A Void the Size of the World Read online

I hid out in the bathroom before the first bell because there was no way I could talk to anyone and still hold it together. As I moved from class to class, it seemed as if my shame burned so bright that people must be blinded by it, but that wasn’t the case. It was the opposite. People I never met before gave me sad half smiles and teachers spoke in low voices and asked if I needed anything. They told me not to worry about the lessons I had missed, that we’d figure out a way for me to catch up. The whole school treated me as if I was fragile and would break at any moment, which I might, but not for the reasons they believed.

  I found myself searching for Abby in the halls. I prayed I’d spot her laughing with her friends or racing to get to class, her blond hair flashing as she dodged anyone in her way.

  Friends of my sister walked around in a daze, a shocked look on their faces, as if someone had turned the light on in a dark room too fast. Her locker had become a shrine, notes were stuck through the slats, a pair of running shoes left below it, and a sheet of paper with the words WE MISS YOU taped to the front. She’d only been missing for a week, but Abby already haunted the halls, like she haunted my every second.

  I hovered at the doorway to my art class. It had always been my favorite time of the day. I certainly wasn’t talented enough at it in the way that Abby was with running, but art was one of those things I was really into. I loved that it was a time when I could forget about everything else and get lost in my work. However, the roar of silence in my mind that was usually so welcomed was the last thing I wanted today.

  The bell rang, and the rush of students forced me to go through the door. I went to my cubby and pulled out the picture I’d been working on. My teacher had us doing a piece using contrast art, where the main image was blank and the background was full of colors or words. We took the negative space and used it to create a picture. I’d been working on a silhouette of me. In the middle of the page, my face was outlined. I’d begun to write words to fill the space around it. Travel, Explore, Wanderlust, words that were so silly and insignificant now.

  I erased them all, so I was left with nothing but blank space again. I pressed the pencil tip into the paper and wrote a new word.

  Gone.

  And then, Lost.

  Where.

  Are.

  You.

  I repeated the words until they filled the entire background of my picture. The words stretched and curved around the outline I’d made of my face. But when I stepped back to look at it from farther away, the silhouette created in the blank space of the picture didn’t resemble me. It looked exactly like Abby.

  21

  The school day continued, even though it felt as if time should stand still. How do we keep moving forward when Abby isn’t here? How do you exist when there’s such a hole in your life? It didn’t feel right. Why was I allowed to do such normal everyday things when my whole world was kicked off its axis and spun out of control?

  Tessa found me in the lunch line. I’d grabbed a bunch of food to simply fill my tray, even though I had no appetite.

  “Why haven’t you answered my texts?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for days.”

  “I haven’t felt much like talking.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming to school today.”

  I wished she’d stop talking. People around us were listening. I moved to the front of the line and gave the woman at the register my money.

  “I didn’t either,” I said. “But right now I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing anymore.”

  My eyes filled with tears and Tessa wrapped her arms around me. My lunch tray jiggled in my hands. I pushed against her to get free and lost my grip. Everything fell to the floor, the silverware clanging as it hit.

  I waited for the people around us to clap, like they always did when someone dropped something in the cafeteria, but instead the room got quiet. Abnormally silent for a cafeteria full of teenagers.

  I hated it.

  I hated that they didn’t do anything because it was me. That even dropping my tray in the cafeteria wasn’t normal anymore.

  Tessa bent down to help pick up my things.

  “I’m so sorry, Rhylee, I didn’t mean to make that happen. . . .” She babbled on. It was so quiet; the whole room could hear her apologize. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, and I couldn’t focus on anything but how much it hurt. A hand grabbed mine and jerked me forward.

  “Follow me,” Tommy whispered.

  He pulled me out of the cafeteria. Some kids jumped out of the way, as if touching him might burn them, and a bunch of others looked at him with disgust.

  Kyle Tanner, a boy on the cross-country team, shoved his shoulder into Tommy as we walked past. Tommy stumbled forward as he lost his balance. He grabbed on to a locker to steady himself.

  “Watch it,” Kyle called over his shoulder as we moved down the hallway.

  “Asshole,” Tommy said under his breath.

  “This isn’t right,” I told him. “The way people are treating you. You don’t deserve this.”

  “Just keep moving,” Tommy muttered and elbowed his way forward. He walked in front of me and blocked everyone. We didn’t stop until we reached the indoor pool, a contradiction to the rest of our run-down school. Some rich alum had donated the funds to build it over a decade ago and a swim team was created, those students arriving at class after early morning practices with wet clumps of hair, the smell of chlorine perpetually bouncing off them. He pushed opened the door and we slipped through. His hand still gripped mine as he led me up the steps to the observation deck.

  “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay,” Tommy said, and I realized I was shaking. The water in the pool was still and blue, and I focused on that. The sun came through the windows above and created shadows in some sections and sparkles of light in others.

  “It’s not okay,” I said. “I’m not okay, and this certainly isn’t okay.”

  Tommy nodded, but didn’t make a move to get up.

