17 & Gone

  This time it worked, in a way. Because the place in the dream was near. I could smell its smoke. Or someone who reeked of it.

  “Who are you looking for?” Luke asked. “My parents are out. It’s just you and me.”

  It’s just you and me, a voice mocked, in my head.

  She was meaner than I expected.

  Don’t go inside the house if he asks you. He just wants to do you in his parents’ water bed.

  I was looking around wildly then, to see where the voice was coming from. I thought she was behind me, but the voice had come from across the garage, on the other side of the car. So was she under it or crouching down against the door?

  Just wait, she said. You’ll ruin everything.

  “No,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Whoa,” Luke said at this, though I wasn’t even talking to him.

  I waited for the voice to return so I could find where she was hiding, and then when she kept silent I realized. That wasn’t Abby. That voice was cruel the way Fiona Burke was cruel, and snide the way Fiona Burke used to be snide. That was Fiona’s low whisper in my ear.

  “Listen,” Luke was saying, “if you do hear from her, no hard feelings, right? It’s not like we were serious. She knew that.”

  My face must have said otherwise.

  “She didn’t?”

  “She thought . . .” I started, wishing she’d speak up and tell me. “She thought maybe,” I finished.

  Luke shook his head. “Why doesn’t she just call me herself? Why’d she send you?”

  “Because I told her I’d help her,” I said, and by saying it out loud, it was like I was declaring it. To him and everyone. To myself. To her and to Fiona Burke—I felt their held lungfuls of breath as they listened.

  Then I wheeled the bike out of the garage and down the driveway toward my van without another word. Maybe I’d been wrong, I told myself. Maybe the bike had been blue.

  — 16 —

  I didn’t end up wheeling Abby’s blue Schwinn bicycle into the police station. I left it in my van parked outside and then I went in, to tell the police I had it.

  The station was small, with a waiting room holding three chairs and an interior window in the wall, through which a receptionist sat reading.

  I didn’t see Officer Heaney or anyone else official-looking through the window, but I was told to sit tight and an officer would be with me very soon. I waited forty-two minutes. Then the receptionist went on break, apologizing for keeping me waiting, and an officer came up front to help me, leaving me sitting another eleven minutes while he ducked back in to take a phone call. During all the time I was waiting in the plastic chair in the front room I considered what this meant. If it was a sign that I should leave. If I was meant to hand over the bike to the police and tell them what I knew, wouldn’t they have helped me when I first walked in?

  I was about to get up, walk out, and drive away, when finally the officer came back to the window and asked what it was I wanted to talk to somebody about. He wasn’t Officer Heaney, but he’d do. I dug through my pockets and my backpack searching for Abby’s flyer, afraid I’d lost it, then remembering where I’d hidden it, in the inside zippered pouch. While the officer read the details on the Missing flyer, I felt something deep in my center rise in temperature, like a pinpoint of panic that would soon take over my whole body and come spewing out my mouth. Then it dawned on me what it was: not a sudden illness or something I ate, but the pendant I was wearing. The stone had gone hot as an iron against my bare skin. I lifted it out away from me, so it wouldn’t burn me, hiding it in a ball inside my sweatshirt-shielded fist.

  The officer handed back Abby’s flyer through the window and said he did remember the girl from this summer. Vaguely. Some runaway. See, it says that right there on the flyer? Case Type: Endangered Runaway. Get that? Runaway. They can’t go chasing every 17-year-old kid who runs away from home—do I have any idea how many there are out there? What a waste of time that would be? Of taxpayers’ dollars? What a waste?

  Within his words were the other things he was saying: how little this mattered to him, and how little this should matter to me. She’d be eighteen soon enough, besides, he added. And then there was really nothing they could do.

  The officer loaded a website on the front desk’s computer, angling the screen so I could see it—the missing children’s database, a public record listing anyone who was under the age of eighteen when reported missing, on which I’d already found Abby’s information. But he had a point to make. He entered these terms into the search field: current age: 17; sex: female. Then he scrolled through face after face and name after name, to show me. Here was a 17-year-old girl who had also run away. Another 17-year-old runaway. Another, another, another, all 17, all runaways. He kept clicking. Another 17-year-old, but her case was labeled “Endangered Missing,” which meant she had disappeared under questionable circumstances. This next one, too. Some were missing, he admitted, but more—more than he’d sit there and count—had run away by their own choice. And they could always go home if they wanted.

  The same number leaped out at me—17, 17, 17—pouncing and etching itself into my skin like a bloody needle in the midst of one of my mom’s more intricate tattoos.

  I was 17.

  I was a girl.

  Didn’t we matter?

  And the fact that I was also 17 and also a girl couldn’t be all there was, but it was enough for me. It wasn’t anything this police officer would ever be able to understand. This was meant for me only. A piece of information that was all mine.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” he said, assuming that’s what she was, and I didn’t correct him. “Though I assure you, if she wants to be found, she’ll turn up.”

  “But what if she didn’t run away?” I asked. I told him about the bike—the same one mentioned right there on the Missing notice—and didn’t they need it for evidence?

