Hailey Pippering’s remains were found in a landfill during the time I was in the hospital. And Kendra Howard was pronounced deceased even though she hasn’t washed ashore yet. The lake is deep, and town officials say they may never find her body.
Whenever I learn a bad thing about one of the girls, it breaks me up some more. Which might be why Jamie usually only brings me the good stories, the happy ends.
Besides, I won’t need his help soon.
I’ll have private access to a computer again, and I’ll be able to take up the searching. I’ll keep checking, with or without him.
Silently, to myself, I’ve vowed to check up on all the girls. Whether we had a true connection or not doesn’t much matter to me. These are real girls.
They’re important. The runaways, too, even if the police don’t act like it. Even if the girls’ families don’t care and don’t go looking, I vow to. These girls matter.
I need to know what happened to every last one of them.
“Thank you,” I tell Jamie. Knowing about Shyann has lifted my spirits a little, and I find myself turning to the window again, almost smiling.
Jamie’s eyes follow mine, but he says nothing. It’s best if he doesn’t ask what I’m seeing out that window or what I’m thinking.
Because I’m thinking how I know what’s going to happen. I couldn’t see Shyann’s true fate, not in the real world, but mine is another story.
The therapist will stop asking me questions about the lost girls, and I’ll stop bringing them up. It’s safer that way. Because even though the pills I swallow have taken the girls from me, it’s not like I’m alone. Not entirely.
There’s one girl who’s always here and always will be. Even through the Brillo Pad walls the meds create in my mind—through which I can sometimes only see her in the space of the tiniest, fuzziest pinhole—she’s here. She stays with me because she never felt at home in that house next door.
We’ll grow up together, though Fiona Burke will stay perpetually 17, with the red dye never inching out of her dark roots, the FU never fading from her frayed jeans. She’ll wear the scowl she always has; her mouth has grown into the shape of it, even though she’s softened on me and I can make her smile sometimes.
That’s something I can be sure of. I can see my life with Fiona cascading on into the distance, and I’m not so sure about my life with Jamie. We’re back together, but I don’t know how long he’ll end up staying.
Fiona will stay. She’ll be with me on my first day back to school next week, and she’ll keep me company during summer school so I don’t have to repeat the eleventh grade. Sometimes she’ll whisper the wrong answers to me during trig tests, but mostly she’ll sleep through class, as she did when she was a student.
If there were a way to sever the invisible ball-and-chain that connects her to me, and me to her, she’d be the first one there with the chain saw.
Fiona Burke will continue to be with me next year. Hers will be the first face I’ll see on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, before I even look in the mirror to confirm I can still see my own. She won’t make a big deal of it, even though my mom will bake up my favorite box-mix cake and bring out the balloons. But Fiona will be happy for me, to know I survived. I’ll catch her staring at me, not only with jealousy, because she knows she’ll always have a place at the table with me, even if my mom doesn’t see her in the third chair and doesn’t set out an extra piece of cake.
Fiona will join me at prom, meeting me in the bathroom when I go in to touch up my eyeliner, and she’ll try and fail to keep quiet when Jamie tries to slow dance with me after spilling the spiked punch all over his rented tux.
She’ll be in the back row during my graduation ceremony; when I cross the stage she’ll be one among many who will cheer my name.
We’ll spend years together, Fiona and I, like childhood friends who grow old side by side. Some might say that means I’ll spend my life being haunted. Or that I won’t ever be better because of her.