Excerpt: The Lost Girls

Here’s the thing: I don’t need anyone. I taught myself how to read, I taught myself how to sew, and I taught myself how to navigate the Lord of the Flies parody that Green Lake High is. I do just fine on my own, or I would, if my cousin Lena would just leave me alone.
Take this thing that happened a couple weeks ago, right before Halloween. I’d just dropped my three kid brothers off at the elementary school, where they spent their days creating havoc and destroying lives. I was heading to school myself, walking through a little wooded area a couple blocks from school. The trees were so thick there that while I could see other people through the trees at the gates of the high school, they couldn’t see me. That was Seattle for you: lush to a fault.
The spot creeped me out, so I would have been jumpy even if the guy with the van hadn’t been watching me.
Guys watching me is nothing new. See, I developed early, and it’s gotten so I have kind of a sixth sense about it: when someone’s checking me out, it feels like a tractor beam from their eyes to mine. It feels like some endless, bottomless need, and I hate it. It happens all the time, no matter how I dress or what I look like, where I focus or how quickly I hurry through a crowd. By the time I turned 14, I’d completely stopped making eye contact with people on the street.
It didn’t always help. It sure didn’t that morning—as I hurried to cross into the open field at the lower edge of the school sports fields, the man who was watching me, standing against his van with his arms crossed over his chest, said something to me.
I didn’t hear it, and for a second I thought I should just make a break for it and run to the field. But he was cute. He was cute, OK? And guys might eye me, but they don’t talk to me. So I slowed down and put a hand behind my ear, and he crossed the street, stopping in front of me.
“You wouldn’t happen to have the time, would you?” He was a little older than I thought he’d be, a few lines starting to spread out from his eyes—like Brad Pitt, all hot in that over-40 way.
“Eight fifteen.” Which meant I was late. I fiddled with the strap on my book bag, looking at the leaves that were staining the sidewalk, blurry leaf ghosts leading me around Mr. Pitt and back to my day.
“Hey, really? Are you sure your watch isn’t fast?”
I looked up at him, and he was smiling. It increased his hotness quotient. I wondered if we could study him in Chem lab.
“No, sad to say, it’s right. My brothers are addicted to the atomic clock.” I faced facts: I had to get going. So I gave him a little smile and started to walk around him.
That’s when he reached out a hand and plucked my sleeve.
“Hey, I just want to talk to you a little. OK?” He tilted his head at me and smiled, and I could see how that might work with other girls. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t other girls.
“No, it isn’t OK.” I yanked my hand back.
“Just a few minutes. Come on, you can be late.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” he said, and the smile leached from his face, leaving something cold and strange and determined.