17 & Gone(68)

“What did you do?” I shriek.

I have it now, in my hand, and it’s still a rock. No matter how many times I turn it over, rubbing it in my fingers, it doesn’t change back. It’s as gone as the girls are, as gone as I should be soon, if the shadows gathering by my feet under the table are any indication. Gone, and this dirty, lumpy rock is all that’s left.

“I didn’t do anything to it,” she says in a quiet voice. “You know that.”

I put my head down, which is why I don’t see the next thing she’s trying to show me. There’s the sound of shuffling papers and some movement on the table before me, and then she says, as if this is a portfolio showing at the end of art class and she wants to know my artistic influences regarding my still life of grapes: “Now tell me about these, Lauren.”

I won’t look.

“Your mother found them in your room, in your dresser, she told me, and under your bed. Your mother said there were a lot more than what we have here, but she brought in a few to show me.

Can you tell me about these posters, Lauren? These ‘Missing’ notices? It looks like you’ve printed yourself up quite a collection.”

On the top is Shyann Johnston, gone missing from Newark, New Jersey, at age 17. Beside her is Yoon-mi Hyun, gone

missing

from

Milford,

Pennsylvania, at age 17, but I don’t see Maura Morris’s flyer, which bothers me, because I always like to keep them together. And then poking out from beneath Shyann is a girl I haven’t found in the dream yet, and edging out from beneath Yoon-mi is a girl I looked for and didn’t ever see and there are so many, all age 17, and these aren’t even all of them.

I wonder what Fiona will have to say about this—or, more, what she’ll tell me to say in my own defense. She stands far across the room, beside the potted plant the doctor accused her of being, and the look on her face is something terrible.

I’ve seen that look only once before, years ago, when she wanted to get me away from that little man and did the only thing she could think when his back was turned, which was hide me, fast. In the moment before she shoved me in the coat closet, I remember how she looked this sickened, this afraid.

I turn back to the doctor. Fiona has given me no words, so I have nothing to say.

It doesn’t matter. The doctor has glanced at the clock. She gathers my girls off the table and holds them in her arms. This is enough, she says, for today.

We’ll talk some more next time. We’ll have time to go through all of this— we’ll have lots and lots of time to talk in the coming weeks.

“Weeks?” I say. “I thought I was getting out on Monday.”

She won’t confirm if I am or not, only that we’ll talk more soon. Then she tells me I can go now. I can go out with the others and line up now, because it’s time for lunch.

— 56 —

THE girl who I witnessed yodeling when she first arrived has the other bed in my room now, but she sleeps with her face to the wall, so all I have is a view of the back of her head and the lump of her body. She sleeps day and night, night and day, and there’s nothing that can wake her, not even when I bolt upright in the dark, shaken to consciousness by a bad feeling I can’t name.

This isn’t a dream—those have been taken from me. This is something else. I let my eyes adjust in the darkness and stare directly overhead, at the ceiling speckled with midnight static. It takes some moments before I start to be able to decipher them. The shadows.

The ceiling and walls are clean and unmarked where my roommate is sleeping—no shadows there. That’s because they’ve all gathered on my side of the room, staining the wall beside my bed and clawing upward to bloom in the darkest spot directly over my pillow, where my head is now resting.

“You have to get out of here,” a voice says.

It wasn’t one of the girls’ voices sidling through the slurred spaces of my mind. It wasn’t Fiona’s voice, her body appearing suddenly beside me in the bed, her mouth tilted to face my ear. It wasn’t even my neighbor, spouting out a random lucid sentence in her sleep. It was my own voice. I’d spoken those words aloud. To myself.

— 57 —

JAMIE has come to visit, and he’s driven my van. He tells me he’ll go drop it off at my house after. A friend will come pick him up, and he’ll leave the keys for me in my room.

I don’t know why he’s come all the way over here to tell me about his transportation arrangements, or why it’s so important to him that I know he got my van off Karl’s back lawn. He goes to the window of the common room to point out the van in the parking lot, and there it is, at the curb beside a low-hanging tree, black and menacing and mine, and if only I could be in it now, going anywhere, just driving.

Jamie’s back is to me, and I can study the set of his shoulders under that old peacoat he’s still got on. His thin legs in those big black boots. The curls of his hair sticking out under that knit cap. If this were the last time I ever got to see him, I’d be okay with it. This memory of him here at the window would be a decent one to hold on to.

Then he turns, and the memory I’m making of him shifts. The pain in his eyes is more emotion than I’ve felt myself in days. It’s like they carved all feeling out of me and handed the gore over to him, as my guest, to carry through the halls on my behalf until his visiting time is up and the dinner hour begins and they make him leave empty-handed.