The Lost Girl (2 page)

When we’d first met, Tristan and I had to pretend to be siblings so that he could get his application accepted at Sagan, the prestigious boarding school that I attended. With the birth certificate and other important documents that my mother had secretely arranged for him, with the
help of some people in her law firm, Tristan was passed off as her own so that the school would take him. We didn’t just lie to the school, though; we didn’t think my mom would approve of us dating while living together under the same roof, so Tristan and I pretended to be just good friends for the whole of that year.

But then I managed to get Tristan back from the dead (again) and everything was brought out into the open. Mom found out the truth about our relationship and she was fine with it. We were finally free to be a couple. Then we started our first tour, only to be told by Mr. Silver to continue the lie about being “just friends” – just for a little while, until we had launched our careers.

Around that time, before the band’s official debut concert, Tiffany helped Tristan to get all of his papers, legal documents and IDs bullet-proofed with the help of her family’s name, power and influence. After the Worthingtons’ lawyers were through with everything, there were absolutely no holes that any nosy reporter could find. Money could truly buy anything, we learned back then: even bringing the dead back into legal existence.

The heavy lifting had already been done, Tiffany used to say, when we’d made a ghost come back to life. Mere paperwork was an easy feat after that.

Three years have passed since then. Three years of smiling to reporters and lying through our teeth, and still it wasn’t enough for Mr. Silver. After so many times repeating The Lie, I was now a master at this pretending game.

Tristan didn’t like lying, though, and so had become skilled at deflecting The Question.

But for the past year or so, the rest of the band had started rebelling against these conditions. Seth was tired
of sneaking out with Tiffany, a particularly hard feat since Tiff was also famous in her own right as she came from a wealthy family and was easily recognized everywhere she went. We managed to cover it up because as my best friend she was always around Seth anyway; sometimes I even had to hang out with them during their dates, so nobody would suspect anything. It sucked being the third wheel, and they hated it as much as I did.

But one day, at the beginning of this year, Tiffany decided she had had enough, and grabbed hold of Seth in front of a dozen paparazzi, kissing the living daylights out of him. Mr. Silver didn’t say anything. He was no fool – Tiffany was a Worthington and it was not a clever move to have a public fight with the aristocracy.

Sammy was dating a beauty queen, Miss Amanda Summers. She was real pretty, sweet and looked like a doll. I didn’t know much about her but Sammy liked her a lot and he was getting pretty grumpy about having to sneak out with her too.

Josh was always in and out of relationships, but never “in” for long enough to bother about having to lie to hide it. Still, he supported our rebellion because he was on our side, no matter what.

But it was Harry who was the second to break the deal with Mr. Silver. One sunny day, without a single warning, there he was in public, making out with Jackie Sunford, the lead singer of a rising pop rock band. Jackie was the complete opposite of Amanda: she had a truckload of bad manners in her arsenal.

For me, covering up my relationship with Tristan was fairly simple because he was also my band-mate and we were
supposed
to spend a lot of time together; we only
needed to be careful not to be too intimate while we were out in public.

The crowd around the bus was still cheering when Becca, our super manager and all-round lifesaver, arrived announcing we were leaving for the hotel. Rebecca had been with us from the start of our first tour, keeping everything organized with her impeccable and efficient scheduling skills. Without her, we’d be completely lost.

I had a feeling our cameraman, Jamie, might have a little crush on her. Or maybe not. Jamie was hard to read. His eyes were usually blank, like his camera lens, recording everything he saw without thinking much about it.

The crowd continued screaming as the bus pulled away, and I could hear them chanting my name now. I was always surprised when they started doing that. I mean, I could understand that reaction to the boys in the band; they were all really handsome, young, fit guys. It was normal for teenage girls to go wild about hunks like that. But for them to do that for me? I couldn’t undersand it.

