17 & Gone(10)

It was then, with no one looking, that it began.

I stood up. I walked on legs that didn’t feel like mine toward the back of the cabin, where there was a line of empty cubbies and a dark bathroom. I kept going, toward the bathroom. I couldn’t hear Jamie on the phone anymore. My ears picked up on something else: a rhythmi c slap-slap-slap coming from floor level. Startled, I stopped. The slapping sound stopped. I started walking again, and the sound picked up as before.

It was coming from my own feet, the noise of my own footsteps traveling the floor into the tiled room that held the showers. I could almost imagine that I didn’t have on my combat boots and was wearing summer flip-flops instead. Flip-flops like the one Abby had on in my van.

As I stood in the shower room I realized I wasn’t cold anymore. It was so far from cold, it was stifling, and I needed to undo the buttons on my wool coat to let my neck breathe. I opened my coat all the way. I shrugged off my thick scarf and let it drop.

There was a single window in the shower room, so small only an arm could fit through, but I went to it and shoved it open for some air. It revealed a view of the woods behind the cabin, but not the snow-covered tree branches I expected, not the heavy-loaded pines and the blanket of white gleaming in the winter darkness. What I saw was green.

The impossible green of summer.

I turned away fast and slid down the tiled wall—warm with humidity against my back—until I was sitting on the shower floor, beside the drain.

“I’m in here,” I said aloud, letting the words echo and find their way to whoever was also there, listening.

I became aware of her breathing, as if she’d sidled up the tiled wall beside me, her bare, bug-bitten shoulder millimeters from mine.

Her story rose up in me, fully formed and practically kicking.

The summer she stayed here, Abby did sleep in that bed in Cabin 3, where I’d found her name and Luke’s name.

She did have the bunk pushed closest to the farthest wall and below the last of the windows. She slept curled into a ball. The pillow in the plastic pouch still on the bed was the pillow she’d hug between her knees.

I would soon know more and more.

Like how when Abby left camp late that July, no new girl came to claim her bed.

Though Cabin 3 was minus one counselor-in-training with Abby gone, they had to make do; it was too late to fill her spot. The girls at camp were simply told she’d quit. The counselor in charge of Cabin 3 removed Abby’s clothes in their neatly rolled stacks from her cubby and packed them into the paisley suitcase stowed under her bed to return to her family, who didn’t seem surprised she’d run away. None of the counselors wanted to tell the kids that she’d run off into the night with only the clothes from Color War on her back.

That she’d left no note to say why. No explanation.

Even so, the girls in Cabin 3

suspected more. They avoided uttering her name and stayed away from the things she’d touched. No one took advantage of the extra cubby or used the tropical shampoo she’d left behind in the communal bathroom. Abby’s bed was in a prime location, more private than the beds in the middle, yet no one wanted to sleep there after she had, as if it had been cursed.

The only way I knew I’d gotten up and started walking was the slap-slap-slap that followed me as I went.

The bed was just as I’d left it, but on the mildewed pillow trapped inside the plastic case was something I hadn’t noticed before. My hand reached out and unzipped the pouch. My fingers plucked it from the stained surface of the pillow and drew it out. It dangled before me.

A single strand of hair.

From Abby’s head.

I knew this fact like I knew all the other things I knew. Besides, the piece of hair couldn’t be mine—due to its light brown color and the spring to its spiraling curl. My own hair was dyed black and coarsely straight.

Something made me sniff it, some disgusting level of curiosity. I knew what it would smell like even before I lifted it to my nose, the faint but acrid hint of smoke as if this piece of hair had been held over a lighter and set ablaze.

Everything connected to Abby seemed to smell like that.

I left Cabin 3, and with the slap-slap-slap of the flip-flops on my bare feet I wandered out again to the campground, feeling the hot summer sun on my shoulders. I lifted my hair and tied it in a knot. The sky was bright blue and dotted with fluffy, drifting clouds. The sounds of girls shrieking, splashing carried over from the lake in the near distance.

There were traces of her everywhere.

Abby peed in these woods. She trampled these flowers. Here she scratched at a mosquito bite. Here she scratched at the same mosquito bite until she bled.

The spot on the campground where she first saw him was hidden from view by pine trees, but I found it from the way the branches grew sparser there and how the ground gave way, as if I’d seen it in pictures. Or, more, as if she were handing over this memory so it didn’t have to be hers any longer. So now it could be mine.

He was on his motorbike, which you could hear way out in the trees, a sawing sound that made it seem like the whole forest was under siege. None of the girls in Abby’s group out picking wildflowers knew what the noise was, or where it was coming from, until there he appeared atop that speeding, screaming machine. He sailed over a hump of tree roots and skidded to a solid stop in the clearing, front tire braking inches from a girl’s toes.

“This is private property,” one girl said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”