And Abby Sinclair, the girl my thoughts keep returning to. The one girl whose end I can’t see. Her story starts here, on this closed-off tract of land in the pines. She’ll have to step out of the woods once the fire starts. How could she ignore us now?
When the fire catches the kindling and begins to burn, I warm my hands over the growing flames. I don’t let myself think about Jamie, who I ditched at the hospital. Or my mom, who’s surely gotten a phone call that I’m not there and is in a panic trying to figure out where I could be. I mean, I think about them, but only for a moment. Fiona stops me. She wants me to see . . .
At this high point, looking over the campground, all the dark, empty cabins can be viewed. The mess hall, the arts-and-crafts cabin, the chapel, the empty flagpole flapping its loose string in the billowing wind. Abby Sinclair spent her last days here, and now—side-eying Fiona, who drifts fire-bright at the edge of the stones—I wonder if this is where I’m about to spend mine.
The fresh night air clears my head. It’s cold, but it’s cleansing, and I can think again the way I used to.
I stand up. I pat my pockets, feeling for a cell phone, and remember I had no cell phone at the hospital, so I have no cell phone here. For a second, I’m on a frozen, windy hill in a vacant, forgotten place on a late January night and I don’t know why.
Then I see what Fiona has been trying to show me.
The snow has disappeared to make way for the sidewalk. The cracks are the same, and I avoid stepping on them, and the black iron gate swings open with a shriek and a creak, the way it always does. The stairs don’t crumble under my weight the way I sometimes suspect they might as I approach the door, and the door pushes open, because it’s never kept locked, not for any of us, not for me.
Inside the house is a wall of heat, from the fire. It climbs high to eat a gaping hole out of the ceiling. I duck when the chandelier drops and falls. I’m so deep in it, the heat should blister my skin and catch and blaze up my clothes, but I can’t feel a thing. It doesn’t touch me.
That’s when they start to come out, one girl from behind the banister, and one girl from another room. One from within the folded curtains, and one from the floor, since there’s no furniture to sit on. They come from upstairs, where their rooms are, and they gather here with me.
There’s a flicker, and I lose sight of the house and can see only the quiet campground again. The fire burns from a pit of ash and sticks and branches at my feet.
But then the night flickers back to what it was, to what Fiona knew would happen. They’ve been smoked out, as she said they would be. Smoke clears to show that the girls are here. The girls I haven’t seen since getting sent away. Now they surround me.
Natalie Montesano, who thought for sure her friends would come back for her, who never thought they’d leave her behind in the crushed car on the sleek, steep road after the accident, but when they did, she took off and she didn’t look back. Even when she wanted to.
Shyann Johnston, who sometimes fantasizes she could glide through the school hallways again, but this time with a sawed-off shotgun tucked under her arm, because they’d see it and they’d shut their mouths. And when the hallways emptied, she’d put the gun down on the floor because it’s not like she’d ever use it and she’d get a drink from the water fountain, which she’s never been able to do before without getting shoved in, and she’d smile.
Isabeth Valdes, who thinks she wouldn’t have gotten in the strange car if she hadn’t been carrying all those books in the rain, and she wouldn’t have been carrying all those books if she didn’t have three tests on Monday, so if she didn’t have three tests on Monday she might still be here.
Madison Waller, who bought herself three fashion magazines for the bus ride into the city, who’s practicing her face for the camera even now, even though nobody who’s anybody can see her.
Eden DeMarco, who only wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, who only wanted to touch it with her toes, that’s all.
Yoon-mi Hyun and Maura Morris, who both think love changes a person for the better, and both agree that it is possible to find your soul mate at age 17, no matter what your parents may say when you bring the girl home.
Kendra Howard, who expects she’s the bravest, baddest, most kickass girl those guy friends of hers have ever known, and bets they still spend nights talking about her, still toast her memory over cold beers, saying how high she leaped, how far she fell, how she had balls, and she’ll never be forgotten, RIP.
