Either way, whatever the explanation, I know I’ll forever hear her voice thrumming through my head.
Still, I can’t blame her for staying with me. She doesn’t have a life of her own anymore; the only way she can live is to walk alongside mine.
There will come a day, decades from now, when I’m again in a bed much like this one. I might have cancer, I might be lucky and simply be dying of old age, I can’t know that part of my fate yet. What I do know is that I won’t be alone for it.
I’ll look across the room and there will be the 17-year-old girl I’ve known all my life. Not a wrinkle or a mark of age on her. She’ll want to jump on the bed. She’ll want to poke the home-care aide with her needle and eat all my Jell-O before I can get to it. She’ll simply be trying to lift my mood before I go.
Because Fiona Burke will never grow up and she won’t want me to, either.
This is what I don’t tell Jamie. He’s looking out the window right now, and he doesn’t even see her.
She heaves a sigh, stretches out her arms, and cracks her knuckles, then balances on the branch of the oak tree to climb inside the room. She eyes the two of us sitting on the bed together and stays perched on the windowsill, not willing to get any closer.
You’re not going to do it while I’m here watching, are you? Fiona says.
I feel my cheeks go hot and shake my head.
Can’t we go out somewhere and have some fun or something? God! I’m so bored. You were in that hospital so long, I thought I’d go INSANE, she says. She giggles a bit at the last word.
She enjoys using it around me.
“You sure you’re all right?” Jamie says. “Do you want to get out of here, go for a walk or something? Get a coffee?
Take a drive?”
“Maybe later,” I answer them both.
Fiona sighs again, loudly, letting me know her deep discontent, but Jamie leans forward and brushes my hair from my face, and by the way he’s sitting, his shoulders are blocking the view of Fiona at the windowsill. “Hey,” he says, “we don’t have to go anywhere. We can stay right here.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Let’s do that.”
The vanity mirror over my dresser reflects this scene back to me: Jamie with his arm over my shoulders and his other hand keeping ahold of my hand. A lock of curly hair drops forward into his face like he can’t ever stop it from doing. Beside him is a girl with choppy, dark hair with lighter roots growing in, and her eyes are wide open, and her cheeks are a little hollow, though there’ll be couscous for dinner later and she’ll eat two plates. She’s wearing black and gray, like she does most days, and the room she’s in is brightly lit by the sun streaming through the window. There are no shadows.
There are no voices. There is no flame-haired visitor on the windowsill waving an arm and giving the finger. There’s just a perfectly normal girl with a boy in her bed and a book on her lap and no hint of what’s kept hidden away in her mind where no one can see it. There’s a girl.
She’s 17, and she’s still here.
Click here for more books by this author AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel evolved as I was writing, leading me to discover what I was meant to be telling just as Lauren discovers the truth of what she’s seeing amid the scattered stories of the missing girls. So much of the ultimate story for 17 & Gone stemmed from my own research into experiences of teens living with mental illness and the visions Lauren could be seeing and the voices she could be hearing.
There is no single way to portray the symptoms or experiences of a teenager facing early-onset schizophrenia or any mental illness—and I can only hope that my portrayal of Lauren’s story will come across as distinct to her, and most of all respectful and true.