17 & Gone(24)

Then I wheeled the bike out of the garage and down the driveway toward my van without another word. Maybe I’d been wrong, I told myself. Maybe the bike had been blue.

— 16 — I didn’t end up wheeling Abby’s blue Schwinn bicycle into the police station. I left it in my van parked outside and then I went in, to tell the police I had it.

The station was small, with a waiting room holding three chairs and an interior window in the wall, through which a receptionist sat reading.

I didn’t see Officer Heaney or anyone else

official-looking

through

the

window, but I was told to sit tight and an officer would be with me very soon. I waited forty-two minutes. Then the receptionist went on break, apologizing for keeping me waiting, and an officer came up front to help me, leaving me sitting another eleven minutes while he ducked back in to take a phone call.

During all the time I was waiting in the plastic chair in the front room I considered what this meant. If it was a sign that I should leave. If I was meant to hand over the bike to the police and tell them what I knew, wouldn’t they have helped me when I first walked in?

I was about to get up, walk out, and drive away, when finally the officer came back to the window and asked what it was I wanted to talk to somebody about. He wasn’t Officer Heaney, but he’d do. I dug through my pockets and my backpack searching for Abby’s flyer, afraid I’d lost it, then remembering where I’d hidden it, in the inside zippered pouch. While the officer read the details on the Missing flyer, I felt something deep in my center rise in temperature, like a pinpoint of panic that would soon take over my whole body and come spewing out my mouth. Then it dawned on me what it was: not a sudden illness or something I ate, but the pendant I was wearing. The stone had gone hot as an iron against my bare skin.

I lifted it out away from me, so it wouldn’t burn me, hiding it in a ball inside my sweatshirt-shielded fist.

The officer handed back Abby’s flyer through the window and said he did remember the girl from this summer.

Vaguely. Some runaway. See, it says that right there on the flyer? Case Type: Endangered

Runaway.

Get

that?

Runaway. They can’t go chasing every 17-year-old kid who runs away from home—do I have any idea how many there are out there? What a waste of time that would be? Of taxpayers’ dollars?

What a waste?

Within his words were the other things he was saying: how little this mattered to him, and how little this should matter to me. She’d be eighteen soon enough, besides, he added. And then there was really nothing they could do.

The officer loaded a website on the front desk’s computer, angling the screen so I could see it—the missing children’s database, a public record listing anyone who was under the age of eighteen when reported missing, on which I’d already found Abby’s information. But he had a point to make. He entered these terms into the search field: current age: 17; sex: female. Then he scrolled through face after face and name after name, to show me. Here was a 17-year-old girl who had also run away. Another 17-year-old runaway. Another, another, another, all 17, all runaways. He kept clicking. Another 17-year-old, but her case

was

labeled

“Endangered

Missing,”

which

meant

she

had

disappeared

under

questionable

circumstances. This next one, too. Some were missing, he admitted, but more— more than he’d sit there and count—had run away by their own choice. And they could always go home if they wanted.

The same number leaped out at me— 17, 17, 17—pouncing and etching itself into my skin like a bloody needle in the midst of one of my mom’s more intricate tattoos.

I was 17.

I was a girl.

Didn’t we matter?

And the fact that I was also 17 and also a girl couldn’t be all there was, but it was enough for me. It wasn’t anything this police officer would ever be able to understand. This was meant for me only.

A piece of information that was all mine.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said, assuming that’s what she was, and I didn’t correct him. “Though I assure you, if she wants to be found, she’ll turn up.”

“But what if she didn’t run away?” I asked. I told him about the bike—the same one mentioned right there on the Missing notice—and didn’t they need it for evidence?

“I’m not sure why we would. Besides, this here says she’s from New Jersey.

Out-of-state.”

Go, said the whispered voice close up to the blazing-hot lobe of my left ear.

Get out of there right now, you imbecile. Go.

This time I knew right away it was Fiona. She knew I was about to mention the necklace, which made me wonder what else she knew. She’d keep insulting me until I left.

“Okay,” I told the officer. “Thank you for your time. I understand.” I grabbed Abby’s flyer from off the desk and returned it to the hoodie’s front pocket, where the touch of the pendant would keep it warm. I didn’t look back. I was almost at the door.

“But maybe when I get a chance I’ll look into it,” he called through the window into the waiting room. My hand was on the knob and the door was coming open, and I knew he didn’t mean it and that as soon as I walked out of the station he’d let himself forget. I glanced back at the window to be sure and noticed him looking up at the clock on the wall. “How old are you, miss?