The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(9)

Like I was nothing at all.

I looked out the window at my dark neighborhood, willing myself to think of something else, anything else, but I couldn’t get Lizzie off my mind. I wondered where she was. If she was happy. How long it would be before she turned up.

Mostly, I just wanted Lizzie to be found so I could go back to not thinking of her.

There was another part of me though, a very small part, that wanted her to stay missing a while longer. Not that I hated her so much that I wanted her to be lost or in pain, but it was kinda nice to have a mystery in the Mills. Once it was solved, the explanation was sure to be totally boring, like when you read a whodunit and end up wishing you’d stopped before you got to the end. The truth was always a letdown.

Besides, when Lizzie eventually showed up, it was going to be a huge deal. The town would celebrate, and everyone would act like Lizzie’s homecoming was the biggest miracle that had ever happened. When it came down to it, I’d rather listen to speculation about Lizzie’s whereabouts than watch everyone worship her when she returned. I’d already experienced enough Lizzie worship to last a lifetime.





Chapter 4


The New Lizzie

On the morning after the morning Lizzie disappeared, there was a big article about her on the front page of the Griffin Mills Daily Journal. The paper was sitting on the kitchen table when I went downstairs, and I figured I’d hear people talking about it at school all day, which is why I almost ignored it. But my curiosity got the best of me.

My family wasn’t around, so I sat down and grabbed the paper without them making annoying comments about how they thought I wasn’t interested in Lizzie.

I didn’t read the article at first, because it was impossible to pay attention to anything other than Lizzie’s photo, which was obnoxiously big. In it, Lizzie was staring straight at the camera with a half smile on her face. The sun was behind her, making her hair into a halo. It was Lizzie all right, pretty Lizzie Lovett. But she wasn’t how I remembered her.

Where was the cheerleader who always looked like she was on her way to a photo shoot? This Lizzie wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her long hair was messy, as if she hadn’t bothered to comb it. She was wearing a loose-fitting men’s dress shirt, which was nothing like the clothes she wore in high school, meaning you couldn’t see her perfect body at all.

This new Lizzie was almost more annoying than the old one. You could imagine old Lizzie waking up three hours early every day to make sure her eyeliner was expertly smudged and the ends of her hair had just the right amount of curl. You could tell yourself that old Lizzie spent her free time exercising and tanning and moisturizing, and that was why she looked as perfect as she did. That if you were willing to dedicate the same attention to your appearance, you could look “effortlessly” gorgeous too.

The Lizzie who stared out from the front page of the paper actually hadn’t put in any effort, and she was about a thousand times prettier than she’d ever been before.

I directed my attention to the article and skimmed it, even though I was pretty sure it wouldn’t say anything new, which turned out to be correct. Elizabeth Lovett, twenty-one years old and formerly of Griffin Mills, Ohio, had gone camping in the woods off Wolf Creek Road. She’d been with her boyfriend, Lorenzo Calvetti, twenty-five, of Layton, which was two towns over. They hiked, set up camp, made s’mores, and all that jazz. According to Calvetti, everything seemed normal; his girlfriend seemed happy. They went to bed around ten. The next morning, Lizzie was gone.

I flipped to page three where the article continued. There was another photo, smaller and in black and white. It was also way more fascinating than the one on the front page, because it showed the new, disheveled Lizzie with her arm around Lorenzo Calvetti.

I brought the paper closer to my face. It was a pretty terrible picture, taken from far away and too grainy to show many details. But you could see the huge grins on Lizzie’s and Lorenzo’s faces. They looked like the sort of couple who never had a single bad thing happen to them, certainly not the sort of couple in which one member disappears in the woods.

“Is that article about Lizzie?”

I jumped.

Rush hovered in the kitchen doorway, still looking a little undead.

“Don’t sneak up on me.”

My brother shrugged and sat in the chair across from me. He nodded at the paper. “What do you think?”

“He’s not as handsome as I expected him to be.” I glanced down at the picture again. “Actually, he’s not really handsome at all.”

“Not about him. I don’t care about him,” Rush said, which was certainly a lie.

“I bet they’ll find her today,” I said.

“Or find her body,” Rush said darkly.

I rolled my eyes. “She’s not dead. And even if she was, what’s it to you?”

He didn’t answer, so I went back to the article. There wasn’t much more to read. A search party had gone through the woods near the camp. Today, they’d be expanding their area of focus. There was a list of Lizzie’s stats at the end, twenty-one years old, five feet six inches tall, one hundred and twenty pounds. Blond hair, blue eyes. Last seen wearing jeans, a red sweatshirt, hiking boots, and a pendant in the shape of a wolf’s tooth. Then the obligatory plea to call the police with any information that might assist them, blah, blah, blah.