17 & Gone

  The train was just behind me and then it was beside me, and for a single, perfect moment the freight train and I were matched, its nose even with the bike’s front tire.

  Then, fast, it overtook me and thundered past me and I was left behind.

  — 40 —

  SHE was waiting for me in my bedroom, watching in silence as I shook out my legs, my muscles burning after riding her bike so hard and for so long.

  Her eyes held on me, and the weight of that gaze felt like she was pressing her entire body down on top of me, caked in mud and littered with burrs and twigs, scraped raw in places, as heavy as a sack of bricks.

  “I tried,” I said.

  She kept staring.

  I sat on the end of my bed and watched her in the vanity mirror. It was easier than looking directly at her. Talking to her reflection came easier, too.

  “I told them,” I said. “I told them you didn’t run away. That’s what you wanted me to say, right? But, Abby, I don’t know if they believed me. And that Cassidy girl from the summer? Don’t even ask me what she said. I went down there and I told them . . . I don’t know what else to do.”

  I tried to keep my voice down, so my mom wouldn’t hear, but why wouldn’t Abby say something? Anything? Why wouldn’t she blink or nod or give me a sign?

  If she told me what to do next—where to go, what to look for—all of this could be over by morning. Any one of the girls could give me a little push like that if she wanted. I mean, if that’s why they contacted me, why wouldn’t they do the simplest, quickest thing? It made me question them, and myself, and all of this. It made me wonder about the dreams and the house that contained them. Either I was meant to stay outside and help, or I was meant to join them inside and never get out. This dark thread of tightrope between the two options couldn’t keep me upright for long.

  Abby, though. Abby was different. She would be the one to give me her secret and let me unravel the answers. Why else stare at me like that?

  I took in all her details in the mirror: the mud spatter and the pieces of road and nature melded to her skin. The center hole in her throat had a faint glow, like she’d taken my pendant and swallowed it. Her lips were a thin, grim line, closed to air and words.

  “It would help if you told me,” I said. “What happened when you were walking back from Luke’s house?”

  I watched as she turned slowly, in small, jerky increments, until the back of her body was what faced the mirror and the front of her faced away from me.

  I hadn’t done what she wanted. I’d visited her grandparents—I’d done that—but maybe I should have said more. Maybe I’d been a coward. Maybe I knew how her grandmother would have responded if I’d told her the disconnected spirit of her lost granddaughter was communicating through me, a complete stranger, from some open gateway between this world and the next. And that I didn’t know what this meant about where she was now, and I didn’t know what that meant for where she could be found in the future. I barely knew how to explain it myself.

  Really, that would have gone over well.

  I was going to say this when Abby suggested writing the letter. She’d turned her body deliberately, and I saw what she was facing now: the open notebook on my desk, the pen pointed to the page. When I sat down at the desk, she came closer, and when I picked up the pen she was at my elbow, smoke-gray breath singeing my skin.

  I couldn’t mimic her handwriting, and this wasn’t a session of automatic writing in which I sealed my eyes, cleared my mind, and let the barest touch of her ghostly hand guide my own. I simply wrote down what she wanted to say for her, because she couldn’t hold the pen and write it herself.

  For the return address, I used the one on Dorsett Road. I borrowed an envelope and a stamp from my mom’s desk in the kitchen downstairs, and then I carried the letter up to my room to mail from a public post office box in the morning.

  But as I was pulling the covers to my chin and curling up to go to sleep, I felt her still there in the room, as if I could do more even than that, as if I should be trolling the back roads in my van, calling out her name, pasting her poster on every telephone pole, visiting the police station every day until they reclassified her case as possible foul play. I thought of Fiona Burke, who I felt sure was observing from a perch somewhere in the shadows, and I thought of how I’d never wondered what happened to her, before this winter, and how I should have. How heartless it was for a girl to be forgotten and buried before there was even anything of her to put in the ground.

  I wouldn’t let that happen now, again. Not to Abby Sinclair.

  — 41 —

  FRIDAY was Deena’s eighteenth birthday party at her boyfriend’s house. It was also the night I lost any control I had over this. If I’d ever been in control.

  First the noise. Not all in my head this time—also in the room around me. It was a raucous party as Deena had been hoping. All the activity didn’t drown out the insistent whispering in my head but drew it out, made it frantic. So much seemed to be happening, and there I was in the midst of it, sitting on a sagging plaid couch with a spiked jug of cranberry juice. I was a part of things in the way any piece of furniture would be.

  I’d forgotten anyone could see me and flinched when two girls from school came up asking if I was still into Jamie.

  “Wait, is Jamie here?” I said. “Have you seen him?”

  They said he was around somewhere, or I thought that’s what they said, but before I could ask why, they’d moved away and somehow taken my jug, the one between my knees that I’d been lifting up, again and again, to my mouth.

  It was here that the party turned from me. I became completely detached from it as if a scissor had poked through the page and removed me from the scene.

  I realized two things: One, that cranberry juice Deena left me with sure had a lot of vodka mixed up in it. And two, none of these people would notice if I went missing.

  Flash, I’m gone, and they’d keep partying.

