17 & Gone(16)

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.