A Void the Size of the World Page 11

  “The police questioned him,” Erica answered, as if she were an expert on the case of my sister’s disappearance. Anger swirled inside of me.

  “They didn’t connect him to anything.” I waited for Mary Grace to speak up and defend Tommy; she had hung out with him and Abby a lot, but she didn’t say a word.

  “Yeah, well, you never know,” Erica told me. She acted like she was talking about some detective show on TV and not my sister. It made my food spoil in my stomach.

  “Actually, I do,” I snapped and wished she’d stop talking, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that I couldn’t stand her right now.

  “Have you found out any more about the circles?”

  “No,” I said, and it was the truth. It had been three days since the circles appeared, and I tried to ignore them, which wasn’t easy considering that this morning the news stations had arrived again and continued their report in front of our house. More and more cars drove slowly down the stretch of road that usually had no more than five cars a day on it. Our house was now a tourist stop, a celebrity’s home on a Hollywood bus tour.

  “Everyone thinks they have something to do with Abby,” said Erica.

  “They don’t have anything to do with Abby,” I said, my voice a bit harsh. All of these people interested in the circles were nuts, and I wasn’t about to feed into it.

  “It’s okay, Rhylee,” Mary Grace spoke up. “I understand why you’re angry. You’re allowed to be mad. My mom says that sometimes people do that when they’re hurting.”

  I swear she was about to reach out for my hand and stroke it. I pictured her pulling out some ginger ale and crackers from her lunch bag and offering them like Mom did when I was sick.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Erica sighed. “We’re not trying to fight with you.” She pulled a purple bracelet out of her bag and put it in front of me. “You aren’t wearing one. You can have mine.”

  “Why? It’s not like it’s going to bring her back,” I snapped again.

  Mary Grace spoke up. “We miss your sister. We don’t want to forget her. A bracelet might help you feel like you’re doing something.”

  Was she implying that I wasn’t?

  Maybe she was right. I felt so helpless about everything that was going on.

  And what would she think if she knew the truth? She sure as heck wouldn’t be sitting here, handing me a bracelet if she did. She and Erica would hate me, they’d shoot me dirty looks, trip me in the halls, and make it their mission to destroy me. Like everyone had with Max Locke. Like they were doing to Tommy.

  I grabbed my lunch bag and stood. “Stop pretending that these things you’re doing are going to help. Cross-country meets, prayers, and bracelets aren’t going to bring my sister home.”

  “It’s like you don’t even want her to return,” Mary Grace said, and her words sliced through me.

  “How can you say I don’t care?” I said.

  “How can we not?” Erica replied.

  “She’s my sister. She’s my sister, and she’s gone.” I squashed my lunch bag into a ball and made a fist around it, I was so upset. “I want her to return more than any of you. I need her to return.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it,” Erica said. “All you do is get mad at us when we try to help.”

  “Don’t you get it? I can’t act like I care. If I get caught up in all of this, it means she’s gone. And she’s not gone. She can’t be,” I yelled, and I didn’t care that my classmates turned around in their seats to watch me. “I need to act like this because what’s the alternative?”

  And no one could reply because to admit any other alternative would be impossible.

  31

  I couldn’t get away from Mary Grace and Erica fast enough. I blamed all the thoughts that clouded my head for why I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. I’d been so careful about the corners I took at school, the hallways I walked down, and stairways I moved up, all so I could avoid Tommy.

  Except today, I rushed away from Mary Grace and Erica and ran right into him.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, and tried to calm myself so Tommy wouldn’t see how upset I was. I focused on the floor where my biology index cards now lay. If I hadn’t blown off studying last night, I’d leave them on the floor, spread out like confetti after ringing in the New Year. I bent to pick them up at the same time Tommy did.

  “Let me help.” He handed a few cards to me, and his arm brushed against mine. I paused, remembering what it felt like. I shook my head to clear it and went back to collecting the cards.

  Tommy handed a few to me. “Can you really not even stand to be near me?”

  I held on to the stack of index cards so hard they cut into my palm. I reminded myself of the things that could never exist between us. Not now. Not ever. Not after what we’d done.

  “I told you. I can’t. We can’t.”

  “We can still talk to each other,” Tommy said, loud enough that people stopped to look.

  “Quiet down,” I told him. Most of my classmates walked right past on their way to class, but there were a few who had slowed and seemed to be waiting to see what exactly was happening between the two of us.

  “You okay?” Kyle, the same boy who had shoved Tommy that day in the cafeteria, asked. “Is he giving you trouble?”

  “We’re fine,” Tommy said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Kyle replied. He looked straight at me. “Everything good?”

  “Everything is good,” I said, my tone every bit as unfriendly as Tommy’s was. It was obvious what Kyle was getting at, and I wasn’t going to allow it.

  Kyle nodded and headed back down the hallway, but shot one more look at Tommy over his shoulder.

  “Asshole,” Tommy said when Kyle was gone.

  “It’s my fault.”

  “Nothing is your fault.”

