17 & Gone (24 page)

saliva and still hooked in her mouth.

Deena was a senior and—I remembered,

as if I were looking back on a life I’d

abandoned on the highway, gaining

distance and watching it shrink—at one

time, she was the closest thing I had to a

best friend.

I hadn’t been thinking much about

Deena lately because I didn’t need to.

She wasn’t one of them. Besides, she

was older than me. She’d turn eighteen

soon, and none of this would even touch

her.

She had no laminated hall pass in her

possession, as far as I could tell, and yet

she didn’t seem in any rush to get to a

particular class. I couldn’t recall the last

time I’d had an actual conversation with

her.

She must have been thinking the same

thing, because she began to carry on a

two-way conversation, doing both her

voice and mine. “How are you, Dee?

Awesome, thanks for asking. I’m so

sorry I forgot, isn’t it your birthday this

week? Oh, no worries, Lauren, I know

you love me. Things with Karl still on?

Oh, yeah, thanks for caring, I know you

never liked him. Hey, speaking of, heard

you dumped Jamie. What’s up with

that
?”

She stopped with the voices then and

raised an eyebrow, waiting for my

answer.

“I can’t talk about this now, Deena,

I’m sorry. There’s someone . . . There’s

somewhere I’ve got to be.”

“Jamie’s right,” she said. “You’ve

changed, and it’s more than just the

hair.”

The awkwardness between us wasn’t

entirely about her boyfriend, Karl,

though it would be nice to say it was.

Truth was, I’d done this. I’d pushed her

away. It was frighteningly easy to do that

with people. I couldn’t pinpoint when I

started pushing—but I guess it would

have been around the time I found

Abby’s flyer. My friendship with Deena

could have been halfway to Montana by

now and I wouldn’t know it.

“So are you coming to my party, or

what? At Karl’s house, remember? Or,

let me guess. You’re planning to bail.”

“I said I’d go,” I told her, though I’d

forgotten about all her plans for her

eighteenth birthday party, including

details about it being at Karl’s house and

if I was supposed to come help her set

up or anything.

I was going to ask, but then I caught

sight of her at the far-off door

glimmering in the distance. Not Deena;

Deena didn’t have anything to do with

this. It was Abby at the end of the black-

and-white-checkered hallway, Abby

holding the door open straight into the

sun. Or it was a vision of Abby. Ghosts

can’t hold open doors.

Did she know I’d gotten in touch with

someone from Lady-of-the-Pines? And

that I was headed down to see her now?

Is that why she’d come out?

Abby was wearing what she always

wore; I’d never seen her in anything

else: her Lady-of-the-Pines T-shirt with

COUNSELOR-IN-TRAINING above her heart

—it was pasted to her skin and dotted

with flecks of mud. The shorts with the

racing stripes. The leaves and twigs and

muck matted into her hair that, from this

distance,

seemed

woven

into

a

headdress, as if she were modeling some

new girl-run-over-by-a-car look in the

fashion pages of
Vogue
. I couldn’t see

her feet to make out if she had on the one

flip-flop.

“
What
are you looking at?” Deena

asked. “Mr. Floris is taking the rest of

the year off—I heard he had a stroke.

We’re good.”

My eyes left the open door where

Abby was waiting and went to Deena,

who was much closer. I’d really liked

her once. I’d liked being her friend. I

remembered this in an absent way, like

how a long time ago I used to enjoy

pooling sand into newly dug holes on the

playground when I was, like, five. Right

now, I needed to get rid of her.

“You’re cutting class, right?” I asked

her.

She lifted her chin, proud. “Spanish.”

I held up the hall pass. “Want this? In

case you get stopped?”

We both knew that, without a pass,

getting caught in the hallway during a

class period would get you detention.

Making a run for it once a hall monitor

spotted you would get you ISS, or in-

school suspension. I don’t know what

never coming back would get you. The

chance to never come back?

She shrugged, and I handed over the

pass. As our fingers touched on the

laminated plastic, there was a charge of

life running from her into me. Deena

would keep living to see this birthday

and the ones that came after. I didn’t

know what her life would be—maybe

that creepy Karl dude would make her

happy one day with baby Karls. Or

maybe they’d forgo the offspring and

take up a life of robbing liquor stores

instead. But whatever choices she made,

whatever mistakes, she’d live them.

She’d go on. It wasn’t in Deena

Douglas’s fate to disappear.

I drew back my hand and shook the

feeling out of it. From around the corner,

two approaching teachers could be

heard talking.

Deena perked up; she loved taunting

the teachers. She whispered, “You go.

Make a run for it. I’ll be loud, cause a

diversion. They won’t have any idea.”

She winked at me and then began

stomping off toward the teachers, rattling

lockers as she went. She turned the

corner and I couldn’t see her anymore,

but I could hear her. I could hear her

even when I reached the end of the

corridor, where there was no vision of

Abby waiting, but there was an exit door

propped open with a cinder block into

the dazzlingly white winter’s day.

