It could be that they ran through the ice as fast as they could. Maybe leaving her behind was all they could think to do, under the circumstances, with the drug in their systems and no signal on any of their cell phones. It could be that they did care, that they did try, that some obstacle they couldn’t control was what kept them away and kept the accident from being reported for so long.
Or it could be that they knew what Natalie had longed for, recognized that burning-cold part of her that made the offhanded wish and then watched it happen—and they turned their backs because of it. Why they never came back for her is not the part of the story I know.
What I do know is that she was unconscious for a long time. Then, when she woke up, she was simply confused.
She emerged from what felt like a deep sleep, pieces of glass embedded all over her body. Then she was crawling through the shattered windshield and calling out for someone, anyone, on the vacant road. Discovering there was no one. The wind whipping through her hair as she got to her feet. The crunch of ice under her feet as she started walking. And nothing after that. No trace of her. No trail. No girl.
— 26 —
THE house in my dream howled with wind. The wind blared through broken windows; the drapes flapped and slapped at soot-stained walls.
I was aware of some things, like time. Like I knew it was January in my waking life, so maybe it was also January in the dream. It could be that the dream lived alongside me, mirroring the weather and holidays, that as I moved ahead through life, so did the dream.
But if that was true, the embers from the fire would have gone dark by now.
If time was the same in here, Fiona Burke would have grown older. All the girls would have. From the newspaper stories I read about her, I knew that Natalie Montesano would have been twenty-four.
Natalie found me before I could find her. She was on the second floor, pale eyes peeking from between the shrunken black sticks of kindling that had once been the banister and, from behind that, all her hair. She wanted me to come up, and I wanted her to come down, so we met, instead, in the middle.
If I’d had my wits about me—if in the dream I kept my wits—I would have asked her why she was following me. Was there something she wanted me to do? Is that why she kept visiting?
But the gum in my brain could only function enough to get me close to her. Close enough to hear her speak.
I didn’t mean to do it, she said. And again. I didn’t mean to do it. Sometimes she said the same thing so many times, I’d lose count.
There was no working electricity in the house, so we hovered on the delicate stairs in the darkness.
They never found me, did they? Natalie asked, and the way she said it, resigned to the wind in her face, to the darkness thick with smoke, made me realize she never expected them to find her. Not ever.
“No,” I said. “Do you need me to—do you want me to . . . call someone? Do something?”
She tilted her head, and I sensed her cold eyes go dim. What could you do? she said. I should not have even asked such a ridiculous question.
All she wished, if she could have a wish, if somewhere outside this limbo a wish from a girl like her could be plucked from the darkness and granted, she’d want them to know she hadn’t meant to cause the accident. That she was sorry. That she would take it back if she could.
It was here that the smoke of the dream seemed to clear and her hair parted and I could see her face for the first time since it appeared in my bathroom mirror. What I saw was something different, because in here, in this house, she was her true self. Her cheeks were still punctured from the windshield glass, causing her face to alternately bleed and sparkle. It was lovely and terrible at the same time.
She turned her back and walked the rest of the way up the stairs. My eyes were adjusting to the lack of light and I saw for the first time that she had impossibly long hair, hair that had never known a pair of scissors in its lifetime, plain and stick-straight and parted down the middle. And for a moment all she was out of the darkness was hair, and all I was in the darkness was another person who’d done nothing to help her.
She turned in a cloud of frizz.
It’s too late, she said, for me. The frizz alighted, and the glass shards in her cheeks shimmered, and the two sharp needles piercing through it were her cold eyes. But it’s not too late . . . for her.
— 27 —
NOT too late for her. Something told me this had to mean Abby Sinclair.
I’d seen Fiona Burke in the house, and now I’d seen Natalie in the house, and on my way out and into consciousness, before the dream sifted away like a haze of smoke tends to do, I caught sight of another figure. This one stood statue-still, her back to an ash-gray wall.
No, not Abby—and no matter how much her disappearance itched at me, tugging and not letting go, she wasn’t the only girl who wanted me to have her story. That’s the thing I’d soon discover: There were more. So many more.
There were more lost girls out there than I’d ever imagined, and now they knew where to find me. Their whispers came from the shadows, the sound of so many voices more static than song.
MISSING
SHYANN JOHNSTON
CASE TYPE: Endangered Runaway
DOB: November 10, 1994
MISSING: January 30, 2012
AGE NOW: 18
SEX: Female
RACE: African American
HAIR: Black
EYES: Brown
HEIGHT: 5’6” (168 cm)
WEIGHT: 153 lbs (69 kg)
MISSING FROM: Newark, NJ, United States
CIRCUMSTANCES: Shyann was last seen leaving school on January 30, 2012, when she was 17 years old. She has a chicken pox scar under her right eye. She is believed to have stayed in the local area.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION SHOULD CONTACT
Newark Police Department (New Jersey) 1-973-555-8297
— 28 —
THEY called her names. They called her ugly names, and stupid names; any cruel name they could think of, and there were many. It didn’t matter what names they called Shyann—there was no logic to it. Like, when she gained that weight over the summer they called her Shamu, and then she went and lost all the weight, and they still called her Shamu. They had no imagination.
