17 & Gone(69)

He takes a seat in a vinyl chair beside me and turns it so we face each other.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he starts. “That night. When I drove you home.”

It’s kind of him, only I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. Bits and pieces like that have been smudged away.

“So that really was what you were seeing?” he goes on. “That girl?” And that’s how I remember I told him about Abby Sinclair.

I have the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t say her name here, so I put my hand on his arm to stop him, the first touch we’ve had between us since he arrived. Unfortunately I’ve used my left arm, and some of the bandage peeks out from the edge of my sleeve. He sees it and freezes. I pull my arm away and put it back where it was.

Jamie and I aren’t together anymore, and I’m not sure if we’re friends, but we’re something. He wouldn’t be here if we were nothing. He starts talking about some random thing and while talking he fidgets—I think the other patients in the common

room

are

making

him

uncomfortable—and it’s while his mouth moves that time slows around him and he doesn’t seem to notice. I’m slow enough to see through it, and what I can see is Fiona standing up from the chair she’s been parked in all afternoon and walking with purpose over to us. She’s behind Jamie’s chair now. Now she’s reaching out her arm and slugging a hand into Jamie’s open coat pocket.

So slow, and also fast. Too fast. In no time, Fiona has picked Jamie’s pocket and rescued my van keys.

I don’t want her to bother me with this now. She’s easier to deal with when she stays catatonic in the vinyl chair in the corner, barely blinking. Yet now she’s dancing behind Jamie’s back, making a game of it, and when he whips around to see what’s got my attention she rises to her toes and throws them.

She doesn’t know me so well. If she did, she’d know I can’t catch any objects pitched straight at me, which is why I always do so dismally in the forced ball games during gym. But what she’s done has surprised me, and in the shock of realizing she’s tossed my keys over Jamie’s head, I have this vision of my good arm shooting out on instinct and my good hand opening. I can see it like it’s already been done and happened: the keys landing there, perfectly timed and well-aimed. It makes as much sense as if I’d simply reached out myself and plucked the keys from Jamie’s gaping pocket when he wasn’t looking.

I can’t fault her. When Fiona sees an opportunity, she takes it. Maybe that’s why she ran off with those two guys all those years ago. It wasn’t either of them she wanted to be with—it was that they had a truck, they had the means to get her out of there, and so she gambled on it, in case she never had another chance again.

I don’t mean to get Jamie in trouble, or leave him stranded, but if this is my only time to go free, shouldn’t I take it?

Shouldn’t I catch the keys in my open hand and wait for a moment when no one’s looking and find my way to the back stairs I remember taking in the fire drill? Shouldn’t I follow her lead and go?

— 58 —

I’M 17 now, I have been since last month, and I think it must have changed me like it changed Fiona all those years ago. It’s made me shrink away from the people in this world who care about me, and obsess over people I’ve never met in real life.

It’s put me in danger, the way it did her. But it’s also opened my mind, and my ears, and I don’t think there’s a way to close either now, after this. I’ve been changed down through to my bones.

Fiona likes me better this way, I can tell. We’re the same age now, but, still, she wants to protect me. She won’t say so aloud; she doesn’t have to. It’s clear from how she refuses to leave my side. I know she doesn’t want the shadow-fingers in my hair, playing with the jagged wisps at the back of my neck, tugging a little, trying to get a good grip.

She doesn’t want the shadow-hands tightening in a stranglehold around my throat. She’s broken me out of the psych ward to help me, she says, to keep me from getting stuck in that house and ending up lost the way the rest of them did, the way she did, she reminds me.

And I did want out. It’s the only way I can help the others. And Abby. Abby especially. Fiona keeps assuring me it’s not too late.

The plan forms as we drive. Its pieces click together almost too easily, as if in her quiet stupor in the corner of the common room she was devising this outing all along. There’s something we need to do; and tonight is the night we must do it.

There are certain things we agree on, philosophically: To save myself, we have to save the others. You can’t have one and not both.

To save Abby, we must pinpoint her location first. Fiona assures me we’re gaining on her; we’re close.

We agree that the lost girls can’t be left in that house. Whatever kind of limbo it may be—made of charred wood and tattered curtains, burned things and ash—it’s still a place that’s not here and not there. It’s the in-between, and whoever’s shown her face there is stuck in the smoke where no one can find her.

Where no one can know her end.

Isn’t it better for people to know?

Fiona says. And I think of her, wrapped in mystery, how her parents still don’t have a clue what became of her. And I think of Abby Sinclair, her fate unspoken, and I think of the others, their gaping stories without any definable finish. It’s better to know, I decide, than to never.