WELCOME TO LA CACHETTE, LOUISIANA ELEVATION 3 FT.
POPULATION 106 LIVING SOULS
The only time the number changes is when someone gets born.
Or dies.
Somewhere inside my head, a voice jeers that they’ll have to repaint it. Because of Elora. But I close my ears. Don’t let myself listen.
Just then, Honey calls to me from inside the bookstore. “Grey, you gonna come in here and see me?”
Evie gives me a little smile as she stands up to leave. “She knows.” A whisper of a breeze moves through, and I hear the tinkle of wind chimes from someplace nearby. It’s a nice sound. Almost like laughter.
Evie’s smile fades. “Miss Roselyn always knows.”
She turns and starts down the boardwalk in the direction of her house, right next door. But I stop her with a question that I hadn’t planned to ask.
“Do you think she’s dead?”
Evie stares at me for a few seconds. She’s twisting that long strand of white-blonde hair around and around one finger again. She blinks at me with pale blue eyes, then answers me with a question of her own. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I hope not.”
I don’t tell Evie the rest of it, though. I don’t say that Elora can’t be dead, because, if she is, I don’t know how I’ll keep breathing.
Evie reaches up to swat away a horsefly that’s buzzing around her head, and when she opens her mouth to speak again, I want to tell her I’m not asking for her opinion. I want to know if she knows. For sure. If she’s got that radio in her head tuned to Elora’s frequency. But all she says is, “Welcome home, Grey.”
Honey yells at me again from inside the bookstore, so I stand up and grab my backpack. Then I spit Evie’s gum into the tall grass before I head inside.
A bell jingles when I open the door, and Honey shouts, “Back here, Sugar Bee!”
I’m careful with my backpack as I weave my way through the crowded shop. Incense burns on the counter, and every bit of space is crammed full of books and bottles and jars and colorful rocks. Herbs dry in little bundles on the windowsills.
I pause a minute to breathe in the comfort of a hundred familiar smells, then I push aside the bead curtain that marks the doorway to the back room. Honey stops unpacking boxes to come give me a big hug. She has on a purple flower-print dress and sensible white tennis shoes. Dangly earrings. A yellow headscarf covers her white curls. I can’t decide if she looks any different than she did when I left last August. It’s like whatever age Honey is, that’s the age she’s always been to me. It’s only when I look at photographs that I see she’s getting older.
“There’s my girl!” She plants a big kiss on the top of my head. “Oh! Look at your hair!” she says, even though I’ve had basically the same short pixie cut for years. “You look so sophisticated!” That makes me smile. “I thought you weren’t coming till later,” she scolds. “I would’ve made breakfast.”
Twice a day Monday through Friday and three times a day on weekends, an ancient ferry shuttles passengers back and forth between Kinter and La Cachette. The first trip of the day is always at ten o’clock. Sometimes, though, if you’re lucky, you can talk Alphonse, the mail-boat captain, into letting you ride along on his early morning run. Today I was lucky.
“I’m not that hungry,” I tell her. “I had a granola bar.” Honey raises one eyebrow, silently judging my dad for putting me on the boat without breakfast.
“Evangeline brought over some fresh muffins,” she tells me. “Bran. And some blackberry, I think.” She leads me back into the shop and points out the basket by the register.
I dig around until I find a big blackberry one. I’m in the middle of peeling away the wax paper when I notice the stack of flyers sitting on the counter.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
Underneath the big block letters, there’s another picture of Elora. This time she’s sitting on the edge of the picnic table out behind her house. She’s wearing cutoffs and an orange bikini top. Her long dark hair is loose, sunglasses perched on the top of her head like a crown. Her mouth is open, and she’s been caught midlaugh.
I recognize the photo immediately. It was taken at the beginning of last summer. Before everything went wrong between the two of us. Only a sliver of bare shoulder at the edge of the picture hints that someone is sitting next to her. Someone who’s been cropped out of the image.
Me.
The best friend she cut out of her life, just the way someone cut me out of that photograph.