“This is the story of how I disappeared.”

“This is the story of how I disappeared.” is Eileen Dunlop’s framing declaration, announcing the outcome toward which her account is moving before recounting the desires, doubts, and preparations that lead toward it. The sentence makes disappearance both a future action and the organizing idea of her story: an imagined escape from X-ville gradually becomes a concrete plan.

A declaration of the story’s direction

The sentence follows Eileen’s introduction of herself as a twenty-four-year-old working as a secretary at Moorehead, a private juvenile correctional facility. She says that she will run away from home in a week and never return. The declaration therefore gives the reader a short horizon and a known destination in the story’s structure, even as the circumstances of her departure remain to be narrated.

Its first-person phrasing also establishes the account as Eileen’s own retrospective telling. She identifies the younger woman whose choices will be described as someone she can look back on, while still making that woman’s disappearance the central subject. The result is a frame that holds distance and continuity together: the narrator can announce what happened, but the coming narrative must retrace how escape became possible to imagine.

From daydream to an imagined alternative

Eileen’s declaration grows out of a long-standing sense that life in X-ville is intolerable, although she also acknowledges that she has continued to endure it. After a trip along the coast ends with her car out of gas and an older woman helping her reach a filling station, she begins to imagine disappearance as a solution. New York City becomes the imagined destination. The idea is initially shaped by a familiar fantasy of arriving in Manhattan with enough money for a boardinghouse room and letting a new future unfold without much planning.

That daydream acquires practical details. Eileen saves cash in the attic and considers withdrawing money from the Dunlops’ savings by giving the bank a false reason. She keeps her wish to leave to herself. In a moment of despair, she imagines seeking help from Dr. Frye, but the possibility does not become an actual conversation; she retreats into the thought that her life, however difficult, has remained tolerable. The escape fantasy gives her another possibility to hold beside endurance.

Fear, resolve, and the planned route

The declaration’s promise of disappearance is sharpened by Eileen’s conflicted thoughts about death. She fears the religious punishment her father might associate with suicide, does not believe in heaven, and says she does not really want to die. She identifies running away as another option, making the desire to leave more than a passing image even before she has the courage to act on it.

By Monday, the fantasy has become a detailed itinerary. Eileen plans to drive northwest across state lines toward Vermont, leave the Dodge in Rutland, and continue by train to New York City, 257 miles south of X-ville. She imagines carrying the money hidden in the attic, clothing, and an empty suitcase for the clothes she would remove on the train. She also considers borrowing books from the X-ville library and keeping them as mementos, while recognizing that their disappearance might make others question whether she meant to return. These plans do not themselves confirm how the escape will unfold; they show how the announced disappearance begins to take shape in her thinking.

Narrative significance

The sentence works as both a promise and a point of suspense. The reader is told that Eileen will disappear, but the account’s attention remains on the uncertain interval between wanting to leave and preparing to do so. Its force comes from that difference: the outcome is declared early, while the motives and steps behind it are disclosed in sequence.

Disappearance also names a change in the terms of Eileen’s imagined future. Her first vision is a comparatively effortless arrival in New York City; the later plan depends on saving money, choosing a route, and anticipating how her departure might be interpreted. The declaration gathers those shifts into one concise frame, making escape not only the event she predicts but the question that organizes her story.