Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
Burke’s arm reached out and smacked
the silvery butterfly knife from the new
girl’s hand. It went sailing and landed
with a
thunk
, spinning on the blackened
wooden floor far across the room where
no one could grab for it.
It doesn’t matter,
Fiona Burke said to
Trina Glatt, as if they were the only two
lost girls in the room.
You know it
doesn’t matter, don’t you?
It matters,
Trina growled.
Give it
back.
You can’t have that here,
Fiona
Burke said.
None of us can have any of
the things we had.
It happened as we heard her say those
words.
One of the girls, Eden, crept over with
curiosity to retrieve the butterfly knife—
though it wasn’t clear who she planned
to give it to, between Fiona and Trina,
or if she meant to keep it for herself—
but before her fingers got close enough,
Fiona Burke had her foot in the fray,
stomping down on the knife to keep it
from being rescued. Trina got in the mix,
lunging forward to kick away Fiona
Burke’s spindly leg. But when she did
so, there was no knife beneath Fiona’s
foot. There was the blackened floor, and
the dusted ash from the fire in relief
against the shape of Fiona’s foot. But no
knife.
Fiona Burke wanted to teach the girls
a lesson.
You couldn’t hold on to what you
loved—unless you were Yoon-mi or
Maura, who loved who they brought
here.
You couldn’t have a keepsake in this
burning house. All you could have were
the clothes on your back, and even those
were illusion because they were the last
things you remembered wearing. (When
she said this, I caught a flash of them, of
all of us, ghostly gray and naked in the
smoky night. Then it passed. It passed,
and I looked down and my dream-self
was still wearing pajamas.)
Fiona Burke continued with her
lesson. All the girls couldn’t help but
listen. She knew more than anyone, and
this was the first time she’d shared this
information.
It didn’t matter what you had before,
or who you were before, or what you
did in the moments leading up to being
here. If you fought or if you let go and
watched it happen. If you were the one
who turned down the dark road on your
own, or if someone led you there.
Because you could be pissed off, you
could stab everyone in sight with your
boyfriend’s stolen butterfly knife, and
yet you could still end up here.
You could come here quiet, and you
could come swinging punches. You
could come and sleep for a week. You
could come here and try to leave, but
you couldn’t make it back down the
stairs and out that door. You could come
here and wonder what happened. You
could come with questions. Or with that
night’s homework half done. You could
come here the day you turn 17, and you
could come here on any day before
you’re 17 no longer. You could come
here any one of those 365 days.
You just couldn’t come here after your
eighteenth birthday. Not one girl ever
has.
That’s what Fiona Burke told us.
Then she said one last thing. Being
here meant you couldn’t be out there
anymore. She counted us all on her
fingers and then settled her eyes on me.
Strangely. Being here meant you were
dead—or soon would be. Didn’t we—
you,
me
—get that yet?
—
47
—
TRINA’S
knife. I had it. Outside.
Here, now, in my hand.
Or a knife almost identical to it, one
with the silvery coating and the blade
that tucked to hide inside itself but that
could snap out quick when needed.
Because you never know when you
might need it.
The butterfly knife was there in the
bathroom medicine chest when I’d
opened it in the night. It was late, closing
in on morning, and the dream had woken
me up. I couldn’t get back to sleep and
was looking for nail clippers, which
was random enough, but in their place on
the bottom shelf was this knife. I’d
patted it at first, to be sure. Removed it
from the medicine chest and studied it in
my palm. Closed the cabinet and looked
into the mirror at myself and what I had
in my hand:
Yes, a knife. So much heavier than the
nail clippers. Larger. And with so much
more possibility.
I couldn’t deny that a pair of ordinary
nail clippers had somehow transformed
themselves into Trina Glatt’s most
treasured possession, the one she was
banned from keeping inside the house.
The one I’d last seen under Fiona
Burke’s foot.
The blade slid out and begged me to
extend a fingertip to touch it. Just to feel.
Only to see how sharp it really was.
And it
was
sharp.
But then the knife slipped and time
slowed and I could see what was about
to happen.
How my fingers would lose their
grasp on it. How the knife would flip in
the air, blade side aimed down. How my
arm would be in the way. How the
impossibly sharp blade of the knife
would land, perpendicular to my arm,
slicing my wrist, and how it wouldn’t
hurt at first, not until I saw the blood.
Then I was feeling so much. This rush
of pain, all at once, radiating out from
that one line below my wrist and
coursing through me, pulsing in places
the blade of the knife hadn’t even
touched.
It shouldn’t have been bleeding so
much—it was one little slice. I rinsed it
in cold water until it numbed some. I
lifted my arm over my head because I
heard somewhere that if you get a cut
that won’t stop bleeding you should hold
it high over your head. Gravity will pull
the blood down to your feet and if you
hold it up there long enough, it’ll slow
the bleeding.
