“You’re sure the girl was blonde,” I say when she answers.
“Yes,” Juniper says immediately. “Blonde, but I think maybe it was dyed.”
I blink, staring blankly at the rows and rows of yearbooks before me. “How do you know that?”
“The color didn’t look super natural, but it was hard to tell.”
“All right,” I say, sighing as I push one hand through my hair. How many blonde girls are at this school right now? Tons. “What else do you remember about her? How old did she look to you?”
“Hmm,” Juniper says, and for a second, she’s silent. When she answers, her voice is a little shaky; I think she, like me, doesn’t particularly love delving into these memories. “I’d say maybe a junior or a senior. She definitely wasn’t a freshman, and I don’t think she was a sophomore either.”
“Okay. So a blonde junior or senior,” I say as a feeling of rising desperation hits me. “What about her face? Can you describe it to me?”
There’s another silence, during which I imagine Juniper giving me a disbelieving look. I don’t blame her.
“I just didn’t register a lot of details, okay?” I say impatiently. “There was—it was a lot of blood.” I swallow. “And I didn’t get very far looking yesterday when all I knew was that she was blonde. So do you remember her face?”
“All right, look,” Juniper says finally. “I don’t have any classes to teach until later this afternoon,” she says. “I’ll come over there, okay?”
“Yeah,” I say quickly, relief flooding me. “Okay. I’m in the library, in the corner with all the yearbooks. Hurry. I’ve only got a couple hours.”
Juniper shows up fifteen minutes later. She appears from the end of the row and approaches in a cloud of sweet citrus, her wet hair and fresh face making it clear that she recently showered. She’s wearing an outfit that shouldn’t make sense, but somehow it works—a white shirt with a pattern of quarter-sized red hearts, tucked into a short corduroy skirt in sunshine yellow. The skirt has two heart-shaped pockets on the front, both of them stitched with little black smiley faces.
I think she might be the kind of woman who reaches into her closet without looking every morning but is pretty enough that anything looks good. The kind of woman that petty women hate. Juniper certainly has enough of a presence about her that a lot of people will find her intimidating. She’s bold and unapologetic; sometimes that’s all it takes to bring out the insecurities of the people around you.
“All right,” she says when she reaches me. She gives theshelves a quick once-over before looking back to me. “Since you’re showing no aptitude for this, I’m here to help.”
“I didn’t call you here to badmouth me,” I mutter, but I pass her last year’s yearbook anyway. Then I return to the one from two years ago, scanning the faces with increasing frustration.
“Did you check this one already?” she says as she lowers herself to the floor. I purposely don’t look at her while she does this, because I’m not sure how one sits in a skirt that short, and there are parts of Juniper I have no business seeing.
“I did,” I say with a sigh, “but I may as well not have. All I remember is that she was blonde, and the pictures in these books are small. Too many of the girls in there looked like they could have been the one we saw.”
“I’ll check it out,” Juniper says. When it finally feels safe to look at her, she’s seated with her legs tucked to the side, flipping through the yearbook with deft fingers. There’s a little crease in her forehead, just above her eyebrows, and her eyes are narrowed slightly. She’s in concentration mode.
She’s in concentration mode, and I’m staring at her. Not weird at all. I whip my head back down so fast I’m going to have a crick in my neck later.
For a few moments we search in silence, the occasional turning page the only thing to break the quiet. I keep my eyes on the book in front of me, and I’m doing my best to focus, but it still seems like all the little faces are blurring together in my mind.
When I’ve gone through the senior and junior classes twice, I finally sigh, setting the yearbook aside and looking at Juniper.
“Anything?” I say. She has to be having more luck than I am.
“Maybe,” she says. “Look at a few of these andsee if any of them feel familiar. I think I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities.”
“Did you?” I say quickly, leaning in so I can better see the yearbook that’s spread open on the floor in front of her. “Who?”
“We have…” She pauses, looking more closely at the page. Then she points to a photo of a girl with blonde hair and a wide, toothy smile. “Helena Matterhorn.”
I nod, trying in my mind to compare the smiling Helena to the girl in the woods. I can’t quite get them to match up, though. “I don’t think it’s her,” I say, shaking my head.
“Okay,” Juniper says. She flips a few pages to where she has one finger holding her spot. Then she points to another photo. “This is Kerry Parson.”
I vaguely recognize Kerry—I don’t have her in any of my classes, but I do think she’s a senior. I’ve probably helped her with transcripts for college applications. She has blonde hair the same color as Helena’s. “Maybe,” I say slowly.
Juniper nods and once more turns the pages to another saved spot. “Last one: Sandra von Meller.”
A sharp sense of…somethingpierces me when my eyes find Sandra’s photo, a faintly smiling girl with light brown hair. “Her,” I say immediately. “It’s her.” I don’t know how I can tell; so much of her face was obscured with blood. But I can.
