Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
screaming.
Aren’t you going to go look for her?
Your mother. She knows.
You haven’t said hello to me yet.
Can’t you see me?
You’re a nasty ho. And you’re not
that cute, either.
You lie. You lie. You lie.
HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY
HERE!
You don’t have much longer.
You said you were going to look for
her. You’re not looking for her.
Hi. I’m saying hi. Hi. Do you see
me? Hi.
You don’t have much longer.
Hi.
My head hammered with the girls’
voices, more than I could have counted,
more than I even recognized, proving
there were lost girls I hadn’t gotten to
meet yet and that I hadn’t been imagining
them in the woods. I screwed my eyes
shut as if that could stop them and it did,
for a moment. Then it made it worse.
One story drowned out the next story and
capsized the story that followed and took
over where the last story left off.
New voices. A new girl named
Jannah wanted to tell me about a boy
named Carlos—how she was supposed
to meet him, and she never made it
before she got taken, and how he had the
most intense brown eyes. And another
new girl named Hailey did some things
she wasn’t proud of, and who am I to
judge? And a girl named Trina hated
every single person who laid eyes on her
—she hated every girl here; she
especially loathed me.
Hailey had run away before. She had
a chipped tooth from the first time, a
pierced belly button from the second
time, a prostitution record for the third
time, but this time, the fourth time she
went missing, she hadn’t run away at all.
Jannah loved Carlos and she ran away to
have a life with him—or she meant to,
before her family caught her and
punished her for what she did. Trina ran
off because no one was even looking.
She ran simply because she could. And
good fucking riddance.
Do you think he waited for me?
They think they know. They don’t
know. No one knows.
Going, going, gone. How you like me
now, huh? How you like me now?
Are you listening? Why aren’t you
listening?
Do you think he waited?
Can’t you hear me? Hi, hi.
She’s out, idiot.
Wake her up, wake her up. Someone
wake her up.
Then—in a gap between the noise—
she spoke. Louder than the others, closer
somehow, more urgent.
Help.
I knew that voice. That was Abby
Sinclair.
—
45
—
WHEN
I opened my eyes, I was
across the room, on the couch, with our
cat, Billie, before me on the coffee table.
The cat stared intently at a spot just
behind my head, and my mom hovered
over me, in crisis mode. She had my two
hands by the wrists and there was a sore
spot on the side of my skull from where
I’d been pounding it, I guess with a fist.
She was making a soothing sound in her
throat, and hearing it calmed something
in me. Calmed the noise and lessened the
panic. The girls responded, too, and
soon we were all still, listening to my
mom’s tuneless humming.
When she saw this, she let go of my
arms and took a seat beside me. “Tell
me,” she said simply. She said it with
the look she used to give me when I was
little, when I was the only person in her
world and she in mine. I focused on one
of her tattoos, the flock of soaring birds
on her neck. I counted them for comfort,
the way I used to when I was younger:
nine. Nine birds. Or was it ten? Ten. I’d
forgotten the tenth bird on the back of her
neck, hidden now behind her ear.
Ten birds, like always. Ten birds, as
I’d remembered.
This was all it took for me to begin
telling her.
“There’s this girl,” I started. “I found
her Missing poster and then I read more
about her online. She’s not from here,
but she went missing from somewhere
close by. They say she ran away, but she
didn’t. Something’s happened, she needs
help, I know she does. But no one’s
looking for her. No one cares.”
My mom kept all expression from her
face, but, twitching beneath her skin,
there was something. The birds fluttered
as the tendons in her neck tightened, and
I kept my eyes on them and kept talking.
I spilled everything about Abby,
except how I’d talked to her myself; I’d
seen her and I’d heard her and I’d been
close enough to her I could’ve reached
out and touched her, but I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say how I hadn’t touched her
because I’d assumed she was a ghost.
But I started to wonder if maybe there
was a way—when you’re in trouble,
when you’re caught somewhere and you
can’t get out—that you can reach out to
someone. Maybe it happens when you’re
sleeping, that you project a vision of
yourself to anyone who can see, and I
can see. I didn’t have the rational,
scientific explanation for seeing the
apparition of a lost but maybe-still-alive
girl in my van and in my bedroom, and
without it I didn’t know how to explain
that piece to my mom. So I skipped that
part.
But I gave her other pieces:
I admitted that I’d talked to the boy
Abby had been hanging out with. That I
went in to talk to the Pinecliff police, not
that they helped. And that I’d even been
to talk to a counselor from the camp and
to Abby’s grandparents, and that was the
real reason I drove down to New Jersey.
I had Abby’s bicycle, the one she left
behind, the one I was storing in the
garage. (I had her pendant, too, but this I
couldn’t say.)
When I stopped talking at last, my
mom had her eyes down, considering all
of what I’d told her. Billie didn’t blink.