I put the blame on Paul Brady. His talk show was one of the most important interviews we did in our first year. Mr. Brady was notorious for his teasing way of dealing with his guests, and that night he kept directing all his questions towards me. He was the first to start the joke about me being the only lost “boy” with “lady parts”, and also about how I even had a boy’s name to complete the act. The fact that I was kind of dressed like a boy at the time didn’t help my case, either. Things started to escalate pretty quickly after Paul Brady’s show. I was the headline in every gossip mag, the star of every chat show. “The only Lost ‘Boy’ that was a ‘girl’.” People thought it was amusing, and the line had a certain ring to it, so they kept repeating it everywhere. After
that interview, I couldn’t stand at the back of the band any more. People demanded that I was up front in the spotlight. Girls loved my tomboy attitude – they shouted “Lost Boy Power!” and “Joe Gray rocks!” everywhere I went.

Tristan laughed at my shock, saying I should stop trying to swim against the tide; it was a battle I was sure going to lose. It was “impossible not to fall in love with me”, he would say.

The bus pulled up when we reached the front of the hotel Becca had booked for us, but there was no way we’d be able to go inside right away because another horde of fans was already waiting at the doors, blocking the path to the lobby.

“Man! How could all these people know we’re staying here?” I cried in dismay, sensing that it would take us hours to get past all those groupies. I glanced sideways and spotted Seth looking shifty. When he noticed my scolding glare he shuffled on the spot and sagged his shoulders guiltily.

“Sorry, Joe. I may have been tweeting and … it kinda slipped out … Sorry!”

I groaned half-heartedly and took a deep breath, trying to accept our inevitable fate. Tomorrow we were going to be heading back home, so I supposed we could spend a few more hours with our fans.

“All right, then. Let’s give them some love,” I said, motioning everyone out of the bus.

We were in the middle of signing autographs, taking photos and giving hugs, when I grabbed Tristan as inconspicuously as I could and pushed him to one side.

“Tris, I’m going to sneak away and head into the lobby to get my room key. Becca just waved a signal that she’s
finished with the check-in,” I whispered, glancing around to see if anyone was eavesdropping. “Boy, at times like this I bet you wished you still had your fading thing, eh?”

Tristan used to have this fading power for the first year after our New Year’s spell – a sort of ex-ghost ability he brought back from the “deadland”. He could fade into the background and be invisible to the human eye. Except to me: I could still spot him, even if it was just in a blurry, shifty kind of way. But after my deal with Death, when Tristan had earned another chance at living, he stopped being able to work his fading ability.

Tristan gave me a funny look at this comment and glanced away, but I couldn’t quite decipher it. He was probably just as tired as I was. I was so intent on getting my room key, I immediately forgot about it.

“Okay, Joe. I’ll make a diversion and you get inside. I’ll be right with you,” he said, looking away.

He sometimes sneaked out of his room during the night and crashed in mine when we were on tour.

“Okay. So, I’m going in. Cover me!” I said, hunching down and making a signal, as if I were in a war movie. He chuckled and nodded, walking away and preparing to create a diversion.

A few minutes later I was letting myself into my room, bags in hand and a relieved expression on my face.

“Hello, Joe,” came a voice from somewhere inside the room.

I flinched, feeling my wrist start to throb, and clenched my hands into fists, glancing around quickly to see who it was but half guessing that I’d find the familiar face staring back at me.

“Hey, you almost gave me a heart attack!” I said.
“You know, we’ve talked about this. Don’t just show up unannounced like that!”

“Sorry. I had forgotten,” he replied.

“Tristan is coming up any second now. He won’t like seeing you here.”

“He does not like to see me anywhere,” he pointed out in a logical, calm tone of voice.

I sighed loudly, too tired to have this conversation all over again. “Listen, now is actually not a good time to talk; I just got out of a really long show. Can we do this some other time?”

“I have important advice I need to ask of you, and since I am already here, maybe you can help me?”

I watched as he stared at me with intense, unblinking eyes, and sighed in defeat.

“Okay. We can talk
a little
,” I said, putting emphasis on the “little”. “But not here. Wait for me downstairs in the hotel bar. I’ll come down as soon as I finish my shower. I don’t want Tristan catching you here.”

I walked to the bathroom without waiting for a reply, heading straight for my well-deserved shower.

