The Keeper of Lost Things Read online

  He shuffled to the front of the class, not an inch of embarrassment to him. “Hey, I’m Frankie. Just moved here from somewhere else. Looking forward to rocking it out.” He raised his fist to the air which made some of the girls giggle.

  Not me.

  I had a name now to add to my list of people I needed to keep away from.

  Frankie Bolero.

  Even his name was annoying. It dimpled like his cheek, all round and sharp at the same time. He was someone I needed to avoid, someone that would serve no purpose to me.

  At least I now knew why I hadn’t seen him before. He would soon enough make friends that would find him interesting because he was new to the school. They’d lose interest after a while, like they always did. By then someone else would have started that they could move onto.

  Then Frankie would be one of the lost.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. Judging by the amount of girls hanging on his every word as he introduced himself without saying anything real about his life, he wouldn’t be lonely. I wouldn’t have to add him to my shelves.

  I suffered all through the double History class until lunchtime. Any break in the curriculum was prime time for rescuing lost things. People forgot about their things when they were having a good time, wrapped up in conversations and gossip.

  My lunch tray was full when I took it outside to sit in the corner. If I sat with my back against the wall, I could watch. I could see it all and search for those items that were in danger of being lost. They needed me and I couldn’t abandon them.

  Not when they needed me the most.

  Just as I was munching away through my jello cup, someone stood in front of me and blocked my view. I was staring at their legs before my gaze travelled up the black skinny jeans, the T-shirt that was supposed to be funny, and then settled on the face.

  It was him.

  Frankie.

  “I thought I told you to leave me alone,” I said in the bluntest and emotionless voice I had.

  He sat cross legged on the ground in front of me. Still blocking my view. I was going to miss something if he didn’t move soon. “Oh, you did. But I decided that it wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

  I dragged my gaze from the lawn to him until our eyes were peering into one another. They were blue, like the ocean on a cloudy day. Blue and deep and sparkling.

  “Why don’t you find someone else to bother, Frankie.” I liked the way his name sounded, like it was angry when the K caught on my tongue. Like it could hook there and refuse to move, much like the boy himself.

  “I didn’t realize I was bothering you.”

  “Well, you are. And now you know, so you can go away. Please.”

  His lips quirked up into a smile, one which I’m sure he thought was charming. It probably worked on all the other girls. “I was hoping we could get to know each other. You seem… interesting.”

  I had been called many names before, but interesting was not one of them. Freak was the normal term of endearment for me. It was usually muttered just a moment before the person walked away from me.

  Not all people appreciated their lost things being found.

  By me.

  Especially when I didn’t give them back.

  It was time for a lie. It had been at least fifteen minutes since I’d used one. “My friends will be here in a moment and we don’t like dealing with the new kid. So please go away.”

  Frankie didn’t look away, he accepted my lie like it was the truth. Of course, he didn’t know me very well. He nodded solemnly, his head bobbing until his messy hair fell in front of his eyes. Then he stood up and left, taking his tray with him.

  As the boy walked away from me, something hurt inside. I felt sorry for him, regretful that I had lied so casually and he had taken my words as golden.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so mean to him.

  But I had to remember my rules.

  They protected me.

  I ate the rest of my lunch watching everyone else and not being a part of their world. If Frankie watched me again, I didn’t see him. Although, something told me he wouldn’t be far away.

  Just watching.

  He would know I was lying by now.

  Chapter 3

  Someone was following me. I’d become aware of them when I left Geography and they were still there as I turned down the corridor to reach my locker.

  I could tell they were female from the sound of their footsteps. She didn’t try to disguise the fact she was following me, she simply was and that was all I needed to know.

  My heart raced as I wondered why.

  I would get my answer soon enough.

  Without warning, the girl grabbed my backpack and pulled me backwards. I lost my footing and slammed into the bank of lockers. My vision swam for a moment before everything settled back into place.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, angry now. Nobody had the right to touch me, especially this girl.

  She leaned in close until I could feel her hot breath against my cheek. I wanted to blink but I didn’t. “You stole my book.”

  I pushed her away, refusing to be scared by this girl who was as skinny as a model. She didn’t scare me, she barely made me shudder under her accusing glare.

  “You lost your book. Therefore it no longer belongs to you. When you walked away from it in the courtyard, you lost all rights to that book.”

  Her face was red now, blazingly angry at not getting her own way. She crossed her arms over her chest, the discontent written in each of the lines across her face.

  “It’s my book. Jennie said she saw you take it and I want it back. It’s a library book, they’re going to charge me forty bucks to replace it,” the girl continued, as if her words would have any bearing on the outcome.

  I shrugged. That was not my concern. She shouldn’t have abandoned her book yesterday and left it to fend for itself like she didn’t care about it. She was the one in the wrong here, not me.

  Now she was even angrier. “I know what you do, Emmeline. You steal everything you can get your grubby little hands on. Now give me back my book or I will hurt you.”

