How to Disappear Completely
By Annika Howells
Cover art: Annika Howells
Cover design: Derek Murphy
Copyright © 2012 Annika Howells. All rights reserved worldwide.
www.htdcnovel.com
3
“What happened back there?” Lycia asked, catching her breath.
“Just another regular school day,” Aster replied with mock cheerfulness.
“Why do you go to school if it’s that terrible?”
“Because they come looking for us if we stay away for too long. Morgan’s dogs are bad enough on their leash. When she sets them loose, they’re even worse.”
They circled around to the side of the school. A decrepit, rusty railway line emerged from the base of the building. Aster set off along the tracks, with Lycia and Meg in tow.
The tracks cut through the center of Greenwood, splitting the town in two. There were low-rise houses on one side of the split, with larger, two-story houses on the other. From above, the whole town would have looked lopsided. The buildings leaned away from the train track, as if Greenwood was slowly ripping itself in half.
“Where do the tracks go?” asked Lycia.
“Nowhere,” Aster said. “They stop at the warehouses at each end. The school is right in the center. The tracks come out from either side of it. It’s like the school fell out of the sky and crashed down on top of them.”
Lycia glanced back at the school, trying to imagine it falling from the sky.
“This train track is the spine of the Greenwood beast,” said Aster. “And it’s broken in so many places that the beast is surely dead. Right, Meg?”
“Dead, dead, dead,” Meg sang.
“Same goes for those warehouses. Not sure what they were ever used for, or if they were ever really used. This whole town has been dead for as long as I can remember. Dead as long as you can remember, Meg?”
“Yep.”
“And how far back can any of us remember?”
“Not very far,” Meg said with a sigh.
The three of them wandered along the tracks. Meg balanced on the rail, her arms outstretched and her head back to catch the rain in her mouth. Aster twirled down the center of the tracks, dancing and splashing in the pools of water that formed between the timber sleepers. He sang made-up songs in a warbling howl. Lycia walked along behind them, watching them and wondering how she came to be in such a strange town with such strange company.
There was a tunnel up ahead, where the road rose up over the tracks—the only hill in all of Greenwood. As the rain grew heavier, the three of them took shelter in the tunnel. Lycia looked around at the rough concrete walls. The words ‘We still believe in love’ were splashed across the wall in black paint, and beneath that, Meg and Aster had scrawled their names.
“It’s our way of saying that we still have hope, that our spirit is still strong,” Meg explained, looking self-conscious.
“We thought we ought to leave our mark here, so that Greenwood still remembers us after we’re gone,” Aster added. “And they’ll know they never broke us.”
“Where are you planning to go?” Lycia asked.
Aster sighed. “Nowhere, yet. But we can dream, can’t we?”
YOU ARE READING
How to Disappear Completely
FantasyCynical seventeen-year-old Lycia wakes up in the dark, twisted town of Greenwood, unable to remember how she got there. Aside from her mother, who is trapped in a coma-like sleep, Greenwood’s only other inhabitants are the hostile and eerily identic...
