Lost Girls Read Free

heels into his back. The screaming doesn't stop even after he pulls back from her and tells her it's okay, it's over, he's sorry, he won't try it again. Checks over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage to see if her sounds have brought anyone down to the beach but he can't tell, his view blinded by the lowering sun. When he turns his head back again the girl is struggling to stand up, one hand waving in the air and the other pushing down on the side. The shadow of her cut against the dim sky, looking down at him with both recognition and horror. Then, in the same moment --in the same half moment--that she gets to her feet the canoe moves into a fluid spin that pushes them both below the water.
    Cold.
    It's the cold that shocks the blood in their hearts and cramps their muscles as soon as they begin thrashing for the surface. The boy keeps his eyes closed but reaches up, searching for the overturned canoe and soon finding it. With a single pull his head breaks through into the air and he takes in a hungry gasp. How long had he been down there? Five seconds? Long enough to make his chest ache. For a time he holds his arms over the slippery hull and simply breathes. Then he remembers the girl.
    Calls her name once, but doesn't shout it.
    Nothing.
    No sound but the lapping of water against his shoulders. Where was she? Both of them good swimmers but she better than he, faster and with far greater endurance. She should have been beside him, spitting water in his face, or a hundred yards off kicking her way to shore. But she wasn't. The boy knows he has to go under to find her, but it feels so cold down there. A difference of several degrees between armpits and toes. It's the cold that frightens him.
    The first time he goes down only a few feet before twisting back up, eyes closed against the imagined sight of bug-eyed snakes and glowing, tentacled jellyfish. Gnashes at the air.
    On the second dive he takes as large a breath as his lungs will allow and flutters down against his own buoyancy, eyes still closed, hands reaching before him. Then he feels her. Not any actual part of her body, but the vibrations of her struggle radiating out through the water. Down, farther down. When he begins to feel the muscles in his jaw ache to pull his mouth open he tells himself to turn back but nothing obeys and he goes two strokes farther yet.
    And finds her arm. Slides his hand up and bracelets her wrist with his fingers. Then he kicks like hell.
    But the girl feels heavy, heavier than she should, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand. The pain that comes with the lack of oxygen now a bell tolling in the boy's head but he doesn't let her go, pushing against the weight with the last of his strength until his free arm knocks against the underside of the canoe.
    Even with the leverage of his fingers locked around the hull's edge the girl is still too heavy to bring up with him. His shoulder strains, his toes brush through her hair but she moves no farther. Then he feels a tug. A sharp force from below her that nearly takes him down too. Then another.
    It's not that the girl is too heavy for him to pull up. Something else is pulling the other way.
    With the third tug she's gone.
    The boy pulls his head through to the light, counts to two, and goes under once more. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . This time, when he's down as far as he can go and moves his arms out to feel for her, there's nothing there.
    He tells himself not to do it, that it will be too horrible and do no good, but he does anyway. He looks.
    What he notices first is that the opening of his eyes also opens his ears, because it is only then that he hears his cousin's scream. Then he sees her scream, her gaping mouth blowing a diminishing stream of bubbles up toward him before breaking soundlessly at the surface. But as she runs out of air her scream becomes something worse, a moaning inhalation of the lake's purple weight. Eyes a wild white,