  “Em. My name is Em.”

  “Give me back my book, Emmeline.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I warned.

  “Then give me my book.”

  “No.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “I don’t have it,” I lied.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Nope.”

  She growled out a cry of frustration before shoving me into the lockers. “You’re going to regret this, Emmeline,” she sneered before stomping down the hallway.

  I really hated it when they thought they had a claim to their lost item. Nobody ever realized that their things were better off in my care. At least they were safe there, they were protected. The book would suffer a far worse fate if returned to the girl.

  The corridor started to fill with people as they left their final class of the day. I stood tall again and readjusted the straps of my backpack. Smoothing my hair, I hurried to leave the school grounds.

  I was going to be late for Recycle Club.

  Ignoring all the school-designated bus lines, I walked the block for a public bus and hopped on the 43. It took me downtown to the Lakeside Mega Mall where the club gathered once a week.

  I was the only member of the Recycle Club.

  I was the founder, president, secretary, and treasurer.

  It wasn’t a real club.

  The Lakeside Mega Mall was a breeding ground for lost things. No matter when I went there, lost things screamed for me to rescue them. I went once a week, compulsively searching for the lost.

  Uncle Marvin didn’t know about my lie. He had been excusing me from cooking dinner on Wednesday nights for over a year. He never came to the mall so he would never know of my deceit.

  I started with the food court, slowly filling with students from the surrounding schools as they munched on high-sugared treats and sipped on drinks they th
ought made them look cool.

  As the noise levels grew and echoed around the open area, my blood pulsed quicker. There were lost things around, I knew there had to be, I just had to locate them before I could make the rescue. My nerves were sitting on edge until I found them.

  The anticipation grew until my palms were sweaty. The lost things needed me, I had to find them. I spied a pair of boys, boasting about their sporting prowess on the football field while their table was splayed with food, drinks, and their belongings. They were at high risk of losing something.

  My profiles were rarely wrong.

  Girls in groups tended to forget about small items they took out of their handbag. Boys in pairs often forgot their phones after taking them from their pockets and dumping them on the table while they ate determinedly.

  People with children were one of the worst offenders. The smaller the child, the more likely they were to lose things. It was easy for a baby to throw an item out of their stroller and their parents never noticing until later when they were searching for it. A pacifier, a single shoe, a toy, they all were lost over the side of a stroller.

  Baby things were always sad to add to my shelf. They were always so cute and pastel, yearning to fulfil their purpose with a baby and instead ending up on a shelf in my room for the rest of their lives.

  Still, a lost thing was a lost thing and they were treated equally by me. I rescued them all like they were the most important item in the world and I had to make sure they were safe.

  There were no families in the food court that afternoon. Only teenagers and bored senior citizens who couldn’t hear the ruckus of their younger counterparts. The elderly quite often left behind newspapers, maybe for someone else to read after them. Unless someone was quicker than me, I took those too. The newspapers were added to the found pile.

  My eyes remained on the boys, getting ready to leave now. They didn’t bother putting their trash in the can, just walked away and made it someone else’s problem.

  I searched the table with my gaze as I sat nearby, looking–always looking–for their lost items. Their table was scattered with their litter, but nothing seemed to be lost. What a waste of time.

  My profiling had let me down.

  The lost things called to me, screamed that they were in the food court somewhere. I had to find them before they were doomed to forever waste away in the trash or the mall’s Lost and Found department.

  Even lost things deserved better than that.

  My gaze flicked to a group of kids a few tables over. It was a mixture of boys and girls, all sitting around eating and laughing happily. It was prime location for at least one of them to lose something.

  They became my next obsession.

  My eyes fell on one of the boys, the back of his head seemingly familiar. I knew the group was from my school because I’d seen most of them before. But this boy, there was something tugging at the edge of my mind about him.

  He turned to speak to the girl next to him when it clicked.

  It was Frankie.

  He was smiling and talking, the new kid had obviously made some new friends after his introduction at school. It was the first time I’d seen him interacting with others and it seemed out of place. Every one of his facial expressions appeared to be forced, squeezed out of him by social convention.

  I was glad his back was to me.

  Now it was my turn to spy on him.

  The heavy book in my backpack reminded me that I couldn’t trust him. That he was capable of setting a trap for me and I needed to be careful. Nobody got close to me for a reason, they would only end up as lost as I was.

  I could say a million bad things about Frankie, but I couldn’t say anything bad about his hair. It was perfectly messy, a little longer than the other boys, but it looked soft. And shiny. He looked after his hair, if not his manners.

  After seventy beats of my heart had passed, the group started to leave. They didn’t go all at once, breaking off in pairs and triplets to depart from their group.

  As Frankie stood to leave–alone, a singular–he saw me. I wasn’t quick enough to avert my gaze before he caught my eyes and held them there.

  One second.

  Two seconds.

