She held her leg across, her back wedged against the frame. She was tall, and her legs were quite long. Her top leg was propped up just high enough that I couldn’t hop over. Her bottom leg was propped lower, so I couldn’t crawl under. She wouldn’t budge.
Why do you think you keep coming back here, Lauren? she asked me. She spoke as if she were only curious, but I could see on her face it wasn’t that.
She wanted me to stay this night and the next. She wanted me here all nights, and it wasn’t because she liked my company. It was only that if she had to be here, she wanted me to have to stay, too.
One night you’ll come back and you won’t be able to get out again, she said.
There was a threat in her words, something unspoken. All the girls had that unsaid question in their eyes when they looked at me. I was in danger, too, wasn’t I? Because why else did I know about this place, and them—why else was I here like they were?
Madison was very blond in the dream, even more so than in the pictures posted all over her online profiles. It was like a fire was still burning somewhere, or flashbulbs were dancing in her hair.
One night you won’t be able to get out, she said again. Then she adjusted her leg, lowering it a smidge, and in that quick moment, I leaped over her shin and darted out the door. She called after me as I made it down the front stairs and into the street, I’m the one he wants to take pictures of. Not you.
I always did make it out, every time. And though the voices stayed with me, snippets of the things they said (You should’ve seen me jump, man, Kendra was going, you should’ve seen me. Or Isabeth, more quietly, I should have walked. It was only rain. I should have just walked home.) cascaded through my head like little lullabies sometimes, other times like cymbals crashing.
These girls were here inside the house and they couldn’t get out—and maybe, no matter how much it pained me, this meant they were dead.
But there was one girl who hadn’t set foot in the house yet. I’d looked, and I still couldn’t see her. She’d reached out to me, and it wasn’t to keep ahold of her story, to record it when no one else was listening, to hear her confessions, her regrets. To know her like no one else on the outside could. There had to be another reason.
She was different, wasn’t she? She was the one I could keep from ending up here. Maybe even save.
— 34 —
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013, at 10:03 AM, Cassidy Delrio wrote:
Lauren,
Sorry it took me a little while to write you back. Yeah, if you’re around campus and you want to get coffee or whatever just let me know. I get out of econ at 2:40, then I have anthro at 4:10, so if you could meet me at like 3? Sorry about your friend. She was sweet. I really don’t know why she ran away, none of us counselors did. Sucks you haven’t heard from her, for real. But if that’s not a bummer and you still want to come by and talk about it, that’s cool. I have an hour to kill.
Cass
— 35 —
I was in math class when the message from Abby’s camp counselor came through on my phone. Which meant I had to leave. Right then. I couldn’t think about sines or cosines or try and fail to find the hypotenuse on the triangle when I knew I could meet her today, if only I could leave school and drive down there.
I raised my hand, and Ms. Torres said couldn’t I wait until the bell rings? I assured her I’d be quick even though I wouldn’t be, because it won’t matter, will it? Trigonometry, after you’re gone.
Jamie was sitting a few rows behind me in class, and his eyes followed me to the door. When I closed it and gave one last backward glance through the window slit, he was still staring. Glaring actually. He knew I wasn’t planning on coming back—but he wasn’t trying to stop me from leaving.
I grabbed my coat from my locker and then headed for the main hallway, the closest way out. The lockers in this hallway were red, and the floors were checkered in black-and-white, making the exit bob and swim out there in the far distance. I could see down the long corridor into the sunlight beyond: the south parking lot, unguarded, the gleaming windshield of my van. There was more I needed to find out about Abby, and I felt drawn to talk to this Cassidy girl, to someone who’d been there with her that summer. There was more, and I could learn what it was . . .
If I could just get myself out of this building.
“The bathrooms are that way,” a voice said. “I mean, if you’re using that hall pass for what I think you’re using it for.”
I paused in the empty hallway and looked back. Around the corner, braced by a wall of teal-painted lockers, stood a tall girl. A real one.
I blanked on her name for a moment, like I barely even knew her, and then it came to me: Deena Douglas. Deena of the fake eyelashes and the smoky voice, of the boyfriend who was six years older and the habit of sucking her thumb when she slept and then denying it when she woke, even when it was sticky with 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 t
aking 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 murdered her.”
“Wait, what do you mean? Did you see anyone in the woods?”
“No. Of course not. I’m just assuming.”
It wasn’t something I was going to assume. Some of the girls I’d seen lately in the house had met terrible fates before they walked up to the front door—it could be told through their eyes and in the way, sometimes, parts of their bodies would go all pins and needles like they hadn’t gotten used to having legs again. Or the way the smoke would flow through their guts like a magic trick, a sad one, without scarves.
It was all in the patches of the stories we skipped over, the unspoken end
s. Isabeth. Eden. Shyann, even, maybe. I ached for them.
But wouldn’t I have known if something like that had happened to Abby, out of all the girls?
“What was that movie where they put the girl’s head in a box?” Cass was saying now. “You know what I’m talking about, right? That movie? There was this box, and they look in it and there’s her head?”
I didn’t know the movie and hoped I never would. I left Cass quicker than I meant to, especially after driving all the way there.
Talking to Abby’s camp counselor had given me nothing. Worse than nothing: She’d drawn a detailed enough image that felt more real than the real thing. I didn’t want to think anymore about what she’d said, didn’t want to picture it.
This visit to the coffee shop was what propelled me down to New Jersey, but there was another place I could try in another part of the state. I had the address. I still had questions. And though I didn’t know how to make sense of it, I couldn’t let myself believe she was dead.
— 37 —
“SHE ran off,” Abby’s grandmother said when I asked her. “That’s it. That’s the story. You drove yourself all the way here to hear that.”
Her expression didn’t become pained as she said these words, though I expected it would. I found myself watching her upper lip, the darker hints of hair growing in there, the way the hairs moved like little antennae as she spoke. She was the woman who raised Abby, her legal guardian. Within minutes, I could already tell she wasn’t the kind of grandmother who’d open her arms to you, who’d remove the cigarette from her mouth to say sweet things and offer you a cookie. She’d let me inside the house, though. At least she’d let me in.
“And you went to that camp together?” her grandmother asked for the third time.
“Yes,” I said. “I was there. She never said a thing about running away. I know she had her wallet with her, and her purse I think, too, but she left all the rest of her stuff there, you know.”