17 & Gone (32 page)

lights of the ambulance dancing over me,

easing out all the bad red, and I heard

her talking to the EMTs. She’d say you

send that girl away.

You send her away.

AND THEN

—
49
—

IT
takes some time before I realize the

words they’re saying aloud are meant for

me.

“We’re going to take care of you here,

Laura, hon. Just rest.”

“I think her name is Lauren.”

“Sorry.
Lauren
. Your mom brought

you in to us. Do you remember? Do you

remember what happened? What you

did?”

“Have you ever tried to hurt yourself

before, Lauren? Lauren?”

“All right then, I see you want to

sleep. Just sit up and swallow this.”

“She won’t sit up.”

“Just help her. There. Let her lean on

your arm. There, Lauren. Here you go.

This will make you comfortable. Good.

Swallow.”

“Who was that you were talking to

just now, Lauren?”

“Did she say something? I didn’t

hear.”

“She’s talking to those girls again . . .

What girls, Lauren? I don’t see any

girls.”

“Let’s leave her be. Don’t encourage

her. Let’s just let her sleep.”

The two nurses shuffle out the door.

They leave it open—it’s a door that

doesn’t seem to ever be able to close—

and they wander back, every so often,

checking on me as I pretend to sleep.

Soon the pill they had me swallow

makes it impossible to keep pretending.

The pill makes the sleeping turn real.

My head thickens with the quiet. The

lost girls who’ve come out to visit with

me slip under the bed to hide. Or they’ve

gone somewhere else, behind the

curtains maybe, where the shadows

gather—all I know is I can’t see or hear

them anymore.

The next time my eyes close, I can’t

get the lids to lift open.

This is the psych ward of the hospital

and I don’t know how many days I’ve

been inside.

—
50
—

I
don’t dream. I don’t wake up coughing,

and I can’t smell smoke.

I’ve been across the river, in the

hospital’s adolescent psychiatric ward,

for what feels like a week’s worth of

nights, though it could be fewer and it

could be more, I’m not sure. The sun

streaming through the window feels like

afternoon sun long left over from

morning, or the dreary start to a new

day. I’m in a long, narrow room, in a

long, narrow bed against a wall. The

bed on the opposite wall is empty. So is

my head.

There isn’t a voice rattling around in

my mind that doesn’t belong to me—

which, after all that’s happened, is a

foreign and noticeable thing. Whatever

they give me here at night knocks me out

and steals the dreams away, also the

voices. I’m wiped clean and returned to

who I was before I ever spied Abby

Sinclair on the side of the road.

Except for the bandage wrapped

around my left arm.

I don’t want to unpeel the bandage to

see what I did. I lie still on the bed and

wait. My limbs are heavy, and I can’t

seem to do much else. Surely, if I wait

long enough, one of the girls will visit

me.

Someone has to.

But no lost girl enters the room, and

no lost girl finds her way through the

quiet caverns of my head to lift her lips

to my ear.

I need to get out of bed and go out

there, see if someone can get my mom on

the phone. She’ll believe me if I could

only get a chance to talk to her. She’ll

come right away and she’ll take me

home.

On the ride back, we’ll laugh over

this. We’ll be sure I’m far more careful

in the future with mirrors and fingernail

clippers. If I missed too much school,

she’ll cover for me as she has before.

Maybe we’ll say I came down with the

flu.

No one will ever have to know this

even happened.

—
51
—

MY
mom seems afraid to look at me

and yet all she can do is look at me, so

there’s the constant swish-swishing of

her head as it turns toward me, then

away, toward me, away. Not to mention

her hands, which keep smoothing the

hair from my face, or grabbing my

fingers and squeezing, or rubbing circles

upon circles on my back between my

shoulder blades even though I’d rather

she didn’t keep touching me right now.

She clears her throat. “They’re going

to keep you here through the weekend,

Lauren,” she says. “Then we’ll . . . we’ll

decide more on Monday.”

When I speak it’s my voice that comes

out, but it’s slower than normal, which

makes me think my ears have gone bad.

The meds they keep giving me whisper

through my system the way the voices

used to, but in dumb, dull sounds I can’t

translate. “Monday?” I say. “I think I

have a big exam on Monday. I can’t stay

through Monday.”

“I’ll bring your schoolbooks and

whatever you need from home, if that’s

really what you want. But are you sure? I

don’t want you worrying about school

after, after . . .”

She can’t say it.

“I didn’t try to kill myself, Mom. It

was an accident. I told you.”

“Do you remember what you said?”

she asks tentatively. “About Fiona

Burke?”

I sharpen. “No. What did I say about

Fiona?”

“You were . . . It sounded to me like

you thought you were talking to Fiona.”

I shake my head. “I don’t remember

that at all.”

She changes the subject. “How do you

feel?”

“Fuzzy.”

“Does it . . .” She points at the arm.

“Hurt?” I finish for her.

She nods.

“Not really. It’s barely even a scratch.

