The impossible green of summer.
I turned away fast and slid down the tiled wall—warm with humidity against my back—until I was sitting on the shower floor, beside the drain.
“I’m in here,” I said aloud, letting the words echo and find their way to whoever was also there, listening.
I became aware of her breathing, as if she’d sidled up the tiled wall beside me, her bare, bug-bitten shoulder millimeters from mine.
Her story rose up in me, fully formed and practically kicking.
The summer she stayed here, Abby did sleep in that bed in Cabin 3, where I’d found her name and Luke’s name. She did have the bunk pushed closest to the farthest wall and below the last of the windows. She slept curled into a ball. The pillow in the plastic pouch still on the bed was the pillow she’d hug between her knees.
I would soon know more and more. Like how when Abby left camp late that July, no new girl came to claim her bed. Though Cabin 3 was minus one counselor-in-training with Abby gone, they had to make do; it was too late to fill her spot. The girls at camp were simply told she’d quit. The counselor in charge of Cabin 3 removed Abby’s clothes in their neatly rolled stacks from her cubby and packed them into the paisley suitcase stowed under her bed to return to her family, who didn’t seem surprised she’d run away. None of the counselors wanted to tell the kids that she’d run off into the night with only the clothes from Color War on her back. That she’d left no note to say why. No explanation.
Even so, the girls in Cabin 3 suspected more. They avoided uttering her name and stayed away from the things she’d touched. No one took advantage of the extra cubby or used the tropical shampoo she’d left behind in the communal bathroom. Abby’s bed was in a prime location, more private than the beds in the middle, yet no one wanted to sleep there after she had, as if it had been cursed.
The only way I knew I’d gotten up and started walking was the slap-slap-slap that followed me as I went.
The bed was just as I’d left it, but on the mildewed pillow trapped inside the plastic case was something I hadn’t noticed before. My hand reached out and unzipped the pouch. My fingers plucked it from the stained surface of the pillow and drew it out. It dangled before me.
A single strand of hair.
From Abby’s head.
I knew this fact like I knew all the other things I knew. Besides, the piece of hair couldn’t be mine—due to its light brown color and the spring to its spiraling curl. My own hair was dyed black and coarsely straight.
Something made me sniff it, some disgusting level of curiosity. I knew what it would smell like even before I lifted it to my nose, the faint but acrid hint of smoke as if this piece of hair had been held over a lighter and set ablaze. Everything connected to Abby seemed to smell like that.
I left Cabin 3, and with the slap-slap-slap of the flip-flops on my bare feet I wandered out again to the campground, feeling the hot summer sun on my shoulders. I lifted my hair and tied it in a knot. The sky was bright blue and dotted with fluffy, drifting clouds. The sounds of girls shrieking, splashing carried over from the lake in the near distance.
There were traces of her everywhere. Abby peed in these woods. She trampled these flowers. Here she scratched at a mosquito bite. Here she scratched at the same mosquito bite until she bled.
The spot on the campground where she first saw him was hidden from view by pine trees, but I found it from the way the branches grew sparser there and how the ground gave way, as if I’d seen it in pictures. Or, more, as if she were handing over this memory so it didn’t have to be hers any longer. So now it could be mine.
He was on his motorbike, which you could hear way out in the trees, a sawing sound that made it seem like the whole forest was under siege. None of the girls in Abby’s group out picking wildflowers knew what the noise was, or where it was coming from, until there he appeared atop that speeding, screaming machine. He sailed over a hump of tree roots and skidded to a solid stop in the clearing, front tire braking inches from a girl’s toes.
“This is private property,” one girl said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I live here,” Luke Castro said. As he said it, I remembered. Luke Castro from school did live somewhere around here—I was pretty sure.
The glare from the sun, or from her memory, made it so I had a hard time looking directly at his face, but it was him, the same guy from school.
He was checking out Abby in her camp-issue tank top. Out of all the girls there, he eyed her and only her—because she was older than the others, because she’d gathered up the most flowers, or simply because she had on the tightest shirt.