Jannah Afsana Din, who believes starting a new life with Carlos in Mexico wouldn’t have been as impossible as people said—they could have lived on the beach together and raised chickens; they could have sold the little cakes she makes on the streets and survived, even flourished, even found happiness.
Hailey Pippering, who’s done some things she can’t say out loud because it’d make her sick; she only wants her parents to know that she didn’t run away this time, even if they think she did. This time, she wanted to stay.
And Trina Glatt, who always meant to track down the father who abandoned her when she was a baby, so she could throttle him and blame him for every bad thing that ever happened to her, but also, secretly, so she could hug him, and admit she missed him, and if he invited her to a baseball game, or to the backyard, to throw a Frisbee around or something, she’d probably go. She’d tell him that, if she could.
There are a lot of things the girls would tell the people they left behind, if they could.
All those girls. So many to keep track of tonight, my head swirling. Only, something’s missing. Something’s not right here. The circle of girls comes close and then weaves tighter around me. I can’t tell if I’m at the center or if the fire is.
The night flickers.
What I thought were the soot-streaked walls of the house are the tall stalks of the pine trees; the staircase to the upper floors is the side of the mountain leading up to the looming ridge; the ceiling doesn’t end because it’s the night sky. Pinpricks of flurries rain down, as soft as ash but cool on my cheeks. My surroundings keep shifting: I’m at Lady-of-the-Pines, in the ring of stones where the campers toast marshmallows in summer. Then I’m in the house in my dream. My dream is here, or this place has become a part of it; I don’t know the difference.
The girls’ hands are tightly clasped, though there’s no singing. This isn’t summer camp. This isn’t the kind of night for belting out “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and holding a flashlight to ghoul up your face and tell ghost stories. The ghosts tonight have already told their stories.
I cast my eyes around the fire. I still can’t shake that something’s not how it’s supposed to be. Madison’s bright-blond hair seems wild in the fire, and there’s an uncountable number of stars in her eyes, but it’s not her. Trina shoots me a threatening glare, but it’s not her, either.
Then I know: Yes, the girls have come out. Some (Jannah, Hailey) have only recently become familiar and I barely know their full stories yet, and some (Natalie, Shyann) are girls I feel like I’ve known since first grade. But there’s one whose face I can’t find in the roaring glow, one I keep looking for in the hissing, dizzying circle of smoke, thinking I must have missed her. Thinking they’re moving too fast, and if they’d only slow down or stop so I could see her.
Where’s Abby?
She doesn’t step out of the smoke. She still hasn’t come. I haven’t gotten her out. All this, and I haven’t found her.
I turn to Fiona to ask what happened. I see Fiona now, at the edge of the ring, not holding a hand, not taking a step inside, only watching. Only waiting. An observer to a disaster about to occur, standing back so she can wipe her hands of it after.
She wants me to join the girls. It’s not fair that I’ve been living my life out in the daylight, driving my van down any road I want, walking into any house I want, seeing the people who love me at any moment, on any day. She’s forgotten I’ve been in the hospital, unable to have any of these things, either. Because surround
ing us is an entire sky made of shadows, and there’s no escaping your fate.
I’m 17. Like she was, like they all were.
Then Fiona meets my eyes, and I question my distrust of her. I question everything.
Because no, she didn’t bring me here to get rid of me. She expected Abby to come out, just as I did. She’s looking at the fire, waiting and wondering where she is, too.
Then she makes a decision.
She grabs my arm. I can’t tell if I’m feeling her touch or if what’s come back is a memory of her touch, from before. Her hand has a hard grasp of my arm, reminding me of that night when I was still eight and she was 17 as she is now, when she grabbed me and shoved me in the closet. But tonight it hurts so much more than it did then because she’s grabbing my left arm, my bad arm.
We’ve got to burn the place down, she says.
