17 & Gone(80)
Because I’m thinking how I know what’s going to happen. I couldn’t see Shyann’s true fate, not in the real world, but mine is another story.
The therapist will stop asking me questions about the lost girls, and I’ll stop bringing them up. It’s safer that way. Because even though the pills I swallow have taken the girls from me, it’s not like I’m alone. Not entirely.
There’s one girl who’s always here and always will be. Even through the Brillo Pad walls the meds create in my mind—through which I can sometimes only see her in the space of the tiniest, fuzziest pinhole—she’s here. She stays with me because she never felt at home in that house next door.
We’ll grow up together, though Fiona Burke will stay perpetually 17, with the red dye never inching out of her dark roots, the FU never fading from her frayed jeans. She’ll wear the scowl she always has; her mouth has grown into the shape of it, even though she’s softened on me and I can make her smile sometimes.
That’s something I can be sure of. I can see my life with Fiona cascading on into the distance, and I’m not so sure about my life with Jamie. We’re back together, but I don’t know how long he’ll end up staying.
Fiona will stay. She’ll be with me on my first day back to school next week, and she’ll keep me company during summer school so I don’t have to repeat the eleventh grade. Sometimes she’ll whisper the wrong answers to me during trig tests, but mostly she’ll sleep through class, as she did when she was a student.
If there were a way to sever the invisible ball-and-chain that connects her to me, and me to her, she’d be the first one there with the chain saw.
Fiona Burke will continue to be with me next year. Hers will be the first face I’ll see on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, before I even look in the mirror to confirm I can still see my own. She won’t make a big deal of it, even though my mom will bake up my favorite box-mix cake and bring out the balloons. But Fiona will be happy for me, to know I survived. I’ll catch her staring at me, not only with jealousy, because she knows she’ll always have a place at the table with me, even if my mom doesn’t see her in the third chair and doesn’t set out an extra piece of cake.
Fiona will join me at prom, meeting me in the bathroom when I go in to touch up my eyeliner, and she’ll try and fail to keep quiet when Jamie tries to slow dance with me after spilling the spiked punch all over his rented tux.
She’ll be in the back row during my graduation ceremony; when I cross the stage she’ll be one among many who will cheer my name.
We’ll spend years together, Fiona and I, like childhood friends who grow old side by side. Some might say that means I’ll spend my life being haunted. Or that I won’t ever be better because of her.
Either way, whatever the explanation, I know I’ll forever hear her voice thrumming through my head.
Still, I can’t blame her for staying with me. She doesn’t have a life of her own anymore; the only way she can live is to walk alongside mine.
There will come a day, decades from now, when I’m again in a bed much like this one. I might have cancer, I might be lucky and simply be dying of old age, I can’t know that part of my fate yet. What I do know is that I won’t be alone for it.
I’ll look across the room and there will be the 17-year-old girl I’ve known all my life. Not a wrinkle or a mark of age on her. She’ll want to jump on the bed. She’ll want to poke the home-care aide with her needle and eat all my Jell-O before I can get to it. She’ll simply be trying to lift my mood before I go.
Because Fiona Burke will never grow up and she won’t want me to, either.
This is what I don’t tell Jamie. He’s looking out the window right now, and he doesn’t even see her.
She heaves a sigh, stretches out her arms, and cracks her knuckles, then balances on the branch of the oak tree to climb inside the room. She eyes the two of us sitting on the bed together and stays perched on the windowsill, not willing to get any closer.
You’re not going to do it while I’m here watching, are you? Fiona says.
I feel my cheeks go hot and shake my head.
Can’t we go out somewhere and have some fun or something? God! I’m so bored. You were in that hospital so long, I thought I’d go INSANE, she says. She giggles a bit at the last word.
She enjoys using it around me.
“You sure you’re all right?” Jamie says. “Do you want to get out of here, go for a walk or something? Get a coffee?
Take a drive?”
“Maybe later,” I answer them both.
Fiona sighs again, loudly, letting me know her deep discontent, but Jamie leans forward and brushes my hair from my face, and by the way he’s sitting, his shoulders are blocking the view of Fiona at the windowsill. “Hey,” he says, “we don’t have to go anywhere. We can stay right here.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Let’s do that.”
The vanity mirror over my dresser reflects this scene back to me: Jamie with his arm over my shoulders and his other hand keeping ahold of my hand. A lock of curly hair drops forward into his face like he can’t ever stop it from doing. Beside him is a girl with choppy, dark hair with lighter roots growing in, and her eyes are wide open, and her cheeks are a little hollow, though there’ll be couscous for dinner later and she’ll eat two plates. She’s wearing black and gray, like she does most days, and the room she’s in is brightly lit by the sun streaming through the window. There are no shadows.