“I live down the hill, that way,” he said.
He gestured out into the trees, though none of the girls knew where that could be, or what direction. Was it toward Pinecliff or away from Pinecliff? Near the train tracks or far from them? The counselors hadn’t taught the girls how to judge direction by the sun or to use a compass yet, and Abby should have figured out how to make this a teaching moment. But she couldn’t care less.
Abby had come here to train to be a camp counselor. On her application, she’d written that she loved kids. She didn’t actually love kids; she’d wanted an excuse to get away from Jersey for the summer. She had no idea how much she’d hate kids after just the first week, after all the yelling through megaphones; eating slop, or trying to; burning through her arm muscles rowing those canoes. Right then she wished the girls would just wander off into the woods and entertain themselves with twigs and pinecones or something so she could have a moment alone with this stranger here.
But the girls were telling Luke to get off camp property, and he did, with one last glance at Abby.
These girls couldn’t know what was communicated in that glance and in Abby’s. The Hey, the Hey yourself. The What’s up with all the weeds? The Oh my God, don’t even ask. The What’re you doing with these losers anyway? The No freaking clue, I’m sooooo bored. The Yeah?, the Yeah. The Then maybe you should come out later and hang with me.
Luke Castro rode off, his motor buzzing in the trees all around them like he could come crashing back and run them over at any moment, crushing toes this time, leaving carnage. But he didn’t come back, not that day.
All Abby remembers is how she said, under her breath, “Who was that?” And how she had no idea she’d find out soon enough. She’d find out.
— 7 —
SHE wanted to show me another memory of hers before I left the campground that night, something more about Luke.
That was Abby’s giggle scattering in the air like pine needles. We were rolling. It was too dark to see, and I’d lost track of my flashlight, but I could feel the warm grass through my shirt, the mud and leaves leaking through my clothes. The ground had given way to some kind of hill, and the decline went on until it stopped at a soft bottom, where another body dropped next to us, as if this other person had gone rolling down the hill, too. Even though I felt connected to her—she and I, me and Abby—I was also aware that there were just two bodies at the bottom of that hill: the boy, who was Luke, and the girl, who was Abby. I was only watching.
She took his hand then—it felt like I, too, took his hand—and she held it tight. She spit out pine needles and smoothed the leaves from her hair, even though it was too dark for him to see her hair, and she said—she said it and my mouth echoed the shape of it: “Oh my God, I totally love you, Luke.”
It had just come out. She didn’t mean to say the words out loud, but something from the fall down the hill made her tongue loosen. Because there it was now, a creature hovering over them in the night, and she couldn’t unsay it.
I didn’t hear what he said back, and at first I assumed that my hearing was going in and out of this memory, but it wasn’t that I was losing sound and connection. It was that he didn’t say anything. She’d told him she loved him and he didn’t bother to respond. He silenced her with his mouth instead.
The last time I was kissed,
it was Jamie, who tasted like cinnamon, which was the way I was used to a boy tasting.
But being kissed by Luke wasn’t what I was used to. He didn’t use his tongue at first, and that made Abby want him to. He teased with his lips, pressing his mouth to her neck. One side of her neck, below her ear, then the other. Then down her neck, down and down to her collarbone, and lower, to between her breasts, which is when I realized her shirt was wide open. Then he brought his lips up again, climbing, climbing, and his tongue entered her mouth, finally, and she tasted him, I tasted him, and he tasted us. It was sweet, a faint and faraway sweetness, and it was much wetter than I expected, so much so, I had to wipe my mouth off after. So did she.
He wanted more than the kiss, but the night wasn’t over yet. Up above, at the top of the hill, was Abby’s borrowed bicycle. I know this like I knew the grass was tickling the backs of her thighs because she had on shorts, but it was too dark to see if they were the red ones with the white racing stripes or another pair of shorts. If this was the night or another night.
