conferences after the third girl vanished. Eventually, it was whispered and settled upon that the girls had joined some sort of a cult ran by a satanic leader and ran away.

Looking back on it now, I don’t think anyone truly believed that rumor. It was like a blanket that the adults had knitted and covered us all with. The material they made it with was coarse, though, and left us kids itching and trying to claw our way out. We knew these girls, there was no way they would up and leave their friends, their futures, their lives — for what? A chance at meeting a ragged hair hippy in a fictitious palace in the woods? Say what you want about the south, but our mamas taught us to stay away from weaselly men. The kind that loiter outside of the skating rink, trying to offer you a ring pop or puff of a cigarette. We just weren’t raised that way.

Haley Jean was the first to go missing — May 29, 2001 — one day before summer break started. It had rained all day, leaving the dusty dirt roads a long string of muddy mess. These were the days that Haley Jean, the twins, and I would peddle our bikes as quickly as possible to 2148 Pinewood Circle. A small townhouse full of small knick-knacks that Mr. Walker had accumulated from yard sales, thrift stores, and storage unit auctions throughout the years. Sometimes, when we had sleepovers, I would wait for the others to fall asleep — and I would sneak out into the living room, just to look at those little figurines of his. I’d run my fingers across them and try to imagine where they originally came from. I did this alone, in the beginning, until Mr. Walker caught me in my PJ clad glory. I was so shocked when he saw me standing there, in the dark, that I blurted out the truth. All he did was laugh and say, “That’s exactly why I buy them, I daydream when I see them and try to imagine what lives they’ve lead.” From then on, it was like our little secret. Sitting together on the couch and pointing out our favorites, trying to come up with complex stories for them. I liked Mr. Walker, he felt like a second dad to me, even if he was a little bit weird.

It was like every other after-school hangout, you know? We passed around a cigarette we had stolen from Mr. Walker’s office drawer, blowing the smoke out of the twins open window. It was customary for one of us to start off the daily gossip session: ‘Did you see Becky’s boobs? They grew three sizes overnight, cross my heart!’ ‘Johnny’s mama told my mama that he has mono and that’s why he’s been out for a week!’ It went back and forth, like crickets holding a conversation in the dead of night. We laughed, smoked, and tried to make sense of life in that bedroom. I can see her, Haley Jean, so clearly when I think about that pink room. The way her chocolate hair was perfectly french braided that day with her favorite white ribbon attached, how her clothes smelled like fresh linen and cotton, and the soft cadence of her voice. The twins, Joanna and Jade, were my friends — but, Haley Jean? She was my best friend.

Haley Jean was always the first to depart from these powwows, considering her mama was the strictest woman in the county. “Now, Haley Jean, you better come straight home! There is no tellin’ what creeps are lurkin’ around this town. It’s gone to hell in a handbasket, I know that much,” Mrs. Johnson would always tell her daughter. She was the kind of woman who watched Unsolved Mysteries and felt the undying need to insist that those sorts of things would happen in our town one day. There was no way for her to know that on her trek home, her only child would be slip into the void, reduced to only memories. It wouldn’t be until much later that a witness came forward, stating they saw the fifteen-year-old girl put her bicycle into the trunk of a honda accord, and ride off into the warm Florida night with a man.

The missing signs went up on the barren power poles almost immediately. It was like a rapid epidemic, the fear that took over our town. Mamas were outraged at the idea of their babies being snatched and demanded that their children be inside of the house no later than 4:30 PM. The skating rink almost went out of business, considering it looked like a ghost town installment. I don’t really remember crying much during that time. I wasn’t like the others, I knew that Haley Jean was still alive. I was convinced she would come walking out of the Tom Thumb at the corner of our street, licking her lips to taste the sugar of the fountain mountain dew. “You don’t understand,” I would say to anyone who doubted me, “We have a connection. She’s out there, I can feel it.”

Mama wanted to send me to a psychiatrist after two months of having night terrors about the whole ordeal. Daddy didn’t let her take it that far, though. Instead, he let me find solace in Joanna and Jade. The only two people that I had left, at that point. It was mid-July, after three other girls went missing, by the time my parents let me stay the night at the Walker’s house again. I think they were too afraid that we would try to sneak out, try to find Haley Jean on our own. They weren’t wrong in their suspicions, though. It started like this: we were smoking our nightly cigarette, our feet hanging off the side of one of their twin sized beds. Joanna, the alpha twin as I like to call her, suggested we have our own three woman search party.

“What's the point? Haven’t there been, like, a zillion search parties lookin’ for her anyway?” Jade counteracted her sister’s idea, snatching the cigarette away from me. It was always like this, one would propose an idea and the other would shut it down with little to no consideration. Each thought their idea was better than the others. It was always my job to be the mediator, Haley Jean backing me up. At this stage of the argument, I decided to sit back and let them hash it out.

“I can guarantee you there is one place they haven’t thought to look.”

“Alright, genius. What spot could there possibly be in this small, shitbag town that the sheriff's department hasn’t thought to comb over?”

“Two words: Hickey Cove.”

