The brush was thickly grown over the fences, and the trees gave shade. No one in their right mind went back there—no one besides dealers, who went in there to hide stashes, or bums, who went in there to sleep—but she could see herself in one of those vacant lots, building a tree house out of vines and old plywood, tires and netting, completely concealed from anyone down on the ground.
Maybe sometimes a couple from the neighborhood would slip in past the fences to hook up, but they’d get it done and be out fast enough. Cops didn’t go back there. Feral dogs did, and scruffy cats without collars, but she’d just kick them down when they climbed her tree.
She’d descend from her perch in the branches only at night, to scrounge for food. When she slept, in her tree house hidden in the middle of her city, she’d open her eyes to see a blanket of stars. No one could take that view from her. Out there was an entire universe, proof that there was life outside this one, and every night she’d have a reminder.
She would have gone in spring, if she could have waited.
She couldn’t wait.
Shyann did have her reasons, and they weren’t secret. She’d left her parents a note:
CANNOT take this anymore!
What is it going to take to make u listen!
I am NOT going back to that school!
But the note wasn’t found for four and a half days, because her little brother balled it up inside his toy dump truck. It wasn’t until the toy tipped over, spilling its contents, that Shyann’s mother recognized her handwriting and unballed the note to finally see what her daughter had said.
Truth was, Shyann watched her family’s windows for hours before she left the confines of the backyard. Out there, where the trash cans were stored, there was a shed that the superintendent never used. Shyann spent her first night inside this shed. She bundled up, keeping a hole uncovered for her two eyes and nothing more, and every once in a while she’d stand and peek outside the shed to her parents’ second-floor windows. They had no idea she was so close. Her mom could have called her name out the window and she would have been startled enough to bolt up and say, “Yes, ma’am?”
Her second night away, she abandoned the shed. It was too close, and now that she’d stayed out a whole night, she was getting anxious about the consequences of coming back. Part of her did want to go home, but when she stepped nearer to the trash cans, she heard voices she recognized, from those kids who lived on her block. She imagined what they’d throw at her, like the bottle that one time. Like trash in the street. Like brightly colored pellets of candy, small and rock-hard as hailstones. When held in hot, grimy fists they sweated off some of their coating, so you could see the impact of them on her clothes as if she’d been out playing paintball. Orange, brown, blue, green, red; the darkest spots where she was hardest hit.
She was about to come out, but she heard those voices. And she knew that if she left her hiding place, if she went home and returned to school, she’d get worse things thrown at her. Far worse. And then she’d topple. They could dump all they wanted on her, the contents of whole trash cans even, and she’d just lie there, and let herself be buried, and that would be the end of Shyann.
That was why she couldn’t ever go back.
After the first night in the shed, she spent one night in an old warehouse, and the night after that in a condemned house where the padlocks had been ripped from the doorjamb so anyone or anything could get in. Her fantasy of spending her last months before she turned eighteen in the wilds of a vacant lot, sleeping nights high up in a thick oak tree where nothing could bother her—that fantasy fell to pieces once she’d experienced the cold.
She was constantly shivering, in dark places where the electric and heat didn’t work because the city had shut it off. She tried to keep warm, but the winter nights were long, longer than she’d expected. She didn’t know how many nights she’d be able to last.
The last thing she remembered was something of a dream. Her eyes were closing, and the cold had gone deep into her bones, and she felt like she could hear the whole city talking about her. But they weren’t taunting—this time they were saying nice things. The mayor would lock them up if they didn’t.
All the girls at school, on camera, they were going: “Shyann, please come home, we’re so sorry. We’re saving you a seat at lunch.” And the guys on her block, they were going: “We only said you’re ugly ’cause we want to get with you, Shyann. Didn’t you know? We thought you knew.”
Teachers were praising her, coming up to the microphone one by one. Mr. Wallace said how wrong he was for blaming her for the candy dropped under her desk and giving her detention for eating in class. Ms. Taylor, who led the grueling warm-ups in gym, swore on the spot that Shyann would never have to do extra sit-ups for being slow with the laps again. And Ms. Atkins, the nasty English teacher, publicly announced that she was taking back all the Fs and awarding Shyann an A.
Stuff like that. Stuff like her parents saying all this was too little, too late, and they’d homeschool her to graduate. And they’d buy her a car. And she’d find it when she came home—all shiny and blue, wrapped in a bow like on commercials.
She was too cold to move. Too cold to get up and see if this had all come true, but she could picture herself doing it. She could see herself slipping into that sparkling blue thing—hers, all hers—and driving far, far away.
— 31 —
I looked it up to be sure. They still hadn’t found Shyann’s body—at least, there was no funeral announcement, no search party scouring the vacant lots of the city, paying careful attention to private hideaways and the climbing branches of tall trees. They hadn’t found her, just like with Natalie on that mountain road two states away. And with Fiona, down whatever road she took, wherever she landed aside from back here with me. None of the girls I saw in the house had been found.
There were more stories still to be told. More girls, their voices rising, their Missing flyers entering my collection. My memory expanding now to hold all of their names.