And then his mouth left hers and she had a moment to catch her breath. She pulled back, dropping her weight to the soft ground, the grass wet with dew from the night, and gazed up to the darkened sky over her head. All those stars: the very same ones I was seeing almost five months later.
This was what Abby remembered. She liked returning to it to keep herself from thinking of what came after.
— 8 —
JAMIE was shaking me. He had me by the shoulders and was calling my name, his voice cracking, like this had been going on for a long time. He’d taken my coat—which had somehow detached itself from my body—and was holding it over me, like a blanket. My skin was slick with chilled sweat underneath the wool coat, my chest sticky with it, and my buttons were all undone, my shirt flapping open. I put the buttons back together as quickly as I could and wrangled myself out from under Jamie’s grip, so I could stand up by myself.
I was at the bottom of a hill that was covered in snow. There was no bicycle at the top, and no Luke Castro.
“Did we just—” I said, motioning at my mouth, then his mouth. My lips felt swollen from kissing, wet.
“What? No!” Jamie said, standing up beside me and trying to help me get my two arms into my coat. “You were freaking out. You ran. You started stripping in the snow, then you fell down the hill. Don’t you remember?”
I didn’t know what would be worse . . . if I told him I did, or if I told him I didn’t.
I was saved by a harsh light in my face. Not Abby’s memory of a blazing summer’s day come to distract me, but an actual light, vivid and aimed straight.
A police officer was waving a flashlight at Jamie and me. “Those your two vehicles out by the front gate?” his voice shot out.
Jamie hesitated. Then he said, “Yeah. The car’s mine. The van’s hers.”
My hands were cold; that’s what I was thinking. And my ears. So cold. I must have lost my hat when rolling down the hill, and my scarf somewhere, too. My legs were soaked and streaked in ice and snow. I had ice in my hair; I had ice up my nose.
“This is private property,” the officer said, averting his eyes while I adjusted my coat and cleaned myself up. “There are signs up all over the fence.”
Now that he was closer, his light bright enough to illuminate the whole area, I tried to make out the name on his uniform, but I couldn’t. He was a dark blur, the brim of his hat keeping his eyes in shadow.
“We were just going,” Jamie said, taking me by the elbow.
But I was realizing something: the opportunity here before me. Abby wouldn’t want me to pass it up. I found my voice. “Officer . . .” I waited for him to give his name.
“Heaney,” he said, after a long moment.
“Officer Heaney, we’re actually here for a reason”—I felt Jamie tense up beside me, alert and on guard—“we, I mean, I just wanted to see what was out here. Since the summer.”
“Uh-huh,” the officer said, putting out a hand. “ID.”
He made us open our wallets and show our driver’s licenses. Jamie wore a deathly stare in his photo, like he’d been planning to set a pipe bomb in the DMV. I looked inexplicably sad in mine, which was strange, as I remember being pretty happy that day, the day I got my driver’s license.
Seeing our IDs—that we were both 17, and both local—the officer seemed satisfied enough, though he still wanted us off the property. He said he’d remember us. He’d remember and arrest us for trespassing next time.
He motioned for us to start walking, ushering us toward the gated entrance, where we’d parked.
I found myself lagging so I could keep pace with the officer, leaving Jamie alone up ahead, the officer’s flashlight a white-hot force against his narrow back.
“Officer Heaney,” I said, “were you around here over the summer? When the girl went missing?”
With the light on Jamie and not on me, I could see more of the officer’s face now, making him less of a uniform and more of a person. Only, Officer Heaney was nondescript in the way middle-aged men often are, with their bloated, stubbled faces and their shedding heads. I wouldn’t recognize him out of uniform. He could be anyone.
I noticed Jamie slow down a little ahead of us, listening. But I had to ask, even if Jamie heard me.
“Which girl?” the officer said in a low voice.
He said it like there could be a great many girls, a whole jumble of thin, coltish legs and heads of long, blown-out hair, and I could select the one I most wanted from a model casting. He was only testing me. He knew which girl.
