17 & Gone(64)

My mom looks stricken.

“Lauren, do you need something?” the doctor says. I don’t know her name, but she knows mine.

“Mom, I was going to ask . . .” I settle my eyes on my mom. Apparently she thinks my absent, supposedly homeless dad is a certified lunatic and she’s been keeping this little detail from me for my whole life. “My necklace. My gray one.

Could you bring that for me from home, too?”

She glances at the doctor. The doctor nods. So she turns back to me and she says sure, she’ll look for it at home and bring it with everything else tomorrow.

“Lauren, did you—” my mom starts to say, but the doctor there beside her is shaking her head. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lauren, honey,” my mom says instead.

I nod and make my way slowly back down the hallway to stare at the wall while sitting in an uncomfortable, antisocial vinyl chair.

— 52 —

A new day, but I haven’t been staring at the wall. I’ve been staring at the girl.

She hasn’t noticed because she notices nothing. She hasn’t moved since the nurse led her in and sat her down, not just not moving from this chair to another chair, but at all. Not even to fidget or scratch an itch. Not to blink her eyes or adjust the piece of fire-red hair that’s fallen in front of her nose.

Maybe she is sitting very, very still in the hopes that I notice her. There are other patients who are louder, and flail more, and in the midst of all that she stands out. Or there could be another reason. She must think we’re being watched here—she must know for sure if she’s keeping herself that still.

Her voice won’t reach me through the drugged confines of my head, so she’s come here in the flesh. It’s the only way.

“Fiona?” I prompt her.

She doesn’t stir.

I try her name again, louder. “Fiona. I see you, okay? I see you there.”

Her body betrays no movement. She’s catatonic, if you can be in that state with your eyes still open. There she sits, as if formed into the vinyl chair by a mold of wax.

I move chairs so I’m right beside her.

Then I reach out and shake her knee, but it’s like playing with the CPR dummy in health class. Deadweight.

“Can’t you talk?” I whisper. “It’s me.”

Her eyes are still open, and I wedge my face in front of them, so she has to look at me. Even then, the brown irises seem to cast straight through me, as if my body has lost all its skin and bones and bloody, bubbling organs so the blank wall behind me holds more space in this world than I do.

“Blink if you can hear me,” I say.

She blinks.

Then I get an idea.

“Write it down if you can’t talk,” I tell her. I pass her my gray notebook, which is the only thing besides the socks that made it through to me on the inside. The nurses’ station acts like the TSA at an airport. Everything must be checked, and since they have no scanners, that means by hand. They’ve only given me two things from the bags my mom brought me for now, and say they have to go through checking the toiletries and all the rest.

I place the open notebook on her knees. She doesn’t flinch. The lock of hair in front of her nose doesn’t shift, so I’m not positive she’s even breathing.

But she blinked. I did see that.

I take the pencil in my hand and place it into hers. The nurses wouldn’t let me have a pen, but they let me use one of their own dull-sharpened pencils. It barely writes, but I tighten her fingers around it so it doesn’t fall. I position the hand holding the pencil on the paper.

Then I step away and wait to see what she’ll do with it.

Which is nothing. The pencil drops and rolls across the floor.

The screams that come next aren’t from her mouth, or mine. A wailing can be made out down the hall, and it’s getting closer. When the new patient— some girl I don’t recognize—is walked through, struggling with two male nurses as she’s led past the common room, I cover my ears and watch her go. She flails and lets her hair fly. I uncover one ear for a second to see if she’s stopped and quickly plug it closed again; it sounds like she’s yodeling. That’s someone with problems.

When I look back to Fiona, I see she’s moved. She isn’t catatonic, as she wants everyone to believe; she’s lightning-quick and on alert. She’s the girl I remember from the house next door, who pitched her bags down the stairs and locked me in the closet. She’s the girl who always thought of running, one eye on the road. Even now, escape plans hatch in her mind, but I’m not sure they’re for her to follow—I think this time they’re meant for me.

Somehow she’s gotten herself to the wall behind the nurses’ station. She’s pulled the fire alarm. And she’s returned to her statue pose on the vinyl seat, her mouth slightly open now so a nice, telltale line of drool can emerge. Her eyes focus on nothing but the dust motes floating around her face in beautiful snowflake patterns, mimicking what’s coming down outside. All within an instant, before the nurses react to the alarm and come to line us up and check with the fire marshal to see if we need to evacuate. That’s how fast Fiona Burke moved.

— 53 —

I don’t run.

I can picture what Fiona wants from me: a daring escape while the hospital staff is distracted. She longs for the sight of me leaping over the half door that divides the patients from the so-called healthy people on the other side, making it out to the elevator, and riding it down to freedom. But she’s forgotten how slow I am.