Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
uncomfortable—and it’s while his mouth
moves that time slows around him and
he doesn’t seem to notice. I’m slow
enough to see through it, and what I can
see is Fiona standing up from the chair
she’s been parked in all afternoon and
walking with purpose over to us. She’s
behind Jamie’s chair now. Now she’s
reaching out her arm and slugging a hand
into Jamie’s open coat pocket.
So slow, and also fast. Too fast. In no
time, Fiona has picked Jamie’s pocket
and rescued my van keys.
I don’t want her to bother me with this
now. She’s easier to deal with when she
stays catatonic in the vinyl chair in the
corner, barely blinking. Yet now she’s
dancing behind Jamie’s back, making a
game of it, and when he whips around to
see what’s got my attention she rises to
her toes and throws them.
She doesn’t know me so well. If she
did, she’d know I can’t catch any objects
pitched straight at me, which is why I
always do so dismally in the forced ball
games during gym. But what she’s done
has surprised me, and in the shock of
realizing she’s tossed my keys over
Jamie’s head, I have this vision of my
good arm shooting out on instinct and my
good hand opening. I can see it like it’s
already been done and happened: the
keys landing there, perfectly timed and
well-aimed. It makes as much sense as if
I’d simply reached out myself and
plucked the keys from Jamie’s gaping
pocket when he wasn’t looking.
I can’t fault her. When Fiona sees an
opportunity, she takes it. Maybe that’s
why she ran off with those two guys all
those years ago. It wasn’t either of them
she wanted to be with—it was that they
had a truck, they had the means to get her
out of there, and so she gambled on it, in
case she never had another chance again.
I don’t mean to get Jamie in trouble,
or leave him stranded, but if this is my
only time to go free, shouldn’t I take it?
Shouldn’t I catch the keys in my open
hand and wait for a moment when no
one’s looking and find my way to the
back stairs I remember taking in the fire
drill? Shouldn’t I follow her lead and
go?
—
58
—
I’M
17 now, I have been since last
month, and I think it must have changed
me like it changed Fiona all those years
ago. It’s made me shrink away from the
people in this world who care about me,
and obsess over people I’ve never met
in real life.
It’s put me in danger, the way it did
her. But it’s also opened my mind, and
my ears, and I don’t think there’s a way
to close either now, after this. I’ve been
changed down through to my bones.
Fiona likes me better this way, I can
tell. We’re the same age now, but, still,
she wants to protect me. She won’t say
so aloud; she doesn’t have to. It’s clear
from how she refuses to leave my side. I
know she doesn’t want the shadow-
fingers in my hair, playing with the
jagged wisps at the back of my neck,
tugging a little, trying to get a good grip.
She doesn’t want the shadow-hands
tightening in a stranglehold around my
throat. She’s broken me out of the psych
ward to
help
me, she says, to keep me
from getting stuck in that house and
ending up lost the way the rest of them
did, the way
she
did, she reminds me.
And I did want out. It’s the only way I
can help the others. And Abby. Abby
especially. Fiona keeps assuring me it’s
not too late.
The plan forms as we drive. Its pieces
click together almost too easily, as if in
her quiet stupor in the corner of the
common room she was devising this
outing all along. There’s something we
need to do; and tonight is the night we
must do it.
There are certain things we agree on,
philosophically: To save myself, we
have to save the others. You can’t have
one and not both.
To save Abby, we must pinpoint her
location first. Fiona assures me we’re
gaining on her; we’re close.
We agree that the lost girls can’t be
left in that house. Whatever kind of
limbo it may be—made of charred wood
and tattered curtains, burned things and
ash—it’s still a place that’s not here and
not there. It’s the in-between, and
whoever’s shown her face there is stuck
in the smoke where no one can find her.
Where no one can know her end.
Isn’t it better for people to know?
Fiona says. And I think of her, wrapped
in mystery, how her parents still don’t
have a clue what became of her. And I
think of Abby Sinclair, her fate
unspoken, and I think of the others, their
gaping stories without any definable
finish. It’s better to know, I decide, than
to never.
Fiona and I agree that the hospital was
not the place for me. We agree I should
be allowed to stop on the road for a
burger and fries, because she might not
be able to eat solid foods, but I still can,
and we agree it was a good thing I only
pretended to swallow my last round of
pills. Fiona says her head feels clearer
already.
We do agree on so much. But there
are other things I sense Fiona wants to
keep to herself until the time comes,
possibly so she won’t scare me off.
Details, mostly. Like not mentioning
exactly where we’re headed. She directs
me on a circular route through snowy
back roads, avoiding fallen trees and
numbered highways.
They’ll be waiting for us, she says.
All the girls will be; we just have to get
ourselves to them. It’s those pills.
