17 & Gone (20 page)

before taking off?

There had been all that snow as the

night went on, but now ice cascaded

from the dark heavens in whipping,

slapping sheets. Anyone would have

hoped, as Natalie would have hoped had

she been fully conscious, that they

wouldn’t just abandon her. The girl,

Jeannette, did say they’d go get help.

To stay put.

To be okay, okay?

To hang on. They’d be back.

But Paul did not come back. Tim did

not come back. Jeannette did not come

back, either, even though she was the

one who said they would. They climbed

out of the totaled car and slipped into the

storm, retreating on foot to Lila’s house,

where they could call for help.

It could be that they ran through the

ice as fast as they could. Maybe leaving

her behind was all they could think to

do, under the circumstances, with the

drug in their systems and no signal on

any of their cell phones. It could be that

they did care, that they did try, that some

obstacle they couldn’t control was what

kept them away and kept the accident

from being reported for so long.

Or it could be that they knew what

Natalie had longed for, recognized that

burning-cold part of her that made the

offhanded wish and then watched it

happen—and they turned their backs

because of it. Why they never came back

for her is not the part of the story I know.

What I do know is that she was

unconscious for a long time. Then, when

she woke up, she was simply confused.

She emerged from what felt like a

deep sleep, pieces of glass embedded

all over her body. Then she was

crawling

through

the

shattered

windshield and calling out for someone,

anyone, on the vacant road. Discovering

there was no one. The wind whipping

through her hair as she got to her feet.

The crunch of ice under her feet as she

started walking. And nothing after that.

No trace of her. No trail. No girl.

—
26
—

THE
house in my dream howled with

wind. The wind blared through broken

windows; the drapes flapped and

slapped at soot-stained walls.

I was aware of some things, like time.

Like I knew it was January in my waking

life, so maybe it was also January in the

dream. It could be that the dream lived

alongside me, mirroring the weather and

holidays, that as I moved ahead through

life, so did the dream.

But if that was true, the embers from

the fire would have gone dark by now.

If time was the same in here, Fiona

Burke would have grown older. All the

girls would have. From the newspaper

stories I read about her, I knew that

Natalie Montesano would have been

twenty-four.

Natalie found me before I could find

her. She was on the second floor, pale

eyes peeking from between the shrunken

black sticks of kindling that had once

been the banister and, from behind that,

all her hair. She wanted me to come up,

and I wanted her to come down, so we

met, instead, in the middle.

If I’d had my wits about me—if in the

dream I kept my wits—I would have

asked her why she was following me.

Was there something she wanted me to

do? Is that why she kept visiting?

But the gum in my brain could only

function enough to get me close to her.

Close enough to hear her speak.

I didn’t mean to do it,
she said. And

again.
I didn’t mean to do it.
Sometimes

she said the same thing so many times,

I’d lose count.

There was no working electricity in

the house, so we hovered on the delicate

stairs in the darkness.

They never found me, did they?

Natalie asked, and the way she said it,

resigned to the wind in her face, to the

darkness thick with smoke, made me

realize she never expected them to find

her. Not ever.

“No,” I said. “Do you need me to—do

you want me to . . . call someone? Do

something?”

She tilted her head, and I sensed her

cold eyes go dim.
What could you do?

she said. I should not have even asked

such a ridiculous question.

All she wished, if she could have a

wish, if somewhere outside this limbo a

wish from a girl like her could be

plucked from the darkness and granted,

she’d want them to know she hadn’t

meant to cause the accident. That she

was sorry. That she would take it back if

she could.

It was here that the smoke of the

dream seemed to clear and her hair

parted and I could see her face for the

first time since it appeared in my

bathroom mirror. What I saw was

something different, because in here, in

this house, she was her true self. Her

cheeks were still punctured from the

windshield glass, causing her face to

alternately bleed and sparkle. It was

lovely and terrible at the same time.

She turned her back and walked the

rest of the way up the stairs. My eyes

were adjusting to the lack of light and I

saw for the first time that she had

impossibly long hair, hair that had never

known a pair of scissors in its lifetime,

plain and stick-straight and parted down

the middle. And for a moment all she

was out of the darkness was hair, and all

I was in the darkness was another person

who’d done nothing to help her.

She turned in a cloud of frizz.

It’s too late,
she said,
for me.
The

frizz alighted, and the glass shards in her

cheeks shimmered, and the two sharp

needles piercing through it were her

cold eyes.
But it’s not too late . . . for

her.

—
27
—

NOT
too late for
her
. Something told

me this had to mean Abby Sinclair.

