17 & Gone(38)
She turned her back and walked the rest of the way up the stairs. My eyes were adjusting to the lack of light and I saw for the first time that she had impossibly long hair, hair that had never known a pair of scissors in its lifetime, plain and stick-straight and parted down the middle. And for a moment all she was out of the darkness was hair, and all I was in the darkness was another person who’d done nothing to help her.
She turned in a cloud of frizz.
It’s too late, she said, for me. The frizz alighted, and the glass shards in her cheeks shimmered, and the two sharp needles piercing through it were her cold eyes. But it’s not too late . . . for her.
— 27 — NOT too late for her. Something told me this had to mean Abby Sinclair.
I’d seen Fiona Burke in the house, and now I’d seen Natalie in the house, and on my way out and into consciousness, before the dream sifted away like a haze of smoke tends to do, I caught sight of another figure. This one stood statue-still, her back to an ash-gray wall.
No, not Abby—and no matter how much her disappearance itched at me, tugging and not letting go, she wasn’t the only girl who wanted me to have her story. That’s the thing I’d soon discover: There were more. So many more.
There were more lost girls out there than I’d ever imagined, and now they knew where to find me. Their whispers came from the shadows, the sound of so many voices more static than song.
MISSING
SHYANN JOHNSTON
CASE TYPE: Endangered Runaway DOB: November 10, 1994
MISSING: January 30, 2012
AGE NOW: 18
SEX: Female RACE: African American HAIR: Black EYES: Brown HEIGHT: 5’6” (168 cm) WEIGHT: 153 lbs (69 kg) MISSING FROM: Newark, NJ, United States CIRCUMSTANCES: Shyann was last seen leaving school on January 30, 2012, when she was 17 years old. She has a chicken pox scar under her right eye. She is believed to have stayed in the local area.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION
SHOULD CONTACT
Newark Police Department (New Jersey) 1-973-555-8297
— 28 — THEY called her names. They called her ugly names, and stupid names; any cruel name they could think of, and there were many. It didn’t matter what names they called Shyann—there was no logic to it. Like, when she gained that weight over the summer they called her Shamu, and then she went and lost all the weight, and they still called her Shamu. They had no imagination.
For every name she’d been called by the age of 17, Shyann Johnston could have forged a fake ID for every sleazy bar in the city and gotten her drink on, even though she’d never tasted beer and she probably wouldn’t like it. She could have left, too. She could’ve collected enough passports to travel the world a dozen times over, escaping so far from her neighborhood she’d never have to go back, not to finish out high school, not to attend her graduation, not to carry her stuff out of her mom and dad’s and cart it to somewhere new. She wished she could do that, but she was stuck there, with these kids she hated because they hated her. These kids who made her life a living nightmare, who followed her around sometimes, in school and after school let out, trailing her down the street, across the crosswalk, pelting her with whatever they had in their pockets when she came down the steps of the library or out of that grocery place on the corner with a bag of food in her arms. Her tormentors.
There were enough bad names swirling through her mind that some mornings she looked in a mirror and saw what they saw. How could she not?
She believed the bad things more than she knew she should. She took in those words and let them burrow. Let them bat back and forth inside her brain. She began to think she’d never be able to spit them out, even if her mom and dad and the anti-bullying counselor assigned to talk to her fourth period told her none of it was true and building some self-esteem was how to fight back.
Bullcrap, Shyann thought. Maybe she should fight back by blasting them in the face with the gun her dad hid behind his porno collection. But she hated guns, and she didn’t want to go sifting through her dad’s personal items, besides, so she fought back by using the most anti-violent method she knew. She turned tail and she ran away.
It was soon after I first read about Shyann that she reached out to me to confirm it. To show she was one of the girls.
All I got at first was her voice on my cell phone. The blur of her body and the shriek of her voice saying, Leave me alone. Stop it already. Stop.
It came from an unidentified caller that said only “New Jersey.” There were no words in the message, but a video was attached.
It was a Monday, lunch period in the cafeteria. And when the text message came up on my phone, when I saw there was a video, I had a feeling, a sense that I was coming into contact with another girl. I stood up, holding the phone close to me so no one could see what was on the screen. “You can’t have that out, it’ll get confiscated,” I heard one of my friends say.
I rushed through the caf, almost knocking over some kid, causing him to drop his tray. I’d reached the edge of the room and I was pushing through the double doors and I was out in the hall and then, finally, finally, I was alone and could hit Play.
Leave me alone, I heard first, coming out my phone’s speaker. Stop it already.
Stop it. Stop.
The camerawork was shaky, the picture distorted. I couldn’t tell who was talking except that it sounded like a girl.