Can’t I go home with you? I have shifts

at work all this week.”

“No, you don’t. I called in for you

already. And it wasn’t a scratch,

Lauren.”

Now she’s not meeting my eyes at all.

She looks like she’s about to burst into

tears. She turns from me in the chair to

survey the common room we’re sitting

in, this sad space meant for sad people.

Blinds block out as much sunlight as

possible,

and

puke-and-blood-proof

couches and chairs covered in scratches

aim away from one another, making it

possible for a dozen people to sit in this

room at once and not have to talk to one

other person, which is a miracle in

furniture arrangement. A large woman

guards the common area from inside an

adjoining office. The window between

her desk and the rest of the room has a

shutter over it that can be closed, so if

the place falls to chaos, she can abandon

ship and blockade herself in.

A boy shuffles past the common room

just in time for my mom to see him—

how both of his arms are covered in the

kind of bandages that cover just my left

forearm—and how slowly his legs

move, barely lifting off the floor as he

inches down the tiled corridor. He

walks like he’s been filled with cement.

Maybe that’s what’s in the pills they

make us swallow here. Carefully I lift

my arm to see how heavy it is, and then

with a
thunk
I watch it drop back down

onto my lap, the way a sack of cement

might drop.

When my mom turns back in my

direction, a perfectly positioned beam of

sunlight from between the blinds catches

her in the face. It lights her up as if

someone in the clouds has aimed a

spotlight down to reveal something of

significance to me.

Pay attention,
it says.

My mom’s beauty mark again. Just

like the other night, it’s on the wrong

side of her face and I’m left wondering.

Am I looking at her in a mirror? Has my

memory gotten dislodged and confused?

Or is this woman—this beautiful woman

with the mark on the wrong cheek, the

one who keeps nervously touching me,

the one who locked me away supposedly

for my own good—is this woman even

my mother?

I want her to speak. I need to hear her

voice. Then I’ll know.

She sighs. She says, “I’m so sorry I

made you feel like you couldn’t come to

me, Lauren.”

For a second I think she called me

Laura, like I swore I heard the nurse call

me the other night. But no. No, she

knows my name, and she’d never make

such a simple mistake as that. It won’t be

so easy.

I’m second-guessing myself again. I’m

not sure who she is now: the one I know

and have always known, or someone

pretending to be that person, trying to

trick me. I decide to take careful stock of

her tattoos, but she’s wearing a sweater,

and the sweater strategically covers

them up with overlong sleeves and a

bulky turtleneck that doesn’t allow even

a peek of vine to be seen. Of the birds on

her neck, only two can be made out, the

last two closest to her ear.

Should I ask her to take off her

sweater? To undress and prove herself

to me?

Then I remember how I tore off her

shirt in the bathroom the other night and

how frightened she seemed of me after,

like I’d attacked her with claws out and

teeth bared, ready to rip into her skin. I

remember the sight of her chest. Her

breasts. Her ribs. Her stomach. And I

hang my head, ashamed.

“What?” she says. “Tell me what

you’re thinking, honey.”

“You should probably go,” I say. “I’m

having weird thoughts right now.”

“Like what weird thoughts?”

“I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Are they telling you what to think?”

She’s leaned forward and whispered

this, like someone might overhear. “Did

they tell you not to tell me?”

I think at first by “they” she means the

doctors, but then I get it. She’s

regurgitating rote from those case studies

in her books again. She used to make me

read them aloud to her so she could

guess the right answer and prep for her

exams. Because that’s the kind of

question you’d ask a patient you’re

trying to categorize, ticking off all her

symptoms until the winning diagnosis

dings and lights up the game board. If I

tell her that the alien-vampires who’ve

come down from the galactic heavens

are telling me what to think and what to

do and what to say, she’ll win the prize

refrigerator.

I give a tiny shake of my head. That’s

the only answer I can offer right now.

“Oh, Lauren,” she says, a hint of pity

in her voice. Her mouth crumples,

showing me how defeated this makes her

feel. She asks if I need anything from

home and I describe what she can bring

me: my textbook, for the test Monday;

some books to read, anything really; my

gray notebook with the doodles on the

front and I think I left it on my desk; my

eyeliner and the rest of my makeup; more

socks.

Then I make myself ask, “Did they

call you yet? The police? About Abby?”

What I know from my last night at

home—and my last visit to the house

before Trina left me her knife—is that

Abby

might

still

be

out

there

somewhere. It’s possible. I can’t give up

hope on that.

She’s hesitating, so I really do begin

to think it’s about to happen, the truth,

the end of the story, the end. And will I

be allowed to be sad about my friend

while in here, will they let me have that

emotion? Will they even let me call her

my friend?

But my mom shakes her head. “No

news,” is all she says.

“Do you want to call them and ask,

maybe? For me?”

I think she might agree to it. Then she

veers around and completely changes the

subject. “So I called Jamie. I thought he

should know.”

“About Abby?” I ask, confused.

“About you,” she says. “I called and