17 & Gone(26)

She won’t know what meeting me will have done to her.

I stood up all of a sudden and grabbed the handles of the back doors, closing up the van. “Go back inside,” I told the girl.

Didn’t she hear me?

“Go,” I snapped, louder this time.

“Get away from me. I mean it. Get out of here. Now. Go.”

She leaped back as if I’d smacked her. Her face twisted like she was about to cry, but before she let me see, she whipped around and started running.

She was racing away, away from the gray, salted sidewalk, and away from me, into the warm and cheerful interior of the local Friendly’s. Her mom was probably in there, her dad and siblings, too, and maybe a trademark Happy Ending Sundae would help her forget about this, and me.

I watched to be sure. When she was safely inside, I realized it was snowing.

Snow falling on the roof of my van and on the pavement and in my hair and on my eyelashes and on my outstretched limbs. Fluffy white flakes of snow covering me just like they’d cover a dead body.

— 18 — FIONA Bur ke did run away—there was never any question.

After she’d finished packing and making up her face, her bags strewn around the foyer and her lashes protruding from her eyelids in gnarled spikes, Fiona Burke made a phone call.

Her voice softened as she spoke, turning simpler, slower, like she’d regressed to my age, or was mocking me by pretending so.

She kept assuring the man on the phone that everything was cool. She said yes a lot, like she wanted to agree with every single thing he said. She got very silent at one point and it sounded like the person on the other end was yelling at her. She stuttered, and said she was sorry, and after a while the yelling stopped and they were just talking and making plans for the night.

I felt her looking at me, where I was in the dining room in my My Little Pony pajamas, and then I heard her speak about me for the first time.

“The thing is,” she told the man, “it’s like . . . someone’s gonna be here when you get to the house. Like, I’m not alone.”

I held my tongue. While she talked, for a reason I didn’t understand, she was making me stand in the corner, face mashed into the crook of the wall. If I opened my eyes from this position, all I could make out was her mother’s dining-room wallpaper: a pattern of yellow blooms marching north in one mindless, orderly flock. They blurred to butter close-up. I couldn’t see her as she spoke, but I could hear everything she said.

“No! Not my parents. I told you my dad’s navy buddy had a f*cking heart attack and they’re in Baltimore for the f*cking funeral. It’s not them. It’s . . . the kid who lives next door. I’m sort of watching her since her mom sort of had no one else to ask. But I’ll just leave her here. I’m still going with you.”

There was some arguing then. About me. About what I’d see and who I’d tell.

But then Fiona Burke hung up the phone and held still. Something in her face told me she didn’t want to go where she promised she’d go. That man had been yelling at her, and she wanted to stay right here.

I thought she was about to say she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d pull me out of the corner and she’d grab my hand and say we had to get out of the house before he got here—whoever he was— and I’d take her to hide in my bedroom next door. This was back when my mom let me have the pup tent in my room, set up at all times for carpet-camping, and Fiona Burke and I would crawl in there and close the flap and I’d show her where I hid the leftover Halloween candy.

Maybe Fiona Burke spent a second thinking something like that, too. About running away from running away. But it was too late to change her mind. She’d set too much of it in motion.

Soon she was prancing over to me in the corner of the dining room, crouching so her wet-glossed lips had my ear.

“What am I going to do with you?”

she said, singsong. “He didn’t like it that you were here, Lauren. He didn’t like it at all.”

“Who’s he?”

She ignored that. “And really, you’re not supposed to be here. My stupid parents said yes to your stupid mom without asking me first, and I couldn’t get out of it. This wasn’t the plan.”

I told her that I was sorry, deeply, as if I’d betrayed her.

Her hand whipped out and she shoved something hard and cold to the back of my neck, moving it up until it was wedged against the base of my skull.

“Do you think I’d hurt you?” she said in a strange, helium voice. Her breathing quickened, and mine rushed to catch up.

I didn’t answer, so she gave more pressure to the back of my neck, wedging in harder. I imagined the muzzle of a gun; I’d seen one in person at a friend’s house once, and so that’s what I pictured. His dad kept it in a box on a high shelf in the bedroom, and my friend had found a way to reach it by balancing on the dresser. But we hadn’t taken it out of the box to see if it was loaded, and we hadn’t played at killing each other, going blam, blam! with the steel against each other’s temples and the writhing on the floor until we got tired and decided to be dead. I’d only touched it, with one finger, once, and all I remembered was that it had been this hard, and this cold.

Thinking of this, I may have begged her, please, not to, begged her, please, leave me alive, and she may have lost her bravado and cracked up laughing.