I don’t remember exactly the chain of events after that moment, other than the gasp of air that left my lungs. It felt like I was going to pass out. How fucking stupid could I be? Of course, no one would think to look out there, unless they were a teenager. The adults of the town didn’t know our pubescent secret, no one dared to snitch. Hickey Cove was as elusive as a location can be. Settled on a sandbar down Blackwater River, assessable down the town’s backroads, nestled between dense bushes and trees that grew in strange patterns. The only way you could find it is if you were given specific directions, which none of us had. It felt like a glimmer of hope, though, like maybe we could be the heroes for once. It didn’t occur to me to stop and think, ‘why in the fresh hell would Haley Jean be hiding on a sandbar?’ I had a one track mind at that time in my life, all I could think of was: we’re going to find her.

“Oh god,” Jade eyed me, her eyebrows were doing that arching thing when someone is feeling suspicious, “Please don’t tell me you wanna actually go look for Hickey Cove.”

Joanna was quick to chime in, taking her drag of the cigarette, “Of course she does, dumbass. You know how she feels about Haley—” this is where my eyes cut to her, my expression was blank. Everyone knew how I felt about Haley Jean, it was in the way that my eyes lingered too long on her when she walked by, or the way that I wrote her five-page long notes.

“Where are your daddy’s car keys? We’re going.”

Strangely enough, it was easy to convince the twins to “borrow” their dad’s car for our misshapen adventure. That was the thing about those girls, they were so sheltered by their daddy that they would have done anything to get a rise out of him and get their kicks. It must have been hard on Mr. Walker, is the only living parent of two wild spirited teenage girls. He worked 9-9 on most days, trying to keep a roof over their heads. Thinking about how hard he had worked to afford that new car was the only thing that had a chance of holding me back. He would just have to understand, though. This was literally a matter of life or death for me. The plan was to take the car, take any and every hint we could scrape together about Hickey Cove’s location, and find Haley Jean. It was a delusional notion, that anything would be waiting for us at that sandbar. It was the only string of hope we could find hanging around, though, and we were gonna be damned if we didn’t at least try to snatch it.

Mr. Walker excused himself for bed at around 11PM, just after we all finished watching Cabin Fever. It was nearing 2AM now, a safe bet to assume that he was sound asleep, preparing for his next long day at work. According to the twins, he kept his spare keys in his private office, in the drawer just below where he kept his cigarettes. We were used to sneaking into the small space, considering our borderline addiction to smoking. As we tried our hand at stealthy walking down the steps of the old townhouse, I could hear the twins bickering about who was going to drive.

“I’m two minutes older, which means I always get dibs. Like, the universe predetermined the order. How can you argue with the universe?” I couldn’t see as we descended the dark staircase, but I could tell that Joanna was smirking. She always did when she thought she was right.

“Two minutes older and twice as dumb. Did you forget that I passed the learners permit test the first go ‘round? When did you pass yours? Oh, yeah, the second time.” I could almost feel Joanna’s newly found victory crumbling in her hands. Leave it to Jade to always come up with a better fact.

“If ya’ll wanna get technical, I’m two months older than the both of you, I’ve had more practice at driving, and I know how to do a three-point turn. I’m driving.” I could hear a conjoined defeated sigh escape the two of them — it was my turn to smirk now.

Mr. Walker’s office looked like a museum of odd things. The small trinkets on his shelves were different from the small collection in the living room. These were mundane, everyday items. A bell off of a bicycle, all rusted and barely functioning. An intricate hair clip, composed of fluttering metal butterflies with different colored wings. An eraser that claimed ‘Pine Ridge High Class of 1997’. They didn’t make any sense and I often wondered why in the hell he had them displayed in such a private place. My mind would always catalog the items as ‘sentimental’ to the man, even though that explanation never felt quite right. His old desk sat in the back corner of the room, an old computer hummed on top of it. Jade was quick to close the door behind us, not wanting to risk our voices carrying through the living room and to their father's room, which was located on the bottom floor. We all looked at each other, undoubtedly our hearts were beating at the same pace. We always talked about doing things like this. Taking something that wasn’t ours, sneaking out to do something reckless. Our teenage minds had been overflowing with possibilities for so long, but now that the time was here — we were stuck in our places.

We knew that once we opened that drawer and grabbed those keys, there was no turning back. That scared the absolute hell out of us.

It was Joanna who moved first, always the bold one to break the silence. It shouldn’t have surprised us, yet Jade and I looked at each other like we just saw a ghost. This was actually happening. We closed in around the wooden desk, it was covered in stacks of papers that had typewritten words cluttering them, sloppily bound by pieces of twine. Later, I would find this strange when reflecting on that night. Mr. Walker worked at a paper plant, he didn’t have any need for so many documents. My eyes trailed and stuck on Joanna’s fingers, delicately tracing the handle of the drawer. The moment was so dramatic, it felt like one of those scenes in scary movies, where you just knew the characters were going to be caught red-handed. A creak escaped the old drawer as she pulled it open, I was positive it was going to give us away. We stood there, basking in the silence, trying to catch any hint of Mr. Walker waking up and barging in. Our eyes trailed from the closed door back to the drawer once we thought the coast was clear. There they were: the ring that held a key with the Honda logo and a smaller key with a tiny label that said ‘unit 236’. I felt my heart beating, like a hummingbird’s wings. It wasn’t because of the keys, though. It was the sight of the lock of deep brown hair perfectly placed next to a stark white ribbon.

#category: literature #type: short story #genre: fiction #contributor: elton saint james

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