17 & Gone(39)

The frame showed ground covered in gray, murky snow. It showed two running feet. It focused in, for just a moment, on those feet: a pair of sneakers in the snow. The laces were yellow, which seemed wrong somehow, too cheerful. One set of laces was undone, trailing.

Here, the camera zoomed out, and the video exploded with laughter. A whole group of them out of view, an anonymous herd hidden where I couldn’t see.

They were taunting her. Calling her names. And now I could see her, all of her, better than I could before. She was cowering under her hair, then trying to run away down an urban sidewalk patched with ice and trash bags left on the curb and low, dirty drifts of snow.

Tripping over her shoelaces and trying to run.

The camera lens pointed down for some seconds, at the ground, like the owner of the phone—a guy, his voice was the loudest—was checking to make sure it was still recording. It showed the world crooked and almost upside down, as if this patch of pitted sidewalk were really sky, but then it raised up again in a great blur of motion. He was running now, running with the phone in hand.

When he stopped, the image stopped, too. It jittered and held in place, moving in to show a brick wall.

A girl was standing against it, shielding her face from view. This was Shyann.

The last few seconds took a wild zoom in on her face and held there, so I could see her: dark skin, big bright eyes, hair gone white from all the snow and ice thrown in it.

Then, before the video came to a stop, she took off. Left the brick wall and bolted off where the camera couldn’t find her. At this, the video cut out.

She’d sent me this video to show me her troubles. So she didn’t have to put it all into words first. So I’d know why.

A teacher was passing by, and I didn’t think fast enough to hide the phone.

“Where are you supposed to be, Miss Woodman?” she asked, then noticed it.

“No phones out during school hours, you know that.” Then there was her hand, the long, bony fingers wrapping themselves around my cell phone and detaching it from me.

“Hey, that was important,” I said, reaching for it, but she shook her head and told me to get to wherever it was I was supposed to be this period, that was what was important.

I stared at her for a moment. I’d been living for weeks in two places at once: here. And there, where they were. This teacher—what did she teach, some slack class like health?—she had no idea what was important, or where I most needed to be.

— — —

When I got my phone back from the vice principal’s office after last bell, the video of Shyann Johnston was gone. The only proof I had that the video did come to me, that my phone had caught the electric charge of her first contact, was the blinking light and the message that said: UNABLE TO DOWNLOAD. ERROR.

— 29 — JANUARY was bringing the most snow the Hudson Valley had seen in close to ten years. It also brought more of those dreams.

The dreams didn’t fit with the falling snow. They were hot instead of cold, made of smoke that steamed my lungs and warmed my skin. But it was that night when the dream became somehow even hotter, so real that I burst out of my bedroom gasping, my arms wildly waving away the smoke, that I became aware of my mom, saying I’d been sleepwalking, saying with a sigh, “Go back to bed, babe,” like this had happened before.

I returned to my room to find her.

Shyann Johnston. This time, not a blur on the miniature screen of my cell phone.

Not an error message. This time for real.

It shocked me even though I should have been expecting her visit. I didn’t scream.

I waited until I couldn’t hear my mom anymore. I held still by the door, my hand unable to come off the knob where I’d hung all my bras, sifting through the underwire while I waited for my mom to get back to her room. It took some minutes. All the while she breathed in and out, quick breaths, like she was more scared than I was.

I couldn’t make out her features in the darkness, but she seemed cold from the way she shivered—and her lips, from what I could see of them, seemed tinged blue.

I wondered how long she’d been sitting there. The whole time I slept? Or had she followed me out of the dream minutes before?

I sat on the edge of my bed, across from the seat she’d chosen. My heart could be felt in my throat, its jogged beating made from the natural instinct to panic at this impossible sight in my room. But also questions, rattling with questions. And the questions won.

“Was that you?” I made myself ask.

“On my phone?”

Her bluish lips pulled into something of a sad smile, which I took as an answer.

Abby and Natalie had both let me into their minds straightaway, and Fiona Burke had my mind for the taking. But Shyann didn’t trust me enough at first.

She probably thought I’d make fun of her for what I saw in there, call her one of those names.

Didn’t you see me? she said. I saw you.

I knew she didn’t mean here, in my desk chair, where the outline of her was sitting in the dark, my bathrobe folded over the back of the chair and my school papers scattered across the desk. She meant somewhere else, that place where I’d been before I found myself sleepwalking, the charred space of the recurring dream. That’s where she actually was—in the house, with the others. That’s where she now had to stay.

I admitted I had seen her. That had been her, standing against the wall. In the dream as in the video; in the video as in the dream.