17 & Gone(55)

It was when she was asking me about the party, when she was saying something that required an answer from my mouth, that the room cracked open and the voices came out. They weren’t slivers of whispers like usual. They didn’t take turns, and they didn’t play nice. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, closing in on all sides, voices gone raspy and hoarse from breathing fire and hoarser still from all the screaming.

Aren’t you going to go look for her?

Your mother. She knows.

You haven’t said hello to me yet.

Can’t you see me?

You’re a nasty ho. And you’re not that cute, either.

You lie. You lie. You lie.

HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY

HERE!

You don’t have much longer.

You said you were going to look for her. You’re not looking for her.

Hi. I’m saying hi. Hi. Do you see me? Hi.

You don’t have much longer.

Hi.

My head hammered with the girls’

voices, more than I could have counted, more than I even recognized, proving there were lost girls I hadn’t gotten to meet yet and that I hadn’t been imagining them in the woods. I screwed my eyes shut as if that could stop them and it did, for a moment. Then it made it worse.

One story drowned out the next story and capsized the story that followed and took over where the last story left off.

New voices. A new girl named Jannah wanted to tell me about a boy named Carlos—how she was supposed to meet him, and she never made it before she got taken, and how he had the most intense brown eyes. And another new girl named Hailey did some things she wasn’t proud of, and who am I to judge? And a girl named Trina hated every single person who laid eyes on her —she hated every girl here; she especially loathed me.

Hailey had run away before. She had a chipped tooth from the first time, a pierced belly button from the second time, a prostitution record for the third time, but this time, the fourth time she went missing, she hadn’t run away at all.

Jannah loved Carlos and she ran away to have a life with him—or she meant to, before her family caught her and punished her for what she did. Trina ran off because no one was even looking.

She ran simply because she could. And good f*cking riddance.

Do you think he waited for me?

They think they know. They don’t know. No one knows.

Going, going, gone. How you like me now, huh? How you like me now?

Are you listening? Why aren’t you listening?

Do you think he waited?

Can’t you hear me? Hi, hi.

She’s out, idiot.

Wake her up, wake her up. Someone wake her up.

Then—in a gap between the noise— she spoke. Louder than the others, closer somehow, more urgent.

Help.

I knew that voice. That was Abby Sinclair.

— 45 — WHEN I opened my eyes, I was across the room, on the couch, with our cat, Billie, before me on the coffee table.

The cat stared intently at a spot just behind my head, and my mom hovered over me, in crisis mode. She had my two hands by the wrists and there was a sore spot on the side of my skull from where I’d been pounding it, I guess with a fist.

She was making a soothing sound in her throat, and hearing it calmed something in me. Calmed the noise and lessened the panic. The girls responded, too, and soon we were all still, listening to my mom’s tuneless humming.

When she saw this, she let go of my arms and took a seat beside me. “Tell me,” she said simply. She said it with the look she used to give me when I was little, when I was the only person in her world and she in mine. I focused on one of her tattoos, the flock of soaring birds on her neck. I counted them for comfort, the way I used to when I was younger: nine. Nine birds. Or was it ten? Ten. I’d forgotten the tenth bird on the back of her neck, hidden now behind her ear.

Ten birds, like always. Ten birds, as I’d remembered.

This was all it took for me to begin telling her.

“There’s this girl,” I started. “I found her Missing poster and then I read more about her online. She’s not from here, but she went missing from somewhere close by. They say she ran away, but she didn’t. Something’s happened, she needs help, I know she does. But no one’s looking for her. No one cares.”

My mom kept all expression from her face, but, twitching beneath her skin, there was something. The birds fluttered as the tendons in her neck tightened, and I kept my eyes on them and kept talking.

I spilled everything about Abby, except how I’d talked to her myself; I’d seen her and I’d heard her and I’d been close enough to her I could’ve reached out and touched her, but I didn’t say that.

I didn’t say how I hadn’t touched her because I’d assumed she was a ghost.

But I started to wonder if maybe there was a way—when you’re in trouble, when you’re caught somewhere and you can’t get out—that you can reach out to someone. Maybe it happens when you’re sleeping, that you project a vision of yourself to anyone who can see, and I can see. I didn’t have the rational, scientific explanation for seeing the apparition of a lost but maybe-still-alive girl in my van and in my bedroom, and without it I didn’t know how to explain that piece to my mom. So I skipped that part.

But I gave her other pieces:

I admitted that I’d talked to the boy Abby had been hanging out with. That I went in to talk to the Pinecliff police, not that they helped. And that I’d even been to talk to a counselor from the camp and to Abby’s grandparents, and that was the real reason I drove down to New Jersey.