I just have to play along whenever my mom’s around.
Now she’s fluffing my pillows. She’s asking me what I think of couscous for dinner tonight. I’m not sure if that’s what we want to eat, but I say it’s fine.
After my mom watches me swallow today’s dose of meds, she says she’ll go make dinner in the kitchen now. But she lingers, at the doorway, blinking her eyes so they don’t water. She does this more and more, this staring, like she can’t believe I exist. It’s how I used to look at the girls, before I got used to them.
“You can go,” I tell her. “I’ll just be in here, reading.” I hold up a novel I’ve barely started because I can’t pay attention to books right now beyond page one. I use my bad arm to lift it, and she flinches, even though it’s just a few Band-Aids now, only to keep the scars covered.
I’ve been wanting to tell her so many things about how lucky I am to have her, but I can’t seem to get out the words, so I haven’t said any of that yet. I only hope she already knows.
She’s gotten a new tattoo, to commemorate this, which is a strange thing to do, but she says it’s a healthy way to handle trauma. It’s not on her chest. That’s still clean—I keep checking. It’s on her arm. So when I see her walk out of the room, I also catch my own face staring back at me, like a stunted anthropomorphic owl perched on her shoulder. I also always check to make sure the beauty mark is on the correct side of her face, so I’m sure the person wearing my image is really her. It says something to me, that she’s done this, tattooed me on her body. It says she’ll be here for me no matter what, and I know for a fact that some of the girls can’t say that about their mothers. Not all girls can.
If I’d been one of the missing, my mom would have never given up on me. Never.
Once she’s gone, I don’t touch the book. I watch the window for some time. She’s closed the window again, when she came up here, but I go over and push it open once more. I have to leave it open. The tree I don’t remember, the one right outside my window, rustles with the lightest touch of wind. It’s an oak, I think. It’s older than I am and will still be here long after me.
There’s a knock on my bedroom door, even though the door is open. I startle, thinking thoughts I shouldn’t. When I look, I see it’s a girl, just a different kind altogether from what I expected.
She steps in the room, the freshman, Rain Patel, who lives nearby and has somehow finagled herself into bringing me packets of homework for next week, even though we barely spoke in school. “Your mom sent me up,” she says.
She gives me a stack of papers and a new book for AP English, though I’m so far behind I’m probably not in advanced placement anymore, and then she bursts out with some random updates, like how Deena Douglas got mono and the wrestling team won some trophy at state.
Then she weaves awkwardly around my room, not wanting to leave yet, lifting things off my dresser and setting them back down. I don’t stop her. But I do flinch when she finds it and holds it in her hand, playing with its smooth, round surface. “What’s this?” she asks.
“Oh, just something. Something I found.”
“Like on the beach? When my mom and my dad and my brother and I went to the shore, I swear I collected, like, hundreds of stones like this. Okay, maybe not hundreds, but you know. I liked ones in prettier colors, though . . . white, blue with speckles, pinkish pink. This one’s just gray.”
In the mirror, for an instant, what she’s holding in the palm of her hand goes bright, like it’s no rock. It dances with a smoky, sultry light. Then it’s dark again.
“Put that down,” I say.
“It’s special,” Rain says, setting it back on the dresser. “I can tell. Where’d you get it?”
It’s so special, I can’t seem to get rid of it. Maybe I’m supposed to keep it, give it a permanent place in my life to commemorate my trauma, like my mom has hers. Or maybe I’m meant to wear it until I know for sure it’s over. Then I can bury it in the yard. Or throw it on the tracks when a freight train goes past, though even the wheels of a train couldn’t crush it. Maybe sometime this weekend I should drive over to the bridge and throw it in the Hudson. No one could get to it then.
“It’s from here,” I say. “From right here in Pinecliff.”
“Oh,” she says, seeming disappointed. She glances in the mirror because that’s where I’ve been staring, and then she comes closer, sitting on the edge of the bed.
She whispers it: “Are you seeing them right now? Your mom told my mom, so I know about the, you know.” Her dark eyes are very wide, the long lashes creating a dusting of spiderwebs on her cheeks. I can tell by the way she’s edged forward, inching along the end of my bed, that she wants me to say I’m seeing them. The lost girls.
I shake my head.
“Oh,” Rain says. “Okay.”
Her face falls. I think she’s the only person who believes that I’ve seen ghosts. She must think I’m psychic, a medium for the undead or something, like the blue woman on the elevator all those months ago might say we are. For this, I like Rain a tiny bit more. I look at her carefully. She’s so young, so open. All I can see on her face is that any possible thing in the world could happen to her—her fate is completely unwritten. That’s not me being psychic; that’s me being kind and not corrupting her with what I know.
There’s another knock on the door, and then he’s here. He seems surprised to find Rain in my room with me, also disappointed he hasn’t found me alone. But he still comes in; he still leans up against the wall beside the bed.
There’s a difference in what Rain believes about me, and what Jamie believes. Rain wants to believe any wild thing to the point that I could tell her there is, right this very moment, a shrunken shadow crawling on the ceiling directly over her head, about to bound down to her shoulders, about to come and curse her future, and she’d believe it because she wants to believe. But she only wants the horror-movie shiver, so delicious because it can be turned off when the lights go up and the movie’s over.
