Page 1 of Just Right
PROLOGUE
Four years ago, my best friend disappeared.
It was during a backpacking trip to Europe that she’d been planning for most of our twenties. At twenty-eight, she finally decided to go for it. Charlotte quit her job, put all of her savings into travel and everything she would need for it, and gave me a hug, promising that she’d be back by the end of the summer.
By mid-September, I’d realized something was wrong. By October, I started to worry. By November, I tried to track her steps, but it was as if she’d vanished. Charlotte Linden had ceased to exist following a trip she took specifically to a small town on the edge of Germany.
Like me, Char didn’t have any family. It’s one thing that bonded us; the other being the super original nicknames we got as kids for our hair. With hair as deep and rich as the shade of a ruby, she was Red. Me? Thanks to my bouncy golden curls, I became Goldie. Somehow we formed our own family, the two of us, even when we lived states apart or when Char insisted on taking her trip alone.
That was four years ago, and it’s been just as long that I’ve been looking for some sort of closure about what happened to her.
My friend is as good as a ghost. She has no online presence, and the phone number she had before she disappeared was reassigned last December; a fact I discovered when I made my umpteenth call, hoping she’d answer, and ended up wishing a stranger a merry Christmas. As far as I know, she never returned to her apartment, and her whole life in Massachusetts was put on pause the summer she left.
Mine slowed to a crawl as loneliness set in, walking hand-in-hand with continued concern. And then, when I’d slowly begun to accept that she either couldn’t be found or didn’twantto be, a random search of one of her old screen names—one I’d forgotten before it seemed to pop back into my brain—brought me to a website that took me to message board that led me to a discussion about that same small village in Germany?—
Blackmoor.
It’s a myth.
A legend.
Afairytale.
At least, that’s what the anonymous posters on that strange message board believed. That, in the forest of Blackmoor, if you pledge to stay three days inside of the trees, you can get what you most want. A wish, that’s how they reverentially referred to it. Sacrifice everything… risk it all… and you could walk out of the woods with a ticket to the one thing you desire, plus enough cash to make it worthwhile.
Me? I wanted to know what happened to Charlotte. And considering her username was one of the most insistent posters on the board that this wasn’t just a fantasy, but that the forest of Blackmoor wasreal…considering that she made her intentions clear starting seven years ago that she would petition the towncouncil to enter and face its beasts… I decided to go on a trip myself.
Of course, it wasn’t as easy as I make it sound. It took a year, a good chunk of my savings, and requesting leave from my job at a New York publishing house to be able to leave on my ‘European vacation’, all of that without actually believing that:
I’d actually find out what happened to Charlotte; and
Anything I read in those years-old online messages could possibly be legitimate.
Tell that to the woman who spent the last four hours interviewing me to see if the Blackmoor council would allow me to enter the woods, hoping to earn my wish. Her name is Sandy—or that’s what she told me it was—and she started the conversation by asking me if I believed in monsters.
Monsters.
There’s a reason the denizens inside those woods are referred to as the beasts of Blackmoor. When the council say ‘sacrifice’ and ‘risk’, they mean it. Before I reached this level of a final interview, only one of two women staying in the small town’s only hostel who were given the opportunity to even request stepping foot into the imposing forest, I had been warned against pursuing this by nearly every local I met.
Because here there be monsters, and if I decide to step foot inside of the trees, I’m agreeing to the idea that they might see a thirty-two-year-old mid-sized blonde who is desperate enough to chase her old friend into a mythical forest and decide… hmm.Lunch.
Shit. I’m not afraid. I stopped being worried when, on the off-chance, I asked the elderly taxi driver—who was the sole car that agreed to take me from the small airport all the way to thevillage of Blackmoor—whether he remembered once bringing a determined redhead this way, and hedid. At the very least, Charlotte was here, and all I’ve been told is that, if I want to know what happened after she agreed to face the forest, I have to do the same myself.
Three days. That’s how it works. You promise that you’ll stay for three days…
So why does the contract that I’m signing say threeweeks?
Sandy is waiting expectantly for me to scribble my signature at the bottom of the two-foot long sheaf of aged parchment. Despite the ancient look of the paper—on purpose, I’d bet, considering how everything in the town seems sooldand, well, like out of a fairytale—the words are all printed. I was able to read it easily, though she assured me that wasn’t necessary, but I’ve done my fair share of contracts at work. Only a sucker signs without knowing what they’re signing for, and though I might be searching for hope in the last place I can find it—or Charlotte—I’m no sucker. I read every line, using the pen to circle the wordweeks.
I glance over at the pleasant-faced woman in her mid-fifties. Like me, she’s blonde, even if her hair is paler than my more golden color. Her hair is twisted up and out of her matronly face, though there’s something about her shrewd dark eyes that has me clearing my throat.
