Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
saliva and still hooked in her mouth.
Deena was a senior and—I remembered,
as if I were looking back on a life I’d
abandoned on the highway, gaining
distance and watching it shrink—at one
time, she was the closest thing I had to a
best friend.
I hadn’t been thinking much about
Deena lately because I didn’t need to.
She wasn’t one of them. Besides, she
was older than me. She’d turn eighteen
soon, and none of this would even touch
her.
She had no laminated hall pass in her
possession, as far as I could tell, and yet
she didn’t seem in any rush to get to a
particular class. I couldn’t recall the last
time I’d had an actual conversation with
her.
She must have been thinking the same
thing, because she began to carry on a
two-way conversation, doing both her
voice and mine. “How are you, Dee?
Awesome, thanks for asking. I’m so
sorry I forgot, isn’t it your birthday this
week? Oh, no worries, Lauren, I know
you love me. Things with Karl still on?
Oh, yeah, thanks for caring, I know you
never liked him. Hey, speaking of, heard
you dumped Jamie. What’s up with
that
?”
She stopped with the voices then and
raised an eyebrow, waiting for my
answer.
“I can’t talk about this now, Deena,
I’m sorry. There’s someone . . . There’s
somewhere I’ve got to be.”
“Jamie’s right,” she said. “You’ve
changed, and it’s more than just the
hair.”
The awkwardness between us wasn’t
entirely about her boyfriend, Karl,
though it would be nice to say it was.
Truth was, I’d done this. I’d pushed her
away. It was frighteningly easy to do that
with people. I couldn’t pinpoint when I
started pushing—but I guess it would
have been around the time I found
Abby’s flyer. My friendship with Deena
could have been halfway to Montana by
now and I wouldn’t know it.
“So are you coming to my party, or
what? At Karl’s house, remember? Or,
let me guess. You’re planning to bail.”
“I said I’d go,” I told her, though I’d
forgotten about all her plans for her
eighteenth birthday party, including
details about it being at Karl’s house and
if I was supposed to come help her set
up or anything.
I was going to ask, but then I caught
sight of her at the far-off door
glimmering in the distance. Not Deena;
Deena didn’t have anything to do with
this. It was Abby at the end of the black-
and-white-checkered hallway, Abby
holding the door open straight into the
sun. Or it was a vision of Abby. Ghosts
can’t hold open doors.
Did she know I’d gotten in touch with
someone from Lady-of-the-Pines? And
that I was headed down to see her now?
Is that why she’d come out?
Abby was wearing what she always
wore; I’d never seen her in anything
else: her Lady-of-the-Pines T-shirt with
COUNSELOR-IN-TRAINING above her heart
—it was pasted to her skin and dotted
with flecks of mud. The shorts with the
racing stripes. The leaves and twigs and
muck matted into her hair that, from this
distance,
seemed
woven
into
a
headdress, as if she were modeling some
new girl-run-over-by-a-car look in the
fashion pages of
Vogue
. I couldn’t see
her feet to make out if she had on the one
flip-flop.
“
What
are you looking at?” Deena
asked. “Mr. Floris is taking the rest of
the year off—I heard he had a stroke.
We’re good.”
My eyes left the open door where
Abby was waiting and went to Deena,
who was much closer. I’d really liked
her once. I’d liked being her friend. I
remembered this in an absent way, like
how a long time ago I used to enjoy
pooling sand into newly dug holes on the
playground when I was, like, five. Right
now, I needed to get rid of her.
“You’re cutting class, right?” I asked
her.
She lifted her chin, proud. “Spanish.”
I held up the hall pass. “Want this? In
case you get stopped?”
We both knew that, without a pass,
getting caught in the hallway during a
class period would get you detention.
Making a run for it once a hall monitor
spotted you would get you ISS, or in-
school suspension. I don’t know what
never coming back would get you. The
chance to never come back?
She shrugged, and I handed over the
pass. As our fingers touched on the
laminated plastic, there was a charge of
life running from her into me. Deena
would keep living to see this birthday
and the ones that came after. I didn’t
know what her life would be—maybe
that creepy Karl dude would make her
happy one day with baby Karls. Or
maybe they’d forgo the offspring and
take up a life of robbing liquor stores
instead. But whatever choices she made,
whatever mistakes, she’d live them.
She’d go on. It wasn’t in Deena
Douglas’s fate to disappear.
I drew back my hand and shook the
feeling out of it. From around the corner,
two approaching teachers could be
heard talking.
Deena perked up; she loved taunting
the teachers. She whispered, “You go.
Make a run for it. I’ll be loud, cause a
diversion. They won’t have any idea.”
She winked at me and then began
stomping off toward the teachers, rattling
lockers as she went. She turned the
corner and I couldn’t see her anymore,
but I could hear her. I could hear her
even when I reached the end of the
corridor, where there was no vision of
Abby waiting, but there was an exit door
propped open with a cinder block into
the dazzlingly white winter’s day.
