“Yes,” I said.
“And you’re sure you got his name right?”
I nodded. “He said. Heaney, he said. Pinecliff police, he said. I think. I’m pretty sure. He was going to arrest us for trespassing on private property. He said.”
She shrugged. Then said what she really meant. “Are you sure you talked to someone that night? Are you sure you’re not . . . confused?” There they were again. The shadows on her face that showed she doubted me. Now she thought I was having imaginary conversations with authority figures and lying to make my story more convincing.
“Jamie was there with me. He met the guy. He talked to him. Officer Heaney. He had on a uniform. He . . . I think he had on a uniform; it was dark.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. They’ve opened an investigation, so if she’s out there and needs help, they’ll find her, okay?”
I didn’t feel okay.
Not anything close to okay.
Yes, I wanted them to be looking for Abby, but there was more to this. There was the fact that I didn’t know if I could trust my own mother.
That was when I saw it on her chest. The hint of red. Bright and searing red. Like a patch of flames.
My mom had new ink. Did she get another tattoo while I was out at the party? Because a blazing crimson thing was newly visible beneath her collarbone on her chest. Her shirt was open beyond the third button, and somehow I’d missed what looked to be an unfamiliar picture there, until now, because now I couldn’t seem to see anything else. The tattoo was a fiery heart above her real heart.
“Mom,” I said carefully, “you didn’t tell me you were getting a new tattoo.”
“What?” she said. “But I’m not.”
“You already did. Can I see?”
“What, when? I didn’t. What do you mean?” And right then, so I could see her do it, and so the shadows watching us could see, my mom took her hand and held it over her chest. Covering the new tattoo.
It was here, while studying her, while paying attention, that I noticed the difference in her face. It was very slight, and there was a good chance I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been concentrating. But I was. And my mother—the one I’ve had all my life—has a beauty mark on her left cheek, just beside her lips. So black it’s almost blue. I always wanted one of my own, and when I was little she’d pencil one on me with her eyeliner and say I was just like her, except mine washed off in the bath at night.
This mother, this one sitting at the kitchen table with me in the early, early hours of a dark morning—she had a beauty mark on her right cheek.
Same spot and same color and same shape. Wrong side.
She saw me staring and rubbed her cheek. “Have I got some food on my face or something?”
“No,” I said, “it’s nothing. I’m tired. I should sleep.”
But, oh, it wasn’t nothing.
The secret tattoo was one thing, but now this? This made me question everything about her. It made me wonder if telling her about Abby had really been the right thing.
I shouldn’t have asked for help, should I? I shouldn’t have trusted her. I should have done this on my own. With only myself. And the girls.
MISSING
JANNAH AFSANA DIN
CASE TYPE: Endangered Missing
DOB: April 4, 1995
MISSING: January 2, 2013
AGE NOW: 17
SEX: Female
RACE: Middle Eastern
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Brown
HEIGHT: 5'3" (163 cm)
WEIGHT: 135 lbs. (62 kg)
MISSING FROM: Clarkestone, MA, United States
CIRCUMSTANCES: Footage of Jannah was caught on surveillance video at a gas station in Clarkestone, Massachusetts, in the early-morning hours of January 2. She may have been meeting someone but appears to have left before that person arrived. She was wearing a white coat, blue jeans, and a Red Sox baseball cap. Jannah also wears contact lenses.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION SHOULD CONTACT
Clarkestone Police Department (Massachusetts) 1-617-555-4592
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
Please help find my sister Hailey Pippering.
She comes here or she used to all the time.
If you see this flyer and you know anything, e-mail me PLEASE!!!!! You don’t have to use your real name! I won’t call the police. I just want to know where she is!!!!
[email protected] (Trina Glatt: disappearance unreported)
— 46 —
THE house was waiting for me. Always there, when nothing else was. The girls were gathered—the newest of the girls, Trina, at their center. She was flashing something that caught the firelight. A blade of some kind . . . sharp, silver. A knife.
No one knew how she smuggled it in, and everyone wanted to hold it, but when she said maybe it’d be for the best if they avoided getting their prints on it, they stopped reaching for the contraband and they stopped asking.
Trina told us that it all began when she got that knife. Before it came into her life, she felt helpless. She felt like a girl. She spat out that word like it was the worst insult in the world, to be what we all were, and so she offended every one of us.
The knife itself was titanium, the blade and handle coated in a silvery finish. It was a butterfly knife that folded in on itself so it could fit in the crevice of a clasped hand.
Trina had stolen the knife from a boyfriend who’d himself shoplifted it from an army-navy surplus store. She couldn’t explain why she’d swiped it from his pocket while he was sleeping—better would have been to rifle through his wallet—but she wanted to take something from him that would really bother him. Something he’d notice, something he couldn’t replace. She’d planned to return it, maybe a week later, but once she had it she found she couldn’t part with it. The knife was so compact, it could be tucked into her front jeans pocket, and the secure sense of it under her pillow helped her sleep at night.
After she dumped him—all right, she admitted, he dumped her—she realized the knife was hers forever. She’d find herself playing with it, like in school or at home in full view of her mom’s boyfriend on the couch. What was to keep her from plunging it into someone who tried to mess with her? Nothing. Not saying she did or would. Just having the weapon and knowing she could use it was enough.
The thing is, she never once made use of that knife. Not technically, because slicing incisions into the arms of her mother’s couch didn’t count. And making snowflakes out of loose-leaf paper for her little half sister didn’t count, either.
She never made use of the knife on a person.
That was her biggest regret. She could have done so much with it! When she leaped up while telling this part of her story, the other girls backed away. Not like they could get hurt in the smoky house, which was more charred and patterned by fire each time I visited—because this house held them close, kept them safe—but they remembered being hurt and reacted like they still could be.
Maybe it was talk of the knife that brought her out after all this time. She shifted from the curtains, and before anyone knew what was happening, Fiona 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 he
r 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 wor
se 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 lights of the ambulance dancing over me, easing out all the bad red, and I heard her talking to the EMTs. She’d say you send that girl away.
You send her away.