  The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch period, and I could hear students outside in the hallway. Their voices rose and fell in conversation as they passed the entrance to the pool. The bell rang for the next period, and still, the two of us stayed. I thought about all the times I had wanted to be with Tommy. The daydreams I’d had of the two of us doing something exactly like this, slipping away during the school day, and it turned my stomach.

  “What if something really has happened to her?” I finally asked.

  “We can’t think like that,” Tommy said.

  “But she was down by the water.”

  “Please,” Tommy interrupted. “Stop.”

  “We can’t be together,” I said, and kept my voice monotone.

  “Rhylee . . . ,” Tommy said, but I wouldn’t let him finish.

  “I’m sorry. But this is the only way it can be. I owe it to my sister. We don’t deserve to be with each other.”

  “We didn’t mean to hurt her,” Tommy said.

  “But we did.”

  “We did,” he agreed.

  “I wasn’t even sorry that I was taking you from her.” My voice broke. Watching Abby and Tommy together had been impossible, but this was a hundred times worse. “We can’t be together.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?” Tommy asked.

  “Survive,” I told him, because really, that’s all we had left.

  22

  Four more days passed without Abby.

  Dad decided to go back to work on Monday. I heard him talking with Mom when they thought no one was around. His boss wanted him to take more time off, but he told Mom that we needed the money and he’d still be able to spend his days helping with the search. I thought about my own job at Webster’s and how I never went back after Abby disappeared. I never even called to tell them, and they never called to see where I was. It was as if my family was given a pass to pause our lives, but for how long? And what were the consequences when everyone around us kept moving?

&nb
sp; Life became an endless stream of hours, minutes, and seconds without my sister. We were essentially living, without really living. Our lives suspended, our breaths held, until she returned.

  I began to create collages again, but not the ones Collin wanted and I didn’t put myself into them. Instead, I invented new lives for Abby, reasons for why we hadn’t heard from her. I placed her in islands with water so blue it hurt your eyes. I put her among crowds of thousands at rock concerts and alone on mountain peaks. She hiked through national forests and crossed sidewalks in cities congested with cars, people, and smog. She was everywhere, even though we couldn’t find her anywhere.

  We all wished for a miracle.

  Even when each day ended and a miracle didn’t come.

  The time rushed by and still we hoped, because everyone seemed to know Abby, and even if they didn’t, they pretended that they did because her disappearance was the biggest thing to happen in our town. Our own personal tragedy, and everyone loved to be connected to a tragedy, especially when it wasn’t your family involved.

  So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the night the circles came, we didn’t notice.

  It was easy not to notice things these days, because we were so busy being consumed by just one thing.

  Mom was the first to see them in the early hours of dawn when she opened the door to let Hound Dog out for his morning pee. She ran into Abby’s room to get a better look.

  “Will, come in here,” she yelled, her voice high and insistent, also pulling Collin and me from our beds. We jostled into each other trying to get down the hall, tired, disoriented, and confused as to why Mom would be in Abby’s room.

  She stood in front of the window that faced the field. Dad hadn’t mowed it since Abby went missing and the paths she had run through were thick with grass and weeds.

  Except for the circles that were now cut into our field.

  Crop circles in the middle of Coffinberry, Ohio.

  They stretched about the size of a football field, and I counted four large circles and three small ones. Seven circles. Abby’s cross-country number. But I told myself I was being silly.

  The circles were attached, forming a pattern that seemed deliberate. The grass around the shapes pushed down. There were no paths outside of them. It was like someone had dropped something and pulled it back up to create the design, their feet never touching the ground. Like in one of those movies where aliens invaded. I half expected a little green creature to jump out of the weeds.

  “What are those?” Collin asked as he rubbed sleep from his eyes. He clutched the teddy bear that Abby always slept with.

  “Some kids’ idea of a joke,” Dad said, but Mom didn’t think it was a joke. She squinted her eyes and studied them as if the reason for their appearance would suddenly show itself. I thought about my classmates, specifically the farm boys who drove their trucks to school, the backs full of feed and dirt. They sat in our parking lot before school blasting their country music, revving their engines. They were the type of kids who would do something like this; make a joke out of our family’s tragedy for a laugh. I could picture the boys creeping into our yard last night, laughing and telling one another to stay quiet in hushed whispers. They’d be drunk, burping out breaths of stale beer and pissing in our grass.

  I gazed out at the field my sister once ran and wondered how we didn’t realize how lucky we were only weeks ago.

  23

  An hour later, Dad honked the horn of his car to get us to move.

  While the circles were important, we had other things to do. Today was the first cross-country meet of the season, and they’d dedicated it to Abby. I had no idea how I was supposed to sit through the whole thing without breaking into tears. But there wasn’t any way to get out of it, even if it would feel next to impossible to be there.

  As hard as it was for me to go, it was even harder for Mom. Her bad days seemed to be outnumbering the good, and this morning even Dad couldn’t convince her to come with us.

