Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
demanded.
“I’m not going to,” I assured her.
“You’ll stay here until your mom gets
back. And you won’t call anyone, and
you won’t do anything. What’s she doing
out so late anyways?”
“She’s out dancing.”
She scoffed. There was something in
her tone that made me feel very small,
smaller than I even was with her
towering over me. “Oh, I know what
she’s doing. I think I know where she
works. Your mom’s not out
dancing
.”
“She said . . .”
“You know what your mom’s doing
right now? She’s grinding her tits into
some perv’s face.”
I remember how strange a picture that
made for me, with actions and objects I
couldn’t fathom at that age. And I would
think back on this later, when my mom
would tell me about her job at the club,
and then when she quit that job and got
an office job and went back to school,
and I’d wish I had said something to
defend her. But I’d never been able to
stand up to Fiona Burke, not for all the
time I’d known her, and especially not
that night.
Besides, that was when the truck
pulled up. First one man came banging
into the house, and then there were two.
Two men, and Fiona Burke had been
expecting only one. The first was tall,
and bigger than the width of two Fiona
Burkes put together, and the other was
quite short. I came up about to his
mustache. This second surprise man, the
short one, was the one who scared
Fiona.
I was surprised, too. What surprised
me was how much older they were. I
knew Fiona Burke was 17, and I
couldn’t estimate the ages of adults—
they all just seemed old to me—but these
two men weren’t in high school, I was
sure of it. They were far older than that.
When she started carrying her bags
out to the truck I realized the men were
taking Fiona Burke away—she was
voluntarily, assuredly going with them—
but they were also taking more than just
her. The little man was unhooking some
paintings from the wall. And the big man
was dismantling the stereo system.
With them occupied, Fiona returned to
my corner.
“If my mom asks why, tell her I hate
her,” she hissed. “Tell her I hate her
stupid guts, her and Dad both. Tell her
I’m getting a ride to LA and I’ve got a
job waiting for me and how’s she like
that? Tell her I’m never coming back,
not ever.”
I assured her I’d pass all this on to
Mrs. Burke.
But Fiona Burke wasn’t done. She’d
been holding a lot inside, all those years
since the Burkes had made her theirs.
She wanted me to tell her adopted
parents that they should have left her
where she came from, and why’d they
ever think she wanted to live in their
stuffy old house with boring old
strangers? And I think she would have
kept on going if I hadn’t stopped her.
“But
why
?” I asked.
I was the kind of kid who used to ask
that a lot, to any small thing and any
large thing, unwilling to leave anything
unanswered. Maybe not much has
changed since then.
Fiona Burke shook her head and
rolled her eyes. “You’ll understand
when you’re my age,” was all she said.
So dismissive, like I’d never get it; I
was just a kid.
I didn’t understand then—but I do
now.
The little man approached. He’d taken
everything he’d wanted from the house
and entered the dining room with hands
out and empty. Even so, Fiona Burke
flinched at the sight of him, as if she
knew what he was capable of doing with
his bare hands.
He wasn’t saying anything. He was
only looking. He was looking at me.
“What?” Fiona Burke said. She didn’t
stand in front of me or block me with her
body or anything, but she leaned ever so
slightly in my direction to let her shadow
cover me.
“How old is she?” the little man said
to her, as if I didn’t understand the
language.
“Nine,”
I
answered.
A
slight
exaggeration. Fiona Burke probably had
no idea how old I was anyway.
“She’s not going to tell on us,” she
was saying. “She won’t call anyone or
anything. I made her promise.”
“She knows my face,” the little man
said. “She’s looking at me right now.”
“No, she’s not,” Fiona Burke said—
though I was. I’d turned from the crook
in the wall and was peeking up at him.
His mustache made his upper lip appear
to be rotting and his eyes were smaller
than natural in his already small head.
While I was looking at him, he was
looking at me.
“Maybe she should come along,” the
little man said then in an odd voice, like
there were unspoken things below the
surface, murky and confusing things he
couldn’t wait to let out. His voice was
betraying him.
“But what would we do with her?”
Fiona Burke joked.
“Don’t worry,” he said in that voice
again. “I could think up a few things.”
She
caught
something
in
his
expression and made a strange squeaking
sound in her throat. A sound you’d emit
only when alone, behind closed doors,
where no one else could hear it. I heard
it. So did he.
The little man laughed in response.
“She stays here,” Fiona Burke said.
I didn’t know then that she was
speaking up for me. Protecting me. I
didn’t know a lot of things I know now.
The big man had returned, and there
was a new sense of urgency, someone
who’d called, somewhere they had to
be. The little man became distracted by
all of this and it was when his back was
turned that Fiona Burke did what she
did. She had me by the elbow, and then
when I was too slow, she had both my
arms and was dragging me out of the
dining room and down the hall. She
hissed into my ear to stay quiet and then
she shoved me into a hall closet.
