Free Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

we had sustained would somehow increase exponentially if they permitted us to communicate. My mother was especially adamant about this, and Gail and the fathers were easily persuaded. My first therapist gently suggested to my mother that carefully regulated correspondence might actually help us work through what she called our “trauma,” but Miranda rejected such advice. “Lois needs to move on,” she said firmly, as if it were that easy. I think she meant that she needed to move on. The very idea of Carly May upset her; I think my mother even blamed her a little. Perhaps Carly’s parents felt the same about me. I can imagine the appeal of making the other girl the complicit one, the one who thwarted escape, the one who was dangerously susceptible to the kidnapper’s spell. In any case, geographically, our estrangement was easy enough to enforce; we could hardly sneak out our back doors and meet covertly in the woods, and cell phones had not yet made distance irrelevant. But putting the past behind you isn’t like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own. I think if they could have cut us off from it entirely, we would not have survived. That sounds a bit overwrought, I know, but I believe it is true. What had happened was part of us. We couldn’t just lop it off like a gangrenous limb. We needed to acknowledge it, examine it, turn it over and let it catch the light at different angles. We had no idea what it meant—and yet we, and everyone else, seemed to take for granted that it did mean something. They just didn’t want to talk about it.
    So in the beginning we surreptitiously posted a few awkward letters; we snuck a couple of phone calls. We did our best to narrate to each other something true about those few strange weeks, after which we were not quite the same people as we had been, or would have been. I am still not the person I would have been, although I sense that person like a shadow. I’m not sure what she would have been like. There is no knowing. I suppose it’s possible that Carly wrote more letters than I received, and vice versa; it would have been simple enough for vigilant parents to intercept letters with telltale postmarks. Phone calls showed up on bills and led to recriminations. The few stilted words we did manage to exchange weren’t nearly enough. We needed more space and time to even begin to figure out what to say—what could be said, what needed saying. Could we have met in person, it might have been different; we might have preserved our connection, some trace of our cabin in the woods. But disembodied words were insufficient, perhaps even worse than nothing. After a while there was silence, and I only talked to Carly May inside my head.
    It was when my parents came to pick me up that I knew how irrevocably I had changed. Carly and I had been swept from the lodge—the crime scene—and deposited at a tiny jail, where no one seemed entirely sure what to do with us except offer us food and assure us that our parents were on their way. Carly May had blood on her clothes, and a young policeman who seemed shy in our presence brought her some adult-sized jeans and a T-shirt that made her look like a scarecrow. (Later the police claimed my dress, too. It was evidence, they said.) I was struck by how pale we were, compared to everyone else. We had not been out in the sun for weeks. We looked like a slightly different species—related to normal humans but distinctly different. A man who identified himself as a detective asked us a few questions—What are your names? Are you hurt?—but my father insisted to the police on the phone that I not be questioned further until he arrived, and consulted a lawyer about my rights. We were numb, anyway; we had little to say. We were whisked away to a nearby hospital and subjected to extremely thorough medical exams—as if the truth might be found inside us; as if we might contain evidence