Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

gust of wind sends them whirling madly past.
    Yes, a jealous son. I’ll give the kidnapper a son, and I’ll make him jealous. Our abductor did have a son, according to the papers, so it isn’t much of a stretch. All his life this son has envied the two little girls his father abducted and adored, the girls he preferred to his own child. The girls with whom his father shared his final days—who, afterward, were on TV, in the papers, everywhere, while he was forgotten, living in his grandparents’ trailer, not even sharing his father’s last name. The girls who stole his father. He’s always wanted to make them pay.
    The sorority fund-raiser settles obediently into the background, along with Delia and the faint strains of the landlady’s television in the room below mine.
    I will start with snow. The jealous son. In a trailer. In the snow.
    *   *   *
    When Brad texts me later that week on a gloomy February afternoon, inviting me to the local pool hall, I agree to tear myself from my computer and go. In addition to the sequel, I have been working on the final revisions of my scholarly book. It’s basically my dissertation. To have had it accepted by a major university press so swiftly on the heels of landing my first job is wildly impressive in this field. It’s good enough for tenure, which is years away. It’s the Oscar of academe, practically; it makes me a rising star. This is not a secret, though I am quiet about it and self-deprecating. The department is officially enthusiastic, but I detect more complicated emotions in some quarters. I have a not-altogether-paranoid suspicion that Kate LeBlanc is rallying her forces against me. That’s to be expected. You’re supposed to pay your dues in this world, and I have not. No doubt there is concern that I will make demands, expect preferential treatment. Or that I will leave for a more prestigious job.
    I might do any of these things. I like being a rising star.
    Only Brad seems truly happy for me. We spent an inordinate amount of time at the pool hall our first semester, but we haven’t been back since we returned from Christmas break. I have missed our excursions. Brad doesn’t truly know me; I’ve kept many secrets from him. He knows the basic outline of my childhood, but he thinks I’ve put the abduction behind me; he knows about the book but not the movie. He knows me better than anyone else, though, that’s for sure, and he is the only person in my life capable of reflecting back at me a recognizable Lois; or, at least, a Lois I would like to be.
    As I shut down the computer and tidy my desk, I come across Sean’s latest offering. He has been slipping photocopies under my office door: press from my abductee days. The first one sent me reeling. It was from the Hartford Courant: “Local Girl Returned Home, Apparently Unharmed,” reads the front-page headline. There’s a grainy picture of me walking with my parents, face in shadow. My mother looks regal and defiant and warlike; my father looks folded inward, absent. I am blurry; you really couldn’t say anything about me at all, based on this photo. The most recent one is earlier, and it’s from the local Gazette: “Community Rallies in Search for Missing Girl.”
    I’ve seen the clippings before, but it’s been a while. They’re as jarring as ever, referring to a world in which I was central but absent. My parents never spoke much about those weeks. “We were terrified,” they said, but I have never been able to grasp their terror, to imagine Miranda and Stephen Lonsdale stricken by fear and loss. It’s not that I don’t believe it; I simply cannot see it. “We looked everywhere,” they said. Where? I have tried to picture them in sturdy shoes and jeans, sleepless and haggard, searching the woods, circling the pond, roaming the village—while I, miles away, settled all too readily into a new life. I resent Sean for reviving this fruitless speculation, this belated guilt—but the