17 & Gone(71)

I follow her along a path and up a hill, made more difficult by the container of kerosene we discover and liberate from under a tarp near the firewood. She makes me carry the kerosene to the circle of stones, so we can build ourselves a fire. It’s what will bring them out the quickest, she says. A fire, she says, to smoke out Abby and the rest of the girls.

A fire, like she was pointing to in the hospital. Fiona Burke has always wanted a fire.

I’m following her and doing what she tells me to do—just like that night when I was a kid. But also, I know she’s right.

I’ve seen the girls in reflective surfaces: mirrors and windows, and once in the exceptionally clean surface of a fork from the dishwasher. And I’ve seen the girls in small spaces, where they emerge only if no one’s looking, and in the trees, where the shadows make good places to hide. But I don’t know how being out in the open, with the pine forest all around and no roof above, will let them know it’s safe to emerge. The only other way is the flicker of flame, the mask and smell of smoke. That’s why we have to do it, Fiona says.

Once we do, they’ll be lured out, and so will their stories. I think of them like apples bobbing to the surface of water, though these are real girls, and real girls’ heads. Soon, families and friends will have closure. Mysteries will be untied and left out in the sun for the finding. I’ll mourn every last one of them, hoping against hope I’m wrong.

And Abby Sinclair, the girl my thoughts keep returning to. The one girl whose end I can’t see. Her story starts here, on this closed-off tract of land in the pines. She’ll have to step out of the woods once the fire starts. How could she ignore us now?

When the fire catches the kindling and begins to burn, I warm my hands over the growing flames. I don’t let myself think about Jamie, who I ditched at the hospital. Or my mom, who’s surely gotten a phone call that I’m not there and is in a panic trying to figure out where I could be. I mean, I think about them, but only for a moment. Fiona stops me. She wants me to see . . .

At this high point, looking over the campground, all the dark, empty cabins can be viewed. The mess hall, the arts-and-crafts cabin, the chapel, the empty flagpole flapping its loose string in the billowing wind. Abby Sinclair spent her last days here, and now—side-eying Fiona, who drifts fire-bright at the edge of the stones—I wonder if this is where I’m about to spend mine.

The fresh night air clears my head. It’s cold, but it’s cleansing, and I can think again the way I used to.

I stand up. I pat my pockets, feeling for a cell phone, and remember I had no cell phone at the hospital, so I have no cell phone here. For a second, I’m on a frozen, windy hill in a vacant, forgotten place on a late January night and I don’t know why.

Then I see what Fiona has been trying to show me.

The snow has disappeared to make way for the sidewalk. The cracks are the same, and I avoid stepping on them, and the black iron gate swings open with a shriek and a creak, the way it always does. The stairs don’t crumble under my weight the way I sometimes suspect they might as I approach the door, and the door pushes open, because it’s never kept locked, not for any of us, not for me.

Inside the house is a wall of heat, from the fire. It climbs high to eat a gaping hole out of the ceiling. I duck when the chandelier drops and falls. I’m so deep in it, the heat should blister my skin and catch and blaze up my clothes, but I can’t feel a thing. It doesn’t touch me.

That’s when they start to come out, one girl from behind the banister, and one girl from another room. One from within the folded curtains, and one from the floor, since there’s no furniture to sit on. They come from upstairs, where their rooms are, and they gather here with me.

There’s a flicker, and I lose sight of the house and can see only the quiet campground again. The fire burns from a pit of ash and sticks and branches at my feet.

But then the night flickers back to what it was, to what Fiona knew would happen. They’ve been smoked out, as she said they would be. Smoke clears to show that the girls are here. The girls I haven’t seen since getting sent away.

Now they surround me.

Natalie Montesano, who thought for sure her friends would come back for her, who never thought they’d leave her behind in the crushed car on the sleek, steep road after the accident, but when they did, she took off and she didn’t look back. Even when she wanted to.

Shyann Johnston, who sometimes fantasizes she could glide through the school hallways again, but this time with a sawed-off shotgun tucked under her arm, because they’d see it and they’d shut their mouths. And when the hallways emptied, she’d put the gun down on the floor because it’s not like she’d ever use it and she’d get a drink from the water fountain, which she’s never been able to do before without getting shoved in, and she’d smile.

Isabeth Valdes, who thinks she wouldn’t have gotten in the strange car if she hadn’t been carrying all those books in the rain, and she wouldn’t have been carrying all those books if she didn’t have three tests on Monday, so if she didn’t have three tests on Monday she might still be here.

Madison Waller, who bought herself three fashion magazines for the bus ride into the city, who’s practicing her face for the camera even now, even though nobody who’s anybody can see her.

Eden DeMarco, who only wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, who only wanted to touch it with her toes, that’s all.