17 & Gone(40)

“Why are you here? What do you want from me?” I asked, and then before I could hear her answer, my mom was back, knocking on my door and wanting to know who was I talking to, was I on the phone? And I was turning away from the desk chair, turning away from the outline of the girl in the staticky darkness, and calling through the door to my mom to say I was fine. My mom asked if it was Jamie, and I said yeah, because he’d be as good an excuse as any. I just didn’t want her opening my door.

“Aren’t you two . . . I thought you said it was over,” my mom said through the door.

“We’re only talking, Mom.”

My mom did open the door, and in those first few seconds I thought for sure she’d see it. The ghost. The girl. Then she’d know.

She leaned her head in and I noticed her spot my phone—it was off, sitting on my dresser all the way across the room, where I couldn’t have just been talking on it. She saw that, but she didn’t see Shyann. “You okay?” she said.

“I’m fine.”

If she knew something, if she could sense something, she would’ve stayed.

But she only said good night again and closed my door.

I looked back, and the desk chair held only my bathrobe, the dark air shimmering as if my eyes were still adjusting, drawing shapes of a girl who wasn’t there anymore, who’d run off, who’d gone. My mom had scared her away.

I was alone, and I felt it. There wasn’t even a breath in my ear.

What did Shyann want from me? Only this. Only to tell me her story and be heard.

— 30 — SHYANN’S parents had reported her missing at the end of January about a year ago, saying she’d run away. “Teen Flees from Neighborhood Bullies,”

stories online said. “Bullied Teen Still Not Found.” The bullying “experts”

were called in, the ones who liked to get gussied up for TV talk shows to denounce the epidemic sweeping our schools,

made

worse

by

social

networking and technologies like camera phones.

Shyann’s

school

principal

was

interviewed, and some teachers. There was one girl who spoke on camera, acting as if she had no idea what had been done to Shyann. “Don’t really know what happened to that girl,” she told Channel 4 and Channel 11.

“Nobody was messing with her. Why’d she run off for no reason?” She smiled a carefully calculated smile, and I wanted to reach my arm into the screen and punch her in the face.

No one but me knew what had happened to Shyann.

If Shyann could have planned better, she wouldn’t have gone in winter. New Jersey in late January was full of frigid gusts of wind, the kind that swept up your pant legs, and strung out tears from your eyes. Snow in the city limits quickly turned gray; maybe it even came down from the sky that color. It could be that it was only white in other towns and in storybooks, and in the cotton-candy fluff they pumped out for holiday movies. Here, there were gray patches on the sidewalks, the ice making the pavement so slick someone could slip and fall if she tried to run.

If it had been warmer—if Shyann could have held on through the winter, kept her head down, didn’t let herself care so much what they all said about her—she would have gone in spring, when the city warmed but before the humidity got the whole area in its clutches. There were ragged plots of land behind some of the row houses in her neighborhood, and if a person didn’t have the money to hop a train and leave, a person could survive there without being detected. If she were smart about it.

The brush was thickly grown over the fences, and the trees gave shade. No one in their right mind went back there—no one besides dealers, who went in there to hide stashes, or bums, who went in there to sleep—but she could see herself in one of those vacant lots, building a tree house out of vines and old plywood, tires and netting, completely concealed from anyone down on the ground.

Maybe sometimes a couple from the neighborhood would slip in past the fences to hook up, but they’d get it done and be out fast enough. Cops didn’t go back there. Feral dogs did, and scruffy cats without collars, but she’d just kick them down when they climbed her tree.

She’d descend from her perch in the branches only at night, to scrounge for food. When she slept, in her tree house hidden in the middle of her city, she’d





open her eyes to see a blanket of stars.

No one could take that view from her.

Out there was an entire universe, proof that there was life outside this one, and every night she’d have a reminder.

She would have gone in spring, if she could have waited.

She couldn’t wait.

Shyann did have her reasons, and they weren’t secret. She’d left her parents a note:



CANNOT take

this anymore!

What is it going

to take to make

u listen!

I am NOT

going back to

that school!



But the note wasn’t found for four and a half days, because her little brother balled it up inside his toy dump truck. It wasn’t until the toy tipped over, spilling its contents, that Shyann’s mother recognized her handwriting and unballed the note to finally see what her daughter had said.

Truth was, Shyann watched her family’s windows for hours before she left the confines of the backyard. Out there, where the trash cans were stored, there was a shed that the superintendent never used. Shyann spent her first night inside this shed. She bundled up, keeping a hole uncovered for her two eyes and nothing more, and every once in a while she’d stand and peek outside the shed to her parents’ second-floor windows. They had no idea she was so close. Her mom could have called her name out the window and she would have been startled enough to bolt up and say, “Yes, ma’am?”