A new excerpt.

This is from a chapter late in the book, narrated by Stephen Bishop, the longtime friend of Julie Sullivan, the girl who is abducted and returns nine years later. Enjoy.


1. THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER, SHE DREW BLOOD.

She was nine, or nearly nine. Which would have made me eleven, or nearly twelve. And on a summer afternoon my little brother and I watched as she bloodied the nose of a South Bailey boy, a feat still spoken of to this day. Back then there were no real neighborhoods in Bailey, merely directions. Coordinates. These days there are small yet exclusive housing developments with names like Copperwood, Southbridge, Bullhead. Specific, unimaginative names affixed to points on a map. But we had no such clear, precise logic on our maps when I was a boy. All was painted in vague, broad strokes. Generalities. Aside from the few homes situated around Mill Creek (literally named for a freshwater spring, or creek, that ran by an old, dilapidated mill), you either lived in North Bailey or South Bailey. And that was it. Naturally, the kids from North Bailey seemed forever at odds with those from South Bailey. Our own little Civil War. All we lacked was the convenient color-coding of blue and gray. For long stretches of time, there would be peace between the two tribes. Yet every so often, a group of South Bailey boys would break free of whatever confinements held them at bay and make the one or two-mile trek up north, a band of stir-crazy marauders looking for something to pillage. We could always hear them before we could see them. They dragged sticks and baseball bats along the sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, banged them on mailboxes and fences and road signs, knocked over trash cans with them and swung them at cats. They sang ridiculous songs, off-key and loud as a fire alarm. They made catcalls to the girls's windows and threats to the boys'. And they would, inevitably, find what they sought most. A group of kids at play. There were no playgrounds in North Bailey. The closest thing could be found at Bailey Elementary, a rusty metal slide and a pair of creaky swings, both considered more potential deathtraps than anything else. So us North Bailey children would either remain in our backyards - mostly just wild, unkempt fields with ribboned, oft-ignored wooden stakes, planted there to let you know when you had left your backyard and wandered into someone else's - or, if we felt courageous, venture over to the old Miller place. Long abandoned, the Miller place was a miniature, burned-out farm shack, no more than three hundred square feet. Its door sat askew in its frame, its chimney had fallen through to the foundation, and the shards of glass which remained in the windows were jagged survivors of volley after volley of stones thrown by children, lending the place the appearance of a hungry monster in possession of razor-sharp fangs. Outside the shack was a clearing, where we were known to while away many an afternoon playing catch, or freeze tag, or nothing at all. The girls of North Bailey, if they happened to find the clearing free of boys, would throw elaborate tea parties or parades of Barbie dolls, and if boys happened to be there first, they would stage a coup, out-sassing and out-backtalking the hapless males into retreat. But this would never work on the South Bailey boys. The few times they did manage to sniff out, like a pack of hyenas, the redolent, sweet fragrance of local girls in the clearing, there had been trouble. Insults had been hurled, resulting in vicious name-calling from the girls, to which the South Bailey boys would respond as boys will most always do. With the forceful application of blunt objects. Rocks were thrown, sticks were swung, though not even a South Bailey boy would dare make contact with a stick. The girls would run around the clearing, teasing and heckling their pursuers in sing-song fashion, playing along until the fear of pain became insufferable, or until a rock actually found one of them, bruising a shin or a shoulder. Then they would cry and wail and run away, leaving the victorious South Bailey boys howling with laughter, pumping their fists in the air.

And it was just such a skirmish my little brother and I wandered into one July afternoon, having come to the clearing in a fit of boredom. The summer prior we had hung a rope swing from old man Miller's largest tree, what we called Miller's Oak, the ancient hulk of a tree that dominated the clearing, littering the ground with leaves in autumn, and casting long, ominous shadows in summer. But even this did not entitle us to free play whenever the South Bailey boys arrived. Rather than flee upon seeing them, we crouched low, slinking along the ground until we found adequate cover behind a pine tree, from which to spy on the proceedings. What we saw was not surprising, but always entertaining. A half dozen girls, most of them my brother's age or younger, being chased around the clearing by three or four South Bailey boys. These boys were larger than usual, it seemed. Or perhaps they were the same I'd seen before, only grown up a bit. One of them I knew, or knew of. Travis Beacham. The others were as foreign as Saracens to me. They loomed over the girls the way Miller's Oak loomed over us all, bearing down on them with an unprecedented ferocity, which made me nervous. I found my body had become tight and rigid with tension as I watched, crouched low as if ready to pounce. All of the girls being pursued I recognized, except one. She had dirty blonde hair, pulled back in a ponytail. You never saw a ponytail on a girl that young in North Bailey. Everything was braided, curled, colored, permed, or straightened. Ponytails were for exercising mothers, or the girls on the high school field hockey team. She dressed oddly. She wore a t-shirt and jeans like us boys, in sharp contrast to all the North Bailey girls who ever came to the clearing, always decked out in their finest dresses and frills, as though groomed for church. And she didn't move like one of them. The other girls, even the most graceful among them, moved and ran with a clunky ineptitude compared to this girl's fluid, balletic movements, as if their legs had been weighed down with lead. She moved as though she had simply sprung out of the ground, darting and dashing with the kind of speed, strength and confidence I had never seen in a girl before, little or no.

