17 & Gone(45)

She wasn’t one of them. Besides, she was older than me. She’d turn eighteen soon, and none of this would even touch her.

She had no laminated hall pass in her possession, as far as I could tell, and yet she didn’t seem in any rush to get to a particular class. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had an actual conversation with her.

She must have been thinking the same thing, because she began to carry on a two-way conversation, doing both her voice and mine. “How are you, Dee?

Awesome, thanks for asking. I’m so sorry I forgot, isn’t it your birthday this week? Oh, no worries, Lauren, I know you love me. Things with Karl still on?

Oh, yeah, thanks for caring, I know you never liked him. Hey, speaking of, heard you dumped Jamie. What’s up with that?”

She stopped with the voices then and raised an eyebrow, waiting for my answer.

“I can’t talk about this now, Deena, I’m sorry. There’s someone . . . There’s somewhere I’ve got to be.”

“Jamie’s right,” she said. “You’ve changed, and it’s more than just the hair.”

The awkwardness between us wasn’t entirely about her boyfriend, Karl, though it would be nice to say it was.

Truth was, I’d done this. I’d pushed her away. It was frighteningly easy to do that with people. I couldn’t pinpoint when I started pushing—but I guess it would have been around the time I found Abby’s flyer. My friendship with Deena could have been halfway to Montana by now and I wouldn’t know it.

“So are you coming to my party, or what? At Karl’s house, remember? Or, let me guess. You’re planning to bail.”

“I said I’d go,” I told her, though I’d forgotten about all her plans for her eighteenth birthday party, including details about it being at Karl’s house and if I was supposed to come help her set up or anything.

I was going to ask, but then I caught sight of her at the far-off door glimmering in the distance. Not Deena; Deena didn’t have anything to do with this. It was Abby at the end of the black-and-white-checkered hallway, Abby holding the door open straight into the sun. Or it was a vision of Abby. Ghosts can’t hold open doors.

Did she know I’d gotten in touch with someone from Lady-of-the-Pines? And that I was headed down to see her now?

Is that why she’d come out?

Abby was wearing what she always wore; I’d never seen her in anything else: her Lady-of-the-Pines T-shirt with COUNSELOR-IN-TRAINING above her heart —it was pasted to her skin and dotted with flecks of mud. The shorts with the racing stripes. The leaves and twigs and muck matted into her hair that, from this distance,

seemed

woven

into

a

headdress, as if she were modeling some new girl-run-over-by-a-car look in the fashion pages of Vogue. I couldn’t see her feet to make out if she had on the one flip-flop.

“What are you looking at?” Deena asked. “Mr. Floris is taking the rest of the year off—I heard he had a stroke.

We’re good.”

My eyes left the open door where Abby was waiting and went to Deena, who was much closer. I’d really liked her once. I’d liked being her friend. I remembered this in an absent way, like how a long time ago I used to enjoy pooling sand into newly dug holes on the playground when I was, like, five. Right now, I needed to get rid of her.

“You’re cutting class, right?” I asked her.

She lifted her chin, proud. “Spanish.”

I held up the hall pass. “Want this? In case you get stopped?”

We both knew that, without a pass, getting caught in the hallway during a class period would get you detention.

Making a run for it once a hall monitor spotted you would get you ISS, or in-school suspension. I don’t know what never coming back would get you. The chance to never come back?

She shrugged, and I handed over the pass. As our fingers touched on the laminated plastic, there was a charge of life running from her into me. Deena would keep living to see this birthday and the ones that came after. I didn’t know what her life would be—maybe that creepy Karl dude would make her happy one day with baby Karls. Or maybe they’d forgo the offspring and take up a life of robbing liquor stores instead. But whatever choices she made, whatever mistakes, she’d live them.

She’d go on. It wasn’t in Deena Douglas’s fate to disappear.

I drew back my hand and shook the feeling out of it. From around the corner, two approaching teachers could be heard talking.

Deena perked up; she loved taunting the teachers. She whispered, “You go.

Make a run for it. I’ll be loud, cause a diversion. They won’t have any idea.”

She winked at me and then began stomping off toward the teachers, rattling lockers as she went. She turned the corner and I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could hear her. I could hear her even when I reached the end of the corridor, where there was no vision of Abby waiting, but there was an exit door propped open with a cinder block into the dazzlingly white winter’s day.

The south parking lot, once I reached it, was drenched in the kind of bright light that always seems artificial.

Anyone looking out the school’s south windows was sure to see me. I spotted my trig teacher at the head of class as I drove for the exit and, in a row in the middle of the classroom, the back of Jamie’s head. Ms. Torres had mapped out a problem on the whiteboard, and at the exact moment I drove past her window, she looked up, straight at me, and revealed the answer.