Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
silky-smooth, gray gemstone as a round
bubble of glass translucent enough to
show its gray insides.
Gray like swirling smoke.
If I moved the circular pendant—
which wasn’t a real circle but a
lopsided, handmade attempt at a circle
—I could see the insides shifting, like
I’d woken a dormant volcano. Other than
this otherworldly aspect to the pendant,
the smoke that moved as the stone
moved, it was a plain piece of jewelry
mounted crookedly on a backing of thick
silver. The broken chain was crusted
with dirt and green with rot, and wasn’t
even that nice of a chain to begin with.
The pendant wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t
beautiful. But it meant something.
It belonged to Abby.
—
10
—
MY
mom caught me with one of
Abby’s flyers. It was the one I’d found
in the Shop & Save where I worked after
school. In the days leading up to visiting
the camp, I’d discovered more of them,
more and more, everywhere I checked in
town.
This particular copy had been within
my reach for months. It had been pinned
up in the break room on the board
between the two vending machines, the
machine with the petrified ice-cream
sandwich stuck in its craw and the
machine that dispensed the same kind of
soda, over and over, out of every hole.
I’d seen only the top of the flyer on the
bulletin board, only part of the headline
that read: ISSING. But the rest quickly
filled itself in for me, even though
corners of other pages were blocking
most of her face. I went to dig it out from
beneath the layers of announcements for
unwanted kittens and needed roommates,
staff notices saying who can park in
what section of the parking lot, and the
store’s holiday hours. There, beneath all
that and pierced with hundreds of old
pushpin holes so the page seemed to
flicker with starlight, was a Missing
notice for Abby Sinclair.
She’d been here waiting for me to find
her all along.
My mom got home from class late that
night, after I’d visited Lady-of-the-Pines.
I was in our living room, curled up in
front of the TV, waiting for her to come
in so I could heat up a frozen pizza.
Jamie hadn’t called or e-mailed or left
me a message, and my mom found me in
an immobile ball.
“Hey,” she said, pausing in the
doorway. She dropped her schoolbooks
on the side table and shrugged off her
coat, then asked how my night out with
Jamie went.
I shrugged. It went fine, I told her, and
by the expression on her face I could tell
she knew it didn’t and she also knew I
had no desire to talk about it. She
digested all of this and restrained herself
from asking more.
“How was class?” I asked.
“Good,” she said.
In the moving light from the television
screen, I watched the dance of her
tattoos—for all my life, she’s been
covered with them. There are the vines
that wrap around her arms and grasp her
shoulders; there’s the pinup girl on her
back, the tendrils of the painted girl’s
yellow hair peeking out from beneath my
mom’s real hair, which she kept a
brilliant bottle burgundy; and the flock of
birds soaring up her neck and into the
sky beyond her ear. All of these tattoos
were as much a part of my mom as her
two blue eyes.
But as I was looking at her, she was
also looking at me, noticing the furious
motion of my hands. “What’s that you’re
holding?” she asked.
I realized I was still fingering the
flyer, running over every rip and prick of
a pin and gouge in the paper, acting like
I was trying to memorize Abby’s story in
Braille.
“Oh this?” I said. When I heard
myself, it sounded so artificial. “It’s
nothing.”
I knew it wasn’t nothing, but I also
didn’t yet know how, in a way, it was
everything. Abby might have been the
first, but she wouldn’t be the last. All the
girls are 17, the same age I’d turned that
month. Soon I’d have flyers like this for
so many of them. I’d be able to recite
their names, their identifying details
(birthmarks and hairstyles, fluctuations
in weight and height), their hometowns
and
possible
destinations,
and
sometimes the outfits they were last seen
wearing (sneaker brands and jacket
colors, specifics like the silver heart
necklace, the turquoise hat with the pom-
pom, the zebra-print belt). I’d know and
understand their vanishings, but I
wouldn’t have the end to their stories, I
wouldn’t have the why.
“Can’t I see?” my mom said, reaching
out as if I’d actually let go. And that’s
when I crushed it—Abby’s Missing flyer
—crushed it fast into a hot, damp knot in
the palm of my hand.
She pulled back her hand as if I’d
bitten her. “Never mind,” she said. “You
don’t have to show me. So I was
thinking of heating up a frozen pizza.
You want?”
I nodded, and watched her drift off to
the kitchen. I want to say I offered to
help, but I stayed put where I was. I kept
the balled-up flyer safe, wedged in
under my body, and I didn’t fight it when
my eyes began to close.
It was almost like I wanted to have the
dream, like I was calling it closer.
Before I knew it, I was on the sidewalk
outside the brick building, and I was
climbing the cracked and crumbling
stairs, and I was at the door trying to
decide if I should ring the bell or just let
myself in.
Oh wait, I was in already. I was
coughing and coughing and batting at the
smoke to get it away from my face.
