17 & Gone(8)

He and I were different, too, but I don’t want to forget all the good things about him. Like how he’s fearless when it comes to braving heights, or breaking and entering; he once scaled the side of my house to reach an open window when I’d locked myself out, balancing on a flimsy gutter high up over the backyard, holding on by his fingertips.

There was the way he’d go ahead and do something with me, simply because I asked him to. He didn’t need to know why.

Like right then, in the snow. He was lifting the lock to take a look. A puff of his cold breath hung between us, as if reaching out to touch me, but I was just out of range. Just.

There I was, watching flurries fall and catch in his hair, those unruly curls of his poking out from under his hoodie, wishing I could tell him about Abby. But Jamie didn’t believe in things like ghosts. And how do you tell a sane, rational person that you’ve had an encounter with one? That you’ve connected somehow with a girl whose face you found on a poster? A girl who went missing right here? How she’s reaching out to you, you’re sure of it?

How she’s trying to communicate something, though you can’t quite make out the message?

I think bringing him with me was my way of telling him—but no matter what screamed out in the dark of my head while we stood there together at the gate, I guess he couldn’t hear if I didn’t open my mouth and let it out.

NO TRESPASSING signs hung on the chain link above us, glowing, practically nuclear, in the night. Snow dusted the shoulders of his green army peacoat, the one from the thrift store that was made for someone much bigger than him (but he wore it anyway, because I got it for him). He was silent for too long; I thought he’d given up and would say we should just go to the restaurant. Then his face lit up.

“So I can’t pick this lock,” he said, with a small smile. “But the chain? It’s busted.” With one hard tug, he got the chain open. The padlock fell into the snow.

Jamie was trying to meet my eyes, and I was trying not to let him. “So what is this place, anyway?” he asked.

“A summer camp, for girls,” I said as I shoved the gate open into a snowdrift.

“They close it up for winter, but I wanted to see.”

I didn’t give him the chance to ask why. I pulled him through to the grounds of Lady-of-the-Pines, abandoned for winter, though from the way it looked that night, expanding into the dark distance, it could have been abandoned years ago, before my mom and I moved to the area, before I was even born.

Jamie and I walked along what I guessed was the main path inside. He took my hand. I don’t know what he thought we were doing there—what my intentions were, seeing how cold it was.

It was starting then, my need for distance. I could feel this crawling sense in my skin whenever he touched me, the need to put some molecules of air between us. I could feel the cold sweat on his palm and something greasy, like he’d gotten goop on his hands when he was playing with the lock on the gate.

There was an ultra-awareness of him, prickling and uncomfortable. Something so much more important was crowding out all thoughts of him.

We passed a shed and a white structure with the words MAIN OFFICE

carved in over the wooden door frame.

We went slowly, my flashlight exploring anything of interest, no words between us. Paths split off into the trees, the levels of snow lower to give hints of where they started, but not where they led. The quiet, except for our boots swishing through the freshly fallen snow, grew more and more intense.

Jamie startled me when he spoke. “I thought you said this place was closed.”

He’d found a set of prints, or really a series of indents over which the day’s snow had fallen. A small, squat building made of cinder blocks was to our left, and to our right a fenced-in square with a sign noting it as the compost, though whatever had been in there, rotting into the soil months before, was now frozen solid and shrouded in white.

“Probably only an animal,” I said, and as soon as the words left my mouth, a rustling could be heard, fast and loose like someone breaking into a panicked run. Then we saw it wasn’t someone at all—it was some thing. A fat little creature trundled out from the darkened patch of woods, over a fallen branch, to the edge of the compost, watching us with two yellow eyes as if waiting for the right moment to pounce.

“Is that a—” I started. “Oh, please no.

That’s a skunk.”

“It’s a fox,” he said. “I think.” We backed away slowly, putting distance between us and it.

This might have been our only encounter of the night on that vacant campground if the wind hadn't shifted and let me know she was close.

“Do you smell that?” I asked. “Like something’s burning?” It drifted—the scent of fire—from an unknown source.

Faint and far-off, but familiar enough to remind me of the dream. Of her. Of how I felt sure they were tangled up together.

“No, I—” he started, but I didn’t give him the chance to say more, because I was moving faster now, searching now, the smoke-thick veil between my world and her world loosening enough to let me slip in.

At some point during this, I let go of Jamie’s hand.

— 6 — SHE’D been here.

Abby Sinclair walked this very path, I could sense it. She’d spent whole weeks of her summer in this place before she was gone. She’d raised the flag on this pole and counted out change for candy at that canteen.