When they were kids, Finn used to imagine herself and Nicki as two halves of a whole, balancing each other out, like yin and yang, coming together to make one full person. As she got older, the image changed to a pair of magnetic poles, each constantly repelling the other. But now she thinks that maybe they are just two versions of the same person, and if circumstances were different – if she had been the one to get pregnant and stay in Thunder Bay and live with Kate and Walter all these years – she wonders if she would have turned out just like Nicki.

—

The Thunder Bay Mall hasn’t changed much in the years since Finn has been gone – it is still mostly teen moms with giant strollers, old men drinking Tim Hortons coffee, middle-aged women scouring the sale rack at Zellers for discount bras. Finding herself back here, with the same drab vinyl-tile floor and dusty fake trees that were here in the eighties, wearing the same Superior Tours T-shirt that she slept in and Kate’s ugly ancient Birkenstocks after discovering her own flip-flops were covered in raw hamburger meat, she feels like an acne-scarred sixteen-year-old misfit again, hunched over and self-conscious, all too-long arms and legs, her eyebrows unplucked, her hair dull and lifeless.

Nicki had eventually conceded to let Finn help her search for London and Kate, sending Finn to the mall while she went down to the police station to file a missing person report and Hamish stayed home with the kids, including three very sorry-looking thirteen-year-old girls with wicked hangovers. When Finn left, he was cheerily forcing them to eat plates full of runny eggs and fatty bacon, saying, “It’s gane be awright once the pain has gane away,” which Finn translated into “I’m having a lot of fun torturing you little demonspawn.” At least he has a sense of humour about it.

Nicki had said the mall was as good a place as any to start looking, but London’s not here. There are just a bunch of girls with shiny hair and expertly shaped brows who Finn is guessing are the popular kids at her school and probably hate her because if memory serves, that’s what popular girls do in high school: hate you. Finn knows teenaged girls don’t come with any kind of warnings. But she was a teenaged girl once, and she knows she wanted to be sexy and she wanted people to like her, and she wanted to be smart, and she was never sure how to make all those things work at once, or in her favour. More than anything, though, what she wanted was to be smarter than her parents, and for a while she thought she was – after all, they were old and out of touch and dead inside. Like London, she thought that unless you grew up to be an artist or a humanitarian, you had sold out.