NOS4A2

An eight-year-old girl named Victoria McQueen—also known as Vic and “The Brat”—hears a sob in her parents’ room. Her father, Chris McQueen, is asking her mother, Linda, to remember where she might have left something. She listens to them insult each other with increasing hostility. Chris says Linda is “ugly” and that he can’t believe he had a kid with her. She hears her mother crying. Vic leaves and gets on her bike: a Tuff Burner. It had been a birthday present from her father and is next to her father’s Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Vic rides to the wood-framed entrance to what is known as the Shorter Way Bridge. She rides across the Bridge as it sags and pops, exiting, somehow, into a building in an alley. She turns and sees the Shorter Way behind her. Moments earlier, she was in Haverhill, but she emerges at Hampton Beach in a matter of seconds.

She walks to Terry’s Primo Subs, past a line of parked motorcycles. She was there only a couple of hours earlier and doesn’t understand how she could have returned such a great distance so quickly. Inside, she avoids looking at the strips of flypaper that are filled with trapped insects. A man named Pete is working behind the counter.

Pete asks her if she came back for the bracelet, which belongs to her mother. Vic feels a sharp pain behind her left eye, and she assumes she must be dreaming. She tells Pete she came back because the bracelet is valuable, but Pete says it is mere costume jewelry.

When she goes back outside, the bridge is still in the alley. When she crosses it, she hears a noise like static. She closes her eyes and pedals, returning to Haverhill.

She is back in her woods near the Merrimack River. The Shorter Way Bridge is gone, and a guardrail replaced the entrance. Vic rides home with the bracelet and finds her father in the kitchen. She asks what time it is because she doesn’t know how long she’s been gone. He says there was a power outage five minutes prior.

She gives him the bracelet and says she found it between the car seats. He asks if she’s okay and says she has a fever. She collapses and he catches her. Her mother comes out and says she has heatstroke from the car ride, then the bike ride. Her father tells her mother that Vic found the bracelet.

Vic dreams of horrible images, including white angels hanging in a forest of pine trees. She wakes to her father holding her wrists, telling her to calm down. He says she was screaming that the “bats were out of the bridge” (46). She says the Shorter Way Bridge is gone and asks why. Her father says someone once tried to drive across it and fell through when it broke. They demolished it afterward. It hasn’t been accessible for many years. As she falls asleep, she hears him mutter that he wishes he could have helped destroy it.

Months later, Vic tries not to think about the Shorter Way. She also tries to forget about other times when she crossed bridges that weren’t there to find other lost objects. Will Lords lost Mr. Pentack, a corduroy penguin. She remembers—what she believes is a false memory—of riding to a bowling alley and finding Mr. Pentack in a lost and found.

At age 10, she found her father’s wallet in the couch, but vaguely remembers finding it at a construction site in Attleboro. Each time, her eye hurt.

She remembers finding Taylor, the cat, which belonged to Mr. de Zoet. She thinks she remembered finding him run over, although no one saw Taylor again.