17 & Gone(15)
I felt myself shiver. My van was black, with windows only in the very front and the very back. The main cavern was windowless, which made it seem like the kind of vehicle a serial killer would aspire to drive, to make it easier for transporting a body. I’d never noticed how ominous the van looked from the outside, how threatening.
It stared at me from up on top of the hill, eyes blazing.
And I think this was the first time it came over me—the reality. I was being followed. Haunted, by another girl the same age as me. She needed me to do something for her, and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I gave her what she wanted. Would she?
She knew every little thing I did, could see me here on the dark road right now. She could hear my thoughts. She could feel my heart and how furiously it was beating. She could feel the panicked sweat dripping down my spine.
I never felt so alone, or so crowded.
I had to keep looking.
When I turned my attention back to the bottom of the hill, I saw things in a new light. It was golden and it was warm, thick with the heat of summer.
Everything was tinged this color, even the night sky.
I noticed how the snow had vanished, so the road and the gully running alongside it was brown with mud, and green with protruding weeds. Then I realized I was on the ground, on the asphalt, because I’d fallen off the bicycle, and my hands were pocked with gravel and my knees were bleeding.
My hair was longer than usual, and I swept it out of my face so I could see. I noticed the front fender of the car— rusted, one headlight gashed in—and I used it to help myself to stand up. I heard a door open, and I heard a voice, and I heard a response come out of my own body, in a voice that wasn’t mine, saying I’m okay. That was not me talking, that was someone else.
I was someone else.
It was over as soon as it had begun, the light around me turning colder and more blue. I was wavering on my two feet, in the middle of the icy back road, completely alone. There was no car here, no bicycle, no glimmering specter of a girl. My raw knees through my jeans burned, as if I’d really fallen to the ground as she had, and the palms of my hands were pricked with bits of snow and grimy pebbles of tire salt. But these were my knees again, and my hands, and my own breath billowing out in visible wisps from my own lungs into the cold.
That’s when I saw it. There, close by, was a glow that seemed to hum from the edge of the road. A light that, once it caught my attention, turned smaller, shrinking in on itself until the tiny thing I was meant to find focused and came clear. It looked like an oddly colored rock at first, and then I blinked. And realized what it was. Someone had dropped . . . a piece of jewelry on the side of the road.
I crept closer and lifted it from the blanket of snow. Impossibly, it had been perched there, half buried and glistening in the darkness. This stone pendant on a broken strand of silver chain.
Once I climbed the hill back up to my van, I let the pendant drop into my palm so I could study it under the dome light.
I’d thought it was a rock, but it wasn’t, at least not the kind of rock or stone that would be found just lying in the dirt in the Hudson Valley. Maybe it was a moonstone, but it wasn’t so much a 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.