The south parking lot, once I reached

it, was drenched in the kind of bright

light that always seems artificial.

Anyone looking out the school’s south

windows was sure to see me. I spotted

my trig teacher at the head of class as I

drove for the exit and, in a row in the

middle of the classroom, the back of

Jamie’s head. Ms. Torres had mapped

out a problem on the whiteboard, and at

the exact moment I drove past her

window, she looked up, straight at me,

and revealed the answer.

—
36
—

THE
girl who had been counselor to

Abby Sinclair’s counselor-in-training

was in the coffee shop between classes

as she said she would be—she just

didn’t know how long I’d driven to get

to her university’s campus, and that I

wasn’t actually “in the neighborhood”

that week as I’d said. In fact, I’d never

been down to that part of New Jersey

before in my life.

Cassidy Delrio—Cass, as she seemed

to want me to call her—was a college

sophomore and a sorority girl. She had

Greek letters emblazoned on every item

of clothing, even her socks. When

Abby’s name came up, her face

darkened.

At first, I thought, because she must

have felt it—the spiraling of Abby’s fate

down that road through the pines and

what it must mean for everything that

came after. Maybe she could see Abby

when I couldn’t anymore, and hadn’t

since that glance of her in the doorway at

school. Maybe I wasn’t the only person

alive who knew that something was

taking these girls and that Abby, out of

all of them, could be grabbed back

before she was made to stay there

forever.

But no. Cass’s face had darkened for

two reasons: The barista hadn’t made

her mocha with soy, as she’d asked

specifically. And because Abby had

made her look bad. No other counselor

in the history of Lady-of-the-Pines

Summer Camp for Girls had one of her

trainees flee in the night like that. And

Cass knew this because she was a

legacy. Three generations of Delrios had

traveled up to that patch of wilderness

and rowed those canoes. Not to mention,

she herself had been going to Lady-of-

the-Pines since she was nine. No way

would she get hired back next summer

because of what Abby did to her.

“Listen,” Cass said, “the thing about

Abby is really pretty simple.” She

leaned in, and I felt my breath catch. I

noticed how perfectly straight and

smooth her hair was and how vacant her

eyes were and I wondered what she’d

been holding in for all these months.

“Abby wanted to go home, so she went

home,” Cass said. “She hated camp, so

she left.”

She waited for me to respond to this.

“That’s what you think?” I asked.

(Though I believed she was right about

one part: Abby did despise the place—

the way it made her itch, no matter what

she sat on; the way it smelled, eternally

damp like a flood had just washed

through; and the way it was so far away

from anything interesting. That is, until

she met Luke.)

“What the hell was I supposed to do?”

Cass said. “Run after her, beg her to

stay? Say pretty please?”

“But you know she didn’t go

home . . .” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I know that
now
. But I

didn’t know that
then
.”

She was sipping on her mocha even

though it had cow’s milk in it; I watched

as the brown-tinged foam gathered at the

corners of her painted lips and I almost

motioned for her to get a napkin and dab

it off—then I didn’t. I had plain coffee

with plain sugar and plain milk, and I

took a chug of that.

“What? I’m wrong?” she said.

“I don’t think she ran away,” I said.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“So she really hasn’t called you or e-

mailed or texted or anything? Not any of

her friends?”

I shook my head—I’d counted myself

among Abby’s friends, and Cass hadn’t

yet questioned it.

“I guess that
is
weird,” she conceded.

“Abby was always going on and on

about all her friends.”

I wanted to ask their names—so I

could track them down, too—but then

she started shaking her head, and I felt

the shift coming. I felt the turn before she

even went there herself.

“But?” I said, helping her along.

“But yeah,” she said. “I mean, she

didn’t take her bags.”

“See? She left all her stuff, right?

Wouldn’t she have taken her things if she

ran away?”

She nodded, then shrugged. “Not if

she got the chance to go, like, out of the

blue or something. A ride. That’s what

we figured. I mean, it’s not like she

didn’t have
anything
with her. She had

her wallet—this hideous plastic purple

thing she kept stuffed with pictures and

random crap. That thing was so big, she

needed, like, a whole purse to carry it.

So if she had her wallet, she probably

had her purse, too. Why come back and

get the rest of her junk if she had all

that?”

“I don’t know . . .” I said.

It was here that her eyes began to

glow with something sick and warm

coming up to the surface. She’d kept it

down all this time and now I guess my

questions about Abby worked to put it

into words in a way she wasn’t able to

before.

“Do you think he killed her?” she said

suddenly, and it was so much worse than

I thought.

She was nineteen or twenty by now;

she’d stick around. Right then I hated her

for that, and more still for what she said.

For not caring. For not noticing. For not

doing a thing.

No wonder Abby had reached out to

me.

“He, who?” I said from between my

teeth.

“He, whoever. Whatever freak of

nature found her in the woods and