  It could happen to me here, at this party, at right that very moment: There’d be a girl in my spot on the couch and then no girl taking up space on the plaid cushion. The seat would stay open for a minute or two before someone snagged it. And that would be the last of me.

  I checked to see what clothes would be listed on my Missing poster: black boots; black cargo pants; ugly flannel shirt I forgot I even had on; under that, a V-neck gray shirt with a rip in the shoulder; black tank top underneath it all. Would anyone remember any of those details when asked?

  That was when I noticed it, the pendant, how it wasn’t tucked under all the layers of my clothes the way I liked it to be. It had been pulled out, and I hadn’t noticed. It was hanging down over my chest. Glowing a milky, fizzy white.

  I stood up. I grabbed my coat. Of course no one stopped me. I took a step toward the door, and everything went on just as it was.

  It was when I was pushing through the crowd to get to that door and to the front porch and then past the porch to where I parked my van outside. It was right then. The shadows. I noticed them at the edges of the room, down by the floor, near the heating vents, and up by the ceiling, where the stucco met the plain white walls. These shadows formed themselves into thin tendrils, like fingers. And the fingers grew, coiling into long, snakelike arms. Reaching. I knew if I got close, they could grab me.

  Maybe this was what each of the girls saw before her time came. One of the shadows was directly over my head now. It could let go at any moment. It could drop and take me down with it.

  No one else could see them. Everyone from the party was oblivious: Chugging cups from the keg. Smoking up in the corner. Dancing to bad music on the worn rug. Making out against the wall. Picking a fight near the windows. Ordinary things on an ordinary night—and Happy Birthday, Deena, you made it—all while something terrible was coming for me, about to swallow me and make me gone.

  It couldn’t be my time yet. Could it? I had people to help, girls to unearth and keep track of, girls who needed m
e out here, alive. Didn’t I? I had to leave this house. I knew how hot the shadowy hands would be, from the fire, how their grip would singe through my flannel shirt and my cotton shirt beneath it and even the shirt beneath that, to what’s left, which was my skin.

  Once they touch your skin, you’re theirs.

  — 42 —

  I was facedown in the snow, and there was a boot planted before my eyes. Something damp was in my mouth, but it wasn’t a tongue. It was the sopping-wet finger of my own glove. I think I might’ve been sucking on it.

  I pulled out the finger, spit out some lint, and looked up. The sole of the boot had a red stripe, and ice and snow were crusted into the laces. There was another boot exactly like it beside the first, and far up above both the boots was a set of shoulders and, above that, a head. The head was shaking with laughter.

  Then he reached out a hand, stretching out his arm so it was close enough to be grabbed by mine. “C’mon, let me help you up.”

  This wasn’t Jamie, but it was a guy I knew. Really, it was a guy I’d talked to only recently, a guy I wouldn’t have known if not for knowing the girls.

  “You’re plastered,” Luke Castro said—Abby Sinclair’s Luke. He grinned when he said it, and I couldn’t see his face to tell if this was all a joke to him or if he really cared.

  “No,” I mumbled, “it’s not that.” Because it wasn’t. It wasn’t the spiked cranberry juice that made me run out of Karl’s house—or if it was that, it was only partly that. I remembered the shadows, targeting me and descending fast.

  “Sure,” he said sarcastically. “You’re perfectly sober. Sure.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and I shook off his hand and stood up on my own. I wobbled and tried to hide it. “Are you a friend of Karl’s or something?”

  “You asked me that already,” he said.

  Wait. I did?

  “Tell me again,” I said. “Tell me again you didn’t do anything to her.” I was back in our first conversation, asking after Abby Sinclair, and it took him a few moments to get there himself, even though I was the one who’d so obviously been drinking.

  “I didn’t. Do anything. To her,” he said.

  We were off to the side of the house, away from the windows, like we meant to sneak over here for a reason. Did I? Did I find Luke at some point and lead him out here? Did I do anything embarrassing? Did I say something stupid? Did he hurt Abby and all along I didn’t know it? Did anyone see us go out here? How many of those things did I say out loud?

  There was a motion sensor and not a regular light, which I didn’t realize until it flicked off and dropped us into darkness. I couldn’t see the puff of breath trailing from his mouth, though I could feel it, since his face was so close to mine. He smelled the way I remember Abby remembering he smelled—or else it was the way he’d smelled when I made that visit to his house weeks before. Her memories were cutting into mine, lifting up out of nowhere and confusing me.

  She thought I’d been ignoring her. And maybe I was. It was just that there were so many, and my head had been crowded up with them, like a smoky, dim room at this party, except my head was filled with girls. And also with myself—because I was a girl, too. I was 17 and maybe in danger, just like they were.

  A flicker of shadowy movement caused me to look toward the woods. And there she was, the dark shape of her at least, shaking her head no.

  “No?” I said aloud.

  Luke said something I didn’t catch, and a voice in my head said, It wasn’t him.

  “Are you sure?” I asked to the trees.

  Yes, she answered sadly. Not him. Not him.

  She meant he hadn’t hurt her, not that I ever really thought he did—besides how she’d gotten her heart broken. Hearing her made me know they were outside with me now. All of them.

