17 & Gone (21 page)

cowering under her hair, then trying to

run away down an urban sidewalk

patched with ice and trash bags left on

the curb and low, dirty drifts of snow.

Tripping over her shoelaces and trying

to run.

The camera lens pointed down for

some seconds, at the ground, like the

owner of the phone—a guy, his voice

was the loudest—was checking to make

sure it was still recording. It showed the

world crooked and almost upside down,

as if this patch of pitted sidewalk were

really sky, but then it raised up again in a

great blur of motion. He was running

now, running with the phone in hand.

When he stopped, the image stopped,

too. It jittered and held in place, moving

in to show a brick wall.

A girl was standing against it,

shielding her face from view. This was

Shyann.

The last few seconds took a wild

zoom in on her face and held there, so I

could see her: dark skin, big bright eyes,

hair gone white from all the snow and

ice thrown in it.

Then, before the video came to a stop,

she took off. Left the brick wall and

bolted off where the camera couldn’t

find her. At this, the video cut out.

She’d sent me this video to show me

her troubles. So she didn’t have to put it

all into words first. So I’d know why.

A teacher was passing by, and I didn’t

think fast enough to hide the phone.

“Where are you supposed to be, Miss

Woodman?” she asked, then noticed it.

“No phones out during school hours, you

know that.” Then there was her hand, the

long, bony fingers wrapping themselves

around my cell phone and detaching it

from me.

“Hey, that was important,” I said,

reaching for it, but she shook her head

and told me to get to wherever it was I

was supposed to be this period,
that

was what was important.

I stared at her for a moment. I’d been

living for weeks in two places at once:

here. And there, where they were. This

teacher—what did she teach, some slack

class like health?—she had no idea what

was important, or where I most needed

to be.

— — —

When I got my phone back from the vice

principal’s office after last bell, the

video of Shyann Johnston was gone. The

only proof I had that the video did come

to me, that my phone had caught the

electric charge of her first contact, was

the blinking light and the message that

said: UNABLE TO DOWNLOAD. ERROR.

—
29
—

JANUARY
was bringing the most

snow the Hudson Valley had seen in

close to ten years. It also brought more

of those dreams.

The dreams didn’t fit with the falling

snow. They were hot instead of cold,

made of smoke that steamed my lungs

and warmed my skin. But it was that

night when the dream became somehow

even hotter, so real that I burst out of my

bedroom gasping, my arms wildly

waving away the smoke, that I became

aware of my mom, saying I’d been

sleepwalking, saying with a sigh, “Go

back to bed, babe,” like this had

happened before.

I returned to my room to find her.

Shyann Johnston. This time, not a blur on

the miniature screen of my cell phone.

Not an error message. This time for real.

It shocked me even though I should

have been expecting her visit. I didn’t

scream.

I waited until I couldn’t hear my mom

anymore. I held still by the door, my

hand unable to come off the knob where

I’d hung all my bras, sifting through the

underwire while I waited for my mom to

get back to her room. It took some

minutes. All the while
she
breathed in

and out, quick breaths, like she was

more scared than I was.

I couldn’t make out her features in the

darkness, but she seemed cold from the

way she shivered—and her lips, from

what I could see of them, seemed tinged

blue.

I wondered how long she’d been

sitting there. The whole time I slept? Or

had she followed me out of the dream

minutes before?

I sat on the edge of my bed, across

from the seat she’d chosen. My heart

could be felt in my throat, its jogged

beating made from the natural instinct to

panic at this impossible sight in my

room. But also questions, rattling with

questions. And the questions won.

“Was that you?” I made myself ask.

“On my phone?”

Her bluish lips pulled into something

of a sad smile, which I took as an

answer.

Abby and Natalie had both let me into

their minds straightaway, and Fiona

Burke had my mind for the taking. But

Shyann didn’t trust me enough at first.

She probably thought I’d make fun of her

for what I saw in there, call her one of

those names.

Didn’t you see me?
she said.
I saw

you.

I knew she didn’t mean here, in my

desk chair, where the outline of her was

sitting in the dark, my bathrobe folded

over the back of the chair and my school

papers scattered across the desk. She

meant somewhere else, that place where

I’d been before I found myself

sleepwalking, the charred space of the

recurring dream. That’s where she

actually was—in the house, with the

others. That’s where she now had to

stay.

I admitted I had seen her. That had

been her, standing against the wall. In

the dream as in the video; in the video as

in the dream.

“Why are you here? What do you want

from me?” I asked, and then before I

could hear her answer, my mom was

back, knocking on my door and wanting

to know who was I talking to, was I on

the phone? And I was turning away from

the desk chair, turning away from the

outline of the girl in the staticky

darkness, and calling through the door to

my mom to say I was fine. My mom

asked if it was Jamie, and I said yeah,

because he’d be as good an excuse as

any. I just didn’t want her opening my

door.

