Lost Girls

By John Bankston

Teens are disappearing from The Academy. One Saturday night, Sheila LaRoche doesn’t come home. Everyone says the world-famous musician is overseas. Casey doesn’t believe it. Her dorm mate was helping her prep for a big audition. She wouldn’t have just ghosted her. Plus, Casey found her passport. How’d she travel without it? More troubling, who was the boy lingering outside their dorm, comfortable in a t-shirt despite the November chill?

Casey soon digs up more secrets buried at The Academy. The first teen who disappeared is identical to the boy she saw. Except, he went missing twenty years ago. Ten years ago, an Academy student was murdered. She looked just like the girl Casey saw playing a cello inside an empty classroom. Casey discovers there’s more than one way to be ghosted...

The first in a series set at The Northeast Kingdom Academy, Lost Girls is filled with building tension and escalating horror. The elite music school exists in a giant dead zone, a corner of Vermont with little cell or internet service.

At The Academy isolation is part of the curriculum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Bankston
• Release date: Jan 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215011102

John Bankston

Although he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, John Bankston grew up in Vermont, where he shared a log cabin with his parents, a cat named George and a dog named Allie. He began writing professionally while still a teenager. Since then, over two hundred of his articles have been published in magazines and newspapers across the country, including The Tallahassee Democrat, The Orlando Sentinel and The Tallahassean. He is the author of over eighty books for young adults, including biographies on Alexander the Great, scientist Stephen Hawking, author F. Scott Fitzgerald and actor Jodi Foster. He currently lives in Newport Beach, California with his girlfriend, Lora, and their adopted Chihuahua-Jack Russell, Astronaut. Vampires of Orange County is his first novel for adults.

Book preview

Time to face the music.

LostGirls

John Bankston

Book One in The Academy Series

Your dead will live.

Their corpses will rise.

And the earth will give birth to the departed spirits.

–Isaiah 26:19 New American Standard Bible

INTRO

You’re still being followed. It’s the middle of August, the middle of the day. Your white T-shirt is clear with sweat, every gasping exhale raw and angry. You’ve crested the hill. You feel safe.A glance back proves you are not.

An ancient sedan idles a few yards back. Sunlight reflects off its windshield in bright spikes. You can’t see who’s at the wheel. You can only guess.

You’ve never seen his face. He lurks in the shadows by Our New Place and the diner. You know him. Well.

He’s mad at your father but in your head you say, Pa.

You’ve never called Dad Pa.

You don’t know why the man is following you.

Daylight dissipates almost everything. Two memories remain. The stomach-dropping feeling that you can’t escape.

And the cabin door, the one you so carefully locked, now wide open and gaping with deadly invitation like the mouth of a Great White.

CHAPTER ONE

Saturday

November5th

The second time Sheila goes missing, I don’t tell anyone.

My Wonder Woman nightlight throws its small ruby circle toward the doorway. Red digits glowing over my nightstand say 3:47 a.m. A faint lilac scent lingers in the room—Sheila’s body spray. But she’s not here.

For nearly three months, Sheila’s tiny snores and deep breaths shifted from annoyance to background. They became as familiar as my mom’s air machine, the one she carted around during Dad’s tours, plugging it in with the cell phones.

Sheila’s nighttime breathing is gone. It’s why I woke up. Sheila? I whisper.

Nothing.

I stretch. Sheets fall away from my black cami and blue tartan pj pants. Gingerly, I set bare feet onto frigid oak floor. I wonder why my mother still hasn’t sent me the wool socks and thermals I begged for weeks ago. When I arrived, I was sleeping in shorts.

Nowwinter’scoldpromisehasslippedovercampus.

Other than my parents, Sheila is the first person I’ve ever shared a room with. The placement was no accident. The Northeast Kingdom Academy of Music & Art wants to make sure Julius Barnes’ daughter doesn’t tank another audition at Manhattan Conservatory. A school that reserved a spot for my roommate around the time she traded diapers for Pull-ups and graciously offered me a second chance this year.

I’m gifted.

Sheila is a prodigy.

I jump a bit at a loud creak from down the hall. Girls’ Dorm A has been expanded and modified half a dozen times since The Academy opened, but there’s no disguising its age. Lincoln was alive when its foundation was poured. Ancient wood screams every time the wind picks up.

It’s barely November.

Barefoot and sleepy, I open the door. Hinges squeak.

I have just a moment to wonder why the noisy hinges didn’t wake me when Sheila left, to notice for the one-hundredth time how off- kilter the diffused hallway lights are, how the carpeting frays along its edges before surrendering to rough floorboards. Then someone says my name and I spin like I’ve been stabbed.

