17 & Gone(2)

the

intersection. I’m not saying she was there in the flesh with her thumb out and her hair wild in the wind and her bare knees purpled from cold—it didn’t start out that way. The first time I saw Abby, it was only a picture: the class photograph reproduced on her Missing poster.

When the light turned green and traffic started moving, I wasn’t moving with it.

I was arrested by the flyer across the road, that weathered, black-and-white image of Abby, with the single bold word

above

her

forehead

that

pronounced her MISSING.

I remember being dimly aware of the cars behind my van honking and swerving around me, some drivers flipping me off as they blasted past. I remember that I couldn’t move. The van, because the engine wouldn’t start, and my body, because my joints had locked.

The green light dangling overhead had cycled through again to yellow— blinking, blinking—then red. I knew this only from the colors dancing on the steering wheel, which I held in two fisted hands, so my knuckles that had been green, then yellow, were now red again.

Ahead of me, where the old highway halted in a fork, a stretch of pine trees braced themselves against the biting wind. The pines were weighted down by weeks’ worth of snow, but they still moved beneath it, unable to keep still.

The slope of ground between them and the road was white and pristine, not a footprint to mar it. Centered within all of this was the telephone pole and, hung there as if displayed on the bare walls of a gallery, the missing girl’s face.

I left my van door swinging open, keys in the ignition, backpack on the front seat, and abandoned it to run across the intersection toward the stretch of pines. A pickup truck skidded; a horn shrieked. A car almost met me with its tires, but I moved out of the way before I could feel the bumper’s touch. I was vaguely aware of a big, yellow vehicle stopping short behind me—the school bus, the one I rode before I got my license and saved up to buy the old van —but by then I’d made it to the pole.

I trampled through the snow to get close. The flyer was old, the date she was last seen long passed. Her photocopied picture had been duplicated too many times for much detail to show through the ink on ink, so with all those layers smudging away her face, and with the snow spatter and the fade, she could have been anybody really, any girl.

By that I mean she could have been someone who had nothing to do with me.

Someone I’d leave attached to the pole on that cold day, someone I’d never think of again in this lifetime.

But I knew she wasn’t just any girl. I had a glimmering pull of recognition, burning me through and through, so I couldn’t even sense the cold. I’d never felt anything like it before. All I knew is I was meant to find her.

The flyer had only facts. She was 17

—like I was; I’d just turned 17 the week before. She’d gone missing from some summer camp I’d never heard of— though it was around here, in the Pinecliff area, near this place that overlooked the frigid, gray Hudson River from the steep hill on which our town was built. The commuter train that ran alongside the river stopped here nearly every hour during the day, and crept past at night. The summer camp had to be close.

I tore the page from the pole, ripping it loose from where it was stuck fast with packing tape that had been wound and wound around the pole to keep her from falling face-first into the snow, or from getting carried away on a gust of exhaust and escaping into the traffic leading to the New York State Thruway.

It was the clear tape covering the details on the flyer that had kept it from disintegrating for all these months. It was also the tape, so much of it, that made it almost impossible to tear her free.

When I crossed the intersection again —more horns honking—and reached my van, I saw that some Good Samaritan (or a creeper disguising himself as a Good Samaritan) had stopped his own car on the shoulder to offer help. There was some tinkering with the engine, mention of a possibly busted fan belt, and a plume of gray smoke that spat itself into the man’s face and then lifted up into the bone-white air overhead, a blot of hate on the sky that already threatened more snow. There was a tow I couldn’t afford, and an hour waiting on a greasy folding chair in the back of the garage because it was too cold to wait outside. It wasn’t until they fixed my van and I was headed in late to school that I had a moment alone to take a closer look at the flyer.

I didn’t tell Jamie or Deena, or anyone. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to tell. This discovery was mine, and I wanted to hold it close.

My heart had an irregular beat that I can almost hear again now, like an extra thump was thrown in to make me think there were two hearts in the van, thumping.

There were—but I wasn’t aware at first. This was before I knew she followed me.

— 2 — I ’ D parked in the senior parking lot even though I wasn’t a senior, cut the engine, and was sitting there holding it.

The flyer. The paper was the same temperature as my fingers—cold—so I couldn’t feel either.

I tried to flatten the paper against the steering wheel, smoothing the tears and wrinkles from her face as best I could to study what they said about her.

“Endangered Runaway” they called her. A sliver of fear entered me when I saw they said she was in danger, but now I know that everyone under eighteen who goes missing is called endangered.

On Missing posters, if you’re not an “Endangered