She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn’t just him. There were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the last page of the Shopper like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did she know? Not even “How Our Government Works.”
What did the parents of those missing children think? How did they go on with their lives? Was Cynthia or Merton or Angel the first thing they thought about in the morning and the last thing they thought about at night? Did they keep their rooms ready for them in case they came home, or did they give all their clothes and toys away to the Goodwill? Abra had heard that was what Lennie O’Meara’s parents did after Lennie fell out of a tree and hit his head on a rock and died. Lennie O’Meara, who got as far as the fifth grade and then just . . . stopped. But of course Lennie’s parents knew he was dead, there was a grave where they could go and put flowers, and maybe that made it different. Maybe not, but Abra thought it would. Because otherwise you’d pretty much have to wonder, wouldn’t you? Like when you were eating breakfast, you’d wonder if your missing
(Cynthia Merton Angel )
was also eating breakfast somewhere, or flying a kite, or picking oranges with a bunch of migrants, or whatever. In the back of your mind you’d have to be pretty sure he or she was dead, that’s what happened to most of them (you only had to watch Action News at Six to know), but you couldn’t be sure.
There was nothing she could do about that uncertainty for the parents of Cynthia Abelard or Merton Askew or Angel Barbera, she had no idea what had happened to them, but that wasn’t true of Bradley Trevor.
She had almost forgotten him, then that stupid newspaper . . . those stupid pictures . . . and the stuff that had come back to her, stuff she didn’t even know she knew, as if the pictures had been startled out of her subconscious . . .
And those things she could do. Things she had never told her parents about because it would worry them, the way she guessed it would worry them if they knew she had made out with Bobby Flannagan—just a little, no sucking face or anything gross like that—one day after school. That was something they wouldn’t want to know. Abra guessed (and about this she wasn’t entirely wrong, although there was no telepathy involved) that in her parents’ minds, she was sort of frozen at eight and would probably stay that way at least until she got boobs, which she sure hadn’t yet—not that you’d notice, anyway.
So far they hadn’t even had THE TALK with her. Julie Vandover said it was almost always your mom who gave you the lowdown, but the only lowdown Abra had gotten lately was on how important it was for her to get the trash out on Thursday mornings before the bus came. “We don’t ask you to do many chores,” Lucy had said, “and this fall it’s especially important for all of us to pitch in.”
Momo had at least approached THE TALK. In the spring, she had taken Abra aside one day and said, “Do you know what boys want from girls, once boys and girls get to be about your age?”
“Sex, I guess,” Abra had said . . . although all that humble, scurrying Pence Effersham ever seemed to want was one of her cookies, or to borrow a quarter for the vending machines, or to tell her how many times he’d seen The Avengers.
Momo had nodded. “You can’t blame human nature, it is what it is, but don’t give it to them. Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you’re nineteen, if you want.”
That had been a little embarrassing, but at least it was straight and clear. There was nothing clear about the thing in her head. That was her birthmark, invisible but real. Her parents no longer talked about the crazy shit that had happened when she was little. Maybe they thought the thing that had caused that stuff was almost gone. Sure, she’d known Momo was sick, but that wasn’t the same as the crazy piano music, or turning on the water in the bathroom, or the birthday party (which she barely remembered) when she had hung spoons all over the kitchen ceiling. She had just learned to control it. Not completely, but mostly.