Doctor Sleep: A Novel

down or stopped completely, he had a tendency to be grumpy. Also, he was more apt to notice her. Today she didn’t want to be noticed.
    “Abba-Doo, is that you?” her father half sang.
    Ordinarily she would have asked him to please stop using that baby name, but not today. “Yup, it’s me.”
    “School go okay?”
    The steady click-click-click had stopped. Please don’t come out here, Abra prayed. Don’t come out and look at me and ask me why I’m so pale or something .
    “Fine. How’s the book?”
    “Having a great day,” he said. “Writing about the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Vo-doe-dee-oh-doe.” Whatever that meant. The important thing was the click-click-click started up again. Thank God.
    “Terrific,” she said, rinsing her glass and putting it in the drainer. “I’m going upstairs to start my homework.”
    “That’s my girl. Think Harvard in ’18.”
    “Okay, Dad.” And maybe she would. Anything to keep herself from thinking about Bankerton, Iowa, in ’11.
    6
    Only she couldn’t stop.
    Because.
    Because what? Because why? Because . . . well . . .
    Because there are things I can do .
    She IM’ed with Jessica for awhile, but then Jessica went to the mall in North Conway to have dinner at Panda Garden with her parents, so Abra opened her social studies book. She meant to go to chapter four, a majorly boresome twenty pages titled “How Our Government Works,” but instead the book had fallen open to chapter five: “Your Responsibilities As a Citizen.”
    Oh God, if there was a word she didn’t want to see this afternoon, it was responsibilities. She went into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick and found herself staring at her own freckles in the mirror. There were exactly three, one on her left cheek and two on her schnozz. Not bad. She had lucked out in the freckles department. Nor did she have a birthmark, like Bethany Stevens, or a cocked eye like Norman McGinley, or a stutter like Ginny Whitlaw, or a horrible name like poor picked-on Pence Effersham. Abra was a little strange, of course, but Abra was fine, people thought it was interesting instead of just weird, like Pence, who was known among the boys (but girls always somehow found these things out) as Pence the Penis.
    And the biggie, I didn’t get cut apart by crazy people who paid no attention when I screamed and begged them to stop. I didn’t have to see some of the crazy people licking my blood off the palms of their hands before I died. Abba-Doo is one lucky ducky .
    But maybe not such a lucky ducky after all. Lucky duckies didn’t know things they had no business knowing.
    She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn’t just him. There were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the last page of the Shopper like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did she know? Not even “How Our Government Works.”
    What did the parents of those missing children think? How did they go on with their lives? Was Cynthia or Merton or Angel the first thing they thought about in the morning and the last thing they thought about at night? Did they keep their rooms ready for them in case they came home, or did they give all their clothes and toys away to the Goodwill? Abra had heard that was what Lennie O’Meara’s parents did after Lennie fell out of a tree and hit his head on a rock and died. Lennie O’Meara, who got as far as the fifth grade and then just . . . stopped. But of course Lennie’s parents knew he was dead, there was a grave where they could go and put flowers, and maybe that made it different. Maybe not, but Abra thought it would. Because otherwise you’d pretty much have to wonder, wouldn’t you? Like when you were eating breakfast, you’d wonder if your missing
    ( Cynthia Merton Angel  )
    was also eating breakfast somewhere, or flying a kite, or picking oranges with a bunch of migrants, or whatever. In the back of your mind you’d have to be pretty sure he or she was dead, that’s what happened to most of them (you only had to watch Action News at Six to know), but you couldn’t be sure.
    There was nothing she could do about that uncertainty for the parents of Cynthia