I’d seen Fiona Burke in the house, and

now I’d seen Natalie in the house, and

on my way out and into consciousness,

before the dream sifted away like a haze

of smoke tends to do, I caught sight of

another figure. This one stood statue-

still, her back to an ash-gray wall.

No, not Abby—and no matter how

much her disappearance itched at me,

tugging and not letting go, she wasn’t the

only girl who wanted me to have her

story. That’s the thing I’d soon discover:

There were more. So many more.

There were more lost girls out there

than I’d ever imagined, and now they

knew where to find me. Their whispers

came from the shadows, the sound of so

many voices more static than song.

MISSING

SHYANN JOHNSTON

CASE TYPE:
Endangered Runaway

DOB:
November 10, 1994

MISSING:
January 30, 2012

AGE NOW:
18

SEX:
Female

RACE:
African American

HAIR:
Black

EYES:
Brown

HEIGHT:
5’6” (168 cm)

WEIGHT:
153 lbs (69 kg)

MISSING FROM:
Newark, NJ, United States

CIRCUMSTANCES:
Shyann was last seen

leaving school on January 30, 2012, when she

was 17 years old. She has a chicken pox scar

under her right eye. She is believed to have

stayed in the local area.

ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION

SHOULD CONTACT

Newark Police Department (New Jersey) 1-973-555-

8297

—
28
—

THEY
called her names. They called

her ugly names, and stupid names; any

cruel name they could think of, and there

were many. It didn’t matter what names

they called Shyann—there was no logic

to it. Like, when she gained that weight

over the summer they called her Shamu,

and then she went and lost all the weight,

and they still called her Shamu. They

had no imagination.

For every name she’d been called by

the age of 17, Shyann Johnston could

have forged a fake ID for every sleazy

bar in the city and gotten her drink on,

even though she’d never tasted beer and

she probably wouldn’t like it. She could

have left, too. She could’ve collected

enough passports to travel the world a

dozen times over, escaping so far from

her neighborhood she’d never have to go

back, not to finish out high school, not to

attend her graduation, not to carry her

stuff out of her mom and dad’s and cart it

to somewhere new. She wished she

could do that, but she was stuck there,

with these kids she hated because they

hated her. These kids who made her life

a living nightmare, who followed her

around sometimes, in school and after

school let out, trailing her down the

street, across the crosswalk, pelting her

with whatever they had in their pockets

when she came down the steps of the

library or out of that grocery place on

the corner with a bag of food in her

arms. Her tormentors.

There were enough bad names

swirling through her mind that some

mornings she looked in a mirror and saw

what they saw. How could she not?

She believed the bad things more than

she knew she should. She took in those

words and let them burrow. Let them bat

back and forth inside her brain. She

began to think she’d never be able to spit

them out, even if her mom and dad and

the anti-bullying counselor assigned to

talk to her fourth period told her none of

it was true and building some self-

esteem was how to fight back.

Bullcrap,
Shyann thought. Maybe she

should fight back by blasting them in the

face with the gun her dad hid behind his

porno collection. But she hated guns, and

she didn’t want to go sifting through her

dad’s personal items, besides, so she

fought back by using the most anti-

violent method she knew. She turned tail

and she ran away.

It was soon after I first read about

Shyann that she reached out to me to

confirm it. To show she was one of the

girls.

All I got at first was her voice on my

cell phone. The blur of her body and the

shriek of her voice saying,
Leave me

alone. Stop it already. Stop.

It came from an unidentified caller

that said only “New Jersey.” There were

no words in the message, but a video

was attached.

It was a Monday, lunch period in the

cafeteria. And when the text message

came up on my phone, when I saw there

was a video, I had a feeling, a sense that

I was coming into contact with another

girl. I stood up, holding the phone close

to me so no one could see what was on

the screen. “You can’t have that out, it’ll

get confiscated,” I heard one of my

friends say.

I rushed through the caf, almost

knocking over some kid, causing him to

drop his tray. I’d reached the edge of the

room and I was pushing through the

double doors and I was out in the hall

and then, finally, finally, I was alone and

could hit Play.

Leave me alone,
I heard first, coming

out my phone’s speaker.
Stop it already.

Stop it. Stop.

The camerawork was shaky, the

picture distorted. I couldn’t tell who was

talking except that it sounded like a girl.

The frame showed ground covered in

gray, murky snow. It showed two

running feet. It focused in, for just a

moment, on those feet: a pair of sneakers

in the snow. The laces were yellow,

which seemed wrong somehow, too

cheerful. One set of laces was undone,

trailing.

Here, the camera zoomed out, and the

video exploded with laughter. A whole

group of them out of view, an anonymous

herd hidden where I couldn’t see.

They were taunting her. Calling her

names. And now I could see her, all of

her, better than I could before. She was