  “I’m not sure why we would. Besides, this here says she’s from New Jersey. Out-of-state.”

  Go, said the whispered voice close up to the blazing-hot lobe of my left ear. Get out of there right now, you imbecile. Go.

  This time I knew right away it was Fiona. She knew I was about to mention the necklace, which made me wonder what else she knew. She’d keep insulting me until I left.

  “Okay,” I told the officer. “Thank you for your time. I understand.” I grabbed Abby’s flyer from off the desk and returned it to the hoodie’s front pocket, where the touch of the pendant would keep it warm. I didn’t look back. I was almost at the door.

  “But maybe when I get a chance I’ll look into it,” he called through the window into the waiting room. My hand was on the knob and the door was coming open, and I knew he didn’t mean it and that as soon as I walked out of the station he’d let himself forget. I glanced back at the window to be sure and noticed him looking up at the clock on the wall. “How old are you, miss? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Winter break,” I said, though technically it didn’t start for another day.

  “You sure about that? My daughter goes to Pinecliff Central, and she had school today, she—”

  The door swung closed before he could finish. I was still here. I was still searching. I was the only one who seemed to care.

  — 17 —

  I didn’t get far.

  My eyes swam and then came into focus: the parking lot of the Friendly’s. The square of blacktop divided by yellow lines. The gray concrete curb. The bumper of my van wedged against the curb. The sign on the plate-glass window advertising a three-course Christmas dinner special next week (was Christmas next week already?) for only $7.99. The cracks in the sidewalk. The faces in the cracks. Smiling faces at first and then mouths in the shape of screams.

  I’d been on the sidewalk outside the Friendly’s for I-couldn’t-say-how-long. Something had come over me when I was leaving the police station and I’d had to pull over. It was the growing sense that I was being watched—a
nd then it was the growing sense that whoever was watching, they were inside the van. They were in the bowels of the back, behind the bench seat. I’d opened the door when I put the bicycle in and I’d left it open too long when I was checking my phone and reading Jamie’s text messages (six since that morning). I’d let them in. They knew I was looking for Abby—they’d heard everything I’d said.

  This chain restaurant, this parking lot, was the nearest turnoff I’d seen. I’d barreled through the lot and I’d come to a stop and I’d opened the driver’s side door and I’d leaped out, and it took much deep breathing and many minutes before I could open the two back doors at the tail end of the van. When I did I could hardly look, but I had to look, because I had to know—

  All I’d found was Abby’s borrowed bicycle inside.

  I’d gotten myself all worked up over nothing.

  Now I was sitting on the sidewalk, out under the cold, winter-white sky. I couldn’t get back in the van just yet.

  I was looking down at my knees, caked with ice and snow and with the salt kernels thrown out in winter so people wouldn’t slip and fall in the ice and snow, and that was how I realized I must have fallen. I lifted my hands and saw that my palms, too, were caked with the mixture, pockmarked and dented from impact, discolored, almost grayed.

  “Hey, you,” I heard.

  This voice was coming from behind me, to my left. I ignored it, of course, like I’d been ignoring Fiona Burke since we’d left the police station.

  “Hey.” The voice again. This was a girl’s voice, I realized, the voice of a very young girl. “Hey. I’m talking to you.” A clean, white toe nudged the scuffed steel toe of my combat boot. “Are you sick? Do you need me to get my mom?”

  From the size of her tiny feet in those puffy white boots I knew she was far too young to even be a part of this. When I craned my neck to look up into her face, I saw I was right: This girl was nine or ten maybe, eleven at most. She was dry and clean and safe. She had years to go. Years and years.

  The girl had many barrettes all over her head and just looking at them made my own head feel heavy. The weight of all those barrettes, if they were plated in steel like the kicking toes of my boots, that’s what knowing all the things I knew felt like.

  “I’m fine,” I managed to answer her, finally.

  “You threw up all over the sidewalk,” the girl said, holding her nose.

  I looked behind me, to my right. “Oh. I guess I did.”

  “Do you have germs?” she said. She took a step back. She moved comically slow in a white snowsuit decorated with little coiled demons awash in fire that I realized, upon blinking, were only goldfish. Orange goldfish were decorating her snowsuit, not demons.

  “Do you?” she said again. “Have germs?”

  “I might,” I admitted.

  “Gross,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose. But she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to care if she caught my sickness.

  I noticed that my van beside the curb was still idling; I’d left the engine on. The back doors were also open, showing the dark cavern inside. It seemed much larger than it should be, like a tunnel that didn’t want you to see its end.

  “Could you do me a favor?” I asked the girl. “Could you look inside there?”

  “What?”

  “My van. Could you look inside the van and tell me what you see?”

  She started shrinking away from me. She must have had that special assembly in school about bad strangers wanting to snatch kids in their dirty, scary vans.

  I had the terrifying feeling then that she’d be smart to play it safe and run, but she only hopped over to the van and peeked into the back. “Cool! A bike,” she said.

  “Anything else? Nothing else in there besides the bike?”

