In the alternate ending:

I got into those strangers’ car.
I crossed my fingers, didn’t pray, but hoped I’d not chosen the wrong car, the wrong time, the wrong place.

They didn’t take me where I asked.
They weren’t who they said they were after all.

I did disappear. I mean elements of me did, at least. Shards of self I cannot reassemble, resurrect. In this ending—I don’t return anywhere because there is nowhere to return to.In this ending, the strangers aren’t to be trusted. Every warning was right. I should’ve stayed inside my dorm. I should’ve locked every last door and window and possibility. In this ending I end up on the news, a school portrait and a handful of empty details about who I was or who they needed me to be.

The novel ends and I am nowhere to be seen or heard or felt; I am all loose ash rattling in a tin can, all stray glimpses of squashed light and a pile of clothes on the side of the highway, a stray femur or collarbone dug up decades later, or maybe that’s just the ending you like to imagine best, as if girl-death has any shock value anymore, as if there is anything new to this narrative. Maybe I just dissolve. Maybe my atoms disassemble and my neurons fire away, inch by inch, color by color, thought by thought, until every organ and memory and desire and last glimmer of feeling shatter and disintegrate.

Maybe there is a white heat that swallows me whole and it isn’t violent or lonely. Maybe our bodies protect us from horror, at the end, sometimes, maybe mine does.