I had to keep looking.
When I turned my attention back to the bottom of the hill, I saw things in a new light. It was golden and it was warm, thick with the heat of summer.
Everything was tinged this color, even the night sky.
I noticed how the snow had vanished, so the road and the gully running alongside it was brown with mud, and green with protruding weeds. Then I realized I was on the ground, on the asphalt, because I’d fallen off the bicycle, and my hands were pocked with gravel and my knees were bleeding.
My hair was longer than usual, and I swept it out of my face so I could see. I noticed the front fender of the car— rusted, one headlight gashed in—and I used it to help myself to stand up. I heard a door open, and I heard a voice, and I heard a response come out of my own body, in a voice that wasn’t mine, saying I’m okay. That was not me talking, that was someone else.
I was someone else.
It was over as soon as it had begun, the light around me turning colder and more blue. I was wavering on my two feet, in the middle of the icy back road, completely alone. There was no car here, no bicycle, no glimmering specter of a girl. My raw knees through my jeans burned, as if I’d really fallen to the ground as she had, and the palms of my hands were pricked with bits of snow and grimy pebbles of tire salt. But these were my knees again, and my hands, and my own breath billowing out in visible wisps from my own lungs into the cold.
That’s when I saw it. There, close by, was a glow that seemed to hum from the edge of the road. A light that, once it caught my attention, turned smaller, shrinking in on itself until the tiny thing I was meant to find focused and came clear. It looked like an oddly colored rock at first, and then I blinked. And realized what it was. Someone had dropped . . . a piece of jewelry on the side of the road.
I crept closer and lifted it from the blanket of snow. Impossibly, it had been perched there, half buried and glistening in the darkness. This stone pendant on a broken strand of silver chain.
Once I climbed the hill back up to my van, I let the pendant drop into my palm so I could study it under the dome light.
I’d thought it was a rock, but it wasn’t, at least not the kind of rock or stone that would be found just lying in the dirt in the Hudson Valley. Maybe it was a moonstone, but it wasn’t so much a silky-smooth, gray gemstone as a round bubble of glass translucent enough to show its gray insides.
Gray like swirling smoke.
If I moved the circular pendant— which wasn’t a real circle but a lopsided, handmade attempt at a circle —I could see the insides shifting, like I’d woken a dormant volcano. Other than this otherworldly aspect to the pendant, the smoke that moved as the stone moved, it was a plain piece of jewelry mounted crookedly on a backing of thick silver. The broken chain was crusted with dirt and green with rot, and wasn’t even that nice of a chain to begin with.
The pendant wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t beautiful. But it meant something.
It belonged to Abby.
— 10 — MY mom caught me with one of Abby’s flyers. It was the one I’d found in the Shop & Save where I worked after school. In the days leading up to visiting the camp, I’d discovered more of them, more and more, everywhere I checked in town.