Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
before taking off?
There had been all that snow as the
night went on, but now ice cascaded
from the dark heavens in whipping,
slapping sheets. Anyone would have
hoped, as Natalie would have hoped had
she been fully conscious, that they
wouldn’t just abandon her. The girl,
Jeannette, did say they’d go get help.
To stay put.
To be okay, okay?
To hang on. They’d be back.
But Paul did not come back. Tim did
not come back. Jeannette did not come
back, either, even though she was the
one who said they would. They climbed
out of the totaled car and slipped into the
storm, retreating on foot to Lila’s house,
where they could call for help.
It could be that they ran through the
ice as fast as they could. Maybe leaving
her behind was all they could think to
do, under the circumstances, with the
drug in their systems and no signal on
any of their cell phones. It could be that
they did care, that they did try, that some
obstacle they couldn’t control was what
kept them away and kept the accident
from being reported for so long.
Or it could be that they knew what
Natalie had longed for, recognized that
burning-cold part of her that made the
offhanded wish and then watched it
happen—and they turned their backs
because of it. Why they never came back
for her is not the part of the story I know.
What I do know is that she was
unconscious for a long time. Then, when
she woke up, she was simply confused.
She emerged from what felt like a
deep sleep, pieces of glass embedded
all over her body. Then she was
crawling
through
the
shattered
windshield and calling out for someone,
anyone, on the vacant road. Discovering
there was no one. The wind whipping
through her hair as she got to her feet.
The crunch of ice under her feet as she
started walking. And nothing after that.
No trace of her. No trail. No girl.
—
26
—
THE
house in my dream howled with
wind. The wind blared through broken
windows; the drapes flapped and
slapped at soot-stained walls.
I was aware of some things, like time.
Like I knew it was January in my waking
life, so maybe it was also January in the
dream. It could be that the dream lived
alongside me, mirroring the weather and
holidays, that as I moved ahead through
life, so did the dream.
But if that was true, the embers from
the fire would have gone dark by now.
If time was the same in here, Fiona
Burke would have grown older. All the
girls would have. From the newspaper
stories I read about her, I knew that
Natalie Montesano would have been
twenty-four.
Natalie found me before I could find
her. She was on the second floor, pale
eyes peeking from between the shrunken
black sticks of kindling that had once
been the banister and, from behind that,
all her hair. She wanted me to come up,
and I wanted her to come down, so we
met, instead, in the middle.
If I’d had my wits about me—if in the
dream I kept my wits—I would have
asked her why she was following me.
Was there something she wanted me to
do? Is that why she kept visiting?
But the gum in my brain could only
function enough to get me close to her.
Close enough to hear her speak.
I didn’t mean to do it,
she said. And
again.
I didn’t mean to do it.
Sometimes
she said the same thing so many times,
I’d lose count.
There was no working electricity in
the house, so we hovered on the delicate
stairs in the darkness.
They never found me, did they?
Natalie asked, and the way she said it,
resigned to the wind in her face, to the
darkness thick with smoke, made me
realize she never expected them to find
her. Not ever.
“No,” I said. “Do you need me to—do
you want me to . . . call someone? Do
something?”
She tilted her head, and I sensed her
cold eyes go dim.
What could you do?
she said. I should not have even asked
such a ridiculous question.
All she wished, if she could have a
wish, if somewhere outside this limbo a
wish from a girl like her could be
plucked from the darkness and granted,
she’d want them to know she hadn’t
meant to cause the accident. That she
was sorry. That she would take it back if
she could.
It was here that the smoke of the
dream seemed to clear and her hair
parted and I could see her face for the
first time since it appeared in my
bathroom mirror. What I saw was
something different, because in here, in
this house, she was her true self. Her
cheeks were still punctured from the
windshield glass, causing her face to
alternately bleed and sparkle. It was
lovely and terrible at the same time.
She turned her back and walked the
rest of the way up the stairs. My eyes
were adjusting to the lack of light and I
saw for the first time that she had
impossibly long hair, hair that had never
known a pair of scissors in its lifetime,
plain and stick-straight and parted down
the middle. And for a moment all she
was out of the darkness was hair, and all
I was in the darkness was another person
who’d done nothing to help her.
She turned in a cloud of frizz.
It’s too late,
she said,
for me.
The
frizz alighted, and the glass shards in her
cheeks shimmered, and the two sharp
needles piercing through it were her
cold eyes.
But it’s not too late . . . for
her.
—
27
—
NOT
too late for
her
. Something told
me this had to mean Abby Sinclair.
