Free 17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

was
    make up a good, steaming lie about us to
    tell her parents, and my mom and I
    would be out on the street. We’d have to
    live in a cardboard box and beg for
    handouts at the train station, she said.
    And maybe my mom would decide I was
    too much for her to take care of, and
    she’d sell me off to some passing
    businessman on an Amtrak train bound
    for Penn Station, and who knew what
    would become of me then.
    I cried the first time she said this,
    which made her enjoy repeating it. Of
    course I know now she didn’t have the
    power to evict us, not by her word
    alone, but I used to believe she did.
    But my sometimes-babysitter and
    longtime next-door neighbor Fiona
    Burke appeared as innocent as she ever
    would in the photograph her parents
    selected for her Missing poster. In it, she
    had straight teeth and straighter hair, not
    yet dyed. Her shirt buttons were done all
    the way up to her neck and there were
    two pearl earrings fastened in her ears.
    She wore a blameless smile and sat
    there on a stool with her hands folded.
    Her favorite necklace was tight around
    her throat, and the flash of the studio
    camera happened to catch it at the exact
    right angle to make it look lovely and not
    like a ghastly, dirty thing hanging over
    her shirt.
    She was who they wanted her to be, in
    that picture. That was before she turned
    17. After, a whole other side to her
    emerged, one that was out in full the
    night I saw her last.
    Fiona Burke’s parents saw one thing,
    and the world saw another.
    When she disappeared, I remember
    seeing her picture in the news, being
    aware that people were looking for her.
    But, as the years went on and she didn’t
    come back, as her Missing posters came
    down from bulletin boards and other
    announcements for yard sales and ride-
    shares and rooms for rent went up in
    their place, people forgot about her and
    stopped asking.
    She’d lost herself to that place where
    the missing kids go, the kids no one
    finds, even when lakes are dredged and
    woods combed. The ones computer-aged
    into adulthood who never make it home.
    She didn’t call. She didn’t write.
    She was just gone.
    And I guess I’d forgotten about her
    like everyone else in town had, until she
    showed up in the dream and tried to give
    me that stone, the one that looked a lot
    like the broken piece of jewelry I’d
    recovered from the gully on the side of
    Dorsett Road. I was sure it meant
    something, and it wasn’t until I was
    alone again later that night, after the
    frozen pizza with my mom and trying to
    deflect her questions about Jamie, that I
    closed myself in my room and dug it out
    from where, the second I got home, I’d
    stowed it inside a sock that was
    wrapped in a sweater and buried in the
    bottom drawer of my dresser. It wasn’t
    until then that I really let myself
    remember.
    — 12 —
    IT was a chilly night in November, the
    night Fiona Burke disappeared. Her
    parents were down in Maryland for the
    weekend, so she had the house to
    herself, and it was clear she’d wanted—
    planned—to keep it that way. Until my
    mom asked her parents if she could
    watch me, and they said yes without
    confirming it with Fiona first. I’m
    guessing that my usual babysitter must
    have flaked like she did sometimes, and
    my sudden appearance at my landlords’
    house was a last-minute surprise—to
    both Fiona and me. Because with her
    parents out of state, this was the night
    Fiona Burke had planned to run away
    from home, and all of a sudden I was
    there, in the way.
    My mom wasn’t in school then. She
    didn’t have the job at the state university
    or even the certificate to get that job, so
    this must have been when she worked
    nights, when she was still dancing at the
    club across the river.
    I want to say I could pinpoint exactly
    what Fiona Burke looked like on that
    night she gave my mom the finger behind
    her back and then said she’d take great
    care of me. I should have an image of
    her cleaning out her