I imagine the woman as I drive, but the flash of the memory is already getting hazy. Like when you wake up from a nightmare and your brain deletes every scary image so you can go back to sleep.
I make it home without anyone commenting on where I was. Aemond curls into me as I drop into the kind of exhausted sleep that can only come when you realize you’re not going to die tonight.
Five
I wake to the sound of my phone vibrating with texts.
Head aching from stress and lack of sleep, I roll over and grab my phone. Aemond mews to get out of my bedroom. Usually I’d follow my prince’s demands first, but something compels me toward my phone.
I never have texts coming in as soon as my phone goes off do-not-disturb mode.
When I see the text previews, I furrow my brow.
None of the names are my friends. They’re…acquaintances. People who sometimes join lunch with Paisley and the gang and me. Students from drama class. Students from other schools who come to Paisley’s parties.
For a moment, I consider clearing the text notifications and burrowing under my covers. Someone must’ve figured out I wasn’t at Paisley’s camping trip and now everyone is mocking me all at once.
But then a text comes in from Owen.
OWEN:Holy shit E google your friends
I google Paisley’s name first.
There isn’t much. Mostly, it’s old tabloids talking about Mrs. Horne taking young Paisley and Beck to the Kids’ Choice Awards or other premieres over the years. One or two local papers talking about theater productions she’s been in.
It’s all too innocent. My chest tightens with each wrong headline.
I knock on the wall between Owen’s and my rooms. “Owen, what are you talking about?”
He doesn’t reply, but his heavy footsteps sound as he moves through his room. I keep scrolling.
Leslie Van Dutch’s daughters attend…
Leslie Van Dutch’s daughters wear…
But these are all so old. Even sorting the headlines by recent isn’t showing anything Owen would text me over.
My door whines. Aemond springs out to freedom. I whirl around.
Owen is ghost white. “It’s on KTLA.”
My heartbeat picks up as I type in her name and the station. I don’t know why Owen can’t say it out loud.
“I’m so sorry, Em,” he mutters. “Do you want me to…?”
I don’t hear what he offers to do. Because I found it.
My phone clatters onto the floor.
REMAINS OF GIRLS, INCLUDING ’80S ICON LESLIE VAN DUTCH’S DAUGHTER, PAISLEY HORNE, FOUND IN KINGSTON NATIONAL PARK
Six
I don’t retain much of the weekend. It’s a series of the same information confirmed seemingly every hour in a different form. I read through all my texts from my classmates in a fog in my room, waiting for my parents to burst through the door and try to untangle the emotional mess of it all. By Saturday night, the local news has picked up the story, airbrushed anchors out on the scene near a taped-off portion of woods. Woods that stretch into the same road I was on Friday night, hallucinating a woman in the road because I was too tired. There are interviews with park rangers, other campers, wilderness experts. A ranger found their bodies at the bottom of a small cliff, already starting to be picked apart by scavenging animals. Opal’s and Harlow’s bodies, anyway. They found Paisley’s hair and a trail of blood, but they’re still searching for her body, hoping to find it before the winter. My parents and Owen watch the news on the couch together, the takeout we thought we could eat getting cold on the coffee table in front of us. Mom holds my hand the whole time, but I can’t feel anything. They must’ve died long after Paisley sent her text, but there’s no real way for me to know.
I have to leave the room when they saymissing body parts. But even with my door closed, I can still hear the drone of the news and the murmurs of Owen and my parents talking.
It’s all deemed a horrible accident, likely caused by hiking irresponsibly at night and not knowing the terrain.