I’d seen Fiona Burke in the house, and
now I’d seen Natalie in the house, and
on my way out and into consciousness,
before the dream sifted away like a haze
of smoke tends to do, I caught sight of
another figure. This one stood statue-
still, her back to an ash-gray wall.
No, not Abby—and no matter how
much her disappearance itched at me,
tugging and not letting go, she wasn’t the
only girl who wanted me to have her
story. That’s the thing I’d soon discover:
There were more. So many more.
There were more lost girls out there
than I’d ever imagined, and now they
knew where to find me. Their whispers
came from the shadows, the sound of so
many voices more static than song.
MISSING
SHYANN JOHNSTON
CASE TYPE:
Endangered Runaway
DOB:
November 10, 1994
MISSING:
January 30, 2012
AGE NOW:
18
SEX:
Female
RACE:
African American
HAIR:
Black
EYES:
Brown
HEIGHT:
5’6” (168 cm)
WEIGHT:
153 lbs (69 kg)
MISSING FROM:
Newark, NJ, United States
CIRCUMSTANCES:
Shyann was last seen
leaving school on January 30, 2012, when she
was 17 years old. She has a chicken pox scar
under her right eye. She is believed to have
stayed in the local area.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION
SHOULD CONTACT
Newark Police Department (New Jersey) 1-973-555-
8297
—
28
—
THEY
called her names. They called
her ugly names, and stupid names; any
cruel name they could think of, and there
were many. It didn’t matter what names
they called Shyann—there was no logic
to it. Like, when she gained that weight
over the summer they called her Shamu,
and then she went and lost all the weight,
and they still called her Shamu. They
had no imagination.
For every name she’d been called by
the age of 17, Shyann Johnston could
have forged a fake ID for every sleazy
bar in the city and gotten her drink on,
even though she’d never tasted beer and
she probably wouldn’t like it. She could
have left, too. She could’ve collected
enough passports to travel the world a
dozen times over, escaping so far from
her neighborhood she’d never have to go
back, not to finish out high school, not to
attend her graduation, not to carry her
stuff out of her mom and dad’s and cart it
to somewhere new. She wished she
could do that, but she was stuck there,
with these kids she hated because they
hated her. These kids who made her life
a living nightmare, who followed her
around sometimes, in school and after
school let out, trailing her down the
street, across the crosswalk, pelting her
with whatever they had in their pockets
when she came down the steps of the
library or out of that grocery place on
the corner with a bag of food in her
arms. Her tormentors.
There were enough bad names
swirling through her mind that some
mornings she looked in a mirror and saw
what they saw. How could she not?
She believed the bad things more than
she knew she should. She took in those
words and let them burrow. Let them bat
back and forth inside her brain. She
began to think she’d never be able to spit
them out, even if her mom and dad and
the anti-bullying counselor assigned to
talk to her fourth period told her none of
it was true and building some self-
esteem was how to fight back.
Bullcrap,
Shyann thought. Maybe she
should fight back by blasting them in the
face with the gun her dad hid behind his
porno collection. But she hated guns, and
she didn’t want to go sifting through her
dad’s personal items, besides, so she
fought back by using the most anti-
violent method she knew. She turned tail
and she ran away.
It was soon after I first read about
Shyann that she reached out to me to
confirm it. To show she was one of the
girls.
All I got at first was her voice on my
cell phone. The blur of her body and the
shriek of her voice saying,
Leave me
alone. Stop it already. Stop.
It came from an unidentified caller
that said only “New Jersey.” There were
no words in the message, but a video
was attached.
It was a Monday, lunch period in the
cafeteria. And when the text message
came up on my phone, when I saw there
was a video, I had a feeling, a sense that
I was coming into contact with another
girl. I stood up, holding the phone close
to me so no one could see what was on
the screen. “You can’t have that out, it’ll
get confiscated,” I heard one of my
friends say.
I rushed through the caf, almost
knocking over some kid, causing him to
drop his tray. I’d reached the edge of the
room and I was pushing through the
double doors and I was out in the hall
and then, finally, finally, I was alone and
could hit Play.
Leave me alone,
I heard first, coming
out my phone’s speaker.
Stop it already.
Stop it. Stop.
The camerawork was shaky, the
picture distorted. I couldn’t tell who was
talking except that it sounded like a girl.
The frame showed ground covered in
gray, murky snow. It showed two
running feet. It focused in, for just a
moment, on those feet: a pair of sneakers
in the snow. The laces were yellow,
which seemed wrong somehow, too
cheerful. One set of laces was undone,
trailing.
Here, the camera zoomed out, and the
video exploded with laughter. A whole
group of them out of view, an anonymous
herd hidden where I couldn’t see.
They were taunting her. Calling her
names. And now I could see her, all of
her, better than I could before. She was