17 & Gone (9 page)

silky-smooth, gray gemstone as a round

bubble of glass translucent enough to

show its gray insides.

Gray like swirling smoke.

If I moved the circular pendant—

which wasn’t a real circle but a

lopsided, handmade attempt at a circle

—I could see the insides shifting, like

I’d woken a dormant volcano. Other than

this otherworldly aspect to the pendant,

the smoke that moved as the stone

moved, it was a plain piece of jewelry

mounted crookedly on a backing of thick

silver. The broken chain was crusted

with dirt and green with rot, and wasn’t

even that nice of a chain to begin with.

The pendant wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t

beautiful. But it meant something.

It belonged to Abby.

—
10
—

MY
mom caught me with one of

Abby’s flyers. It was the one I’d found

in the Shop & Save where I worked after

school. In the days leading up to visiting

the camp, I’d discovered more of them,

more and more, everywhere I checked in

town.

This particular copy had been within

my reach for months. It had been pinned

up in the break room on the board

between the two vending machines, the

machine with the petrified ice-cream

sandwich stuck in its craw and the

machine that dispensed the same kind of

soda, over and over, out of every hole.

I’d seen only the top of the flyer on the

bulletin board, only part of the headline

that read: ISSING. But the rest quickly

filled itself in for me, even though

corners of other pages were blocking

most of her face. I went to dig it out from

beneath the layers of announcements for

unwanted kittens and needed roommates,

staff notices saying who can park in

what section of the parking lot, and the

store’s holiday hours. There, beneath all

that and pierced with hundreds of old

pushpin holes so the page seemed to

flicker with starlight, was a Missing

notice for Abby Sinclair.

She’d been here waiting for me to find

her all along.

My mom got home from class late that

night, after I’d visited Lady-of-the-Pines.

I was in our living room, curled up in

front of the TV, waiting for her to come

in so I could heat up a frozen pizza.

Jamie hadn’t called or e-mailed or left

me a message, and my mom found me in

an immobile ball.

“Hey,” she said, pausing in the

doorway. She dropped her schoolbooks

on the side table and shrugged off her

coat, then asked how my night out with

Jamie went.

I shrugged. It went fine, I told her, and

by the expression on her face I could tell

she knew it didn’t and she also knew I

had no desire to talk about it. She

digested all of this and restrained herself

from asking more.

“How was class?” I asked.

“Good,” she said.

In the moving light from the television

screen, I watched the dance of her

tattoos—for all my life, she’s been

covered with them. There are the vines

that wrap around her arms and grasp her

shoulders; there’s the pinup girl on her

back, the tendrils of the painted girl’s

yellow hair peeking out from beneath my

mom’s real hair, which she kept a

brilliant bottle burgundy; and the flock of

birds soaring up her neck and into the

sky beyond her ear. All of these tattoos

were as much a part of my mom as her

two blue eyes.

But as I was looking at her, she was

also looking at me, noticing the furious

motion of my hands. “What’s that you’re

holding?” she asked.

I realized I was still fingering the

flyer, running over every rip and prick of

a pin and gouge in the paper, acting like

I was trying to memorize Abby’s story in

Braille.

“Oh this?” I said. When I heard

myself, it sounded so artificial. “It’s

nothing.”

I knew it wasn’t nothing, but I also

didn’t yet know how, in a way, it was

everything. Abby might have been the

first, but she wouldn’t be the last. All the

girls are 17, the same age I’d turned that

month. Soon I’d have flyers like this for

so many of them. I’d be able to recite

their names, their identifying details

(birthmarks and hairstyles, fluctuations

in weight and height), their hometowns

and

possible

destinations,

and

sometimes the outfits they were last seen

wearing (sneaker brands and jacket

colors, specifics like the silver heart

necklace, the turquoise hat with the pom-

pom, the zebra-print belt). I’d know and

understand their vanishings, but I

wouldn’t have the end to their stories, I

wouldn’t have the why.

“Can’t I see?” my mom said, reaching

out as if I’d actually let go. And that’s

when I crushed it—Abby’s Missing flyer

—crushed it fast into a hot, damp knot in

the palm of my hand.

She pulled back her hand as if I’d

bitten her. “Never mind,” she said. “You

don’t have to show me. So I was

thinking of heating up a frozen pizza.

You want?”

I nodded, and watched her drift off to

the kitchen. I want to say I offered to

help, but I stayed put where I was. I kept

the balled-up flyer safe, wedged in

under my body, and I didn’t fight it when

my eyes began to close.

It was almost like I wanted to have the

dream, like I was calling it closer.

Before I knew it, I was on the sidewalk

outside the brick building, and I was

climbing the cracked and crumbling

stairs, and I was at the door trying to

decide if I should ring the bell or just let

myself in.

Oh wait, I was in already. I was

coughing and coughing and batting at the

smoke to get it away from my face.