— 32 —
ISABETH
Isabeth got in the car. Didn’t she know a girl alone should never get in the strange car when it pulls up alongside her, when the man calls out asking if she needs a ride, when even after she says no, he keeps tailing her, keeps asking?
She knew.
On any other day, she wouldn’t have accepted the ride. But what she wanted her family and friends to know, what she hoped they’d only understand, had they been there, was how the rainstorm had caught her unaware when she was walking home from school. How the burst of showers came from out of nowhere and how, within seconds, she was soaked. And that’s when the car pulled up behind her.
At first she ignored him. Then he pulled the car closer, and she happened to take a peek and realized—a glimmer of relief—that it was only someone she knew. Well, sort of. The man’s face was familiar; he was from around the neighborhood. He knew her dad, or was it her brothers? He worked in a store in town, or was he a member of her church? Either way, she’d seen him before, somewhere.
“Need a ride?” this man, technically not a stranger, called.
She hesitated.
“Come on, get in out of the rain,” he said.
Isabeth nodded, and within moments she was depositing her schoolbooks in the backseat. She was climbing into the front seat. She was closing the car door.
Only then did she waver. She hadn’t done the wrong thing, had she? Did she really know this man? Should she ask his name to be sure? Would that be rude? That would be. So rude. She didn’t want to be rude. That’s what she was thinking moments before she realized the door had been locked automatically.
Isabeth had done everything she was told to do for the past 17 years: She had studied. She had washed the dishes. She had kept her legs closed. She had stayed off the Internet past ten o’clock. She had joined her family for church every Sunday. She had eaten her vegetables. She had, once or twice, helped an old lady cross a street. She had ne
ver once rolled up the waistband of her school-uniform skirt to show more leg.
She’d done so many things right, and one thing wrong. She shouldn’t have gotten in that car.
Isabeth Valdes: Gone 2010 from Binghamton, New York. Age 17.
— — —
MADISON
Madison was going to be a model. She’d been told she should model all her life, like randomly when she was out shopping for a cute new outfit at the mall or sucking on the straw of her iced, sugar-free, skim-milk chai latte at the coffee place or just minding her own business walking down the street. She figured it was only a matter of time before someone plucked her from the great big nothing that was her life and plastered her face on a billboard and made her into Something. She figured heading to New York would only bring her into Somethingness that much faster.
She met the photographer online, or talked to him anyway. He said he’d do her portfolio for free, and he had the lights set up in his apartment and everything.
So Madison spent the entire six-hour ride practicing her posing face in the bus window. She had an expression she was trying to perfect, half serious, half sweet, lips pursed, eyebrows lifted, chin held high. She knew the photographer would love her for it.
Madison Waller: Gone 2013 from Keene, New Hampshire. Age 17.
— — —
EDEN
Eden simply wanted a taco. She was the one who saw the roadside stand at the edge of nowhere and begged her friends to stop. She was the one who raced out of the car before anyone else did. The light was falling, and picnic tables were empty, and all she knew was that the roadside stand said TACOS and she needed one, right now. The rickety shack was covered in hand-painted signs like that. One said STRAWBERRIES and another said BLUEBERRIES. And the biggest of them all said JEWELRY / PIE / WOVEN RUGS / CIGARS. Though the place was ready to close up shop, Eden talked them into serving her and her friends some tacos slathered in cheese and sour cream and pico de gallo and heaps of guac. But by the time she and her friends were finished eating, the place was closed and dark and there was nowhere to use the bathroom before they got back on the road, so Eden had to make use of the weeds.
The last thing Eden’s friends heard her say before she trampled off into the darkness beyond the picnic tables was, “Back in a sec! Gotta pee.”
Eden DeMarco: Gone 2011 from Fairborn, Ohio. Age 17.
— — —
YOON-MI AND MAURA
Yoon-mi said she knew the minute she walked into the gymnasium for early pep-squad practice. She knew as she stretched and as, across the gym, the last phys ed class of the day counted off into teams. She knew as the class spread out to start dodgeball, getting ever closer to where they were practicing. And she knew as she stood up to learn the new cheer. She knew when she felt the smack of impact as the ball hit her square in the face. She knew as she fell backward, and she knew as she lay there, staring up at the ridiculously tall ceiling, where caught in the rafters was a lone silver balloon from the formal the month before. She’d gone to that dance with a boy, even though she secretly liked girls. What she knew is that something significant would happen today.
The feeling took shape and grew eyes and a mouth and a face, turning into this girl, this fellow junior named Maura.
“I’m so freaking sorry!” Maura was going. “I didn’t mean to get you in the face!”
And there were more people surrounding them—the gym teacher, the other juniors in last-period gym, and the girls on the pep squad, a crowd of heads and hands—but Yoon-mi focused in on one of them.
Maura Morris, who’d moved here from Canada last year.
Her future girlfriend who’d just clocked her in the face during dodgeball.