  I could see a girl. Then two more girls. Then another. Another. Girls I recognized, and some girls I didn’t. There were so many girls I had yet to meet.

  The lost girls’ eyes glowed, fire-lit, from the sweep of pine trees nearby. How far were we from where Abby went missing? It was close, I realized. So close.

  If Luke could see them there, he’d be scared the way I should have been scared. I squinted and tried to picture the girls as he would: the one girl with the glittering shards of broken windshield encrusted into her cheeks; the girl with the frost-blue lips; the girl soaked through her clothes, dripping from an absent rain. Then the two girls melded together as if their bodies met in the most intimate tissue- and sinew-filled spaces that Siamese twins share, shoulder muscle growing into lungs and liver, their sides fused hip to hip.

  These two girls were motioning to get my attention, waving at me to stop, waving at me to get away from him, to get in my van and get away. I should have listened, but what struck me was how it looked like they had three hands. Two individual hands of their own, and the third hand, the one they shared, far larger than the other two.

  “What are you looking at? What’s over there?” Luke asked.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me? You sure seemed to be two minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, right.” But I didn’t bother arguing. I heard what the girls were trying to tell me, and I was feeling around in my pockets. The pockets of my cargo pants—there were many—and my coat pockets, too, inside and outside, every last one. Then I was down on my knees, there at Luke’s feet, searching the snow to see if I’d dropped them when I passed out. I was drunk, probably, and I was seeing ghosts, definitely, and now to top it all off I’d lost my van keys.

  With my movement, the motion sensor made the back porch light flick on. It spotlit us, beaming down on the crown of my head.

  Luke laughed again, and I realized how this looked to him, where I had myself positioned on the ground, with such easy access to his zipper. “You’re something else, aren’t you?” he said. I had absolutely no idea what Abby saw—sees, even still—in the guy, why she got so intoxicated by him and took off in the middle of the night on her bike to see him and let him stomp on her heart.

  But then I wasn’t looking up at him anymore. The side door of the house had come open, and the person standing there let go of the door and let it swing closed.

  When it slammed, Luke turned toward it, too.

  “Hey, man,” Luke said, all nonchalant, when he saw it was Jamie. “What’s up?”

  This was what the two girls had been trying to warn me about. Now I knew. Nobody wanted Jamie to get the wrong idea.

  “I was looking for you,” Jamie said—to me, not to Luke. His voice was flat; I couldn’t decipher any emotion from it. His hair had fallen over his eyes like it always did.

  “Oh, I’ve got her,” Luke said, a game in his voice and a hard hand on my arm, pulling me up to my feet so he could jerk me closer.

  I pushed him away and disentangled myself, fumbling on clumsy legs but at least standing on my own without his help. “He doesn’t,” I told Jamie. “This wasn’t . . . It’s not, it’s not anything. What?” I turned fast, in the other direction. One of the girls was talking to me, trying to tell me what to say to fix this, but I couldn’t make out the words because there was this panic in my chest and it was cold and there was all the wind.

  “That’s not what she said before,” Luke said.

  I turned around to see Jamie backing up, away from us. That was it. He was going to believe that liar over me, thinking I’d gotten together with this sleaze so soon after our breakup. He was watching me with a strained, strange look on his face. But he didn’t leave.

  Luke cracked up laughing. “I’m kidding, man. Dude, just kidding. She’s all yours. I’m going inside for a beer.”

  Jamie stepped away from the door and let him through. But he didn’t join me in the pool of light, where I was still standing.

  “I . . . that wasn’t what it looked like,” I told him.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m only talking to him because she wants me to.”


  “She, who?”

  “She . . . oh.” I stopped. I had to quit saying things out loud. I couldn’t talk anymore about her or about the others. Not then, not to him. “Never mind. I’m not supposed to say.”

  He shifted a little, a flinch almost. Like I’d said something that scared him.

  I found myself longing for it. I longed for the motion sensor to come on in another part of the yard and show him. There’d be Abby, moving fast across the snow with one flip-flop and one bare foot, but not fast enough. Natalie’s long hair would hide her face, but a shimmer of glass would shine through. Shyann would be concealing herself in the branches, well-practiced from her days of living off nature in the vacant lots of her city. Madison would speak first before anyone, saying could we hurry it up already since she had somewhere to be, and Isabeth would have the most concern in her eyes, thinking of how it feels to lose the people you love, so she’d tell Madison to be quiet. Eden wouldn’t care about any of this. She’d just want me to find my keys so we could go home. Kendra would want to leap out and go, Boo! And Yoon-mi and Maura would be shaking their heads because they tried to warn me; they tried to wave me away.

  And the others? It was unbearable to think of how many girls the dark expanse of woods could contain.

  Then there’d be Fiona Burke herself. She wasn’t really one of them, but she was more like them than she was like me. She was missing, and I was still here. She was a ghost, and I was alive for however much longer I was allowed to be. She’d try to talk me out of him. We don’t need him, she might say. Walk away, Lauren. Walk away.

  But none of the girls came out, and no one spoke up from the vacant darkness. And so Jamie kept on disbelieving me.