  Three and four seconds before he would release me. I felt exhausted from that one stare, like an hour had passed in the time it took us to lock eyes.

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  I didn’t want to know what that meant.

  The lost things were my concern, not the boy known as Frankie who came from somewhere. Once they were all gone, I took a walk to the trash can, using it as an excuse to get a better look at the table.

  Only half of the group had cleaned up after themselves. The students in this town needed to learn better manners as well as how not to lose things. They were pigs, messy and unkempt.

  Out of control.

  It was no wonder so many items found themselves lost.

  Someone had left their cell phone on the table. It was haphazardly resting underneath a burger wrapper. Whoever lost it was seriously going to regret it later on.

  I swooped in and picked up the phone, placing it in my bag carefully. Phones were a hassle, they always rang frantically as its owner tried to reclaim it. When they ran out of battery it was always a relief knowing they would now remain silent.

  The phone was the only lost item. It was a good catch for a long afternoon in Recycle Club. It was starting to get dark outside, the large skylights hanging over the food court showing the grey clouds as they started to swirl over the town.

  It was time to get home.

  I grabbed a burger and some fries to eat on the bus ride home. I had to sit in the back and tuck the greasy paper bag into my backpack so I didn’t get caught. Bus drivers hated it when you ate on their bus. It wasn’t because it was against the rules–which it was–but because the smell made them hungry.

  The bus rolled along the streets, groaning around the corners, and complaining every time the brakes were tapped. The town needed a bunch of new buses but the mayor said it wasn’t feasible. He’d gambled all the town’s money away when he didn’t think anyone would look. He’d been covering it up ever since.

  How did I know?

  Mayor Hay had lost his notebook at the cinema one night.

  I read it cover to cover, seeing all his lazy scrawl spell out his troubles. His debts grew over the pages until they were too large he started underlining the numbers in red pen.

  At least he kept good records.

  His notebook was currently sitting on my shelves.

  Safe and found.

  I didn’t need to wonder what Uncle Marvin had for dinner when I arrived home. The house was in darkness except for the living room television. The soap opera was casting out its rays in all different colors, leaving the room illuminated in a kind of blue hue.

  Uncle Marvin was passed out, a bottle of whiskey on the floor next to him. His mouth was open while he snored, a line of drool running down his chin.

  My uncle had indulged in a liquid dinner.

  He somehow managed to look just as mean and dispirited unconscious as he did while awake. Still, I covered him with a blanket and left him there. He probably wouldn’t move until the morning, depending on how much he’d actually drunk.

  I took the stairs to my room, opening the door and making sure he hadn’t disturbed anything of mine. If Uncle Marvin did go snooping today, he didn’t leave any traces.

  The phone was starting to sing, the screen displaying the same number repeatedly. It was probably the owner, trying to find the person who picked up his lost phone.

  A picture of a dog was his screen background. It was cute.

  The former owner deserved his panic now. He should be worried enough to search for his lost item. He would never get it back and maybe that would teach him a valuable lesson to take through his life.

  Everything had value.

  Everything was precious.

  Nothing deserved
to be lost.

  If only it was that easy to educate people. Humans were inertly reckless, they acted without thought or care. Hurting others came naturally, so why shouldn’t it extend to their things? They would never really learn.

  I placed the phone with the other two I already had on my shelf. It was getting cramped in my room. The lost things were spilling over, having to be shoved together just to remain on the shelves. There were too many for them to be comfortable.

  I needed more space.

  My collection had started more years ago than I could remember. The first item was a keyring with a single key dangling from it. From then onwards I noticed lost things everywhere I went. I started picking them up from that day forwards.

  Assessing my rows and rows of shelves, I was proud of my accomplishment. I had saved so many things from being lost that I deserved a medal. If not for me, all those items would have ended up in the trash or ruined forever. I gave them a home and a second chance.

  No item was going to feel lost.

  Not on my watch.

  People weren’t going to stop losing things, and I wasn’t going to stop rescuing them. Unless I wanted to end up like one of those people on Hoarders, I needed to expand my shelf space. I wasn’t going to be found buried under a six foot high mountain of lost things one day.

  That wouldn’t be me.

  I made a mental note to solve the problem another day. Right now I was exhausted and needed to rest. If Uncle Marvin was passed out for the night, that meant I could be too.

  After taking a nice, hot shower I fell into bed, only faintly aware of the new cell phone still chirping away with missed calls and messages.

  Everything was silent when I awoke in the morning. I was awake before my alarm started buzzing, it took a few bleary moments to remember that something else had pulled me from my sleep.

  Knock knock knock.

  The hard beats were coming from downstairs, someone was knocking on our front door. They tapped incessantly, demanding my attention and forcing me to get out of bed.

  I had to hurry. If Uncle Marvin hadn’t answered the door, that meant he was still asleep. He was worse than an angry bear when awoken earlier than he needed to be.