No, no, wait, we can’t yet, I try to tell Fiona. Abby’s not here. Aren’t we supposed to find Abby first, and only after can we—
But I’m not fast enough to catch her. Fiona’s racing down the hill with the bottle of kerosene in her arms. It’s too late. She will start the destruction without me.
— 60 —
SHE’S telling me to do it. She’s telling all of us, pulling our strings and giving commands. Soon the girls have sticks gathered from the outskirts of the woods that they raise to light the way, and soon the kerosene can is in my good arm and the spout is open and the liquid is dribbling out on my toes.
I start to wonder: Is it too late for Abby? Fiona is acting like it might be. And if we destroy this place, this last place Abby stayed before she disappeared, will we set her free? Maybe we will. Maybe doing this will set us all free. Even me.
First go the cabins closest to the hill. We set fire to the empty beds. Next is the camp office, a small building with a wraparound porch, and we run a line of kerosene all around the porch, from end to end. The canteen is a tiny outhouse of a structure and we leave a fire at one corner, like a bird’s nest. The canoes go up as if they were doused already and were just waiting to be set alight.
Smoke is in the air the way it always is in the dream; it smells just the same.
But then something’s not the same. Something’s off, and calling to me through the smoke. A voice. And not a voice in my head or a whisper at my ear or the girls with the torches at my back.
This is an actual voice shouting out into the actual night. Someone is on the campground with me.
I’m afraid it’s a delusion, that my mind has shattered and scattered all over the snow. And when he reaches me and he’s been running and the panic colors his face and he says, “Lauren! Are you okay? Lauren?” it takes me a long moment to realize he’s not a ghost or an escaped piece of a dream. He’s Jamie.
Jamie’s been here with me once before, so I should have guessed he’d know where to find me.
He’s shouting. At me. “Did you do this? What did you do?”
He means the fires. When I glance back behind him I expect to see a tidal wave of fire, the coiling, curling lip edged with girls holding torches as tall as their arms will lift, so if they reach high enough they could catch the night on fire. They could destroy the whole world they’ve been stolen from. They could end everything.
But there are only the fires in the places where I set them myself, and there is a trail of kerosene in the snow that no one’s dropped a match to light. The fires are burning, and letting off black puffs of smoke, but they’re not near as large as I thought they would be.
The girls are nowhere to be seen.
“Why’d you do this?” he says quietly, taking one wide step closer to me.
And I take the next step, to close the gap. “I had to,” I say, the words thick in my throat, forcing me to choke them out. Also the smoke, coughing from it. Making it difficult to speak. “She . . . They . . .”
He holds me, and I have his arms around me again. I know what I should do is shove him into the pines and tell him to start running. Get away from me, Jamie. I’m burning. Get away before I burn you, too.
But there’s the way his body feels pressed to mine. The way his fingers brush away my tears when I didn’t even know I was making any tears and the way his mouth says the things that calm the blazing fury in my head and there’s everything we used to have between us, not dead and trampled in the snow, but here, somehow still among the living.
I have his voice in my ear, and it’s not a phantom, not a demon, not a hallucination. His voice that I lock on to so it’s all I’m hearing.
“It’s okay,” is what he’s saying. “Look at me. Lauren, look at me. They’re not real. They’re not real. I’m real. I’m right here.”
— 61 —
WE break apart when we notice a flicker of movement down the hill. There’s a figure in the distance who I think at first must be Fiona herself, come out to lure me away from Jamie and back together with her and only her, the way it was when this night started. But the figure is in dark colors and appears much larger than Fiona ever was, even in my memories.
It’s a man. And I’m afraid I know who it is.
“You called the cops on me!” I hiss at Jamie, horrified, but he appears just as shocked as I am, pulling me off the pathway and into a thicket of trees.
“I didn’t, I swear,” he says, close up against my ear. “Quiet.”
“But you called my mom.” I whisper it as if I can worm my way into his head for the answer, the way I have with the girls. I watch his face as he stares down the hill.
“Yeah,” he admits, “of course I called her.”
“So she must have called them,” I say, indicating the man at the bottom of the hill. “The cops.”
