17 & Gone(25)

Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Winter break,” I said, though technically it didn’t start for another day.

“You sure about that? My daughter goes to Pinecliff Central, and she had school today, she—”

The door swung closed before he could finish. I was still here. I was still searching. I was the only one who seemed to care.

— 17 — I didn’t get far.

My eyes swam and then came into focus: the parking lot of the Friendly’s.

The square of blacktop divided by yellow lines. The gray concrete curb.

The bumper of my van wedged against the curb. The sign on the plate-glass window advertising a three-course Christmas dinner special next week (was Christmas next week already?) for only $7.99. The cracks in the sidewalk.

The faces in the cracks. Smiling faces at first and then mouths in the shape of screams.

I’d been on the sidewalk outside the Friendly’s for I-couldn’t-say-how-long.

Something had come over me when I was leaving the police station and I’d had to pull over. It was the growing sense that I was being watched—and then it was the growing sense that whoever was watching, they were inside the van. They were in the bowels of the back, behind the bench seat. I’d opened the door when I put the bicycle in and I’d left it open too long when I was checking my phone and reading Jamie’s text messages (six since that morning).

I’d let them in. They knew I was looking for Abby—they’d heard everything I’d said.

This chain restaurant, this parking lot, was the nearest turnoff I’d seen. I’d barreled through the lot and I’d come to a stop and I’d opened the driver’s side door and I’d leaped out, and it took much deep breathing and many minutes before I could open the two back doors at the tail end of the van. When I did I could hardly look, but I had to look, because I had to know— All I’d found was Abby’s borrowed bicycle inside.

I’d gotten myself all worked up over nothing.

Now I was sitting on the sidewalk, out under the cold, winter-white sky. I couldn’t get back in the van just yet.

I was looking down at my knees, caked with ice and snow and with the salt kernels thrown out in winter so people wouldn’t slip and fall in the ice and snow, and that was how I realized I must have fallen. I lifted my hands and saw that my palms, too, were caked with the mixture, pockmarked and dented from impact, discolored, almost grayed.

“Hey, you,” I heard.

This voice was coming from behind me, to my left. I ignored it, of course, like I’d been ignoring Fiona Burke since we’d left the police station.

“Hey.” The voice again. This was a girl’s voice, I realized, the voice of a very young girl. “Hey. I’m talking to you.” A clean, white toe nudged the scuffed steel toe of my combat boot.

“Are you sick? Do you need me to get my mom?”

From the size of her tiny feet in those puffy white boots I knew she was far too young to even be a part of this. When I craned my neck to look up into her face, I saw I was right: This girl was nine or ten maybe, eleven at most. She was dry and clean and safe. She had years to go.

Years and years.

The girl had many barrettes all over her head and just looking at them made my own head feel heavy. The weight of all those barrettes, if they were plated in steel like the kicking toes of my boots, that’s what knowing all the things I knew felt like.

“I’m fine,” I managed to answer her, finally.

“You threw up all over the sidewalk,”

the girl said, holding her nose.

I looked behind me, to my right. “Oh. I guess I did.”

“Do you have germs?” she said. She took a step back. She moved comically slow in a white snowsuit decorated with little coiled demons awash in fire that I realized, upon blinking, were only goldfish.

Orange

goldfish

were

decorating her snowsuit, not demons.

“Do you?” she said again. “Have germs?”

“I might,” I admitted.

“Gross,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose. But she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to care if she caught my sickness.

I noticed that my van beside the curb was still idling; I’d left the engine on.

The back doors were also open, showing the dark cavern inside. It seemed much larger than it should be, like a tunnel that didn’t want you to see its end.

“Could you do me a favor?” I asked the girl. “Could you look inside there?”

“What?”

“My van. Could you look inside the van and tell me what you see?”

She started shrinking away from me.

She must have had that special assembly in school about bad strangers wanting to snatch kids in their dirty, scary vans.

I had the terrifying feeling then that she’d be smart to play it safe and run, but she only hopped over to the van and peeked into the back. “Cool! A bike,”

she said.

“Anything else? Nothing else in there besides the bike?”

“No,” she said. She looked back at me like I was a wacko. Still, she didn’t run.

I began to worry for her. Where were her parents?

If she stayed with me for much longer, she really would catch it. She’d catch it off me and carry it around with her through elementary school and middle school and into high school. She’d carry it down the field during soccer matches, up to the top of the Empire State Building when she visited on a class trip, down hallways and in the pockets of her tightest jeans, and then her birthday would come, and she’d celebrate with friends, they’d have a party, and she’d fling herself around the room dancing, not having any idea of what’s to come. She’d be 17, and by then she wouldn’t remember any of this.