Jamie believes that I believe, and that’s all that matters to him. He knows what the doctors have said; my mom told him. Besides, I can tell by the way he looks at me sometimes, the unsaid diagnosis scuttling beneath his lips. How terrifying that must be for him, to not know for sure what’s happening to me yet.
“Oh hi, Jamie,” Rain says, blushing. “I should go.”
She slips out and pulls the door closed with her, so now it’s just Jamie and me.
He edges closer until he’s beside the bed. I move my book so he can climb up, and he does, leaning against the pillows propped up behind me so our shoulders touch. “So glad you’re home,” he says. He takes my bad arm and holds my hand.
“Me too,” is all I say. I don’t apologize again about the arson charges; he’s told me to stop bringing it up. I don’t say how even though I’m home from the hospital, that doesn’t mean I’m cured. Because I’ll never be the way I was before, and there’s a reason I know this, there’s a reason I hold it like a whisper in my ear, hearing it again and again, even when I tell myself not to listen. There’s a reason.
“How’re you feeling?” he asks, his fingers laced in my fingers, his wrist against my bad wrist.
“Tired,” I say. “It’s the meds. I don’t know if they’re helping, except that they make me tired. So tired I can’t even read this book.”
He sits up straighter. “They’re helping,” he says. “They’re not helping?”
“Sure. They’ve helped a lot.” I turn to the window.
“What’s out there?” he asks. “What are you looking at?” Whenever I look at anything, anything at all, he’s going to ask me what I’m seeing. I need to get used to it.
“Just that tree,” I say. And I am gazing at the tree I have no memory of standing so close to my house in the backyard, the tree brushing its branches against my window. How is it I never realized a tree was right beside my bedroom before? A whole tree?
I don’t want to say what else I’m
seeing.
“Did you find out about any others?” I ask, changing the subject.
He hesitates. “You sure you want to know?”
“Always.”
Jamie’s been helping me. My mom keeps track of what sites I visit on the computer, but he understands my need to know what happened to them.
“Shyann Johnston,” he says, pulling a printout from his backpack to show me. “She made it home. See?”
I take in a breath, holding my mind very still in fear of its reaction, as I read the story he’s printed out about her. Apparently she won a prize at the senior-class science fair, and this is dated just last month, which means she couldn’t have frozen to death in a vacant lot in Newark, she couldn’t have died. It’s always a beautiful thing when a girl I thought had found a tragic end turns out to still be alive. I feel choked up about it, in my throat, and I hold my hands there, hovering, letting the relief sink in.
I felt the same when I learned about Yoon-mi Hyun and Maura Morris, who ran away to Canada and did make it up there together before they got sent home.
Some girls don’t have such good ends. Hailey Pippering’s remains were found in a landfill during the time I was in the hospital. And Kendra Howard was pronounced deceased even though she hasn’t washed ashore yet. The lake is deep, and town officials say they may never find her body.
Whenever I learn a bad thing about one of the girls, it breaks me up some more. Which might be why Jamie usually only brings me the good stories, the happy ends.
Besides, I won’t need his help soon. I’ll have private access to a computer again, and I’ll be able to take up the searching. I’ll keep checking, with or without him.
Silently, to myself, I’ve vowed to check up on all the girls. Whether we had a true connection or not doesn’t much matter to me. These are real girls. They’re important. The runaways, too, even if the police don’t act like it. Even if the girls’ families don’t care and don’t go looking, I vow to. These girls matter. I need to know what happened to every last one of them.
“Thank you,” I tell Jamie. Knowing about Shyann has lifted my spirits a little, and I find myself turning to the window again, almost smiling.
Jamie’s eyes follow mine, but he says nothing. It’s best if he doesn’t ask what I’m seeing out that window or what I’m thinking.
Because I’m thinking how I know what’s going to happen. I couldn’t see Shyann’s true fate, not in the real world, but mine is another story.
The therapist will stop asking me questions about the lost girls, and I’ll stop bringing them up. It’s safer that way. Because even though the pills I swallow have taken the girls from me, it’s not like I’m alone. Not entirely.
There’s one girl who’s always here and always will be. Even through the Brillo Pad walls the meds create in my mind—through which I can sometimes only see her in the space of the tiniest, fuzziest pinhole—she’s here. She stays with me because she never felt at home in that house next door.
We’ll grow up together, though Fiona Burke will stay perpetually 17, with the red dye never inching out of her dark roots, the FU never fading from her frayed jeans. She’ll wear the scowl she always has; her mouth has grown into the shape of it, even though she’s softened on me and I can make her smile sometimes.
That’s something I can be sure of. I can see my life with Fiona cascading on into the distance, and I’m not so sure about my life with Jamie. We’re back together, but I don’t know how long he’ll end up staying.
Fiona will stay. She’ll be with me on my first day back to school next week, and she’ll keep me company during summer school so I don’t have to repeat the eleventh grade. Sometimes she’ll whisper the wrong answers to me during trig tests, but mostly she’ll sleep through class, as she did when she was a student.