Her bright gaze bored into me, as if
she’d been trying to decide how to
respond, too. She sat poised on the
coffee table, a slight tremor in her fuzzy
tail.
My mom chose her words carefully.
“You say you know?
How
do you
know?”
“I just . . . know.”
“How, Lauren? Explain.”
“I have a feeling.” The expression on
her face didn’t change, though the birds
on her neck jittered. “I had a dream.”
“You had a dream or you had a
feeling? Do you know something you’re
not telling me?”
“No.” Yes. “Both. I had a dream
and
a feeling. She’s not okay. Something
happened. I know.”
“Do you want to call the police again?
Do you want me to call for you?” She
believed me. My mom believed I was
telling the truth.
Relief washed over me, and I wanted
to lie back and let that be enough for
tonight, and I also wanted to keep
talking, now that I’d started, to tell her
more about the dreams. About the other
girls. About everything I knew that I
shouldn’t know, every memory that had
been shared with me.
Then I remembered something. She
made me think of it when she’d
suggested calling the police. “Maybe we
could ask for Officer Heaney this time.
That’s who I met when Jamie and I were
looking around that camp place. He was
there—he found us. He made us leave,
you know, for trespassing. But he
remembered Abby. He knew she’d gone
missing. He knew about the bike. We
should call him. I didn’t get to talk to
him at the station.”
“All right,” she said. She grabbed a
notebook and wrote it down:
Heaney.
Heeney? Heeny?
We weren’t sure how
to spell it.
I still couldn’t read her expression.
“First show me this girl,” she said.
“This Abby Sinclair.”
I found the folded flyer in my coat
pocket and smoothed it out to show her.
Abby’s face had faded away to a white
space as if she could be anyone, a fill-
in-the-blank face surrounded by a block
of dark hair. Showing her flyer felt like
exposing a page from my middle-school
diary; it was that gooey and personal and
important and tinged with shame.
“It’s hard to read,” my mom said. “Is
this online?”
Now she was acting like she might not
believe me, and a little trickle of doubt
hooked itself to the lobe of my ear,
hovering there, breathing, waiting to
hear what she’d say next. Did she think I
made this flyer on my computer for fun,
invented a missing girl’s name and
hometown and decided what clothes
she’d be last seen wearing?
“It’s just hard to read,” my mom said,
seeming to sense what I was thinking.
“It’s online,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
As we went into the kitchen, the girls’
voices in my ears stayed ominously
silent. No shadows skirted the walls.
They must have been angry with me. I
might be barred from the house if my
dream took me there again in the night—
but would they forgive me if I found
Abby? Would that be enough? Or was it
that I needed to save all of them,
retroactively, every last one?
On my mom’s laptop I brought up the
missing-persons page: proof Abby was
an actual girl and I didn’t make her up.
This was not imaginary; this girl really
was missing.
She read it carefully and clicked on
the photo to enlarge it and see her face
more clearly. Abigail Sinclair, 17, of
Orange Terrace, New Jersey. The
pendant was a gray shadow in the
hollow of her neck, and her eyes were
black pools full of secrets, not all of
which I knew yet.
I found my voice. “That’s her.”
“You dreamed about this girl,” my
mom said, as if she wanted to get the
facts straight.
Can a dream be happening when
you’re fully conscious of it? I wanted to
ask her. Because, if so, then I did dream
about this girl. All the time. And I
dreamed about the other girls; I dreamed
about them all the time, too. And these
were dreams when I was sleeping, and
these were dreams when I was awake.
This
could have been a dream, I
realized, sitting there at the kitchen table
before my mom’s laptop, the cat having
followed us in and still watching me
intently, pointing her fuzzed tail. The
dream could have been this night, this
room, this conversation, and the reality
could have been the broken house on the
cracked street under the dark smog, with
those girls. The reality could have been
that I was trapped inside that limbo with
the rest of them, and there was no true
sky above us, and there were no roads
leading to us, and the sidewalk ended,
and the house was about to burn down
with us in it. I could have already been
taken.
“What else?” she said. “Does this
girl . . . talk to you? In your . . .
dreams?”
The way she said it—condescending,
like she’d added invisible quotation
marks around choice words—I could
see her reciting it as instructed from one
of her textbooks. This was what a doctor
might ask a psychotic person.
“Let the
patient think you believe her. Don’t
affirm the delusions, but don’t let her
feel attacked.”
She was treating me like
I’d gone mental.
I met her eyes. “Yes,” I said.
At this, my gaze was pulled away
from her to the window over the kitchen
sink, the small one that looked in the
direction of the grand old Burke house
next door. The view was of the side of
the house near the laundry room, where
the fire had burned all those years ago. I
knew there was snow outside, and the
temperature hovered near freezing, but