For every name she’d been called by the age of 17, Shyann Johnston could have forged a fake ID for every sleazy bar in the city and gotten her drink on, even though she’d never tasted beer and she probably wouldn’t like it. She could have left, too. She could’ve collected enough passports to travel the world a dozen times over, escaping so far from her neighborhood she’d never have to go back, not to finish out high school, not to attend her graduation, not to carry her stuff out of her mom and dad’s and cart it to somewhere new. She wished she could do that, but she was stuck there, with these kids she hated because they hated her. These kids who made her life a living nightmare, who followed her around sometimes, in school and after school let out, trailing her down the street, across the crosswalk, pelting her with whatever they had in their pockets when she came down the steps of the library or out of that grocery place on the corner with a bag of food in her arms. Her tormentors.
There were enough bad names swirling through her mind that some mornings she looked in a mirror and saw what they saw. How could she not?
She believed the bad things more than she knew she should. She took in those words and let them burrow. Let them bat back and forth inside her brain. She began to think she’d never be able to spit them out, even if her mom and dad and the anti-bullying counselor assigned to talk to her fourth period told her none of it was true and building some self-esteem was how to fight back.
Bullcrap, Shyann thought. Maybe she should fight back by blasting them in the face with the gun her dad hid behind his porno collection. But she hated guns, and she didn’t want to go sifting through her dad’s personal items, besides, so she fought back by using the most anti-violent method she knew. She turned tai
l and she ran away.
It was soon after I first read about Shyann that she reached out to me to confirm it. To show she was one of the girls.
All I got at first was her voice on my cell phone. The blur of her body and the shriek of her voice saying, Leave me alone. Stop it already. Stop.
It came from an unidentified caller that said only “New Jersey.” There were no words in the message, but a video was attached.
It was a Monday, lunch period in the cafeteria. And when the text message came up on my phone, when I saw there was a video, I had a feeling, a sense that I was coming into contact with another girl. I stood up, holding the phone close to me so no one could see what was on the screen. “You can’t have that out, it’ll get confiscated,” I heard one of my friends say.
I rushed through the caf, almost knocking over some kid, causing him to drop his tray. I’d reached the edge of the room and I was pushing through the double doors and I was out in the hall and then, finally, finally, I was alone and could hit Play.
Leave me alone, I heard first, coming out my phone’s speaker. Stop it already. Stop it. Stop.
The camerawork was shaky, the picture distorted. I couldn’t tell who was talking except that it sounded like a girl. The frame showed ground covered in gray, murky snow. It showed two running feet. It focused in, for just a moment, on those feet: a pair of sneakers in the snow. The laces were yellow, which seemed wrong somehow, too cheerful. One set of laces was undone, trailing.
Here, the camera zoomed out, and the video exploded with laughter. A whole group of them out of view, an anonymous herd hidden where I couldn’t see.
They were taunting her. Calling her names. And now I could see her, all of her, better than I could before. She was cowering under her hair, then trying to run away down an urban sidewalk patched with ice and trash bags left on the curb and low, dirty drifts of snow. Tripping over her shoelaces and trying to run.
The camera lens pointed down for some seconds, at the ground, like the owner of the phone—a guy, his voice was the loudest—was checking to make sure it was still recording. It showed the world crooked and almost upside down, as if this patch of pitted sidewalk were really sky, but then it raised up again in a great blur of motion. He was running now, running with the phone in hand. When he stopped, the image stopped, too. It jittered and held in place, moving in to show a brick wall.
A girl was standing against it, shielding her face from view. This was Shyann.
The last few seconds took a wild zoom in on her face and held there, so I could see her: dark skin, big bright eyes, hair gone white from all the snow and ice thrown in it.
Then, before the video came to a stop, she took off. Left the brick wall and bolted off where the camera couldn’t find her. At this, the video cut out.
She’d sent me this video to show me her troubles. So she didn’t have to put it all into words first. So I’d know why.
A teacher was passing by, and I didn’t think fast enough to hide the phone. “Where are you supposed to be, Miss Woodman?” she asked, then noticed it. “No phones out during school hours, you know that.” Then there was her hand, the long, bony fingers wrapping themselves around my cell phone and detaching it from me.
“Hey, that was important,” I said, reaching for it, but she shook her head and told me to get to wherever it was I was supposed to be this period, that was what was important.
I stared at her for a moment. I’d been living for weeks in two places at once: here. And there, where they were. This teacher—what did she teach, some slack class like health?—she had no idea what was important, or where I most needed to be.
— — —
When I got my phone back from the vice principal’s office after last bell, the video of Shyann Johnston was gone. The only proof I had that the video did come to me, that my phone had caught the electric charge of her first contact, was the blinking light and the message that said: UNABLE TO DOWNLOAD. ERROR.
— 29 —
JANUARY was bringing the most snow the Hudson Valley had seen in close to ten years. It also brought more of those dreams.
