The air outside the car was crisp and clean—too clean; I wasn’t sure my city-infected
lungs could handle the pure stuff. The night sky was unbelievably clear, which I guessed was how
it must always look when the city lights weren’t there to distort it. Of course I had seen
stars before, but not like this. It was like every imaginable constellation was shining above.
It took me a while to find the dippers—big and little were the only ones I knew; but in this
perfect sky, they weren’t the only superstars.
The sound of a door creaking open and the flood of light that followed knocked me out of my
reverie. A man walked through the earlier guiding light that, as it turned out, was a door with
a window of carved glass.
My legs went numb when I noticed that he was carrying a long-barreled shotgun over his shoulder.
Kid greeted this armed man nonchalantly as they met in the middle.
“Why are you back so early?” demanded the gunman.
Kid shrugged his head in my direction and explained, “Pain-in-the-butt delivery.”
The gunman did a once-over in my direction. Then he parted ways with Kid to make his way toward
me.
I held my breath and closed my eyes, listening to the shuffling of his feet against the loose
gravel—I didn’t want to see the bullet coming. The footsteps approached and shuffled on, past
me. I opened one eye in time to see him disappear into the darkness of the surrounding woods. I
heard his footsteps crush against the grass, until I couldn’t hear anything else but the wind
rushing through the darkened trees.
I turned my eyes to the sky again. I was looking for them—my lucky stars—but it was early
still and there were just too many stars to find mine.
Kid had been watching me go through my rush of emotions from the opened doorway. With the same
look of mystification on his face, he hollered, “Hey, freak, are you just going to stand there
all night—or do you plan on ever coming in?”
The doorway where he was standing was attached to a large building that, from the darkness,
looked like a barn. There were tall cedar shrubs that lined the face of the edifice, with the
door being the only shrub-free space. The moon’s shine reflected off the tin roof, and I couldn
’t tell if the building had any windows because of the cedars that hid its exterior walls.
Inside the barn was a foyer with a vaulted ceiling. The beige, tiled floor of the foyer merged
with dark, ancient-looking hardwood floor. Half-mooned stairs led to a second-level hallway with
an unencumbered white wall and wood rail. Through a side doorway, another set of stairs led down
to a floor below. I could see the flickering of images from an unseen downstairs TV bouncing off
the plain stair walls.
Kid kicked off his shoes onto the pile of huge man shoes that were strewn by the front door and
disappeared through an arched doorway that was at the far end of the foyer, next to the curved
staircase. Getting used to his unspoken commands, I did the same and followed him through the
archway. By the time I made it down the two steps that led to a living area, he was already
sprawled in front of the TV on one of the two couches, remote control in hand—it was like we
had never left the apartment in the city.
I sat on the edge of the other couch and waited, carefully examining my surroundings.
It was one big open space that connected a living room to a kitchen to a large, pine-colored
dining table. I could see now that the barn was a home. The living room had brown leather
furniture—the soft kind that seemed to form around your body as you sunk into it. There was a
fireplace made of stones stacked to the high ceiling, with an oversized flat screen television
that hung above its mantel, which Kid hadn’t taken his eyes off of.
A humungous kitchen separated the living room from the dining table—it had two of almost every
appliance: two restaurant-sized refrigerators, two microwaves, two toasters, two dishwashers,
but only one oven. And the dining table looked big enough to seat twenty people. To the other
side of the living room was a small hallway.
While Kid settled on cartoons, I nervously kept my eyes on him. I was trying to decide which one
was worse: not knowing how I was going to die, or not knowing when it was going to happen. I was
weary, impatient.
After a few minutes of my stare, Kid diverted his attention from the TV and sighed loudly, “Are
you always this uptight, or are you just like that with me?”
“No, I’m usually a lot more fun when I get kidnapped and brought in the middle of nowhere
against my will,” I snapped. His indifference to my plight was maddening to me.
His eyebrows furrowed. “Hey, don’t get upset with me. I’m just following orders.”
“What are your orders, exactly?” I took the chance of asking, just in case he obliged me with
an actual answer.
“Weren’t you right there when I got them?” he questioned in answer to my question.
“All I heard was that you were taking me for a drive to the farm. I don’t know what that
means, but this place doesn’t look much like a farm to me.”
“It does when you know the animals who live here,” he said, laughing.
My eyes swept the room again and rested back on his face. “This place is what Cameron meant by
taking me to the farm?” I had noticed his face flinch when I said Cameron’s name, but he didn
’t say anything about it.
“What else could it mean?”