Maisie’s like a celebrity in my hometown. I mean, we don’t really have celebrities, but people talk about the girl that stopped.

I was a toddler when it happened, so I don’t remember it, but my parents told me about it when I turned ten, all big eyes and low voices because they didn’t know what made Maisie stop. Some people thought it’d jinx children if you told them, but my parents explained everything. It was like they were afraid it’d happen to me, and they thought as long as I knew about it, I wouldn’t stop too. And maybe they were right, but the rest of the world is still moving.

Thing is, no one ever restarted Maisie. There were family and friends over, doctors and doctors and doctors, even a priest, but no one could figure it out.

So my seventeenth birthday came around, and seventeen’s when Maisie stopped, and my friends were spending the night, and they were all you should go sneak into the McKinley’s house and talk to Maisie, and you know how everything seems like a good idea when it’s three in the morning and you’ve been drinking Monster? I had to sneak out of my house first, which was fine except they were gasping and giggling because I was actually doing it, but somehow we got out and drove to the McKinley’s.

And I chickened out because I wasn’t going to jail.

But I went back the next day, while the sun was up, and I said I wanted to see Maisie for homework, which teachers did sometimes, so they took me upstairs, and she was lying in a teenage girl’s room, still looking like a teenage girl and staring at nothing. She wasn’t even breathing, but if you touched her, she was warm and alive.

Stopped is the best word for it. People tried to call it paralysis at first, but even if she couldn’t move her body, she’d be able to think, and the doctors would be able to see it with their machines. She would have aged. It was like God hit the pause button, left the screen, and forgot to come back and press play again. I think that’s why her parents kept her in bed. In case God remembered her.

Anyone who saw Maisie talked about how it made their skin crawl to see a person stopped like she was, but I just felt sad.

I visited more after that day, and I talked. Stopped wasn’t dead, and I figured I’d want someone to be sad and talk to me if I stopped. Maisie was a good listener, even when I bitched about Pete, which no one else wanted to listen to because we told you so. I figured out a lot talking to her, about what I wanted to do and who I was and where I wanted to go. I talked a whole year away. Birthday to birthday, gone, and it was time to leave. I cried; Mr. and Mrs. McKinley cried; Maisie didn’t react.

Even after I left, I called every day, and the McKinley’s were cool about it and put me on speaker and left the phone in Maisie’s room while I’d talk. When I visited my parents, I’d visit Maisie too. I even kissed her once, thinking maybe that would fix her.

And then I realized I was going to stop too, just like Maisie, if I didn’t let go, because sometimes it didn’t feel like anything mattered except talking to her, puzzling her out, trying to get her to restart. I wasn’t really going anywhere.

It scared me so bad I told the McKinley’s I was done and deleted their numbers from my phone. I stopped coming home so much, afraid to run into them, and tried not to think of Maisie. I started doing things to keep busy—made new friends, went to parties, became an adult with a real job, got married, had kids, and eventually stopped thinking about her.

My daughter turned seventeen today. I’m the opposite of my parents; I’m afraid she’ll stop if she finds out she can. I’m afraid to know whether God ever remembered Maisie.

– Kristen Shea