Maura, on the other hand, didn’t know a thing when she walked into PE that day. Not even when she smacked the beautiful pep-squad girl in the face with a speeding dodgeball. Yoon-mi Hyun, the girl to whom she gave two black eyes—little did Maura know that, within a week, she’d become her first girlfriend.
The mystery wasn’t how they fell in love—that was quick; that was easy—it was what happened once they went public. Their families’ reactions. The kids at school. When Maura suggested they could run off together and start a new life up in Canada, she’d only said it offhand. A little wishful thinking, a silly dream. She didn’t expect Yoon-mi to show up at her house with her bags that very night and say, “Let’s go.”
Yoon-mi Hyun and Maura Morris: Gone 2007 from Milford, Pennsylvania. Both age 17.
— — —
KENDRA
Kendra ran to the edge of the cliff and waved to all her friends. “Guys, guys!” she called. “I’m gonna do it. Watch!”
Kendra had seen the guys jump the cliffs before—one of the guys would take a running leap to clear the outcropping of rocks and cannonball into the bright blue basin of water below. The splash would be terrific. Then there’d be those heart-pounding moments after the jumper went in, when he was so deep no trace of him could be made out, and then, just when some coward was thinking of dialing 911, the surface of the lake would shatter.
The jumper would surface, whooping and yelling, and the next guy would get in line to see if he could make a bigger splash.
None of Kendra’s friends had ever jumped off this particular cliff—the highest point above the lake—and she knew they were too chickenshit to try. She’d be legend.
She powered through the run, took the leap, and her body set sail. Gravity took hold and air rushed around her as she started to fall. It sang her name.
When she hit water, she didn’t expect it to sting so much. She’d fallen sideways, and the impact was a surprise, and the cool temperature of the water was also a surprise, and she was sinking fast, going deeper than she knew the lake could go. Traces of foam surrounded her, forming a tunnel that seemed to bury her in the wet and sopping center of the Earth.
She looked up and up, and up and up some more. That pinpoint of golden light at the highest height of the blue above her was the sun, she knew, casting down over the water. All she had to do was swim up to reach it.
How far could it be?
Kendra Howard: Gone 2012, from Greenwich, Connecticut. Age 17.
— 33 —
EVERY night it seemed I was out on the cracked sidewalk again, feeling that distinctive pinch of smoke in my throat as I approached the front gate. I was climbing the stairs and ignoring the bell—because there’s no need to ring a doorbell in a place that’s like home—and going in. I always went in.
The house was brighter, the flames having caught the drapes and only beginning to dance in delight across the vaulted ceilings.
I didn’t know if this was a new fire, set from a flick of Fiona Burke’s lighter, or if time had woven in on itself and the remnants of fire I saw on nights before this were meant to become this one, this fire that still had a chance to build and rage.
Still, the flames didn’t hurt us. We lived with them like we would the quirks of any ordinary house, the way my mom and I constantly catch our socks and pant hems on the loose nail in the floorboard in the upstairs hallway, but we’ve never bothered getting it fixed.
The house was getting crowded now as each new girl arrived. Voices coasted down corridors and stairways, echoing so it sounded like they were repeating ever after the same things.
Two of the newest girls were moving in. They wanted to share a room, since they came here together, and they didn’t want to spend a night apart.
I met them on the stairs outside and noticed they were holding hands.
What is this place? Yoon-mi asked me as she eyed the door. Yoon-mi wore a hat that hid her long hair, so she seemed made of only two bright brown eyes.
Beside her, Maura wore her own hair tightly tied back, pulling sharply at the skin of her scalp. Only when they were alone did she take down her hair. She whispered something and then Yoon-mi asked that question also, for the both of them.
Why are we here?
“It’s where y
ou live now,” my dream-self told them, holding open the door so they could join the others. Once they made it through, I pushed the door closed. And I wondered: They wouldn’t get out, would they? Now that they were here, they were as good as stuck and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
They must have read the curse of this place from off my face. Maybe they thought I was the one who’d manufactured their doom, who commanded this house and kept them bound here. I expected them to fight me, claw at my arms and try to push open the door to get out onto the ashy street, but they didn’t seem too upset so long as it was both of them on the same side of that door.
There was one girl, though, who couldn’t accept it—the curse of what being in this house meant for her fate. For her plans.
Whenever I saw Madison, she was trying to find a way out. The house had many windows, some with no glass left in the frames so it should be easy to jump through and hit the sidewalk running, but none of the girls could leave through the windows or even the front door. If they could make it to the rooftop, if the crumbling stairs didn’t cave in on the way up, they still couldn’t take a flying leap to reach the bottom. Something always stopped them.
Still, Madison had tried every one of the exits. She’s got someone to meet, she’d go around saying. That photographer. It was really all she talked about—how she had to leave and get back to his place, how they never did get around to finishing the pictures for her portfolio.
Madison hated that I could simply come and go and she couldn’t, so she tried to block the door to keep me with her. It was only fair, she told me. It’s not like anyone would want to take my picture, with my choppy haircut and my ugly boy boots and my face, which was okay, she conceded, but nothing special.