  “No,” she said. She looked back at me like I was a wacko. Still, she didn’t run.

  I began to worry for her. Where were her parents?

  If she stayed with me for much longer, she really would catch it. She’d catch it off me and carry it around with her through elementary school and middle school and into high school. She’d carry it down the field during soccer matches, up to the top of the Empire State Building when she visited on a class trip, down hallways and in the pockets of her tightest jeans, and then her birthday would come, and she’d celebrate with friends, they’d have a party, and she’d fling herself around the room dancing, not having any idea of what’s to come. She’d be 17, and by then she wouldn’t remember any of this. She won’t know what meeting me will have done to her.

  I stood up all of a sudden and grabbed the handles of the back doors, closing up the van. “Go back inside,” I told the girl.

  Didn’t she hear me?

  “Go,” I snapped, louder this time. “Get away from me. I mean it. Get out of here. Now. Go.”

  She leaped back as if I’d smacked her. Her face twisted like she was about to cry, but before she let me see, she whipped around and started running.

  She was racing away, away from the gray, salted sidewalk, and away from me, into the warm and cheerful interior of the local Friendly’s. Her mom was probably in there, her dad and siblings, too, and maybe a trademark Happy Ending Sundae would help her forget about this, and me.

  I watched to be sure. When she was safely inside, I realized it was snowing. Snow falling on the roof of my van and on the pavement and in my hair and on my eyelashes and on my outstretched limbs. Fluffy white flakes of snow covering me just like they’d cover a dead body.

  — 18 —

  FIONA Burke did run away—there was never any question.

  After she’d finished packing and making up her face, her bags strewn around the foyer and her lashes protruding from her eyelids in gnarled spikes, Fiona Burke made a phone call. Her voice softened as she spoke, turning simpler, slower, like she’d regressed to my age, or was mocking me by pretending so.

  She kept assuring the man on the phone that everything was cool. She said yes a lot, like she wanted to agree with every single thing he said. She got very silent at one point and it sounded like the person on the other end was yelling at her. She stuttered, and said she was sorry, and after a while the yelling stopped and they were just talking and making plans for the night.

  I felt her looking at me, where I was in the dining room in my My Little Pony pajamas, and then I heard her speak about me for the first time.

  “The thing is,” she told the man, “it’s like . . . someone’s gonna be here when you get to the house. Like, I’m not alone.”

  I held my tongue. While she talked, for a reason I didn’t understand, she was making me stand in the corner, face mashed into the crook of the wall. If I opened my eyes from this position, all I could make out was her mother’s dining-room wallpaper: a pattern of yellow blooms marching north in one mindless, orderly flock. They blurred to butter close-up. I couldn’t see her as she spoke, but I could hear everything she said.

  “No! Not my parents. I told you my dad’s navy buddy had a fucking heart attack and they’re in Baltimore for the fucking funeral. It’s not them. It’s . . . the kid who lives next door. I’m sort of watching her since her mom sort of had no one else to ask. But I’ll just leave her here. I’m still going with you.”

  There was some arguing then. About me. About what I’d see and who I’d tell.

  But then Fiona Burke hung up the phone and held still. Something in her face told me she didn’t want to go where she promised she’d go. That man had been yelling at her, and she wanted to stay right here.

  I thought she was about to say she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d pull me out of the corner and she’d grab my hand and say we had to get out of the house before he got here—whoever he was—and I’d take her to hide in my bedroom next door. This was back when my mom let me have the pup tent in my room, set up at all times for carpet-camping, and Fiona Burke and I would crawl in there and close the flap and I’d show her where I hid the leftover Halloween candy.

  Maybe Fiona Burke spent
a second thinking something like that, too. About running away from running away. But it was too late to change her mind. She’d set too much of it in motion.

  Soon she was prancing over to me in the corner of the dining room, crouching so her wet-glossed lips had my ear.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she said, singsong. “He didn’t like it that you were here, Lauren. He didn’t like it at all.”

  “Who’s he?”

  She ignored that. “And really, you’re not supposed to be here. My stupid parents said yes to your stupid mom without asking me first, and I couldn’t get out of it. This wasn’t the plan.”

  I told her that I was sorry, deeply, as if I’d betrayed her.

  Her hand whipped out and she shoved something hard and cold to the back of my neck, moving it up until it was wedged against the base of my skull. “Do you think I’d hurt you?” she said in a strange, helium voice. Her breathing quickened, and mine rushed to catch up.

  I didn’t answer, so she gave more pressure to the back of my neck, wedging in harder. I imagined the muzzle of a gun; I’d seen one in person at a friend’s house once, and so that’s what I pictured. His dad kept it in a box on a high shelf in the bedroom, and my friend had found a way to reach it by balancing on the dresser. But we hadn’t taken it out of the box to see if it was loaded, and we hadn’t played at killing each other, going blam, blam! with the steel against each other’s temples and the writhing on the floor until we got tired and decided to be dead. I’d only touched it, with one finger, once, and all I remembered was that it had been this hard, and this cold.