Her bluish lips pulled into something of a sad smile, which I took as an answer.
Abby and Natalie had both let me into their minds straightaway, and Fiona Burke had my mind for the taking. But Shyann didn’t trust me enough at first.
She probably thought I’d make fun of her for what I saw in there, call her one of those names.
Didn’t you see me? she said. I saw you.
I knew she didn’t mean here, in my desk chair, where the outline of her was sitting in the dark, my bathrobe folded over the back of the chair and my school papers scattered across the desk. She meant somewhere else, that place where I’d been before I found myself sleepwalking, the charred space of the recurring dream. That’s where she actually was—in the house, with the others. That’s where she now had to stay.
I admitted I had seen her. That had been her, standing against the wall. In the dream as in the video; in the video as in the dream.
“Why are you here? What do you want from me?” I asked, and then before I could hear her answer, my mom was back, knocking on my door and wanting to know who was I talking to, was I on the phone? And I was turning away from the desk chair, turning away from the outline of the girl in the staticky darkness, and calling through the door to my mom to say I was fine. My mom asked if it was Jamie, and I said yeah, because he’d be as good an excuse as any. I just didn’t want her opening my door.
“Aren’t you two . . . I thought you said it was over,” my mom said through the door.
“We’re only talking, Mom.”
My mom did open the door, and in those first few seconds I thought for sure she’d see it. The ghost. The girl. Then she’d know.
She leaned her head in and I noticed her spot my phone—it was off, sitting on my dresser all the way across the room, where I couldn’t have just been talking on it. She saw that, but she didn’t see Shyann. “You okay?” she said.
“I’m fine.”
If she knew something, if she could sense something, she would’ve stayed.
But she only said good night again and closed my door.
I looked back, and the desk chair held only my bathrobe, the dark air shimmering as if my eyes were still adjusting, drawing shapes of a girl who wasn’t there anymore, who’d run off, who’d gone. My mom had scared her away.
I was alone, and I felt it. There wasn’t even a breath in my ear.
What did Shyann want from me? Only this. Only to tell me her story and be heard.
— 30 — SHYANN’S parents had reported her missing at the end of January about a year ago, saying she’d run away. “Teen Flees from Neighborhood Bullies,”
stories online said. “Bullied Teen Still Not Found.” The bullying “experts”
were called in, the ones who liked to get gussied up for TV talk shows to denounce the epidemic sweeping our schools,
made
worse
by
social
networking and technologies like camera phones.
Shyann’s
school
principal
was
interviewed, and some teachers. There was one girl who spoke on camera, acting as if she had no idea what had been done to Shyann. “Don’t really know what happened to that girl,” she told Channel 4 and Channel 11.
“Nobody was messing with her. Why’d she run off for no reason?” She smiled a carefully calculated smile, and I wanted to reach my arm into the screen and punch her in the face.
No one but me knew what had happened to Shyann.