  “But it is. The way Kyle just treated you. It’s because he thinks you had something to do with Abby.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tommy said.

  “Are you kidding me? Don’t worry about it?”

  “I can handle it. Just ignore them.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as if it would erase the awful feelings I had about myself and what Tommy was going through, but all it did was make things worse. “All I do is worry about it. You shouldn’t have to be used to it.”

  “Rhylee, I’ll be okay,” Tommy said, but how could that be true? There was nothing okay about any of this.

  32

  Collin tackled me when I arrived home after school. His hair was messed up and he had smears of chocolate on his face. He must have had one of the pudding cups he was obsessed with. He dipped a spoon in peanut butter and then ate it with the pudding. It was absolutely brilliant; I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t tried it myself. But Mom never let him do it. I wished I could believe she let him have it as a treat, but it was more likely she wasn’t paying attention so he helped himself. Mom tuning out from the world seemed like the norm these days.

  Our field was still full of people, but it looked as if the news trucks had backed off. It was mostly adults from our town. Officer Scarano stood off to the side. Dad had insisted that if we were going to keep these circles, the police needed to provide someone to keep a watch over things. But Scarano sure wasn’t doing that great a job; he was on his phone more than he was keeping order.

  Collin tugged at the bottom of my T-shirt. “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for hours.”

  “More like half an hour. I know when your bus drops you off,” I said and messed up his hair more. He pushed my hand away and made a face.

  He dug around in his book bag and then shoved a pile of books at me. A few fell to the floor, but he left them there, too excited to show me the one still in his hand. He opened it to a page and shoved it in my face. “Look, Rhylee, look.”

  “What are these?” I grabbed the book out of his hands. The cover read Urban Legends: Fact or Fiction.

  “The librarian helped me pic
k them out. They’re research.”

  “Research?” I asked, giving him a look to let him know he wasn’t fooling me.

  “Hello—the crop circles. There’s tons of information in these books.” He pointed at a specific picture and jumped up and down, excited for me to look at it. “And this one looks like the ones we have. In 1976 Clayton Thorp discovered them in his cornfields.”

  “Clayton who?” This was getting a bit ridiculous.

  “Thorp,” Collin said and pointed at the grainy pictures of a field similar to my family’s. A man with a long white beard stood in front of one of the circles, his lips set in a grim line like this was all very serious. “The circles showed up in his yard too. They came out of nowhere and then strange things began to happen.”

  “Like what?” I took the book out of his hand and glanced at the page, not wanting to encourage him, but they were interesting.

  “Unusual stuff. His horses appeared in the road near his house even though he locked them in the stable at night, the leaves on his trees turned red and orange in the summer, and he’d find windows in his house wide open. It’s like when Abby visited me. The circles are connected to her, I know it.”

  I thought about the other night with the light in Abby’s room. Stop it, I told myself. This is nuts. I shook my head to clear it from any creepy ideas Collin’s books were giving me. I refused to believe any of it. I closed his book and gave it back to him.

  “The only strange thing about the ones in our yard is that a bunch of idiots find them important enough to stand around and stare at them for hours. Everyone needs to get a life.”

  I counted fourteen people in our field. They stood in the circles and faced the woods as if waiting for something. Something they had lost because of me. I yearned to tell them that the circles were useless, just like all the other things the town had tried to do to bring Abby back.

  33

  Later that night, while I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, Mom called my name. I nearly choked on a mouthful of toothpaste when I realized she was in Abby’s room. She hadn’t been able to even walk by her room without crying.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Look outside.” She sat on the desk chair, which she had pulled to the window. Her hand was draped over the back, lying against a purple sweater of my sister’s that waited for her to return and put it on. “Tell me what you see.”

  I hesitated, afraid of what was out there, but when I looked, it wasn’t any different from earlier that afternoon.

  “A bunch of people,” I told her.

  “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “I have no idea.” I pressed my face against the glass and tried to get a better look at the group that was outside in our field. I counted nine of them, six women and three men. They were older, maybe my parents’ age, and wore thick-soled shoes better suited for being outside than the heels and shiny dress shoes the news crew had worn. I recognized a librarian from the children’s room who always saved new books for me and a teacher from my elementary school. It was strange to see people from town hanging out in our yard. They walked in a line through the paths that cut into the circles.

  I opened the window, half expecting one of them to notice me, but nobody did.

  “Did you tell Dad?”

  “He left for work before I saw them.”

  “They’re saying something.” I put my ear against the screen. I very faintly heard bits and pieces of their words. I turned back to Mom, puzzled. “It sounds as if they’re praying.”

  We both fell silent, our heads tilted toward the outside. Mom’s eyes grew dark and serious.

  “They’re praying for Abby,” she said, and I listened again. When meaning was connected to the words, they became clear, and she was right; they were out there for Abby. I thought about all the prayers I had sent out to bring my sister home and how useless it seemed. I’d begged and pleaded with fate, willing to trade the world to have her back. I wondered how many more prayers would be sent up to Abby. And if anyone was listening.