“The girl who stayed here over the summer,” I said, and then let the name stumble off my lips for the first time. “Abby Sinclair. Abigail Sinclair, I mean. The girl who disappeared.”
The officer was moving us quickly off the property. As we passed the naked flagpole, its rope hanging slack and then flowing upward with the wind, I caught Jamie glancing back at me. His face had gone bone-white in the beam of the flashlight, a piece of understanding settling there. He now knew why I’d stopped the van, that I’d planned this and kept it from him.
The officer had stopped mid-step, as if trying to decide what he could say, but when he spoke, it was with recognition and with authority, like I didn’t have a legal right to ask for her by name. “Yes,” he said. “Abigail Sinclair. Why are you asking about her?”
I didn’t like the way he said her name.
“She’s an”—I was avoiding Jamie’s gaze—“old friend of mine. I heard she was up here this summer, and then I heard what happened, and I thought I’d come here and look around . . .”
The officer nudged me to walk faster. We’d passed the compost now and were coming up close to the front gate. “From what I understand,” he said, “you’re looking in the wrong place.”
I shivered from the slap of a cold breeze. My feet had gone numb, and I was almost surprised to look down and see I did still have my boots on, and not Abby’s flip-flops, because I could have sworn my bare toes were buried in snow.
“What do you mean, the wrong place?”
“The girl ran off. Her family knows that. Everyone knows that.”
“You’re wrong. She didn’t run away.”
“You sure about that?”
I was, all at once.
We’d reached the chain-link fence out front. He held it open with an arm out level with my chest, and there seemed to be a fraction of a second when he was keeping me from stepping through the broken gate.
“I know her,” I said lamely. “I know she wouldn’t.”
Jamie spoke up, surprising me. “Didn’t anyone see anything? Where she went? Who with? Anything?” He gave me a sidelong glance, assuring me we’d talk about this later, but for now he’d go along with it.
“And did you ever search the area?” I added. “The woods? Did you look for her bicycle, did you—”
“If you’re only curious and that’s all this is, I’ll tell you,” the officer said, looking on
ly at Jamie’s face, I noted, not mine. He revealed a couple details I didn’t remember from the Missing poster, and I drank them in, holding them close for later.
It was Abby’s grandparents, her legal guardians, who said she ran away—that’s what they told camp officials and the police—and that’s why there was no urgency to propel anyone to keep searching.
The officer pointed off the campground toward the old highway, now called Dorsett Road. A witness—he didn’t share who—had seen Abby take a right on her bicycle down this road, and that was the last anyone saw of her. He shook his head like there was nothing that could be done. She’d done it to herself.
Besides, I could sense him thinking, what was she? She was only a 17-year-old girl. And 17-year-old girls vanish all the time.
Soon after this the officer closed the gate, made sure we got in our separate vehicles, and then took off. He drove an unmarked car without any lights on top, and I wondered if he’d been off-duty when he noticed our cars parked here. But as soon as his taillights were swallowed by the night, Jamie got out of his car and strode over to my van.
“What was that?” he said, taking a seat on the passenger side. My engine was idling to get the heat running, and he cupped his hands to the vent.
And here was another opportunity for me to tell him. Here—in the quiet night, minutes after I wore Abby’s body, or she wore mine, when the two of us together rolled in a bed of pine needles, in the arms of the boy she said she loved. Now that Jamie knew she existed, I could have told him how connected I felt to her, this stranger who wasn’t a stranger to me.
I could have. But all I said was, “I saw her Missing poster. I looked up this place. I was . . . curious.”
(I did not tell him I had the Missing poster, folded as many times as a piece of paper could be folded, in my backpack, near his feet. I felt Abby in the trees, and I felt Abby in the air. I felt the exhale of her breath through the heating vents, and I felt the inhale in my head. She didn’t want me to show Jamie, and what she wanted felt far more important than what I wanted.)