“Aren’t you two . . . I thought you said

it was over,” my mom said through the

door.

“We’re only talking, Mom.”

My mom did open the door, and in

those first few seconds I thought for sure

she’d see it. The ghost. The girl. Then

she’d know.

She leaned her head in and I noticed

her spot my phone—it was off, sitting on

my dresser all the way across the room,

where I couldn’t have just been talking

on it. She saw that, but she didn’t see

Shyann. “You okay?” she said.

“I’m fine.”

If she knew something, if she could

sense something, she would’ve stayed.

But she only said good night again and

closed my door.

I looked back, and the desk chair held

only my bathrobe, the dark air

shimmering as if my eyes were still

adjusting, drawing shapes of a girl who

wasn’t there anymore, who’d run off,

who’d gone. My mom had scared her

away.

I was alone, and I felt it. There wasn’t

even a breath in my ear.

What did Shyann want from me? Only

this. Only to tell me her story and be

heard.

—
30
—

SHYANN’S
parents had reported

her missing at the end of January about a

year ago, saying she’d run away. “Teen

Flees from Neighborhood Bullies,”

stories online said. “Bullied Teen Still

Not Found.” The bullying “experts”

were called in, the ones who liked to get

gussied up for TV talk shows to

denounce the epidemic sweeping our

schools,

made

worse

by

social

networking and technologies like camera

phones.

Shyann’s

school

principal

was

interviewed, and some teachers. There

was one girl who spoke on camera,

acting as if she had no idea what had

been done to Shyann. “Don’t really

know what happened to that girl,” she

told Channel 4 and Channel 11.

“Nobody was messing with her. Why’d

she run off for no reason?” She smiled a

carefully calculated smile, and I wanted

to reach my arm into the screen and

punch her in the face.

No one but me knew what had

happened to Shyann.

If Shyann could have planned better,

she wouldn’t have gone in winter. New

Jersey in late January was full of frigid

gusts of wind, the kind that swept up

your pant legs, and strung out tears from

your eyes. Snow in the city limits

quickly turned gray; maybe it even came

down from the sky that color. It could be

that it was only white in other towns and

in storybooks, and in the cotton-candy

fluff they pumped out for holiday

movies. Here, there were gray patches

on the sidewalks, the ice making the

pavement so slick someone could slip

and fall if she tried to run.

If it had been warmer—if Shyann

could have held on through the winter,

kept her head down, didn’t let herself

care so much what they all said about

her—she would have gone in spring,

when the city warmed but before the

humidity got the whole area in its

clutches. There were ragged plots of

land behind some of the row houses in

her neighborhood, and if a person didn’t

have the money to hop a train and leave,

a person could survive there without

being detected. If she were smart about

it.

The brush was thickly grown over the

fences, and the trees gave shade. No one

in their right mind went back there—no

one besides dealers, who went in there

to hide stashes, or bums, who went in

there to sleep—but she could see herself

in one of those vacant lots, building a

tree house out of vines and old plywood,

tires and netting, completely concealed

from anyone down on the ground.

Maybe sometimes a couple from the

neighborhood would slip in past the

fences to hook up, but they’d get it done

and be out fast enough. Cops didn’t go

back there. Feral dogs did, and scruffy

cats without collars, but she’d just kick

them down when they climbed her tree.

She’d descend from her perch in the

branches only at night, to scrounge for

food. When she slept, in her tree house

hidden in the middle of her city, she’d

open her eyes to see a blanket of stars.

No one could take that view from her.

Out there was an entire universe, proof

that there was life outside this one, and

every night she’d have a reminder.

She would have gone in spring, if she

could have waited.

She couldn’t wait.

Shyann did have her reasons, and they

weren’t secret. She’d left her parents a

note:

CANNOT take

this anymore!

What is it going

to take to make

u listen!

I am NOT

going back to

that school!

But the note wasn’t found for four and

a half days, because her little brother

balled it up inside his toy dump truck. It

wasn’t until the toy tipped over, spilling

its contents, that Shyann’s mother

recognized her handwriting and unballed

the note to finally see what her daughter

had said.

Truth was, Shyann watched her

family’s windows for hours before she

left the confines of the backyard. Out

there, where the trash cans were stored,

there was a shed that the superintendent

never used. Shyann spent her first night

inside this shed. She bundled up,

keeping a hole uncovered for her two

eyes and nothing more, and every once

in a while she’d stand and peek outside

the shed to her parents’ second-floor

windows. They had no idea she was so

close. Her mom could have called her

name out the window and she would