Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
and hid the pictures from me.
Our cat, Billie—for Billie Holiday—
leaped up on the back of the couch. Her
long gray hair made her appear even
larger than she actually was, and her
green eyes held on me warily. We’d had
her almost as long as Fiona Burke had
been missing.
“Yeah,” I told my mom. “I hadn’t
thought of her in a long time, either.”
She asked a simple question next. She
asked why.
This is how it’s been between me and
my mom since I was a kid: I’d tell her
anything. I’d tell her things before she
asked. I told her the first time I tried a
cigarette, at thirteen, and never again.
And as soon as Jamie and I were getting
close to taking it to the next level, I
confided in my mom and she made me an
appointment at Planned Parenthood.
That’s what happens when it’s only
you and your mom and no one else.
There’s a trust you share that no one can
get close to. My mom had a tattoo on her
left arm of two blackbirds in a knotted
tree; that was the piece she got for her
and me, after I was born. We were in
this tree, together, she liked to say.
Something breathed in the living room
with us, and I was the only one aware.
Was it Abby, whispering through the
hollow spaces in the walls? Was it the
rising voices of the other girls, who I
didn’t know were coming yet, so I didn’t
know to listen for them? Was it Fiona
Burke herself, haunting this property and
reminding me she could still have us
evicted from this house?
All I knew was something—someone?
—didn’t want me to tell my mom why
right now. I felt sure of that, almost as if
I could hear a voice breathing these
commands into my open ear:
Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her about
the dream.
I knew I shouldn’t tell her about
Abby’s Missing poster rescued from the
telephone pole, or about the summer
camp where she’d gone missing. Not
about Luke Castro, either, who I’d now
tracked down and would go visit. And
not about Abby’s grandparents’ address
in Orange Terrace, New Jersey, and
how I’d mapped my path there from our
front door. Not about the pendant I was
now wearing on a long string that hung
under two layers of shirts and felt warm,
oddly warm, against my bare skin.
I was not supposed to tell my mom
any of these things.
I spoke carefully, as if there were
someone keeping tabs on me from the
shadows, making sure.
“I don’t know why,” I said. “I . . . I
just thought of her. Like randomly. For
no reason. And I wondered if Mr. and
Mrs. Burke ever got any word about
what happened. Did they?”
My mom had gotten to her feet by this
point and stood there worrying the
tattoos at her wrists, winding her fingers
around and around them, as if she could
rub off the vines and start over with
fresh skin. This was a nervous habit she
had, when she was finding words for
something difficult.
She drifted to the window, the one
facing the hedge that separated our house
from the Burkes’ next door. The night
was glistening white and as silent as an
unsprung trap. Billie wove herself
through my mom’s legs and tried to look
up and out the window herself, though
she was far too short to reach and a little
too fat lately to go leaping.
Obviously I assumed my mom was
going to tell me that Fiona Burke was
dead. But she only confirmed what I
already knew: Fiona Burke had run
away, and no one had ever heard from
her again.
The Burkes’ house was dark, as if
they were away—and maybe they were,
like the night their daughter took off—
but my mom studied its windows as if
expecting a light in one of them.
“It’s so sad,” she said, turning back to
me. “I still don’t know what to say to
Mr. and Mrs. Burke, now, after all these
years.”
“Me either,” I said.
“I could have helped her,” my mom
kept on. “Fiona. I could’ve done
something. If I’d known.”
I could see how she took it in, what
happened to the girl who’d once lived
next door, knotting it up into her own
little ball of knots she carried around
inside, lifting it out every once in a
while to dwell. She was studying to be a
psychologist at the university where she
worked; it would take her years to get
the degree, as she could only take a
couple night classes a semester with her
tuition reimbursement while she worked
days in an office on campus, but I
believed she’d make it. I believed she’d
get to help people.
Still, I don’t think she could have
helped Fiona Burke.
“You two were close,” my mom said.
“We weren’t close. I hardly knew
her.”
“It wasn’t your fault, you know. Not
by any stretch of the imagination was
that your fault.”
She was thinking about the night Fiona
Burke left, and then I was thinking of it,
and then there it was, that almost-nine-
year-old memory, itchy and oily like
wool.
“I know it’s not my fault,” I said.
Fiona Burke had been babysitting me
the night she ran away, that’s fact. Her
parents didn’t come home that night, so
my mom was the one who found me
after, and she never once blamed me for
not stopping the girl from getting in that
truck, mainly because she didn’t know
about the truck.
Besides, I couldn’t have stopped
Fiona Burke, I told myself. She’d been
watching the road for a good long time.
Once on it, I don’t think there was
anything that could have turned her back
around.
So it was no one’s fault. There was
nothing I could have done.