The south parking lot, once I reached
it, was drenched in the kind of bright
light that always seems artificial.
Anyone looking out the school’s south
windows was sure to see me. I spotted
my trig teacher at the head of class as I
drove for the exit and, in a row in the
middle of the classroom, the back of
Jamie’s head. Ms. Torres had mapped
out a problem on the whiteboard, and at
the exact moment I drove past her
window, she looked up, straight at me,
and revealed the answer.
—
36
—
THE
girl who had been counselor to
Abby Sinclair’s counselor-in-training
was in the coffee shop between classes
as she said she would be—she just
didn’t know how long I’d driven to get
to her university’s campus, and that I
wasn’t actually “in the neighborhood”
that week as I’d said. In fact, I’d never
been down to that part of New Jersey
before in my life.
Cassidy Delrio—Cass, as she seemed
to want me to call her—was a college
sophomore and a sorority girl. She had
Greek letters emblazoned on every item
of clothing, even her socks. When
Abby’s name came up, her face
darkened.
At first, I thought, because she must
have felt it—the spiraling of Abby’s fate
down that road through the pines and
what it must mean for everything that
came after. Maybe she could see Abby
when I couldn’t anymore, and hadn’t
since that glance of her in the doorway at
school. Maybe I wasn’t the only person
alive who knew that something was
taking these girls and that Abby, out of
all of them, could be grabbed back
before she was made to stay there
forever.
But no. Cass’s face had darkened for
two reasons: The barista hadn’t made
her mocha with soy, as she’d asked
specifically. And because Abby had
made her look bad. No other counselor
in the history of Lady-of-the-Pines
Summer Camp for Girls had one of her
trainees flee in the night like that. And
Cass knew this because she was a
legacy. Three generations of Delrios had
traveled up to that patch of wilderness
and rowed those canoes. Not to mention,
she herself had been going to Lady-of-
the-Pines since she was nine. No way
would she get hired back next summer
because of what Abby did to her.
“Listen,” Cass said, “the thing about
Abby is really pretty simple.” She
leaned in, and I felt my breath catch. I
noticed how perfectly straight and
smooth her hair was and how vacant her
eyes were and I wondered what she’d
been holding in for all these months.
“Abby wanted to go home, so she went
home,” Cass said. “She hated camp, so
she left.”
She waited for me to respond to this.
“That’s what you think?” I asked.
(Though I believed she was right about
one part: Abby did despise the place—
the way it made her itch, no matter what
she sat on; the way it smelled, eternally
damp like a flood had just washed
through; and the way it was so far away
from anything interesting. That is, until
she met Luke.)
“What the hell was I supposed to do?”
Cass said. “Run after her, beg her to
stay? Say pretty please?”
“But you know she didn’t go
home . . .” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, I know that
now
. But I
didn’t know that
then
.”
She was sipping on her mocha even
though it had cow’s milk in it; I watched
as the brown-tinged foam gathered at the
corners of her painted lips and I almost
motioned for her to get a napkin and dab
it off—then I didn’t. I had plain coffee
with plain sugar and plain milk, and I
took a chug of that.
“What? I’m wrong?” she said.
“I don’t think she ran away,” I said.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“So she really hasn’t called you or e-
mailed or texted or anything? Not any of
her friends?”
I shook my head—I’d counted myself
among Abby’s friends, and Cass hadn’t
yet questioned it.
“I guess that
is
weird,” she conceded.
“Abby was always going on and on
about all her friends.”
I wanted to ask their names—so I
could track them down, too—but then
she started shaking her head, and I felt
the shift coming. I felt the turn before she
even went there herself.
“But?” I said, helping her along.
“But yeah,” she said. “I mean, she
didn’t take her bags.”
“See? She left all her stuff, right?
Wouldn’t she have taken her things if she
ran away?”
She nodded, then shrugged. “Not if
she got the chance to go, like, out of the
blue or something. A ride. That’s what
we figured. I mean, it’s not like she
didn’t have
anything
with her. She had
her wallet—this hideous plastic purple
thing she kept stuffed with pictures and
random crap. That thing was so big, she
needed, like, a whole purse to carry it.
So if she had her wallet, she probably
had her purse, too. Why come back and
get the rest of her junk if she had all
that?”
“I don’t know . . .” I said.
It was here that her eyes began to
glow with something sick and warm
coming up to the surface. She’d kept it
down all this time and now I guess my
questions about Abby worked to put it
into words in a way she wasn’t able to
before.
“Do you think he killed her?” she said
suddenly, and it was so much worse than
I thought.
She was nineteen or twenty by now;
she’d stick around. Right then I hated her
for that, and more still for what she said.
For not caring. For not noticing. For not
doing a thing.
No wonder Abby had reached out to
me.
“He, who?” I said from between my
teeth.
“He, whoever. Whatever freak of
nature found her in the woods and