She turned and went to her bedroom. She checked her top drawer first, in the plastic jewelry box where she kept her earnings. Everything was gone but forty dollars. Of course. Her mom had stolen it.
This didn’t bring a fresh wave of anger, only a new kind of disgust. Animals. They were animals, and Krista was the worst of them.
She pocketed the twenties and moved quickly through the room, stuffing things in Lily’s backpack: shoes, pants, shirts, underwear. When the backpack was full, she bundled things up in one of the comforters. They would need a blanket, anyway. And toothbrushes. She remembered reading in a magazine once that toothbrushes were the number one item travelers forgot to pack. But she wouldn’t forget. She was calm, thinking straight. She had it all together.
She slid the backpack onto one of her shoulders—it was so small, she couldn’t fit it correctly. Poor Lily. She wanted to get food from the kitchen, but that would mean walking past her mom and Bo and Maureen. She’d have to skip it. There probably wasn’t much she could use, anyway.
At the last second she took the rose off her dresser, the one Bishop had made her from metal and wire. It would be good luck.
She hefted the blanket in her arms, now heavy with all the clothing and shoes it contained, and shuffled sideways out of the bedroom door. She’d been worried her mom would try and stop her, but she shouldn’t have been. Krista was sitting on the couch, crying, with Maureen’s arms around her. Her hair was a stringy mess. Heather heard her say, “. . . did everything . . . on my own.” Only half the words were audible. She was too messed up to speak clearly. Bo was gone. He’d probably split, since the drugs were nothing but carpet crumbs now. Maybe he’d left to get more.
Heather pushed out the door. It didn’t matter. She’d never see Bo again. She’d never see her mother, or Maureen, or the inside of that trailer again. For one second, she could have sobbed, going down the porch steps. Never again—the idea filled her with a relief so strong, it almost turned her knees to water and made her trip.
But she couldn’t cry, not yet. She had to be strong for Lily.
Lily had fallen asleep in the front seat, her mouth open, her hair feathering slightly in the heat. Finally her lips weren’t blue anymore, and she was no longer shivering.
She didn’t open her eyes until they were just bouncing out of the entrance to the Pines and onto Route 22.
“Heather?” she said in a small voice.
“What’s up, Billy?” Heather tried to smile and couldn’t.
“I don’t want to go back there.” Lily turned and rested her forehead against the window. In the glass’s reflection, her face was narrow and pale, like a tapered flame.
Heather tightened her fingers on the wheel. “We’re not going back there,” she said. Weirdly, the words made the taste of sick come up. “We’re never going back, okay? I promise.”
“Where will we go?” Lily asked.
Heather reached over and squeezed Lily’s knee. Her jeans had finally dried. “We’ll figure something out. Okay? We’re going to be just fine.” The rain was still coming down in sheets; the car carved waves in the road, sending liquid rivers sloshing toward the gutters. “You trust me, right?” Heather asked.
Lily nodded without turning her face away from the window.
“We’re going to be fine,” Heather repeated, and returned both hands to the wheel, gripping tightly.
They couldn’t, she realized, go to Bishop’s or Nat’s. She’d taken her mom’s car and had no intention of returning it, which counted as stealing. And her friends’ houses would be the first place her mom would think of looking when she sobered up and realized what had happened.
Would she call the police? Would they track Heather down? Maybe her mom would convince them that Heather was a delinquent, and they would try to pin the fire on her.
But there was no point in worrying about that yet.
No one could know. It came down to that. She and Lily would have to be very, very careful for the next few weeks. As soon as they had enough money to leave Carp, they would. And until then, they had to hide. They’d have to hide the car, too, and use it only at night.
The idea came to her suddenly: Meth Row. The whole road was cluttered with old cars and abandoned houses. No one would notice one more shitty car parked there.
Lily had fallen asleep again and was snoring quietly. Meth Row looked even bleaker than usual. The rain had turned the pitted road to sludge, and Heather had trouble just keeping the wheel from jerking under her hands. It was hard to tell which houses were occupied and which weren’t, but she finally found a spot next to a storage shed and an old Buick, stripped nearly to its metal frame, where she could angle the car so it was mostly unseen from the road.