  “I want to go,” she had said when Dad tried to reason with her. “But I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

  I’d watched the two of them from the hallway. Dad had taken Mom into his arms and stroked her hair as if she were a little kid, rocking her back and forth.

  Everyone says that the pain of grief lessens, but it was the opposite for us. The grief was elastic and continued to stretch further and further into everything around me, especially moments like that, when my family was so different than what we once had been.

  Mom stood at the screen door as we backed out of the driveway. I willed the car to get a flat tire or break down, but no such luck.

  I pressed my face against the window and watched the circles disappear from sight as we drove away.

  It was a gorgeous day, the sky a blue so vivid it was as if you were living within a picture. It was the type of day where you wanted to stay outside and soak in all the sun you could.

  Collin sat in the backseat and flipped through the pages of a comic book; something full of bangs, pows, and kabams with superheroes who saved the world in a single bound. They seemed the opposite from our reality where we had learned that a world where good prevailed and the bad guys perished seemed impossible.

  “What planet do you think the circles came from?” Collin asked. “Mars? People say there’s life on Mars.”

  Dad slowed for two kids walking across the street and glanced at Collin. “I don’t know, buddy. Let’s let the police figure that out.”

  “So you do think they came from outer space?”

  Dad sighed. “They came from Earth. We’ll find out exactly how, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “It’s weird,” Collin continued. “Why didn’t we hear anything? Hound Dog goes nuts when there’s an animal in our backyard.”

  “It probably happened when we were sleeping,” Dad said, and turned up the radio to try to stop the conversation, but Collin continued to push the topic.

  “No, I bet it was because a human didn’t make the circles.”

  “Collin,” Dad said, “we’re not talking about this anymore. We need to focus on what’s happening today rather than the circles.”

  But today was the last thing in the world I wanted to focus on. It was Mary Grace who had suggested that the school dedicate the race to Abby. As a way to keep her in the town’s mind. But it’s not like she needed to; everything these days was about Abby. The school even named it the Abby Towers Hope Run.

  A race named after my sister. She would’ve thought the whole town had gone nuts.

  And maybe we had.

  Dad, Collin, and I headed into the stadium so everyone could turn their gaze on us and give sad, pitying looks. I tried not to make eye contact, afraid they could see it all on my face. Mom was the one had stayed home, but I should have been the one who didn’t go. After all, none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for me and what I’d done.

  You did this, I reminded myself. And you weren’t even sorry.

  My classmates stood on either side of the entrance with plastic bags in their hands. These were the same people who’d come to our house for pre-meet dinners where Mom would make pot after pot of spaghetti while they carbo-loaded for their races the next day. They all had the tall muscular look. Their legs long and arms lanky. The group ran together as a team, and I always thought they looked like one another after the first few weeks of the season. The girls with their hair held back in elastic bands and everyone in red track jackets with warm-up pants. Tessa and I called them the Cult of Coffinberry. I swear they’d run off a cliff like lemmings if the person in the front led them there.

  “Hi, Mr. Towers,” Amy, a senior who always wore her hair in a thick braid, said when we made our way to the girls. “It’s good to see you.” She dipped her hand into the bag. “Thanks for coming.”

  She pushed a purple bracelet into my hand with the words HOMEWARD BOUND printed on it. I twirled the bracelet around in my fingers. I didn’t ne
ed to ask what it meant; they were the must-have accessory since Abby had disappeared. Purple was her favorite color, and the slogan was from one of the songs she’d played over and over. She loved old folk music: Crosby, Stills, & Nash; Bob Dylan; Neil Young—anyone who would go on and on about the world needing a’ changing. We’d groan when she had control of the radio during a car trip. There was only so much rambling and sappy singing one could take. Dad would joke that it reminded him of his days in college lying in the grass and smoking a joint, and Mom would then elbow him or give him a look that made him apologize and quickly turn the joint into an ice-cream cone.

  “We’re glad you’re doing this for Abby,” Dad said.

  I put my bracelet on even though it felt more like a shackle. They were supposed to show our solidarity, but it didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t going to bring back my sister. When they had first passed out the bracelets at school, I couldn’t even look them, another constant reminder that Abby was gone and I was still here. I’d thrown mine into my locker, where it probably still sat.

  Collin took his and slipped it over his wrist next to the four he was already wearing.

  “Do you think Abby will be here?” he asked.

  “I sure wish she was,” I said. “Everyone is here because they really want her to come home.” I wrapped my arms around him in a tight hug and tickled him to get him to smile.

  “She’s been gone long enough. She better come home soon,” he said, and I wished I could promise him that.

  My French teacher, Mademoiselle Lang, was the first to come up to us after we made our way into the stadium. She was short and dressed like she was going to some fancy cocktail event. She always wore pearls and pantyhose and heels, even when it was early in the school year and the days still blazed heat. Or at a cross-country meet on a Saturday morning when the rest of the world was looking like lazy bums in jeans and T-shirts.

  Abby had urged me to sign up for French when I had to pick a foreign language.

  “We’ll both know a secret language that Mom and Dad can’t understand,” she’d said.