When the air settled—when my eyes and
lungs got used to it, or when I realized I
was lucid enough to communicate to
myself that I was dreaming and this
wasn’t actual smoke—a sense of calm
came over me. I let myself see where I
was.
The house had shifted its arrangement
of rooms, with some doorways I didn’t
remember, and some rooms in places
there hadn’t previously been rooms. Up
above, the ceiling creaked with the
weight
of
movement.
A
rotting
chandelier, covered in moss and
spiderwebs, misted with smoke, shook
as if a person were stomping heavily
right over it.
“Is someone up there?” I called.
“Abby?”
That’s when I caught the drapes
moving at the far end of the giant room.
Someone was hiding near the windows,
like last time. The same figure, the same
girl.
I could see her more clearly now.
The long curtains were in tatters, so it
wasn’t entirely possible for her to fully
conceal herself behind them. Holes in
the mealy fabric showed pieces of her
body—she was still wearing the too-
tight jeans she’d been wearing on the
night I last saw her; the jeans that said
FU
on the thigh (upside down, because
she’d scrawled it without thinking of
how other people would read it, or
because she meant it for herself more
than anyone else)—and the gutted hem of
the drapes showed me the bottoms of her
legs in those jeans and two bare, dirt-
blackened feet.
All this time I’d been looking for
Abby, and here I’d found someone else.
In the dream, I found myself doing
things I’m not sure I could have done in
real life. My dream-self picked her way
through the room to get closer to those
drapes. My dream-self had no fear. She
ignored the growing sense that there
were others behind her, others she
hadn’t been introduced to yet. She found
the edge of the drapes and moved slowly
along the length, searching for a cord.
When she found it, hidden in the tatters
and held together by a few tangled
threads, she took it in both hands and she
pulled. The drapes slid open, and the
girl, Fiona Burke, was revealed.
There she was—not an animated and
gruesome corpse, dead the way she
surely should have been if the stories
were to be believed. And not years
older, either, the way she would be now
if she’d survived.
Fiona Burke hadn’t aged a day.
Her hair was red with the black roots,
gone pinkish in some spots. Her eyes
were liquid-lined. Her bare stomach
was visible, but it wasn’t that she’d
grown out of her shirt in the years since
I’d known her; that’s how she liked to
wear her shirts, one size too small and
no shame for what was showing.
With the drapes open, Fiona Burke
stepped out into the room because there
was nowhere to hide. There was glass
all over the floor from a window that
must have been shattered—and as she
walked closer to me she stepped right on
the shards. Pain didn’t reach her face, if
she felt any at all. I realized, now that
I’d grown up and she’d stopped
growing, we were about the same height.
She spoke then. She recognized me.
Happy now? You little brat.
I could have asked her how she knew
it was me, after all these years, because
I dyed my hair black now, blue-black
from a bottle, and didn’t I look any
different from when I was a kid?
Before I could utter a word, she
grabbed my hand and shoved something
into it that was hotter even than her skin,
sizzling like a coal burning from a fire,
and hard, like a knob of bone. My sole
reaction was to get it away from me as
quickly as possible. My hand opened
and let go.
What dropped to the ground was a
pendant made from a smoke-gray stone.
That’s when I remembered I’d seen
something very much like it before.
Fiona Burke used to wear a choker with
a similar stone around her long, thin
neck.
My dream-self didn’t have the
wherewithal to make the connection, but
my waking self, the self bursting out of
sleep on the couch before the flickering
TV at the sound of Mom saying the pizza
was ready—my waking self needed only
an instant to connect the dots and connect
the girl.
There was me. There was Abby
Sinclair. And now there was a girl I last
saw when I was eight years old. Fiona
Burke used to be my next-door neighbor,
but she ran away from home when she
was 17 years old.
MISSING
FIONA BURKE
CASE TYPE:
Endangered Runaway
DOB:
June 17, 1987
MISSING:
November 13, 2004
AGE NOW:
25
SEX:
Female
RACE:
Asian
HAIR:
Black
EYES:
Brown
HEIGHT:
5’3” (160 cm)
WEIGHT:
125 lbs (57 kg)
MISSING
FROM:
Pinecliff, NY, United
States
CIRCUMSTANCES:
The photo on the right
is a composite image to show how Fiona may
look at twenty-five years old. She was last seen
on November 13, 2004. When she was last seen
her hair was dyed red. Her hair is naturally
black.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION
SHOULD CONTACT
Pinecliff Police Department (New York) 1-845-555-
1100
—
11
—
WHEN
I look back, I can see the
hints. The hints that were there all along
—like the time I was eight years old and
my mom left me in the care of the girl
who lived next door. The girl who told
me to stand very still with my face
squashed
up
against
the
yellow
wallpaper and to not turn around and to
not dare look. To stand against the wall
in my My Little Pony pajamas while she
made plans to ditch town for good.
That was the first time I came in
contact with someone who went missing.