Prologue
FOR WEEKS AFTER THE DAY RILEY FRASER DISAPPEARED—A cold Saturday in March that seemed ordinary in every other way—people thought he would come back.
It’s not that bad things never happened in Montgomery Falls. There was the schoolteacher who poisoned her husband with arsenic in 1919 and the textile mill fire of ’44—the one that killed thirteen men. There was the man who died on the old rail bridge and the university student who went for a walk five years ago and never came back—the one a group of kids found near the spot where chimney swifts nest in the thousands.
But those things were few and far between, spread far enough apart that they didn’t threaten the town’s reputation as good and safe.
When bad things did happen, they certainly didn’t happen to boys like Riley; they didn’t happen to boys who shone so bright the whole town waited to see what their futures held.
And so Montgomery Falls rallied.
There were search parties and flyers.
Announcements and pleas for information.
There were public meetings and Facebook groups and vigils as Riley’s father flew in from Toronto and offered a reward so large that Riley’s face was on the national news.
But as the days stretched out, as the river rose with snowmelt and swelled up past its banks, the rumors started.
What if Riley Fraser wasn’t as perfect as he seemed?
Maybe he had gotten a girl into trouble. In fact, hadn’t something happened just before he disappeared—some sort of incident at a party?
Maybe he was still upset about his parents’ divorce—a split so contentious that it had been the talk of Montgomery Falls for over a year. Everyone knew Riley went a little wild after his father left. Everybody said that the divorce was proof that no matter how much money you had—and some people claimed the Frasers could buy and sell half the town if they wanted to—there were some things you couldn’t fix.
Wasn’t Riley one of the kids who found that university student up by the mill a few years ago? Riley and his brother and that Montgomery girl from New York. What if something like that changed you? Wormed its way in and hollowed you out.
And if all of that wasn’t enough, plenty of people remembered what Riley had been like when his family first moved to town. Quiet and skinny and just a bit odd. A far cry from the charismatic, popular boy who went for a walk in the woods one day and didn’t come back.
It didn’t take Riley’s mother long to stop leaving the house. It took even less time for his father to fly back to his new life in Toronto, leaving Riley’s brother—two years older and as dark as Riley was golden—to drop out of college and move home.
More than 900 miles away, I knew none of this.
I hadn’t spoken to Riley Fraser since the summer I turned twelve. Not since the day he kissed me—a first kiss that tasted like lucky pennies and grape bubble gum—on the old swing on my aunt’s front porch. Not since the day he figured out what I really am.
I didn’t know Riley was missing or that his photo was on posters from the border of Maine to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Even if I had known, there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done.
More than 900 miles away, my own world was crumbling.
Now, of course, it’s different.
Ask me where I was when Riley Fraser disappeared.
I can’t tell you.
I don’t know where I was.
Or what I was doing.
Or who I was with.
But ask me what happened to Riley Fraser—ask me that, and I’ll tell you everything.
One
BAD GIRLS GO TO NEW YORK. I SAW THAT ON A T-SHIRT once. I had been wandering around a street fair with Lacey when she spotted it on a vendor’s cart. She reached past me, careful not to let her arm brush mine, lifted the shirt, and then held it up to her chest. The guy behind the table tried to convince her that purple was her color, that the shirt looked so great against her skin that he’d practically give it away—as long as she took his number at the same time.
Things like that are always happening to Lacey.
“Aren’t you the one who’s usually giving it away?” I asked, rolling my eyes skyward as I tried to bring her down a peg or two.
“Jealous?” she retorted.
“Not even a little.”
It was fine if she saw through the lie. For someone who seems to have everything and has always been able to tell people exactly what she wants, Lacey may be the most insecure person I’ve ever met. My jealousy reminds her that she’s doing okay, that things are on track, that people want to be her even if she desperately wants to be someone else.
If Lacey’s life were a movie, I’d be the plucky sidekick. The short, fat redhead who provides comic relief and moral support without ever stealing the scenes. The one always standing just a little bit behind her in Instagram pics.
And that suits me just fine.
At least it had. Back when it seemed like there was safety in Lacey’s shadow, when being near someone with a personality that big allowed me to be part of things without ever drawing too much attention to myself.
Before it had all backfired and my entire life blew up.
From where I’m sitting right now—eight rows back on a bus that smells like week-old pizza and dirty socks—that T-shirt had gotten it wrong: Bad girls don’t go to New York. Bad girls get put on a Greyhound back to a place they’d rather forget.
The bus slows and pulls into a gas station with peeling paint and a hand-lettered sign advertising live bait. Stop forty-three, I think as a trickle of people climb aboard and search for spots.
Up until now, I’ve been lucky: I scored a pair of seats at the start and somehow—possibly through a combination of guarded posture, prayer, and the sound of the Violent Femmes blaring from my earbuds—have managed to hold them for the first ten hours of the trip.
But luck deserts me as a plump woman with gray hair stops in the middle of the aisle and shoots me a friendly smile. The scent of vanilla wafts from her like perfume as she glances from my face to the backpack on the empty seat next to me.
When I don’t immediately make room, the friendly smile slips a notch. It doesn’t disappear completely, though, and she doesn’t keep walking.
I hesitate a second longer before pulling my bag onto my lap. As the woman lowers herself next to me, I tug the sleeves of my shirt down as far as they’ll go and then hunch in on myself, trying to make my body as small as possible. Lacey calls it my “subway slump.” Also good for crowded shopping malls, the hallway between classes, and apparently, the bus from New York to Canada.
But there’s only so much you can do when you’re big. You can twist and contort all you want, but volume is volume, and with both of us fat—“overweight,” my dad always corrects, as if that somehow sounds better—a trickle of sweat forms where our hips press against each other.
Before long, my shoulders start to ache from the effort of holding my torso as still as a statue, and eventually, the distance between New York and where I am now—not to mention all of the hours and weeks it took to get to this point—catches up with me. I slip a little farther down in my seat, and as the bus makes its way across Maine, my eyelids get heavy and then heavier.
Eventually, I close my eyes. I close my eyes and pull in a deep breath and—