Once I got it in my head to go visit the girl skeleton at the Smithsonian, I couldn't shake it. Her name was New Jersey Skeleton 1972, but everyone called her Sandy: forever 15, presented to the museum's anthropology department by the police. A strange gift. I learned about her in a book published the year I was born, as I read up on teen runaways in the late '60s and early '70s, a group that included my own mother, for my memoir. My mom is the only grown-up teen runaway I know, but she was apparently a drop in a wave. New Jersey Skeleton 1972 was the phantom girl I was taught to fear becoming myself: the girl with the trusting smile, the girl with the grabbed wrist, the girl kept in the room, the girl dumped in a ditch.