This is when the idea came to me,
featherlight and drifting through the room
like tufts of Billie’s shedding fur. What
if that’s why all this was happening—
starting with my van breaking down on
the side of the road so I could find that
flyer—was it so I could do something
for someone else? For Abby?
My mom touched her cheek, absently,
as if she knew the exact spot where her
beauty mark could be found, the distinct
circle so black it was almost blue, on the
left side of her cheek, beside her lips.
She put her fingernail to it like it itched.
Her beauty mark wasn’t inked on in a
tattoo parlor; she was born with it.
That’s why it was my favorite piece on
her.
It was then that Billie hissed at no
one, as if someone had entered the room
who only she could see. And then, when
my mom turned her attention back to her
studies, I saw them, the twinned
shimmering outlines in my living room,
though it looked like they didn’t know
they were in my living room, that they
didn’t see me or us or even our furniture,
since they stood in the same space
already occupied by the couch.
My mom looked up because I was
staring. “What?” she said. “Still thinking
of Fiona?”
“No,” I said. My eyes weren’t on
Fiona; they were on the girl beside her.
I now knew for sure that Fiona was
connected to Abby and Abby to her,
somehow. They were reaching out from
wherever they were now, trying to let
me know.
They stood wavering like a two-
headed mirage in the space where the
couch was. Then, when my mom reached
out to turn on the reading lamp, like
shadows do when the light hits, they
disappeared.
—
14
—
THERE
was a witness. The officer
said someone saw Abby Sinclair ride
the bike off the campus of Lady-of-the-
Pines and into the night. He didn’t say
who the witness was. Of course he
didn’t; why would he tell me? But Abby
did.
It was another girl—a kid. She was
one of Abby’s campers in Cabin 3, and
happened to be the only soul who knew
that Abby would sneak off after lights-
out, and who she’d go to meet. This girl
carried around the secret about Abby
and Luke for weeks, first because she
got up to pee in the middle of the night
and caught Abby tiptoeing into the cabin
with a blazing smile on her face that
illuminated her teeth even in the
darkness. And then because Abby
wanted someone to confide in, and she
believed that this girl—with her frizzy
braids and her thick glasses, her lack of
friends and her innocent sense of
devotion—would never betray Abby to
the counselors.
And so, the girl ended up witnessing
more than the last bike ride. Nights
previous, she’d seen Abby slip back in
beneath the mosquito netting with her
eyes full of stars, her lipstick smeared,
and the grass stains riding up the back of
her shirt. The girl wasn’t there herself
when it happened, but she heard it
recounted later, how Abby and Luke
almost did it.
Almost
. This girl was
young enough to wonder, for hours on
end, in vivid-if-anatomically-impossible
detail, during games with balls she was
supposed to be in the outfield to catch,
just what “almost” could even mean.
It wasn’t so much a premonition but
simple curiosity that made her follow
Abby that night. The faint
slap-slap-slap
of Abby’s flip-flops were what had
woken her, as if Abby were being
careless and begging to be caught.
When the cabin’s front door swished
closed and the shadow of her favorite
counselor-in-training sneaked past the
window, she slipped out of her bed and
tiptoed outside. She felt the crunch of
leaves and pebbled dirt beneath her bare
feet and wished she’d thought to bring
shoes. Once she saw Abby make a run
for it past the mess hall, where the
counselors had gathered to be loud and
reckless now that the campers in their
charge were asleep, she knew she’d
have to run, too. And again she longed
for shoes.
Somehow she made it past the
counselors—in
there
laughing
and
popping bottles, not one of them glancing
out the windows to catch Abby or the
girl streaking past—and she caught up to
Abby by the bike shed near the edge of
the road. What did she expect Abby to
do once she saw she had company?
Welcome her with open arms? Let her
ride the handlebars of the borrowed
bicycle and join her on the hill past the
fence with Luke, lying between them and
making a game of searching out
constellations in the sky? Even better,
making it so Abby changed her mind and
didn’t go see Luke at all?
She didn’t exactly know. But she sure
hadn’t expected Abby to get so mad.
Abby snapped at her, called her a
nosy brat, and a few worse names
besides, and told her to get her butt back
to Cabin 3 before she got them both
kicked out. The girl happened to mention
that the bicycles in the bike shed were
for counselors only—she believed in
following rules—and since Abby was
only in training to be a counselor she
wasn’t allowed to ride them, and that
made Abby madder still.
The girl backed away, stung, and then
watched dejectedly as Abby pedaled off
on the old, rusted Schwinn bicycle
toward the main road.
That was how I pictured it.
I could put myself in place of either
girl: the witness, willing her not to go,
or Abby herself, the wind in her hair, the
blur of the road, those last moments of
gorgeous freedom.
—
15
—
WHEN
I pulled up in my van, Luke
Castro was in the garage, the sliding
door raised open so I could see him