17 & Gone(5)
Abby: age 17, reported missing September 2, but gone before that, gone in summer and no one went looking.
Gone.
— 3 — I don’t know how I made it through the day I first found Abby.
My memory holds on only to vague pieces, because other, sharper things have since come to take their place. I remember the detention slip for cutting class and smoking in the parking lot, torn ragged on one side so it looked like someone had taken a bite out of my sentence, but I don’t remember the detention itself. I don’t remember what happened in my classes or what I learned, if anything. I don’t remember lunch period with Deena, and what particular kind of slop-on-a-tray I carried to our table and then put in my mouth. Or what plans she made for her eighteenth birthday party, which was all she could talk about even though it was weeks and weeks away. Or anything else she said.
At one point there was my boyfriend, Jamie Rossi, at my locker, asking what happened and why I was late, and I remember this because it was the first time I had ever kept something from him.
“Just engine trouble,” I heard myself telling him, “that’s all.” I didn’t say anything about a girl taped to a telephone pole, a girl hidden in the back of my van.
It was still possible I’d imagined it.
Imagined her.
I have this freeze-frame of Jamie in my memory, this picture. In it, the hood of his sweatshirt is popped up over his head, and the dark curls over his forehead are spilling out because he needed a haircut again like he seemed to practically every other week. He’s leaning in, eyes closed so I see how long his lashes are. And there are his lips out to meet mine. His stubble showing, but only on his chin, because he couldn’t grow a full beard, not if he tried. I can’t tell what he’s thinking—if he believes me—because his eyes are closed. Not that I could ever guess, with Jamie. He’s a guy, so he’s used to keeping things close.
Then the picture of Jamie’s face falls away, and I must have kissed him back, or a teacher came by and stopped us, but I don’t remember that part.
I was outside myself, as if I were standing at the dip in the highway that led to Pinecliff Central High School, the last place you could turn before heading to school, all while some shadow-me was inside the building going to my classes, kissing my boyfriend, answering to my name when it was called.
I couldn’t get Abby out of my mind.
During my free period, I did a search online, on one of the library computers, and found a listing in the missing persons database for an Abigail Sinclair from New Jersey. That flyer on the telephone pole may have been a few months old, but she was still out there somewhere. She was still 17 years old.
Still missing.
There was also a public page online that her family or friends must have made for her—a memorial of sorts where anyone could post a message:
ABBY!
IF
YOU
ARE
READING THIS! Come home!
We miss you.
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Abigail, it’s your cousin Trinity.
You have Grandma and Grandpa so worried you have no idea.
Where are you????? Call me if you’re reading this. We just want to know you’re ok!
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Dear Abby, I have never met u but I am praying for u every night ----------------------------------------
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Abbz U R missed @ school <3
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luv you girl come home!!!!
It was when I was scrolling through this page of notes left for Abby, notes I felt sure she’d never seen, from some people she didn’t even know, that I realized a person was standing behind me, waiting for the right moment to speak.
When I turned in my chair, I watched this girl’s gaze peel away from my computer screen and go to me. I didn’t recognize her at first, and then her face took on shape and I realized she was a freshman, a girl I’d seen around school. I was more aware of the fact that she was breathing, undeniably alive, than of anything else. This girl wasn’t missing; she was right here. And all I wanted was for her to go away.
“Hey, Lauren,” she said, “we saw you this morning. Are you, um . . . okay?”
“You saw me? Where?” The thought of being watched while I was in the van alarmed me.
“Before school? You were in the middle of the road? The bus almost hit you? We all saw you and we called out the window to you.” She waited. “Didn’t you hear us?”
I shook my head. A feeling of cold came over me as she brought me back to that moment—so immediate I could have been out on the windy highway beneath the snowy pines right then. I shivered involuntarily.
“We were all like, ‘Hey what’s going on, why’d we stop?’ And the bus driver was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a girl in the road.’ And then I was like, ‘I know her, that’s Lauren Woodman! From school!’
You know we used to be on the same bus and—”
“My van broke down,” I said, so she’d stop talking. I’d already clicked away from Abby’s page and filled the computer screen with the library’s search catalog. But the flyer—Abby’s dirty, crumpled flyer—was on my lap under the desk, and I twisted it up and rolled it into a tight tube.