The Distance Between Lost and Found
Read The Distance Between Lost and Found Online
Authors: Kathryn Holmes
F
or my parents, who never stopped believing
She's alone. More alone than she's ever been. It's just her and the trees closing in and the sun beating down. The branches block her path, holding her back. The birds are laughing at her. The ground drops out from under her with no warning, and she stumbles. There's no one to catch her. She falls hard. She lies still for a moment, gasping, feeling pain and fear and hunger and panic roll across her in waves. Then she uses the nearest tree to pull herself back to her feet. She has to keep moving. No one else can help her do this. It's all up to her
.
Everything is different. The five days she's been out here are a lifetime. Before is a memory. Before thatâbarely a dream. Now, there's only ahead. One foot in front of the other. This trail will lead somewhere. It has to
.
She used to think alone was the answer. Alone would stop the whispers and the taunts. Alone couldn't get her into any more trouble. Alone meant not getting hurt. Now, she'd give anything to see another human being. To hear someone call her name
.
1T
HE LAUGHTER STARTS AS A LOW MURMUR
. H
ALLELUJAH
might not have even noticed it if it wasn't coming from a few seats down. From where he's sitting. But she hears the laughs, hears them spreading, and she knows. She's not surprised. She expects this. Still, she feels anxiety blossom.
She just wants to be invisible. He can't even let her have that.
And so she folds in on herself. She stares at the fire pit. She watches the embers glow and the sparks float up with the smoke through the opening in the gazebo ceiling. She inhales the burnt air.
She waits.
And then something hits the side of her head. It bounces off her shoulder and lands on the wooden bench next to her. She glances down. A tiny twig.
A few seconds pass, and then another twig hits her. This time, on her cheek. She ignores the muffled laughter. Refuses to look over. Tries not to react. Because that's what Luke wants.
Directly across the fire pit, their youth group director, Rich, is oblivious. He's leading campfire songs, strumming an acoustic guitar, eyes closed.
The next twig bounces off the top of Hallelujah's head. The one after that gets stuck in her hair, right by her forehead. She thinks about which is worse: brushing it away or leaving it. Then she pulls the twig loose and drops it on the ground. Her cheeks burn.
She knows she shouldn't let Luke get to her. But flicking twigs at her is just the beginning. Luke's got the other kids' attention. Next: the rumors spread. The real mocking starts. It's a chain of events he's been repeating for almost six months, a chain she doesn't know how to break.
So she does the only thing she knows how to do: she sets her face to stone and keeps her eyes on the fire.
The group keeps singing. Campfire standards. A few hymns. They all blur together in her ears, just notes and notes and notes. Singing used to be her life. She would stand in the choir room at school, in the church auditorium during Sunday services, in her backyard, in her shower, and let her pure soprano sail up to the highest notes. Music used to burst from her. She couldn't contain it.
She doesn't sing anymore. She can barely stand to listen.
When she's pretty sure Luke is done launching twigs at her, she lifts her eyes and lets her gaze travel around the circle, wooden bench to wooden bench. There are kids from her church. Kids from other churches who she knows from past youth group events, or from school. Kids she's never met before. They're all clapping. Singing. Smiling. She doesn't join in. She can't.
She doesn't want to be here, anyway. She doesn't belong here.
She closes her eyes and sees herself the way she used to be. She sees herself a year ago, on a retreat just like this one, except on a college campus instead of in the Smoky Mountains. She sees herself sitting with a group of friends. Singing every song. Cracking jokes. And then she opens her eyes, and she's back in this new version of her life, where she's alone and silent, and where she is the joke.
Rich and his guitar are replaced by the director of Hiking with Him, a clean-cut thirtysomething in cargo shorts and Tevas named Jesse. Jesse starts talking about the week ahead: daily hikes, nightly campfire circles, life lessons to be learned.
Hallelujah tunes him out. She looks up at the wooden gazebo ceiling. Knotholes. Spiderwebs. Some kind of nest in one corner. She stares at it, at all of the individual bits of brush that make up the whole, an uneven, bristly mass wedged into the eave.
She feels uneven and bristly. All the time.
She thinks about being somewhere else, anywhere else. Anywhere Luke isn't. Anywhere she doesn't have to keep reliving what happened.