If there were a way to sever the invisible ball-and-chain that connects her to me, and me to her, she’d be the first one there with the chain saw.
Fiona Burke will continue to be with me next year. Hers will be the first face I’ll see on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, before I even look in the mirror to confirm I can still see my own. She won’t make a big deal of it, even though my mom will bake up my favorite box-mix cake and bring out the balloons. But Fiona will be happy for me, to know I survived. I’ll catch her staring at me, not only with jealousy, because she knows she’ll always have a place at the table with me, even if my mom doesn’t see her in the third chair and doesn’t set out an extra piece of cake.
Fiona will join me at prom, meeting me in the bathroom when I go in to touch up my eyeliner, and she’ll try and fail to keep quiet when Jamie tries to slow dance with me after spilling the spiked punch all over his rented tux.
She’ll be in the back row during my graduation ceremony; when I cross the stage she’ll be one among many who will cheer my name.
We’ll spend years together, Fiona and I, like childhood friends who grow old side by side. Some might say that means I’ll spend my life being haunted. Or that I won’t ever be better because of her. Either way, whatever the explanation, I know I’ll forever hear her voice thrumming through my head.
Still, I can’t blame her for staying with me. She doesn’t have a life of her own anymore; the only way she can live is to walk alongside mine.
There will come a day, decades from now, when I’m again in a bed much like this one. I might have cancer, I might be lucky and simply be dying of old age, I can’t know that part of my fate yet. What I do know is that I won’t be alone for it.
I’ll look across the room and there will be the 17-year-old girl I’ve known all my life. Not a wrinkle or a mark of age on her. She’ll want to jump on the bed. She’ll want to poke the home-care aide with her needle and eat all my Jell-O before I can get to it. She’ll simply be trying to lift my mood before I go. Because Fiona Burke will never grow up and she won’t want me to, either.
This is what I don’t tell Jamie. He’s looking out the window right now, and he doesn’t even see her.
She heaves a sigh, stretches out her arms, and cracks her knuckles, then balances on the branch of the oak tree to climb inside the room. She eyes the two of us sitting on the bed together and stays perched on the windowsill, not willing to get any closer.
You’re not going to do it while I’m here watching, are you? Fiona says.
I feel my cheeks go hot and shake my head.
Can’t we go out somewhere and have some fun or something? God! I’m so bored. You were in that hospital so long, I thought I’d go INSANE, she says. She giggles a bit at the last word. She enjoys using it around me.
“You sure you’re all right?” Jamie says. “Do you want to get out of here, go for a walk or something? Get a coffee? Take a drive?”
“Maybe later,” I answer them both.
Fiona sighs again, loudly, letting me know her deep discontent, but Jamie leans forward and brushes my hair from my face, and by the way he’s sitting, his shoulders are blocking the view of Fiona at the windowsill. “Hey,” he says, “we don’t have to go anywhere. We can stay right here.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Let’s do that.”
The vanity mirror over my dresser reflects this scene back to me:
Jamie with his arm over my shoulders and his other hand keeping ahold of my hand. A lock of curly hair drops forward into his face like he can’t ever stop it from doing. Beside him is a girl with choppy, dark hair with lighter roots growing in, and her eyes are wide open, and her cheeks are a little hollow, though there’ll be couscous for dinner later and she’ll eat two plates. She’s wearing black and gray, like she does most days, and the room she’s in is brightly lit by the sun streaming through the window. There are no shadows. There are no voices. There is no flame-haired visitor on the windowsill waving an arm and giving the finger. There’s just a perfectly normal girl with a boy in her bed and a book on her lap and no hint of what’s kept hidden away in her mind where no one can see it. There’s a girl.
&
nbsp; She’s 17, and she’s still here.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel evolved as I was writing, leading me to discover what I was meant to be telling just as Lauren discovers the truth of what she’s seeing amid the scattered stories of the missing girls. So much of the ultimate story for 17 & Gone stemmed from my own research into experiences of teens living with mental illness and the visions Lauren could be seeing and the voices she could be hearing.
There is no single way to portray the symptoms or experiences of a teenager facing early-onset schizophrenia or any mental illness—and I can only hope that my portrayal of Lauren’s story will come across as distinct to her, and most of all respectful and true.
If you are worried that you may have warning signs or symptoms that might prove to be a mental health problem, please consider reaching out and talking to someone and getting help.
If you are thinking of running away or if you have left home and don’t know how to go back, there are resources that can help you and even assist in finding a safe place for you to go.
Here are some resources in the United States that could be a lifeline when you need one:
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI): A national grassroots organization providing resources for teenagers and adults affected by mental illness. www.nami.org • Information Helpline: 1-800-950-NAMI.
National Runaway Switchboard: A toll-free number to call if you’re thinking of running away from home, have run away and want to go back home, or have a friend you want to help. www.1800runaway.org • 24-hour Crisis Line: 1-800-RUNAWAY.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: Free and confidential support for anyone facing a suicidal or emotional crisis. www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org • 24-hour Hotline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Safe Place: A national youth outreach program for teenagers and runaways who need a safe place to go. nationalsafeplace.org • If you are in trouble or need help, text SAFE and the location where you are (street address/city/state) to 69866.