When the air settled—when my eyes and

lungs got used to it, or when I realized I

was lucid enough to communicate to

myself that I was dreaming and this

wasn’t actual smoke—a sense of calm

came over me. I let myself see where I

was.

The house had shifted its arrangement

of rooms, with some doorways I didn’t

remember, and some rooms in places

there hadn’t previously been rooms. Up

above, the ceiling creaked with the

weight

of

movement.

A

rotting

chandelier, covered in moss and

spiderwebs, misted with smoke, shook

as if a person were stomping heavily

right over it.

“Is someone up there?” I called.

“Abby?”

That’s when I caught the drapes

moving at the far end of the giant room.

Someone was hiding near the windows,

like last time. The same figure, the same

girl.

I could see her more clearly now.

The long curtains were in tatters, so it

wasn’t entirely possible for her to fully

conceal herself behind them. Holes in

the mealy fabric showed pieces of her

body—she was still wearing the too-

tight jeans she’d been wearing on the

night I last saw her; the jeans that said

FU
on the thigh (upside down, because

she’d scrawled it without thinking of

how other people would read it, or

because she meant it for herself more

than anyone else)—and the gutted hem of

the drapes showed me the bottoms of her

legs in those jeans and two bare, dirt-

blackened feet.

All this time I’d been looking for

Abby, and here I’d found someone else.

In the dream, I found myself doing

things I’m not sure I could have done in

real life. My dream-self picked her way

through the room to get closer to those

drapes. My dream-self had no fear. She

ignored the growing sense that there

were others behind her, others she

hadn’t been introduced to yet. She found

the edge of the drapes and moved slowly

along the length, searching for a cord.

When she found it, hidden in the tatters

and held together by a few tangled

threads, she took it in both hands and she

pulled. The drapes slid open, and the

girl, Fiona Burke, was revealed.

There she was—not an animated and

gruesome corpse, dead the way she

surely should have been if the stories

were to be believed. And not years

older, either, the way she would be now

if she’d survived.

Fiona Burke hadn’t aged a day.

Her hair was red with the black roots,

gone pinkish in some spots. Her eyes

were liquid-lined. Her bare stomach

was visible, but it wasn’t that she’d

grown out of her shirt in the years since

I’d known her; that’s how she liked to

wear her shirts, one size too small and

no shame for what was showing.

With the drapes open, Fiona Burke

stepped out into the room because there

was nowhere to hide. There was glass

all over the floor from a window that

must have been shattered—and as she

walked closer to me she stepped right on

the shards. Pain didn’t reach her face, if

she felt any at all. I realized, now that

I’d grown up and she’d stopped

growing, we were about the same height.

She spoke then. She recognized me.

Happy now? You little brat.

I could have asked her how she knew

it was me, after all these years, because

I dyed my hair black now, blue-black

from a bottle, and didn’t I look any

different from when I was a kid?

Before I could utter a word, she

grabbed my hand and shoved something

into it that was hotter even than her skin,

sizzling like a coal burning from a fire,

and hard, like a knob of bone. My sole

reaction was to get it away from me as

quickly as possible. My hand opened

and let go.

What dropped to the ground was a

pendant made from a smoke-gray stone.

That’s when I remembered I’d seen

something very much like it before.

Fiona Burke used to wear a choker with

a similar stone around her long, thin

neck.

My dream-self didn’t have the

wherewithal to make the connection, but

my waking self, the self bursting out of

sleep on the couch before the flickering

TV at the sound of Mom saying the pizza

was ready—my waking self needed only

an instant to connect the dots and connect

the girl.

There was me. There was Abby

Sinclair. And now there was a girl I last

saw when I was eight years old. Fiona

Burke used to be my next-door neighbor,

but she ran away from home when she

was 17 years old.

MISSING

FIONA BURKE

CASE TYPE:
Endangered Runaway

DOB:
June 17, 1987

MISSING:
November 13, 2004

AGE NOW:
25

SEX:
Female

RACE:
Asian

HAIR:
Black

EYES:
Brown

HEIGHT:
5’3” (160 cm)

WEIGHT:
125 lbs (57 kg)

MISSING

FROM:
Pinecliff, NY, United

States

CIRCUMSTANCES:
The photo on the right

is a composite image to show how Fiona may

look at twenty-five years old. She was last seen

on November 13, 2004. When she was last seen

her hair was dyed red. Her hair is naturally

black.

ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION

SHOULD CONTACT

Pinecliff Police Department (New York) 1-845-555-

1100

—
11
—

WHEN
I look back, I can see the

hints. The hints that were there all along

—like the time I was eight years old and

my mom left me in the care of the girl

who lived next door. The girl who told

me to stand very still with my face

squashed

up

against

the

yellow

wallpaper and to not turn around and to

not dare look. To stand against the wall

in my My Little Pony pajamas while she

made plans to ditch town for good.

That was the first time I came in

contact with someone who went missing.