But, this time, gravity didn’t make it
stop.
Blood came pooling down my arm,
dripping all over the white sink.
The mirror showed me a gruesome
image of myself, the way the girls might
have seen it, if they were there watching.
I must have been making noise, or else
my mom must have woken from her own
sleep and needed to visit our shared
bathroom at just the exact moment I
needed her. Which at first felt like some
far-off answer to some unspoken plea
buried inside me. And then it flipped and
felt like the exact opposite.
Because next thing, my mom was
bursting in and there I was, dropping my
arm and hiding it behind my back,
forgetting there was a pool of blood in
the sink.
Don’t let her think—
Fiona Burke’s
commanding, distinctive voice started to
say inside my left ear, but that was
drowned out by my mom’s shrieking.
Before she wrestled the arm out from
behind my back, and before the blood
started coursing out quicker than before
and running in thick rivulets to the tiled
bathroom floor, before her eyes alighted
on the knife and the mess of the sink and
then shifted fast to me, growing wide,
and wider still, I think I knew what she
was thinking. And so I knew just what
she’d say:
“Lauren! Honey, what— Oh my God,
baby. What did you do to yourself?”
It wasn’t possible to be a girl with a
bloody arm and a dirty knife in my
mom’s world without having done a sick
and twisted thing to myself. To her, this
scene she stumbled on starring me and
the butterfly knife in the upstairs
bathroom could mean only one thing.
She’d read all about this. She’d gone
over the case studies in her textbooks
and written papers about adolescent
depression and done all that research to
get an A on the last one, and she was
hunting for signs she must have missed.
I would have argued it. I would have
explained, even if I couldn’t tell her
about the missing girl this knife belonged
to.
But when I looked down into the sink,
I saw the blood-smeared nail clippers.
That’s the thing: They really were only
nail clippers. And then I saw the shards
all over the bathroom, on the sink and
the floor and the shelf and even the top
of the toilet and the bathtub. The sharp,
bloody pieces of glass that reminded me
of Natalie Montesano, who still wore
bits of broken windshield in her face.
Oh.
Oh no. The mirror. It had been
shattered. It was beginning to look like
I’d broken the mirror and sliced myself
up with it.
Did I?
One glance at my arm told me I did.
Realizing this, there was a growing
sense of heat building up the length of
my body from the floor. My skin went
feverish with it; my gaze went red. I was
all red, inside and outside and
everywhere.
My mom was in shock, and so she
didn’t stop me when I reached out and
did what I needed to do next. I pulled
open her nightshirt, bursting the buttons,
to expose her chest. I had to see the
secret tattoo, the new art she’d had
permanently etched onto her body
without telling me first. And I didn’t
know for sure what I expected to find
there: my own Missing poster, done up
in crimson Gothic lettering with my
measurements and my eye color for the
world to see? Or instead, a My Little
Pony, a shriek of hot pink like a stove
burn? A cartoon heart, the exact size and
shape of the true heart my mom carried
inside?
It wasn’t any of those things, my
mom’s new tattoo. That was what
startled me. It wasn’t a tattoo at all.
It was skin. Her bare skin. Blank as a
porcelain sink before all my blood
messed it up.
She pulled herself away from me,
closed her ripped shirt, and then came
for me again, arms out, wanting to hug
me, I think, or wanting to stop me from
doing much worse than I’d already done.
The heat in my head.
How it buzzed, centering in on my
brain like I was about to lose my own
signal.
An
infestation
of
wasps
expanding up the walls of my mind and
burrowing into all my corners where I
hadn’t lived enough years to keep any
thoughts yet. They dislodged pieces of
me. Like how one time I was stung by a
wasp in the backyard and my mom
cradled me in her arms like she was
doing now and pressed a package of
frozen peas to the sting, and the peas
really did make the pain ease away and
now whenever I eat frozen vegetables I
feel a sense of deep comfort, of love,
because it reminds me of her. But why
was I thinking of the frozen peas at that
moment? And how come there was so
much blood? And why couldn’t I feel my
—
So dizzy.
Needed to sit down.
When my mom started shaking me,
saying, “Stay awake, baby, stay awake,”
the lost girls chose to remain silent and
refused to come out.
They kept silent as the room went
black.
And I guess they keep silent now, too,
because of what came after. Because
they’re afraid. Because we all are.
—
48
—
WHAT
do you do with a girl who’s
slit her own wrist with the shards of a
mirror? Who’s done it vertical, like she
knew what she was doing, and had every
intention to die? What do you do with a
girl who hears voices whispering
secrets in her ears? Who believes she’s
chased by shadows? Who has an
unnatural, unexplainable connection to a
host of missing girls?
Ask my mother. I know what she’ll
say because I woke up with the blue