Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Not that it was the first time someone had asked if she worked. It starts early. Fourteen on the sidewalk after the movie let out, waiting for Petra’s mom. A car pulled up close and the driver—some guy with a scrubby moustache and the ubiquitous baseball cap.

“You girls want to party?”

Jen giggled, and Petra said something like, Um. I don’t know? Her voice weak-sounding, the way it rose at the end. The guy pulled away without saying anything else.

“He was kind of cute,” Jen said.

This was how it used to be. You are both sixteen. You will be an actress. You will be a world traveler. You will direct great films, or write epic novels. You will fuck a million beautiful men. Just for now, though, you’re lying together on an air mattress in a backyard and listening to a mix tape you have listened to a thousand times already and which has been distorted by all those listenings and by the cheap cassette deck in the car, and by the heat of summer. For twenty years afterward you will keep the tape, and when you listen to it, and hear the familiar distortions that time and repetition make, it will break your heart a tiny little bit.

When you’re sixteen, though, that doesn’t matter, because you’ll be out of here pretty soon, and mix tapes are easy to make and easy to lose.

Jen says, “This is the start of a montage. Like. The opening part.”

And yes, Petra thinks. Because these are the sharp, poignant scenes that spark the story, and what begins with two sixteen-year-old girls pledging their eternal ambition and their absolute affection will, in fact, end somewhere else entirely.

This is true.

But this was how it ended up happening. In July there are parties in someone’s woodlot or in a gravel pit where even on a hot night the air is cool and clammy. Some girl was playing Bon Jovi and someone else insisted, noisily, on Guns N’ Roses. There are two guys. Chris with the startling dark eyes and the buffalo plaid, his chin angry with pimples, drinking Kokanee or Carling High Test. He’s brought a friend, Eric, whose eyes are not so startling but who is otherwise identical, down to the High Test. Eric was obviously instructed to entertain Petra while Chris chats with Jen, and Petra is aware of this.

For these reasons she shotguns the gin she stole from her parents, and is surly, and thinks, This is just so stupid , but Eric sticks with her. Jen and Chris move farther away, and a little closer to one another, then farther again from where Petra sits on the hood with her attendant Eric talking about Guns N’ Roses, who suck.

Jen says something Petra can’t hear, but she knows what’s happening because she’s seen it before, when Jen was faced with any number of men, gas station attendants, and waiters, with the boys in their Consumer Education class, with Petra’s own younger brother. His looks were always plaintive when Jen came to dinner, with her very blue eyes, and her very dark hair, and her translucent skin, the fine, long bones of her fingers, her narrow ankles, the pale stem of her wrist.

“So, what’s going on with you?” Eric tries again.

“Just. Stuff. Summer stuff.”

“Cool. Cool,” he says, then, “Yeah.” Then, “So you hear about that girl?”

“At the Petro-Can?”

“No. She was off the trail at Skutz Falls. Don’t know how long she’d been there, but someone saw her on the highway a few days before. It’s pretty stupid, you know, it’s pretty stupid to go out there alone.”

“I guess,” she says.

“I heard her neck was—”

Petra listens for a few minutes longer than she can stand about what happened to the girl.

Abruptly she has to pee, so she explains to Eric, who is like, Um, okay, and she knows he’s happy to interrupt their conversation. Petra walks through the long, spindly shadows the bonfire casts among the trees, and though the night is very dark around her, she keeps her back to the light and pushes through the bush. She can feel around her the night that engulfs them, the deep reaches of the island’s interior, its valleys and mountain ranges. And she thinks, as she often does—because this scene is not singular, but often repeated that summer—about how far she would have to walk to reach the dark places of the island. How long, she wonders, would it take to become lost?

She’d walked the trail to Skutz Falls a dozen times. She’d gone on field trips there and camped with Jen, hanging out on beach towels by the river.

For a moment she hears—as though she was still in the beige-velvet Reliant—the sound of a door locking and unlocking, locking and unlocking.

When she got back, Petra was happy she couldn’t find Eric anywhere. She crawled into the back seat of Jen’s car and put her head down on a bunched-up sweatshirt that smelled of Cool Coconut Teen Spirit. She sank into the uncomfortable, paralyzed state that is necessary when one tries to sleep in the damp backseat of a Plymouth Horizon, but she did not sleep. Time passed quickly and slowly and quickly again, so when she closed her eyes, “Patience” was still playing on the tinny speakers of a car somewhere nearby, and when she opened them it was “Stairway to Heaven.” Between closing and opening her eyes she had lived only a few, fretful moments.

The night was short, though, and when the sky lightened she got out of the car and walked past sleeping-bagged bodies in the beds of pickup trucks or curled as she had been in the back seats of cars—though not alone.

Jen must be somewhere among them, in the back of Chris’s truck, or lying on a tarp on the other side of the fire. Petra decided, That’s enough, fuck it , and wrote a note to leave on the dashboard. Going home. I hope you had a really really really great time with Chris . She followed the rutted driveway from the pit to the road where, under the first yellow stain of dawn, she saw a girl. It was Jen.

“Hey!” Petra shouted. “Jen! Wait for me!”

The girl didn’t move, so she shouted again, and then a car left the pit, gravel popping like gunshots. Petra glanced upward without thinking to see the stars wink out as the sky turned from black to blue. When she looked down again, Jen was gone. The car stopped and someone’s older brother asked if she wanted a ride back into town.

Petra tried to explain about the note, but by August Jen didn’t have any time. She moved in with the Parkinsons to look after their three kids when Mr. Parkinson headed to Yellowknife for three weeks a month. After the kids came Chris, and after Chris there was Jen’s mother, and after that it might be Petra, if she was lucky.

It didn’t matter, she told herself, because sometime soon Jen would call. They’d escape together in the car, and if they saw a girl hitchhiking, Petra promised herself, they’d pick her up. She would make Jen do it, before it was too late.

Jen never called. Petra finally caved on the last weekend before she left for university, and Jen agreed, if reluctantly, because she had to work six days that week, and it was going to be Chris’s birthday soon.

They drove for two hours to an empty beach with a spiral slide and a tire swing. They ate jelly worms and drank Orange Crush and drove home just before sunrise.

Petra saw the girl first. She was a slightly darker shade of gray than the predawn highway.

“Let’s pick her up.”

“What? No. Do you know her?”

“Just once? Okay?”

They reached her, their headlights sliding across her pale face—the dark hair, the skinny limbs in denim—and Jen, still bristling, pulled over onto the shoulder.

Petra opened the door and got out.

“Hey!” she called back. “You need a ride?”

So quiet on the shoulder that when she heard a crow overhead she glanced up. When she looked back, the girl was gone.