17 & Gone (17 page)

wedged in, I found the scissors, the good

ones not made for cutting paper, and I

just started chopping around the comb,

snipping shorter than I meant to, and then

needing to cut shorter still to make up for

a crooked spot. The haircut was DIY, it

was daring, and it brought out my eyes.

Someone else’s eyes.

I flinched. Something had happened to

my face. The mirror was showing a

second face projected over my own. Her

face hovered, lit up like a round and

glowing moon.

I noticed a nose shorter than my nose,

thicker eyebrows than mine, and arching

far higher than mine could arch, the

straight line of the mouth, just like in the

picture, and the eyes, mostly the eyes,

pale and unsettling and absolutely

recognizable from that photo I’d found of

her, the one used in some of the

newspaper articles. Eyes so cold, they

could cut your throat.

My hand lost its grip on the scissors

and then we were watching them fall

into the sink, the girl and I, blades

spread open, and then a mouth also

opened—my mouth, hidden behind the

girl’s—and a sound emerged, startling

us both.

I guess I’d yelled something, because

my mom came running and was soon in

the doorway, one leg of her black-

patterned tights on and the other dangling

from her hip like a shriveled extra limb.

She wore her usual button-down work

shirt to cover most of her tattoos, but the

buttons were gaping open to show the

bare, perfectly clear skin of her chest.

She had no tattoos there, so she seemed

even more naked.

She buttoned her shirt quickly and

said, “Way to give me a heart attack,

Lauren! I thought you slipped in the tub.”

I shook my head and waited, waited

for her to see the face in the mirror.

Natalie’s face.

All she noticed was the haircut.

“Wow,” she said. “I mean that:
wow
.

Wanted something different for your first

day back at school, huh?”

I was still waiting.

She touched my hair and fluffed it out

at one side. She clucked her tongue,

cocked her head, then smiled. “I love it,”

she said. “It’s killer. I hope you don’t

hate it, because it’ll take years to grow

the length back. Is that why you

screamed?”

She didn’t see the face.

“I saw . . .” My arm, threatening to

give me up, was already pointing at the

mirror. I
saw
, past tense, and
was still

seeing
someone else’s face. I was

wearing a mask made out of her skin and

features and I couldn’t get it to come off.

“. . . nothing,” I finished. “I thought I

saw something, but it was nothing.”

“You okay?” my mom asked.

I turned back to the mirror and

realized she was gone. The new girl,

Natalie Montesano, gone as she was in

real life. The face staring back from the

glass was my own face—and, because

my reflection was clean, I saw the deep

and shocking truth of what I looked like:

I’d

given

myself

a

stupendously

unattractive haircut.

My mom had asked if I was okay and,

for the first time, I answered her

honestly. “I don’t know.”

Her gaze held mine in the mirror.

“What is it?” she asked my reflection, as

if it would be easier to talk to than to

flesh-and-blood me. And, you know,

maybe it would have been. Maybe my

mirror-self could have told her about the

dreams, still smoking in the backmost

rooms of my mind, or about the voice

that sometimes sounded so much like a

girl I knew a long time ago, if that could

even be possible, the voice that called

me names and needled at me to not tell

my mom a thing. The voice that stayed

hushed now, listening.

Maybe my reflection could have told

her that a wriggling thought was

dislodging itself in my mind as we stood

in the morning-lit bathroom, and this

new thought was telling me that if I

opened the shower curtain and looked in

the tub I’d find one of them: Fiona. Or

Abby. Or Natalie. Or, worse, all three of

them together, a tangle of shadowy legs

and vapory arms, a huddle of heat and

smoke and the dream’s deafening

darkness. I’d pull open that shower

curtain and show my mom and she’d be

the one to scream.

Of course I wouldn’t tell my mom.

Once you tuck one secret inside yourself,

digging out a little pocket to hold it,

you’ll find the pocket can be stretched to

fit another. And another, and another . . .

until you’ve got yourself a whole

collection.

So, instead, I searched for an excuse

and found a good one: “Jamie and me,” I

said. “I think we’re over.”

She made a noncommittal noise in the

back of her throat; I knew she liked

Jamie, but all her loyalties had to be

with me, since I was her daughter. “I

figured,” she said. “I haven’t seen him

around in a while. I knew you’d tell me

when you were ready to tell me. So

you’re nervous about seeing him in

school today, right?”

I shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “We don’t have

to talk about it. Just tell me one thing.

Should I be mad at him? Did he do

something I should know about?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s all me.”

She kept the judgment off her face, a

skill she wouldn’t even need to practice

for when she finished her psychology

degree and became a therapist or a

school counselor or whatever she

decided to do after graduation. She

stepped closer to me and reached out an

arm to touch the nape of my neck,

playing with the chopped pieces of hair

back there. “Want me to even out the

back a little for you?”