The blonde girl, I said to my brother, the one with the pink t-shirt and ponytail. Who is that?

You mean you don't know? said my brother. I thought everybody knew her. That's Julie Sullivan.

I had heard the name before, of course. The Sullivans, who lived in relative seclusion at the northernmost point of Bailey's limits, were practically celebrities in our town. Mr. Sullivan, whose first name, like the first name of most girls' fathers, I did not yet know, was terribly rich, according to our mother. Rich and sad, she used to say. Years later I would come to love Arthur Sullivan, almost like my own father, but back then, in the minds of us North Bailey kids, he was a craggy old bastard, as miserly and foul as Ebenezer Scrooge. No one ever saw the Sullivans in town, it seemed. For many years, until Julie was in high school, she was educated at home, by tutors. And they had help. A cook, a maid, and a gardener. It was these three, nameless and silent, whom we would encounter in town, running various errands for old Mr. Sullivan. But now here she was, Julie Sullivan, among us. How or why, I had no clue. From the safety of our pine tree, I watched her run. Unlike the other girls, she laughed as she ran, and she ran without fear. As though she knew exactly what she was doing. She seemed to know just how far and how fast to run in order to stay out of danger, while still managing to tease the boys in return by slowing down a little, offering herself as a potential target. She would turn around and run backwards, then make antlers with her hands and stick out her tongue, giving the boys a nice, loud, raspberry. If they came close to catching her or pelting her with a stone, she would pick up the pace. And she could outrun them all. If they were going to be foolhardy enough to chuck rocks at her, well then she was going to make them work for it. I couldn't help but be impressed.

Finally, it happened. One of the girls - who it was escapes me now - was clocked in the face by a hefty throw from the biggest of the South Bailey boys. The stone made a repulsive, nauseating sound as it collided with her face, and her hands flew up to cover her nose. Everything stopped. No one, not my brother or myself, or anyone in the clearing, moved or made a sound. Then the blood came. In the months and years that followed, the amount of blood pouring from this girl's nose would grow more and more copious with each telling, all depending on who the storyteller happened to be. In truth, it was not a trickle, and not an ocean, but somewhere in between. Twin streams of red descended from her nostrils to her mouth, then came dripping from her chin to the grass and splattering on her shoe. I didn't know whether to laugh or gasp in horror. The girl screamed and bawled, flapping her arms and shaking her hands as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. The boys, who for several long moments had remained silent, now erupted with laughter. Travis Beacham slapped his belly and doubled over, while the giant who threw the stone pointed, hooted and cackled. He was so distracted with his own fit of laughter that he did not see Julie Sullivan, marching across the clearing. Hey! she shouted, startling him. He opened his mouth and began to say what I believe he meant to be Hey yourself. But he was unable to complete his sentence. Instead, he received a beautiful right cross delivered with uncanny speed and accuracy to the meat of his nose; delivered by a girl who had clearly punched a boy in the face before. The giant swore and staggered, wobbling like a newly born calf. He attempted to regain his bearings and play it off, but he wasn't fooling any of us. He was genuinely stunned. And hurt. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and it came away streaked with blood. There was a conflict at work in the muscles of his face, and clearly he was waging a violent internal debate about what to do next. Any other girl, and I imagine he would have chased her down, exacted some sort of punishment. I don't believe he would have hit her - that was beneath even the nastiest of South Bailey boys - but there would have been some sort of penalty. Perhaps he would have pinned her arm to her back until she cried Mercy, or perhaps an Indian Sunburn. But this kid hadn't figured Julie Sullivan out yet. None of us had. He simply wobbled in place for a moment or two and glared at her, while everyone looking on remained silent. I suspect he was weighing the cost of pursuing vengeance versus the risk of catching another beating. In the end he simply gave her the finger, turned around and skulked off alone, ignoring the gales of laughter that erupted the moment he turned his back.

Years later I would return with Julie to this very spot, where we would recall the event with progressive levels of clarity, and laugh about it until our stomachs hurt. Then we would take the door of the old Miller place off its hinges, quite by accident, and walk the shack's crumbling floors, shining flashlights into every corner, searching for brown recluses and rats and ancient secrets. She would jump and shriek and cling to me for a moment when a hairy spider the size of an apple darted from beneath the window, down the wall, scurrying across the floor and between her legs before being crushed beneath my bootheel. And I would hold her for a few seconds longer than necessary, feeling the warmth of her body travel into mine. I would smell her hair, rich with the scent of strawberries and brown sugar. We would spread a blanket down on the floor and read Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and t.s. eliot to each other. We would open a verboten bottle of cheap red wine, stolen from my parents' pantry, and take turns sipping from it. And it would never occur to her, I'm sure, to view this scene as romantic. She was in love with Travis Beacham, or at least this was my assumption. She had never said as much. But she was with him. They had kissed, with great passion and frequency, right in front of me, as though I had ceased to exist. For all I knew, she had lost her virginity to him. But I had never asked her about this, as my acquisition of the truth, whatever the truth may have been, was far too dangerous to be worth the risk. For that one night I would pretend, for as long as I was able, that there were only the two of us alive in the world. That there was no other truth but ours. And she would float along with me, adrift in my happy illusion; reading poetry, sipping wine, taking comfort, I think, in the knowledge that she was safe with me, safe in the warm cocoon of our friendship.