And then she hears Luke's voice. She can't tune him out, no matter how much she wants to. His voice is in her head.
“Hallie! Hurry it up!” He whistles at her. Like she's a golden retriever.
She looks around. She's sitting alone. Everyone else has left. Left her sitting there. No one said her name, touched her shoulder to let her know. Or maybe someone did, and she didn't hear it, didn't feel it. Now it's only her and the dying fire.
Luke, Brad, and Jonah are standing outside the wooden gazebo. The three musketeers. When she turns her head their way, Luke says, “It's like there's no one in there, under all that hair.” He adds, speaking slowly, “Curfew. Remember? You don't want to be late.” He's so smug it hurts to look at him. Hallelujah can't believe she ever thought he was cute, with his stupid tan and his stupid shaggy brown hair and his stupid chocolate-brown eyes.
“Sorry,” she mutters, getting to her feet. It's the only word she says. She follows the musketeers back to the lodge, a few steps behind. Always a few steps behind.
H
ALLELUJAH STARES AT HERSELF IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR
. Frizzy brown hair. Dark circles under her blue eyes. An angry zit on her chin. Absolutely nothing to “hallelujah” about.
She's steeling herself to go back down the hall to the girls' side of the dorm, telling herself that being ignored won't kill her, and neither will having a few more people laugh at her, no matter how much it hurts, when a voice startles her:
“So what was all that?”
Hallelujah spins around to see a girl coming out of a toilet stall. She doesn't know this girl, but she saw her at the campfire earlier.
“What was all what?” Hallelujah knows the answer. Of course she knows. Luke. What else could it be?
And sure enough, the girl says, “The twig thing. That looked kind of annoying.”
Annoying
. One way to put it. “It's fine. It's nothing.”
The girl approaches the sink, turns the faucet, splashes her hands in the water. She doesn't use soap. She dries her hands on her jeans. “I'm Rachel.”
Hallelujah doesn't answer right away. Why should she trust this girl? With anything? Even her name? But then she decides she's being paranoid. Clearly, Luke's grapevine hasn't reached Rachel yet. “I'm Hallelujah.”
“Your name is Hallelujah? Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Huh. Are you super-religious or something?”
“No. But my parents are. And they couldn't have kids for a long time, so when I showed up, they named me Hallelujah.” She shuts her mouth abruptly. Too much information.
“So, Hallelujahâ”
“Everyone calls me Hallie.”
“Do they?” Rachel's eyes sparkle, even in the fluorescent bathroom light. She has an easy smile. For an instant, she reminds Hallelujah of Sarahâquick to laugh, to talk to someone new, to put herself out there. And the missing hits, sudden and deep. Hallelujah had a best friend, before Sarah moved to Georgia last summer and got new friends and a new life. Before Luke.
Rachel says, “I'm gonna call you Hal. If that's okay.” The last sentence is an afterthought, like asking to come into a room when you're already inside.
Surprised, Hallelujah says, “Sure.” She rolls the name around in her brain. Hal.
Hal
. It sounds kind of edgy, kind of cool.
Hallelujah is not cool. She was pretty popular at her private Christian middle school, but when she started public high school, that popularity faded, leaving her solidly middle-of-the-pack. A side effect of being the polite, rule-following girl everyone's parents loved. And of being blessed with the name Hallelujah.
Still, until everything happened with Luke in the fall, she had a social life. She had friends. Sarah, before she moved away, and Dani and Lynn, and Jonah, and her choir classmates. She was happy. That girl wouldn't recognize her now.
“So, Hal.” Rachel links her arm through Hallelujah's. Another thing Sarah used to do. It makes Hallelujah want to squirm away and hold tighter, all at once. “I heard something about a party tonight? Behind the lodge, in the woods? I heard that guy Luke's kind of the ringleader. You go to the same church, right? Where his dad's the preacher? If that twig thing really wasn't a big deal . . .” Rachel pauses, like she's giving Hallelujah a chance to take her earlier words back. Hallelujah stays quiet, so Rachel goes on, “Maybe you can show me where the party is? We can make a break for it after lights-out? I bet we could slip out this window and no one would even notice.”