17 & Gone(61)

Ask my mother. I know what she’ll say because I woke up with the blue lights of the ambulance dancing over me, easing out all the bad red, and I heard her talking to the EMTs. She’d say you send that girl away.

You send her away.





AND THEN


— 49 — IT takes some time before I realize the words they’re saying aloud are meant for me.

“We’re going to take care of you here, Laura, hon. Just rest.”

“I think her name is Lauren.”

“Sorry. Lauren. Your mom brought you in to us. Do you remember? Do you remember what happened? What you did?”

“Have you ever tried to hurt yourself before, Lauren? Lauren?”

“All right then, I see you want to sleep. Just sit up and swallow this.”

“She won’t sit up.”

“Just help her. There. Let her lean on your arm. There, Lauren. Here you go.

This will make you comfortable. Good.

Swallow.”

“Who was that you were talking to just now, Lauren?”

“Did she say something? I didn’t hear.”

“She’s talking to those girls again . . .

What girls, Lauren? I don’t see any girls.”

“Let’s leave her be. Don’t encourage her. Let’s just let her sleep.”

The two nurses shuffle out the door.

They leave it open—it’s a door that doesn’t seem to ever be able to close—





and they wander back, every so often, checking on me as I pretend to sleep.

Soon the pill they had me swallow makes it impossible to keep pretending.

The pill makes the sleeping turn real.

My head thickens with the quiet. The lost girls who’ve come out to visit with me slip under the bed to hide. Or they’ve gone somewhere else, behind the curtains maybe, where the shadows gather—all I know is I can’t see or hear them anymore.

The next time my eyes close, I can’t get the lids to lift open.

This is the psych ward of the hospital and I don’t know how many days I’ve been inside.

— 50 —

I don’t dream. I don’t wake up coughing, and I can’t smell smoke.

I’ve been across the river, in the hospital’s adolescent psychiatric ward, for what feels like a week’s worth of nights, though it could be fewer and it could be more, I’m not sure. The sun streaming through the window feels like afternoon sun long left over from morning, or the dreary start to a new day. I’m in a long, narrow room, in a long, narrow bed against a wall. The bed on the opposite wall is empty. So is my head.

There isn’t a voice rattling around in my mind that doesn’t belong to me— which, after all that’s happened, is a foreign and noticeable thing. Whatever they give me here at night knocks me out and steals the dreams away, also the voices. I’m wiped clean and returned to who I was before I ever spied Abby Sinclair on the side of the road.

Except for the bandage wrapped around my left arm.

I don’t want to unpeel the bandage to see what I did. I lie still on the bed and wait. My limbs are heavy, and I can’t seem to do much else. Surely, if I wait long enough, one of the girls will visit me.

Someone has to.

But no lost girl enters the room, and no lost girl finds her way through the quiet caverns of my head to lift her lips to my ear.

I need to get out of bed and go out there, see if someone can get my mom on the phone. She’ll believe me if I could only get a chance to talk to her. She’ll come right away and she’ll take me home.

On the ride back, we’ll laugh over this. We’ll be sure I’m far more careful in the future with mirrors and fingernail clippers. If I missed too much school, she’ll cover for me as she has before.

Maybe we’ll say I came down with the flu.

No one will ever have to know this even happened.

— 51 —

MY mom seems afraid to look at me and yet all she can do is look at me, so there’s the constant swish-swishing of her head as it turns toward me, then away, toward me, away. Not to mention her hands, which keep smoothing the hair from my face, or grabbing my fingers and squeezing, or rubbing circles upon circles on my back between my shoulder blades even though I’d rather she didn’t keep touching me right now.

She clears her throat. “They’re going to keep you here through the weekend, Lauren,” she says. “Then we’ll . . . we’ll decide more on Monday.”

When I speak it’s my voice that comes out, but it’s slower than normal, which makes me think my ears have gone bad.

The meds they keep giving me whisper through my system the way the voices used to, but in dumb, dull sounds I can’t translate. “Monday?” I say. “I think I have a big exam on Monday. I can’t stay through Monday.”

“I’ll bring your schoolbooks and whatever you need from home, if that’s really what you want. But are you sure? I don’t want you worrying about school after, after . . .”

She can’t say it.

“I didn’t try to kill myself, Mom. It was an accident. I told you.”

“Do you remember what you said?”

she asks tentatively. “About Fiona Burke?”

I sharpen. “No. What did I say about Fiona?”