The dreams didn’t fit with the falling snow. They were hot instead of cold, made of smoke that steamed my lungs and warmed my skin. But it was that night when the dream became somehow even hotter, so real that I burst out of my bedroom gasping, my arms wildly waving away the smoke, that I became aware of my mom, saying I’d been sleepwalking, saying with a sigh, “Go back to bed, babe,” like this had happened before.
I returned to my room to find her. Shyann Johnston. This time, not a blur on the miniature screen of my cell phone. Not an error message. This time for real.
It shocked me even though I should have been expecting her visit. I didn’t scream.
I waited until I couldn’t hear my mom anymore. I held still by the door, my hand unable to come off the knob where I’d hung all my bras, sifting through the underwire while I waited for my mom to get back to her room. It took some minutes. All the while she breathed in and out, quick breaths, like she was more scared than I was.
I couldn’t make out her features in the darkness, but she seemed cold from the way she shivered—and her lips, from what I could see of them, seemed tinged blue.
I wondered how long she’d been sitting there. The whole time I slept? Or had she followed me out of the dream minutes before?
I sat on the edge of my bed, across from the seat she’d chosen. My heart could be felt in my throat, its jogged beating made from the natural instinct to panic at this impossible sight in my room. But also questions, rattling with questions. And the questions won.
“Was that you?” I made myself ask. “On my phone?”
Her bluish lips pulled into something of a sad smile, which I took as an answer.
Abby and Natalie had both let me into their minds straightaway, and Fiona Burke had my mind for the taking. But Shyann didn’t trust me enough at first. She probably thought I’d make fun of her for what I saw in there, call her one of those names.
Didn’t you see me? she said. I saw you.
I knew she didn’t mean here, in my desk chair, where the outline of her was sitting in the dark, my bathrobe folded over the back of the chair and my school papers scattered across the desk. She meant somewhere else, that place where I’d been before I found myself sleepwalking, the charred space of the recurring dream. That’s where she actually was—in the house, with the others. That’s where she now had to stay.
I admitted I had seen her. That had been her, standing against the wall. In the dream as in the video; in the video as in the dream.
“Why are you here? What do you want from me?” I asked, and then before I could hear her answer, my mom was back, knocking on my door and wanting to know who was I talking to, was I on the phone? And I was turning away from the desk chair, turning away from the outline of the girl in the staticky darkness, and calling through the door to my mom to say I was fine. My mom asked if it was Jamie, and I said yeah, because he’d be as good an excuse as any. I just didn’t want her opening my door.
“Aren’t you two . . . I thought you said it was over,” my mom said through the door.
“We’re only talking, Mom.”
My mom did open the door, and in those first few seconds I thought for sure she’d see it. The ghost. The girl. Then she’d know.
She leaned her head in and I noticed her spot my phone—it was off, sitting on my dresser all the way across the room, where I couldn’t have just been talking on it. She saw that, but she didn’t see Shyann. “You okay?” she said.
“I’m fine.”
If she knew something, if she could sense something, she would’ve stayed. But she only said good night again and closed my door.
I looked back, and the desk chair held only my bathrobe, the dark air shimmering as if my eyes were still adjusting, drawing shapes of a girl who wasn’t there anymore, who’d run off, who’d gone. My mom had scared her away.
I was alone, and I felt it
. There wasn’t even a breath in my ear.
What did Shyann want from me? Only this. Only to tell me her story and be heard.
— 30 —
SHYANN’S parents had reported her missing at the end of January about a year ago, saying she’d run away. “Teen Flees from Neighborhood Bullies,” stories online said. “Bullied Teen Still Not Found.” The bullying “experts” were called in, the ones who liked to get gussied up for TV talk shows to denounce the epidemic sweeping our schools, made worse by social networking and technologies like camera phones.
Shyann’s school principal was interviewed, and some teachers. There was one girl who spoke on camera, acting as if she had no idea what had been done to Shyann. “Don’t really know what happened to that girl,” she told Channel 4 and Channel 11. “Nobody was messing with her. Why’d she run off for no reason?” She smiled a carefully calculated smile, and I wanted to reach my arm into the screen and punch her in the face.
No one but me knew what had happened to Shyann.
If Shyann could have planned better, she wouldn’t have gone in winter. New Jersey in late January was full of frigid gusts of wind, the kind that swept up your pant legs, and strung out tears from your eyes. Snow in the city limits quickly turned gray; maybe it even came down from the sky that color. It could be that it was only white in other towns and in storybooks, and in the cotton-candy fluff they pumped out for holiday movies. Here, there were gray patches on the sidewalks, the ice making the pavement so slick someone could slip and fall if she tried to run.
If it had been warmer—if Shyann could have held on through the winter, kept her head down, didn’t let herself care so much what they all said about her—she would have gone in spring, when the city warmed but before the humidity got the whole area in its clutches. There were ragged plots of land behind some of the row houses in her neighborhood, and if a person didn’t have the money to hop a train and leave, a person could survive there without being detected. If she were smart about it.