The Girls Are Never Gone by Sarah Glenn Marsh

Author:Sarah Glenn Marsh [Glenn Marsh, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

I DON’T GO BACK to sleep that night.

Instead, I grab my cameras and stare drowsily at the recording of the empty hallway, squinting extra hard at each shiver of static, each subtle shift in pixels as clouds skid over the moon. But there’s nothing even close to what I saw on the ceiling in my dream. Not even a whisper of water falling onto the new carpet.

As a pale, pearly dawn breaks over the lake, Waffles and I head down to the dock, where I’ll get the strongest signal for my phone call to the medical supply company.

With static-riddled elevator music playing in my ear as I wait to be connected with a representative, I scan the shoreline. There’s no sign of the heron that watched me with its baleful yellow eyes on my first day here.

I try to remember the last time I saw any bird fishing this vast stretch of water since that day. I can’t.

My gaze strays to the middle of the lake. There’s no eerie light drawing me closer, no floating feathered bodies. Yet a little part of me wouldn’t have been surprised to see them, not when I still can’t explain what touched my neck last night. Or the face in the mirror.

Waffles sniffs the grass near the rising shoreline now creeping toward the house. This lake, the real lake, isn’t nearly as sinister as the massive, restless one in my dreams; the water level must swell like this every summer when there’s heavy rain, and my subconscious made it into something more.

Still, the water is closer to the dock than I’ve seen it, bringing the old rowboat almost level with the wood boards where I pace.

The boat, too, looks a lot like the one in my dream, which makes sense; my mind drew on familiar things to convince me it was real. Brains are jerks. It’s a fact.

The rep picks up and begins to ask me questions. I mumble drowsily through my answers, my gaze now straying to the far shore near the blackberry thicket.

There’s no one watching me. No sodden, decaying bodies. The dead deer is gone, too, likely dragged into the forest by hungry coyotes. Somehow, my mind must have turned the deer’s corpse into the bodies of those girls, watching me because I hadn’t taken time to call animal control or give the creature a proper burial or anything. Dream guilt—fun.

With each passing minute, the events of last night grow hazier, shrouded by distance and doubt. By the time I’ve hung up with the rep and my new insulin pump is set to arrive in a few days—New Hope is too rural for overnight shipping—I feel tired, but that’s nothing unusual. At least, not for a type 1 diabetic who’s used to making a hundred extra decisions a day and trying to predict the future for my own health. Not to mention the insomnia.

The sun warms my face, and I find an old tennis ball to throw for Waffles, enjoying the balmy morning air before heading back into the house’s dim, oppressive interior.

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