17 & Gone(22)

That was what my body did and what my brain thought, but then what Abby wanted took over. It was having Luke Castro so close that had brought her out again. Her breath fogged up my mind.

For a second, as if Abby’s nails were digging into my skin to keep me from squealing, I didn’t want to say why I was there. I wanted to do what she would’ve done. To be her. To take over from where she would have landed, had she made it all the way here on her bike that July night. To lean in and kiss him and let him tug off my skinny jeans and see what his body looked like under those clothes. It was cold outside, but with these thoughts in my head, it was warm.

I’d never been with anyone but Jamie, and there was only the thinnest thread holding me to him. How easy it would be to break it.

But I shook my head and wrestled back control of my mind. “I’m here because of Abby. I heard you knew her.”

The sound of her name turned his face an unnatural shade of blank. The kind of expression someone would have when trying to hide something.

“Abby Sinclair,” I said, watching his face carefully. “I heard you guys hung out this summer.”

Still blank. So blank I thought he’d deny it. And then I’d have to remind him.

Abby’s memories of Luke, of the nights she snuck off the campground to see him before the night in question, are full of lips pressed in darkness, and the way his neck smelled, which was musky from his cologne, and the way the planes of his face caught the barest patches of light in the darkness. How he looked under a streetlight. How he looked in the beam of the tiniest flashlight, so small it hung from the ring of his keys. How he looked under the light of the moon.

“Abby?” I repeated. “Pretty girl?

From New Jersey? Long brown hair?”

He straightened, and a shadow could be made out, slinking across his eyes and cheek, cascading down his chin.

“That girl from that camp down the road?”

“Yeah. Abby. I know you know her.

She told me.”

“You a friend of hers or something?”


I nodded. I was way more than a friend. He had no idea.

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “Took you long enough.” He turned his back on me then and walked up into the garage. I had no choice but to follow.

Abby was deathly silent as I trudged up the driveway behind Luke Castro. I couldn’t see her anywhere in the snow and I couldn’t feel her behind me.

Was she in the house? Had Abby Sinclair been hiding here in Pinecliff all along?

Once in the garage, where it was warmer because of the space heater, and darker because the sun didn’t reach, I tensed, expecting him to open the door leading into the house and then there, all cozied up in a winter sweater knitted by his grandma, would be Abby herself, alive and well and rolling her eyes at my intrusion. She would have known my thoughts all this time, have been listening in as if over a radio, playing with me, teasing me, pushing me to see how far I’d go.

I felt like a fool. I questioned her face in my rearview, her shadow skirting the edges of rooms. I questioned all of it, everything about her, for the first time since all this started. And then as quick as the doubt had come, anger replaced it.

My insides flipped and seethed. Oh, it had been Abby, haunting me ever since I found her picture on the side of the road.

But not so I could help her. Not so I could find out what happened. Not because we were connected, somehow, through Fiona Burke, who knew me, who somehow

knew

her.

She

wasn’t

communicating with me because I was meant to help her, because out of everyone in the town of Pinecliff, in all of Dutchess County, in this state, in this country, in this world, it had to be me.

No. She was f*cking with me.

All of this rushed over me, and I lost sight of if she was a ghost or not a ghost, a villain or a victim or a messed-up teenage girl.

“What’s your problem? Don’t you want this or what?” Luke was asking me.

And him. He’d been a part of it. I wanted to punch him in his chiseled nose, break it clean across the middle so he never recovered and he lost some of his luster and people called him ugly sometimes. How would he like that? But before I could make a fist, I realized what he meant. There was no door open into the house. There was no Abby in his grandma’s hand-knitted sweater leaning out, laughing at me for trying to save her when she didn’t need saving.

We were alone in the garage as before, and he was balancing a blue Schwinn bicycle, holding it upright by the handlebars. The frame was doused in rust, and one of the tires was punctured.

“What’s that?” I said slowly, putting it together. “That’s not . . .” I eyed the rest of the garage. My panic soothed when I heard her breathing. She must have trailed me so closely, I hadn’t even seen her shadow.

“Abby’s bicycle,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“No,” I said. You see, the bicycle in his hands was blue. Sure, it was a Schwinn, but I could have sworn, when I saw it in her memories, that it had been green. Bright green. Green like the trees surrounding the road she’d been riding.

Green. “That’s not it.”

“Uh, yeah, it is,” he said, rolling it as best he could with the flat back tire over to me so I had to take it. Its metal frame was very cold, and its seat was gashed open, spilling yellowed fluff and a protruding wire spring.