17 & Gone(3)

Runaway,”

you’re

“Endangered Missing,” but you’re always in danger—it’s never a “She’s Probably Doing Okay, But We Have to Check Since It’s the Law” missing girl.

Besides, Abby was in danger. I felt it.

I pored over her flyer again, learning her hometown, her hair color, her eye color, her weight and height. I learned that she was gone before she was reported missing, and I didn’t understand why. I learned of her pierced nose. I didn’t learn about her habit of writing the name of the boy she liked on the inside of her elbow, then spitting on it and rubbing at it till it was clean. That information wasn’t on the flyer, and this was before she told me.

I would have pocketed the piece of paper and gone into the school building, and maybe all of what happened next would have been different, but that’s when I saw the light.

My Dodge van had one of those cigarette

lighters

built

into

the

dashboard, a knob beside the stereo that you press in to heat. It glows orange, and then when it’s ready to use, it pops back out. I’d had the van a couple months, but I’d never used the lighter.

Now the knob was pressed in. An orb of fire-orange was blazing from the dashboard as if someone had reached out an arm to light a cigarette. A phantom cigarette and a phantom arm, because I was alone in the van. I was alone.

I told myself I must’ve knocked the lighter when I parked. Or the mechanic who’d fixed the engine got it stuck. It’s been lit up, I assured myself; it’s been on the whole time.

I looked out at the quiet parking lot, a white expanse beneath the rising ridge above the school. Nothing stirred.

This was when something streaked past outside: a fast-moving blur, as if someone were sprinting the length of the school property. Someone wearing red.

My temples hammered, and I screwed my eyes shut. I lost my grip on the flyer and felt it fall to the floor. There were stars clouding my vision, stars that became one star, until then, there: the sparkling cubic zirconia in her left nostril.

She was visible in the van’s rearview mirror when I opened my eyes. Bright and searing like a sunspot, until my eyes adjusted, or her heat dimmed enough so I could see her clearly.

She’d taken the middle bench seat, the collapsible one I hadn’t bothered to collapse all week, as if I’d known to expect her company. This seat was just behind mine, but I didn’t turn around. I could say that I didn’t want to make any sudden movements, that I was trying not to scare her away, but truth is I couldn’t.

My body wouldn’t move for me at all.

Her reflection in the rearview showed her face at eye level. Her shoulders hunched. Her two bare knees folded to her chin, purplish blooms of bruises on her shins like she’d crawled across the icy asphalt lot, slithering between parked cars, to reach my black van.

This was Abigail Sinclair from the Missing flyer. I could smell her, harsh and hot like a tuft of hair burning.

She uncrossed her arms and lowered her knees, and I noticed that her T-shirt had the name of the summer camp and a picture to go with it: a veiled lady lifted up above a trio of pine trees, as if in the midst of being taken herself. The shirt was covered in grime and streaked with mud,

so

the

words COUNSELOR-IN—

TRAINING could barely be made out above her heart. Below the shirt, I saw she had on a pair of shorts. Red ones, with thin white racer stripes. She had been on the home team in Color War that day—I found that out later.

She was letting me see what she was wearing on the night she disappeared, but I knew, even then, that this wasn’t about what a girl was wearing when she found herself gone. Nothing she could have worn on that night would have made a difference. Not these shorts or another pair that were longer or less red.

Not a bathing suit. Not a bear costume.

Not a short skirt. Not a burqa.

There was so much more to her story I didn’t know.

“Abigail?” I said. It came out in a whisper.

Without a word or warning, my vision shifted. I was soon seeing through some layers of smoke and coughed-up haze into what she herself saw the night she went missing. This seeing was more like knowing. I didn’t have to question it—in the way that I can be sure, without needing to check first, that there are five fingers on my hand.

What I came to know was this: She didn’t like it when people called her Abigail. So I wouldn’t, not anymore.

And she did ride away on that bike, though it was green, not blue as had been reported. What I saw of her—what she willed me to see—was a moving image spooling out in the frame of my rearview mirror, a home movie projected in an empty theater for me and only me.

There she was, riding a bright green bicycle into a sea of darkness. That was her, coasting on a gust of wind and letting her long hair untangle and fly. It was a rusty old bike, one she borrowed from the counselor’s shed; it was an empty road, one on which no cars passed; it was a slick, sweet-smelling summer’s night.

That was it, that was the last of her.

She lingered on it, and so did I, holding the memory between us like something sweet slowly licked off a shared spoon.

I watched the reflective light mounted on the back of the bicycle catch and glow and grow small as she traveled into the dark distance. Watched her pedal, quick at first, then slowing to coast down the hill. Watched as she lifted both arms from the handlebars for a heartbeat of a second, then put them back down and held on. I watched her go.