  34

  I woke that evening to a light shining into my window.

  Someone was in the woods behind our house.

  The person stood there, unmoving, and held a flashlight with the bright beam pointed directly at my window.

  It hit the wall where I hung Abby’s missing person flyers, her face illuminated and then fading into the dark edges where the light didn’t touch.

  I placed my palms against the window screen and stared at the light. It was steady, held at the person’s middle, and only wavered slightly every few seconds.

  I ducked down onto my bed, as if whoever it was could see me, and counted to one hundred. When I came back up, they were still there. The light in the same position, the inky darkness swallowing up the edges.

  It wasn’t Abby.

  It couldn’t be Abby.

  But a nervous thrill went through me.

  What if it was Abby?

  When my sister and I were younger, we used to play a game we called I Haunt You. We’d stand somewhere in the dark, usually a bedroom, the hallway, or the backyard, unmoving. Sometimes one of us was brave enough to walk up to the other person to see if that person was really there or if it was only shadows in the dark. Usually the game ended with the person jumping out and scaring the other or the light being flicked on. Tonight, as I watched the person with a flashlight, my mind went back to that game. What if Abby was waiting there for me? Maybe she was testing my courage to see if I’d come out and discover her.

  I considered telling my parents, but they’d want to investigate, and I couldn’t scare away whoever was there.

  I needed to find out what was going on.

  I threw on a sweatshirt over my pajamas and slipped out the door.

  I tried not to be terrified, but I was.

  The light pulled me toward it, as if I were connected to a string. I moved through the field; the dew-soaked grass clung to the bottom of my pants. With each step, I expected the person to leave or move, but they remained, and so each step brought me closer to whoever was out there.

  The dark shadows of the woods played tricks on my eyes. They warped and changed so it looked as if people were hiding everywhere, a line of bodies at the edge of the forest.

  This had to be a prank. Some kid from school messing with us like when the circles were created.

  But what if it wasn’t, a voice in my head kept saying.

  “Abby?” I asked.

  I took baby steps. One foot in front of each other. A wind stirred the leaves in the trees. It lifted the ends of my hair.

  I continued to move forward, even though all I wanted to do was turn and run back to my room, lock the door, and hide under the covers until the morning light erased the night. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t do that now, not if it really was Abby.

  I was about ten feet away, but it was so dark, and the flashlight blinded me.

  I stopped when I was close enough to reach out and touch the person. But I didn’t touch them. Instead, I held my hands palm up, as if offering everything, even though I had nothing left to give. I’d lost it all.

  I could hear their breathing. Deep and heavy and labored. As if it were impossible to take in air.

  I took the final step toward the light and reached straight out. But as I touched skin, the flashlight went off.

  I was plunged into darkness as whoever it was turned and ran away. I was left reaching out into the emptiness with the memory of brief contact with skin so cold it took my breath away.

  35

  A fight erupted between my parents the next morning at breakfast when Dad saw that a few people had spent the night in our field. I wondered if one of them had been the person who had stood at the edge of the woods. It had to be. There were no other explanations that didn’t make me sound certifiably crazy.

  “This has to stop,” Dad argued with Mom. “I’ve put up with way too much this last week. I let the news crew come here and
report for some ungodly reason, I allowed practically the entire town to converge here and hash out some insane conspiracy about how the circles had to do with our daughter, and said nothing when it was obvious some of the people here just had a sick curiosity to check out our tragedy. But this, this is where I draw the line. I’m not okay with a bunch of random people spending the night in our yard.”

  “They’re not random,” Mom said, the surprise advocate for this strange group who had nothing better to do than hang out in our field. “We know every one of them. Jen, Gavin, a few parents from the kids’ schools were there. No one is a threat.”

  Dad shook his head in frustration. “I didn’t say they posed any threat. But our field does not have to be the gathering place in town.”

  “They’re staying,” Mom said with more force than I’d heard her use since Abby disappeared. “They’re trying to help.”

  “Sitting in a field is not going to help anything,” Dad shot back.

  “No one knows what to do, and this is something. They’re here for Abby. How could you be against that?”

  Dad sighed and scratched his beard. “I’m not against it. I just don’t like the idea of this.”

  “Nobody is hurting anyone,” Mom said. “Let it be.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea . . . ,” Dad said, the struggle apparent. Mom hadn’t shown this much passion for anything since Abby left. But this. These people. It was all so strange.

  “Please,” Mom begged. “I’ll talk with Officer Scarano. Check to see if he can patrol the house a few times a night. These people are doing good; they’re praying for our daughter. How can we fault them in that?”

  “We can’t,” Dad said and the decision was made. He’d allow these people to continue to search for some kind of meaning in a bunch of circles that were more than likely mowed into our fields by some of my asshole classmates with nothing better to do on a Friday night.

  36

  My parents weren’t the only ones caught up in the circles. My classmates were fascinated too. The whole school talked about them. Not directly to me—that would be too awkward—but I’m sure they wanted to say something.