The Night She Disappeared

The story of an adolescent girl being victimized by an adult man is an unfortunately common one, both in fictional crime narratives and in real life. In The Night She Disappeared, Kayla and Gabie are acutely aware of their place within this common story. After being targeted by Robertson, both girls must find a way to survive and fight back against the idea that they are powerless victims.

In The Night She Disappeared, as in real life, stories of missing and murdered girls are everywhere. These stories are easily accessible even to teenagers; in Chapter 19, Gabie googles “body found” and finds an article about a 16-year-old-girl who was murdered and stuffed into a suitcase. Countless similar stories of girls being victimized converge into a single narrative that reliably ends in tragedy and “a shallow mountain grave” (23).

Everybody in the novel is influenced by this pervasive narrative. After Kayla’s disappearance, the police quickly form a theory that she was taken by a man, possibly sexually assaulted, and then killed. Because statistics point to Kayla likely being dead, the police erroneously close her case while she is still fighting for survival.

Kayla’s peers have heard the same narrative and are primed to believe Kayla is dead within days of her disappearance.