The dark-clad figure’s movements against the white snow are impossible to miss. The man looks up, toward the fires—he doesn’t seem to see us hiding in the trees. Witnessing the fires blazing appears to make him move even faster. But not toward them. Toward something else.
He’s headed for the maintenance shed, along the path where I found my fallen scarf. My stomach sinks when I realize: the footprints in the snow, not an animal’s, a man’s. The one who called himself Officer Heaney. Is that what he said, Officer Heaney, or did I mistake him for something he wasn’t? Did I assume?
Jamie echoes what’s coursing through my mind. “You think that’s the same guy?”
I nod.
“I’ve been thinking. About him. That night. I’m not sure he was an officer . . . A security guard, maybe. But police?”
“My mom said he wasn’t,” I say.
Whatever his name is, whoever he is, we watch him struggling with the locks on the door of the maintenance shed. Pushing the door open, disappearing inside.
“You saw that, too?” I say quietly to Jamie, wanting to be absolutely sure. My eyes can’t be trusted. I’m not positive if any part of me can be trusted from now on.
Jamie only nods, watching. He stays very, very silent. His body straightens and I swear he goes cold, colder than the snow we’re knee-deep in right now.
Near us, the fires continue to burn. But if we walk the path down and out of the campground, we’d have to pass the maintenance shed. I know now that the man isn’t a police officer, and I feel very sure that we don’t want him to see us.
He comes out carrying some things in his arms—papers? A bag, or some kind of blanket? We’re not close enough to see what—and then he turns fast, down a side path and into the trees, which I guess is another way to get on and off the campground that I didn’t know about. He’s gone, just like that. He came here only to take some things from that shed, and he left with the fires still burning.
Jamie’s focus is all on me now, saying we have to go. We have to call 911 about the fires, and we have to get me out of here, and he’s torn, I can tell, not sure what to do first. I’m reeking with kerosene, my face surely blackened by fire smoke and ash—I can tell when I cough and wipe my mouth and a streak of soot comes off on my sleeve. But when we reach the bottom
of the hill, when we get to the turn that will take us to the camp exit, where my van and whatever car Jamie used to get himself here is parked, I stop and ground my feet in. The door to the maintenance shed is no longer locked. In fact, it hangs partly open, as if there’s nothing in there to hide.
Of course I have to see.
Jamie doesn’t understand; he’s still pulling me away, saying we need to get out of there, I’ll be caught, they’ll know I did this, I’ll be arrested for arson, and more things I can’t hear. The fires are burning. And yet I won’t budge.
I feel sure I’m going to find someone inside that shed.
I imagine her: Abby Sinclair, in the flesh. I imagine with so much of me that I even begin to think I can hear her voice. That she’s in there. That I’ve brought her to life. That now she’s calling out—for help, from me.
Fiona Burke was right: Setting the fires has led me to her, the real girl she is apart from her Missing poster. It’s happened as Fiona told me it would. Even Jamie should be able to see.
But now the image before me flickers, and it’s not the dreamscape that comes back to me this time. It’s the questions.
In a rush I think about what the doctor said. Those nurses at the hospital, the ones who couldn’t remember my name, who gave me the pills in the little paper cup. Does this mean they’re right about me?
This girl shouting for my help, she’s a voice in my head—that’s what they’d tell me. They’d tell me Fiona Burke is a figment of my imagination, one grown from a traumatic night in my past and turned real. They’d tell me all the girls are visions I’ve brought to life from the Missing notices I found online and on bulletin boards and in the post office. Those girls may indeed be real, but my dreams that star them, my conversations among them, the memories of theirs I’ve walked through, all of that, every detail and flash of color and cough of smoke, every ounce, is a delusion I’ve concocted. Isn’t that what the doctor would tell me? These girls don’t know I exist. They don’t know I’ve claimed them and made them a part of my life, sleeping with their photocopied faces under my mattress every night. That this is my psychosis.