Whatever’s in them kept me from
visiting the dream. But it was also the
hospital itself, the walls there that kept
my dream-self from stepping in where it
belonged. That, too, she says.
This has to be done, she says. This is
the only way, she assures me when I ask
if maybe I should look for a pay phone
somewhere and call my mom. We can’t
call Mom yet. I won’t be able to see the
girls otherwise. But I have her, Fiona
says, so it’s okay. I have her, and she’ll
take me to them.
She stretches out in the front
passenger seat of my van beside me, her
legs up on the high dashboard and her
feet pressed against the slope of the
windshield like she might kick it out at
any moment and cover us in glass,
knowing it wouldn’t hurt her, but it
would hurt me. That’s the old Fiona, I
tell myself. She wouldn’t do that to me
now. She might tease, but she wouldn’t
actually kick.
She becomes more animated the
farther we get from the hospital. Her
voice is clear, her eyes bright. And
there’s a cunning curve to her lips
sometimes as she points me down this
road and that road, leading the way.
I keep an eye on her as I drive. It’s
late afternoon and already the light is
falling fast, bringing with it a dark night.
In that low light what I see is my former
babysitter, the neighbor girl who ran off
and left me suffocating in a coat closet
for my own protection, a flash-point
decision that proved to be the right one.
Her flame-dyed hair reveals her natural
dark roots as it did then. The
FU
scrawled on her thigh is now facing me,
right side up.
Everything Fiona has said makes
logical sense to me, until I see the road
she has us driving. Dorsett Road is more
narrow and twisting, coming from this
end, which was closer to the side of the
river where the hospital could be found,
and the hills are all leading downward
instead of up. The entrance to the Lady-
of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls has
been piled with snow, as if a snowplow
gathered all the weather from every
corner of Pinecliff and deposited it in
this spot to keep me out.
I’ve slowed, but I haven’t stopped.
“Not here?” I ask.
Yes, here,
she says.
Don’t play dumb.
There’s nowhere to park near the gate,
so I have to leave the van at the edge of
the road, only half hidden in the trees,
and I don’t know how I’ll get back out,
with the way my tires are jammed in.
I shut off the engine. Still, I hesitate.
What?
she says.
You were thinking
we’d find that brick building with the
gate? That we’d drive to some street
and there it’d be? Popped up like a
mushroom from your little dream?
I don’t nod. Then again I don’t
not
nod.
She sighs, showing she’s on her last
nerve, then gazes out at the gate
separating us from the campground.
It’s where this all started,
she says,
waving her arm at it.
This sick,
disgusting
place
where
whatever
happened to her happened. Do you
want to help Abby or not?
I nod. I do.
And the others?
I nod. All of them, I do.
Then we have to do it here. Where
else?
—
59
—
SO
much snow since I last visited. But
not enough to keep us out.
We trudge through it to reach the gate.
There, we discover that the broken chain
on the fence has been replaced with a
much thicker one, along with a more
sturdy lock, a gold one, shiny new and
too solid to get through without a big
hammer. The top of the gate is still
woven with coils of barbed wire, but
Fiona is undeterred. I expect her to hoist
herself up on the chain link and climb
over—because how would the barbed
wire cut through smoke, if that’s what
she’s made of? How would it cut
through a ghost, a memory, an idea? But
she won’t do it. She says we’ll have to
find another way in.
After maneuvering over a snowbank
and circling widely past the first set of
trees, we do find another entrance.
Really, the whole pine forest is an
entrance. We come in through the back
way, past the offices and a maintenance
shed made of gray concrete blocks.
There are prints in the snow leading up
to its door, there are prints to the
compost pile, and there are prints
heading into the darkened woods, but
Fiona waves at me from far up the path.
I’m slow.
Fiona isn’t cold, but I am, and then,
like it’s been left out for me to find, I
discover my own scarf lying in a knot in
the snowy path—I must have dropped it
weeks ago, though I don’t remember
walking this particular path at the edges
of the campground. So how would I have
dropped it here? It doesn’t matter,
because I pick it up and shake off the
snow and wrap it twice around my neck.
And it helps, a little.
It won’t be so cold soon,
Fiona tells
me, making me shiver. I can’t help but
wonder if she means it won’t be so cold
after you die. If it’s warm and snug when
it’s over, and the star-shine glowing
down over you warms your skin. If that’s
what she’s telling me. If that’s really
what’s about to happen tonight.
I follow her along a path and up a hill,
made more difficult by the container of
kerosene we discover and liberate from
under a tarp near the firewood. She
makes me carry the kerosene to the
circle of stones, so we can build
ourselves a fire. It’s what will bring
them out the quickest, she says. A fire,
she says, to smoke out Abby and the rest
of the girls.
A fire, like she was pointing to in the
hospital. Fiona Burke has always
wanted a fire.
I’m following her and doing what she
tells me to do—just like that night when