17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma Page A

shape of
    screams.
    I’d been on the sidewalk outside the
    Friendly’s for I-couldn’t-say-how-long.
    Something had come over me when I
    was leaving the police station and I’d
    had to pull over. It was the growing
    sense that I was being watched—and
    then it was the growing sense that
    whoever was watching, they were inside
    the van. They were in the bowels of the
    back, behind the bench seat. I’d opened
    the door when I put the bicycle in and
    I’d left it open too long when I was
    checking my phone and reading Jamie’s
    text messages (six since that morning).
    I’d let them in. They knew I was looking
    for Abby—they’d heard everything I’d
    said.
    This chain restaurant, this parking lot,
    was the nearest turnoff I’d seen. I’d
    barreled through the lot and I’d come to
    a stop and I’d opened the driver’s side
    door and I’d leaped out, and it took
    much deep breathing and many minutes
    before I could open the two back doors
    at the tail end of the van. When I did I
    could hardly look, but I had to look,
    because I had to know—
    All I’d found was Abby’s borrowed
    bicycle inside.
    I’d gotten myself all worked up over
    nothing.
    Now I was sitting on the sidewalk, out
    under the cold, winter-white sky. I
    couldn’t get back in the van just yet.
    I was looking down at my knees,
    caked with ice and snow and with the
    salt kernels thrown out in winter so
    people wouldn’t slip and fall in the ice
    and snow, and that was how I realized I
    must have fallen. I lifted my hands and
    saw that my palms, too, were caked with
    the mixture, pockmarked and dented
    from impact, discolored, almost grayed.
    “Hey, you,” I heard.
    This voice was coming from behind
    me, to my left. I ignored it, of course,
    like I’d been ignoring Fiona Burke since
    we’d left the police station.
    “Hey.” The voice again. This was a
    girl’s voice, I realized, the voice of a
    very young girl. “Hey. I’m talking to
    you.” A clean, white toe nudged the
    scuffed steel toe of my combat boot.
    “Are you sick? Do you need me to get
    my mom?”
    From the size of her tiny feet in those
    puffy white boots I knew she was far too
    young to even be a part of this. When I
    craned my neck to look up into her face,
    I saw I was right: This girl was nine or
    ten maybe, eleven at most. She was dry
    and clean and safe. She had years to go.
    Years and years.
    The girl had many barrettes all over
    her head and just looking at them made
    my own head feel heavy. The weight of
    all those barrettes, if they were plated in
    steel like the kicking toes of my boots,
    that’s what knowing all the things I knew
    felt like.
    “I’m fine,” I managed to answer her,
    finally.
    “You threw up all over the sidewalk,”
    the girl said, holding her nose.
    I looked behind me, to my right. “Oh. I
    guess I did.”
    “Do you have germs?” she said. She
    took a step back. She moved comically
    slow in a white snowsuit decorated with
    little coiled demons awash in fire that I
    realized, upon blinking, were only
    goldfish.
    Orange
    goldfish
    were
    decorating her snowsuit, not demons.
    “Do you?” she said again. “Have
    germs?”
    “I might,” I admitted.
    “Gross,” the girl said, wrinkling her
    nose. But she didn’t move. She didn’t
    seem to care if she caught my sickness.
    I noticed that my van beside the curb
    was still idling; I’d left the engine on.
    The back doors were also open,
    showing the dark cavern inside. It
    seemed much larger than it should be,
    like a tunnel that didn’t want you to see
    its end.
    “Could you do me a favor?” I asked
    the girl. “Could you look inside there?”
    “What?”
    “My van. Could you look inside the
    van and tell me what you see?”
    She started shrinking away from me.
    She must have had that special assembly
    in school about bad strangers wanting to
    snatch kids in their dirty, scary vans.
    I had the terrifying feeling then that
    she’d be smart to play it safe and run,
    but she only