17 & Gone(53)

She thought I’d been ignoring her. And maybe I was. It was just that there were so many, and my head had been crowded up with them, like a smoky, dim room at this party, except my head was filled with girls. And also with myself— because I was a girl, too. I was 17 and maybe in danger, just like they were.

A flicker of shadowy movement caused me to look toward the woods.

And there she was, the dark shape of her at least, shaking her head no.

“No?” I said aloud.

Luke said something I didn’t catch, and a voice in my head said, It wasn’t him.

“Are you sure?” I asked to the trees.

Yes, she answered sadly. Not him.

Not him.

She meant he hadn’t hurt her, not that I ever really thought he did—besides how she’d gotten her heart broken. Hearing her made me know they were outside with me now. All of them.

I could see a girl. Then two more girls. Then another. Another. Girls I recognized, and some girls I didn’t.

There were so many girls I had yet to meet.

The lost girls’ eyes glowed, fire-lit, from the sweep of pine trees nearby.

How far were we from where Abby went missing? It was close, I realized.

So close.

If Luke could see them there, he’d be scared the way I should have been scared. I squinted and tried to picture the girls as he would: the one girl with the glittering shards of broken windshield encrusted into her cheeks; the girl with the frost-blue lips; the girl soaked through her clothes, dripping from an absent rain. Then the two girls melded together as if their bodies met in the most intimate tissue-and sinew-filled spaces that Siamese twins share, shoulder muscle growing into lungs and liver, their sides fused hip to hip.

These two girls were motioning to get my attention, waving at me to stop, waving at me to get away from him, to get in my van and get away. I should have listened, but what struck me was how it looked like they had three hands.

Two individual hands of their own, and the third hand, the one they shared, far larger than the other two.

“What are you looking at? What’s over there?” Luke asked.

“Nobody,” I said.

“Aren’t you happy to see me? You sure seemed to be two minutes ago.”

“Yeah, right.” But I didn’t bother arguing. I heard what the girls were trying to tell me, and I was feeling around in my pockets. The pockets of my cargo pants—there were many—and my coat pockets, too, inside and outside, every last one. Then I was down on my knees, there at Luke’s feet, searching the snow to see if I’d dropped them when I passed out. I was drunk, probably, and I was seeing ghosts, definitely, and now to top it all off I’d lost my van keys.

With my movement, the motion sensor made the back porch light flick on. It spotlit us, beaming down on the crown of my head.

Luke laughed again, and I realized how this looked to him, where I had myself positioned on the ground, with such easy access to his zipper. “You’re something else, aren’t you?” he said. I had absolutely no idea what Abby saw —sees, even still—in the guy, why she got so intoxicated by him and took off in the middle of the night on her bike to see him and let him stomp on her heart.

But then I wasn’t looking up at him anymore. The side door of the house had come open, and the person standing there let go of the door and let it swing closed.

When it slammed, Luke turned toward it, too.

“Hey, man,” Luke said, all nonchalant, when he saw it was Jamie. “What’s up?”

This was what the two girls had been trying to warn me about. Now I knew.

Nobody wanted Jamie to get the wrong idea.

“I was looking for you,” Jamie said— to me, not to Luke. His voice was flat; I couldn’t decipher any emotion from it.

His hair had fallen over his eyes like it always did.

“Oh, I’ve got her,” Luke said, a game in his voice and a hard hand on my arm, pulling me up to my feet so he could jerk me closer.

I pushed him away and disentangled myself, fumbling on clumsy legs but at least standing on my own without his help. “He doesn’t,” I told Jamie. “This wasn’t . . . It’s not, it’s not anything.

What?” I turned fast, in the other direction. One of the girls was talking to me, trying to tell me what to say to fix this, but I couldn’t make out the words because there was this panic in my chest and it was cold and there was all the wind.

“That’s not what she said before,”

Luke said.

I turned around to see Jamie backing up, away from us. That was it. He was going to believe that liar over me, thinking I’d gotten together with this sleaze so soon after our breakup. He was watching me with a strained, strange look on his face. But he didn’t leave.

Luke cracked up laughing. “I’m kidding, man. Dude, just kidding. She’s all yours. I’m going inside for a beer.”

Jamie stepped away from the door and let him through. But he didn’t join me in the pool of light, where I was still standing.

“I . . . that wasn’t what it looked like,”

I told him.

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m only talking to him because she wants me to.”

“She, who?”

“She . . . oh.” I stopped. I had to quit saying things out loud. I couldn’t talk anymore about her or about the others.