This was going to be a long night …

When I was out of the shower and dressed, I heard the door slam shut and Tristan’s voice calling out to me. I glanced at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. A tired-looking girl stared back at me. I really wasn’t in the mood to argue with Tristan right now, but I knew he was going to be upset about this. I just knew it.

He was lying on the bed when I came out of the bathroom, his bag by the foot of the bed and an exhausted look on his face. He was flipping through the channels on the TV, the sound on mute. Turning the TV on was always the first thing Tristan did when he got inside a room. He liked the flickering of the lights in the room and was always amazed by modern TV shows and special effects in movies, a technological novelty that never wore thin for his Fifties mindset.

“Hey. You’re all dressed up to go out. Why?” he asked, raising one inquisitive eyebrow. “I thought you’d be in your PJs by now.”

“I, um … I need to go out for a little bit. I’ll be back real soon,” I said, trying to avoid giving him too much
information but at the same time answering his question honestly.

“Where are you going, then?” he asked, not satisfied with my answer.

“I’ve got to meet Vigil. He’s waiting for me downstairs. I think it’s something urgent, I don’t know …” I mumbled hurriedly, fiddling with my bag instead of looking directly at him.

“Vigil? He’s here? And you’re seeing him
now
? Why? It’s really late, Joey,” he protested, just like I knew he would.

Vigil had been our enemy for a whole year, the year after I first met Tristan, but then we became linked by the powerful spell that had brought Tristan back to life. Vigil was an unearthly being whose job was to restore order in the world, which effectively meant he had to return Tristan back to his ghostly state. He succeeded in this by the end of the year, as he was supposed to, but then, as my eighteenth birthday present, he helped me bring Tristan back again, by helping me to make a deal with Sky. I owed him for ever for that.

The awkward thing that became apparent at that time, though, was that Vigil had confessed to loving me, as much as a creature of his kind could: emotions did not come easily to him. We’d settled for being just friends, but it was something that still bothered Tristan. He never liked it when I went to meet Vigil. He was grateful for his help, but struggled to control his jealousy when Vigil was around me.

“Listen, Tris, it’s just for a few minutes. I’ll be right back,” I insisted.

“You always say that. And you always end up spending
hours away, talking to him. What is it that you two need to talk so much about, anyway?” He huffed, exasperated, a disgruntled frown shadowing his face.

“He needs my help, Tris. I owe him; you know that.
We
owe him. And it’s not only because of that. He’s my friend. I’ll help if he needs my help,” I explained.

“But you don’t have to go running like this every time he snaps his fingers. Like you’re at his beck and call. That makes you more like a doormat than a friend.” He muttered the last part to himself, but I still heard him.

That stung a bit. But I knew I shouldn’t bite back now. It would only make him more angry.

I breathed in, trying to control my temper. “Tris, don’t be like this. Listen, I already told him I would meet him. He’s waiting downstairs. I’ll be back in a minute, I promise.”

“Yeah, right. Go, then. We don’t want to leave him waiting, do we?” he jeered acidly. “And here, let me make this real easy for you, so you won’t need to sneak guiltily back into the room tonight,” he spat out, grabbing his bag. “I’m crashing in my own room. Have fun with your pal. Stay out as long as you want, I won’t be in your way.” Jealousy burned fiercely in his gray eyes and he stormed out of the room.

Tristan wasn’t usually very jealous. He handled the male attention directed at me in a reasonably fair way. I knew he’d been brought up at a time of really conservative and old-fashioned standards, when men decided everything for women, but now he needed to get used to a modern way of life filled with independent, brave women, such as myself. But when the subject was Vigil, he always took a few steps back in his progressive development. At first he’d pretended he was okay with it, but as Vigil and I continued
meeting, he grew restless. He knew Vigil “liked” me and he thought Vigil was only biding his time, he said – that he was just waiting for the perfect moment to steal me away.

At that point, I would always ask Tristan if he didn’t trust me. Vigil could “try to steal me” all he wanted, but I still had to agree to it. How could he possibly think I would ever betray him like that?