I nodded and let her keep touching me,

even though every finger on my scalp

and every brush against my neck felt

wrong all of a sudden, weird. It wasn’t

so much her. Again, it was me. All me.

My

skin

was

tightening

against

intrusions. My body was pulling in on

itself like a knot tied over a knot tied

over a knot that would never come

undone.

It took my mom another ten minutes to

fix my haircut, since she insisted on

straightening out the sides and finessing

the front. By the time she left the

bathroom, my hair looked far more

stylish than I felt, like I’d gone and

gotten it cut on purpose for the first day

back from winter break. But beneath the

hair, the skin of my face had hardened to

ice. I was alone again. At last.

I leaped across the bathroom and did

the expected. It’s what you see in the

movies when the heroine fears someone

is hiding behind the closed shower

curtain and pulls it aside in a panicked

flurry . . . only to reveal an empty tub

and no serial killer lurking with a

glinting knife from the kitchen. The

heroine will sigh in relief. She’ll laugh

at her silly, overactive imagination,

leave the room unharmed, and the scene

will end.

But the difference was this: When I

pulled aside the shower curtain, the tub

wasn’t empty. Fiona Burke leaned

against the far wall, her legs straddling

the faucet, her glossy mouth in a small

smirk.

Abby

Sinclair’s

feet—one

muddied and bare, one in a mangled

flip-flop—were dirtying up the white

bottom of the tub. And the newest girl,

Natalie Montesano, was hiding behind a

second curtain, but this one was made of

her long hair.

I saw them for an extended moment,

unable to react, as if my mind had been

shoved full of socks. Then I blinked and

the tub was empty and clean and the lost

girls were gone and my mom was calling

from the kitchen that I’d have to eat

breakfast, now, or I’d be late for school.

—
23
—

I
saw Jamie when he got to school, but

he didn’t see me. I had AP Lit first

period, but when I caught a glimpse of

Jamie’s

jacket—that

sludge-green

peacoat I gave him—and his dark mop

of hair coming around the corner of the

social-studies hallway, I took off up the

stairs.

Seeing him, something caught in my

throat. Regret maybe. Or confusion. I’d

told my mom it was over, but we’d

never officially broken up—at least,

Jamie didn’t know I’d made it official.

Needing to get away from him, I made

my way up the north stairwell—past

another junior, who said, “Lauren, what

happened to your hair?” and another

who said, “It looks awesome!”—and

into the safety of the north bathroom, in

the hallway near the art classrooms,

where I could close myself into a stall

and breathe.

When I finally emerged and went to

wash my hands, I realized I’d been

followed. I was alone in the girls’ room,

or thought I was alone, when I heard

this:

I didn’t mean to do it.

That’s what I thought she said. Really

what I heard were those whispered

words slurred into one long word:

Ididntmeantodoit.

I doubled back. I checked all the stalls

until I came to the third one from the

right, the only one that had its door fully

closed. I pushed on this door and it

didn’t swing open; it was locked from

the inside. Most stalls in our school

bathrooms didn’t lock anymore. The

stall doors had to be held in place while

someone was inside with an outstretched

leg or a wildly reaching hand.

Here I was now, outside an

impossibly locked stall door, reaching to

open it.

The stall was as green as a lime left to

grow mold in a fridge drawer. It was

cold, not warm.

“Hello?” I said against it.

What I heard was . . . a hiss. The

hissing wasn’t her breathing. I knew it

was only the old radiators against the far

wall, the spit of the steam heat.

I tried to push the stall door again, but

it held in place. I bent down, but no feet

poked out below.

I climbed the toilet in the neighboring

stall and balanced up on the point of one

toe, bracing myself against the shared

wall, to dangle over. No one was hiding

inside, though the toilet looked stopped

up with paper. I assumed the stall was

only locked because the toilet was out of

order.

The last bell rang, meaning class had

started already, and I should have been

in my chair getting ready to discourse on

Shakespeare. I hopped off the toilet and

grabbed the backpack I’d left on the

sink. I was almost at the exit when I

heard the voice again. Heard it

distinctly. Heard it in my ears and heard

its echo through my bones.

Lauren, wait.

I did. The bell stopped ringing. Again

I found myself edging closer to the third

stall from the right.

“Natalie?” I said softly. “Is that you?”

It was then that she knocked in

response. Her knuckles rapped from the

inside of the stall in quick succession.

Even though I’d willed it to happen, it

startled me. I jumped backward and

almost took out a sink.

She was in that stall—or something

was. An entity without visible feet was

trying to communicate with me. To let

me know she didn’t mean to do . . .

whatever it was she did.

I could sense her inside, willing me

closer. I didn’t speak, and she didn’t

speak, and when I took two steps in her

direction, a foot could be seen dropping

down, finding floor. A scuffed snow

boot, once pale blue but dirtied and

streaked with soot. A second boot

followed, more blackened than the first.

Time distended into one long,

unbreakable moment that broke anyway