It’s Winter Haddenton.

My first week here, Sheila told me our housemom graduated from Juilliard when she was 17. But instead of symphonies, she made money in cheesy piano bars and dying malls. She probably thought the job here was a lifeline, a temporary gig while she figured out her future.

Thatwastenyearsago.

Winter’s red-rimmed eyes and blotchy face are a post-bawling look I only share with the mirror. Hey, are you all right? I ask.

I’m fine. Her tone is dismissive. Whatever she’s been crying over isn’t my business.

I uh... I have to spend a penny, I say, falling back on an expression my dad used to drop.

Get that from London, did we? Winter asks in a put-on Cockney accent that only makes me feel more embarrassed. You don’t need permission to use the bathroom.

I know. And then I let my door shut behind me, because the lie is now the truth. I really, really have to pee.

Back in my room, I detach Wonder Woman from the outlet and edge around the room. The plaster is Braille. I run my fingertips across dents where Sheila’s hammer missed a nail, where she shifted her art to a higher perch. Along the wall over her bed are three framed concert posters. Her name tops the credits, along with glossy images of her playing a violin.

In the first one, she’s barely 11.

Before I hit her footboard, my toes brush the vanity. Beneath it is a power cord. Her hairdryer and flat iron are still plugged in. I unplug them, exchanging beauty aids for the nightlight.

The sudden illumination is a shock, despite my responsibility for it. I’m startled by my reflection. In amber tones my brown hair shifts to auburn, my green eyes flash like the devil’s. I stare at myself, at this messy girl with split ends whom I barely recognize.

Then I yank the cord from the wall.

Climbing onto Sheila’s bed, I’m calmed by the satiny silk of her comforter. Despite her absence, this feels intrusive and weird.

At the top of the bed, I lean over. Beneath the window dividing our room, there’s another outlet. I plug in the power cord, then use my makeshift flashlight to sweep the room.

Sheila’s bed is made, looking as it did when I fell asleep. It was barely midnight, and now I’m certain she didn’t come home.

My roommate’s side could be displayed at a Bloomingdale’s Home Store.

Mine is Goodwill.

I snagged the three-shelf bookcase from beside a dumpster my second day here. Now it’s bloated with paperbacks and crammed between a tiny dresser and a nightstand. A sketchy thriller perches next to my digital alarm clock, with my cell phone serving as bookmark. Buying the alarm was easier than keeping my phone charged—there’s no service, so there’s no point. We have Internet only in the library. Teachers here say isolation is part of the curriculum.

Setting the light atop my bed, I shuffle to our closet. I open the door partway, then yank the string.

I have less than a quarter of the real estate, but I can’t complain. My jeans, leggings, t-shirts, socks, bras, and underwear are shoved into my dresser. All I have hanging up are a couple of second-hand leather jackets, my junior prom dress and the uniform from my old school. And no, I don’t have any idea why I brought the last two things with me either.

Sheila’s section is an homage to her personas: high-fashion dresses, club kid glitter, a few outfits ideal for a well behaved, classically trained violinist to wear during recitals and tours. Both the shelf and half of the floor space are dominated by her shoes— mostly still in boxes with three-figure price tags. My kicks are scattered in one corner.

It looks just as it did yesterday.

Other than the time she disappeared last month, she’s never been out this late. She often misses curfew—and gets away with it—but she always comes home.

I’m worried as I approach the thick rose-colored curtains. Pushing them open, I peer into the silent night. Three stories below, a boy is standing just outside the dorm.

This is odd. Someone waiting for or dropping off my roommate wouldn’t be so blatant. Still, I hold my breath for a moment to see if Sheila emerges, if she was in the building even while I was searching our room.

Instead the boy looks up, smiling. I dart back, turning sideways to the wall.

When I get enough courage to look again, he is strolling casually away.

And then I get what’s bothering me about him. It’s below freezing and he doesn’t have a coat, just a thin white tee. He’s not even shivering.

CHAPTER TWO

The first time Sheila disappeared, I almost didn’t say anything. I was the one with the reputation. I was the one who bore watching.

This is what I think about while striding across campus on a sunny Saturday afternoon. My plaid pajamas are stuffed into faded blue FUGGS, my top concealed under a wool hoodie, my bed head managed by a floppy cap.

I’m disorientated and edgy but I’ve stayed indoors long enough.

I’ve almost reached my goal when Mr. Collins crosses the street. I take a deep breath, hoping he doesn’t see me. He’s a legend, a man who was in his twenties when he founded a music school in the middle of nowhere and made it a destination. Today former Academy kids play