It was dark and thick with the heady
scent of what I’d later discover was
wool. The wool was from her parents’
coats, decades’ worth of coats, and there
were pointy objects that were the bony
prongs of her parents’ umbrellas.
She’d jammed the lock from the
outside, or she’d known that the knob
would stick. I don’t know. Either way,
she’d locked me in.
I couldn’t hear much of what
happened outside the wall of coats that
confined me in that dark, small space.
When they were near the front door,
mere steps from the coat closet, I could
hear the little man’s voice—it boomed
bigger than you’d expect from his body
—slithering under the door and through
the layers of wool, causing a cool line of
sweat to trickle anxiously beneath my
pajama shirt and down my spine.
I would not scream to be let out of the
closet, and I was afraid to try the knob
again to see if it would turn. I wouldn’t
make a sound with him so close. Fiona
Burke would come back for me when he
wasn’t looking and undo the lock to set
me free. She’d do that before she went
away in that truck with them. She would.
The little man was asking for me.
“Where’d she go?” he was saying. “I
didn’t scare her away, did I? Call for
her. Tell her I won’t hurt her. Tell her to
come back.”
Fiona Burke refused. She must have
been standing very close to the closet,
but she didn’t open it. We were there
together, one thin slab of wood between
us, like our hands were touching, palm to
palm. I didn’t understand then what he
could have wanted from me. All I knew
is she was determined not to let him find
me.
“She ran,” I heard her say through the
door. “Out into the backyard, stupid kid.
She’ll come back when she gets cold—
she’s only got those pajamas on. Let’s
just go?”
“Oh, yeah? She’s back there?” the
little man said, and he must have made a
move in the direction of the backyard
because his voice got lower with
distance. But then the big man spoke—he
said very few words, but when he spoke
everyone listened—and he was saying
they had to leave.
I kept quiet. My mind was flashing on
Fiona Burke’s eyes, how wild they’d
looked beneath the wings of shellacked
black mascara as she hurried me out of
the dining room. She’d been frightened
of what could happen to me, and that’s
what frightened me.
At some point they left, drove away.
At some point Fiona Burke said good-
bye to the house where she was raised,
turned her back on all of us, and took off.
She didn’t leave a note. In a way, I
guess I was the note.
Only, she’d stuffed me in the coat
closet, and I was too short to reach the
string that would turn the light on—and it
was too dark for me to even see if there
was a string.
I don’t know if I could have saved her
if I’d opened my mouth and told
someone—her parents, the police, my
mom, anyone—about the men she went
with.
But—looking back on it now—I am
sure of one thing. She’d saved me.
—
19
—
SPENDING
the entirety of a night
in a small, dark space ruins all
understanding of time. A minute expands
into an hour’s worth of seconds. Air
rebreathed is made of less and less air
until you feel like you’re choking on
your own spit. The panic sets in and you
think you’ll never get out, that no one can
hear because no one is there, that the hot,
scratchy, heavy walls all around you
will keep you forever, and when you
hear someone yelling your name you
don’t know who it is at first. You don’t
recognize your own mother’s voice; you
can’t imagine that you’re safe now, that
you’ll be let out now, that there aren’t
two strange men and a cruel flame-
haired girl crouching on the other side of
that door waiting to take you away.
—
20
—
I
don’t know how many hours it was
before the shock of light hit me and I
could breathe air. I must have made a
noise inside the coat closet because,
soon, someone was pounding and I was
pounding back and she was pulling and I
was pushing and the door got unstuck
and the light was in my face and she was
there.
My mom enveloped me in her arms,
frantic. The colorful pattern of prancing,
dancing My Little Ponies had sweated
onto my skin, and I’d been desperate
enough to have to empty my bladder
hours before, so I was sticky all over,
smelling of sheep and urine, nearly
blinded at the shock of light.
I chugged a glass of water, choking up
most of it, and then when I found my
voice I told my mom that Fiona Burke
was the one who’d done this to me.
“Where is she?” she asked, seething.
Her hands left me for a moment to ball
into fists.
“Gone,” I said. That’s the only word I
could think to call what had happened to
my 17-year-old neighbor: She was
gone
.
“What do you mean,
gone
?” my mom
said. She sparkled in a flurry of rage. I
didn’t realize at first that she still had on
her work clothes, the kind of outfit she
wore when she danced at the club, and
that those sequins weren’t the scaly,
iridescent texture of her skin.
“Gone,”
I
repeated,
without
embellishment. I meant
gone from the
house
,
gone off somewhere with two
creepy men I don’t know,
but I think,
from the way my mom ran around
searching, she suspected that Fiona