“I’m not trying to discourage you,” Bea said, and it made Allie jump. “I want nothing more than to be riding with someone who has cash. I’m all on board with that. So take the electronics, by all means. I’m only trying to discourage you from acting like you’re better than I am.”
Allie sighed. How long would she be riding with this woman? Surely not until she was eighteen. Somehow there had to be a plan. Something beyond this. But Allie didn’t have one. So she turned her thoughts back to the conversation at hand.
“I’ll try not to do that so much anymore. Tell you what. If I’m wrong, and my family owes the IRS the money from every single thing we own, then whenever I can, when I have enough money to do it, I’ll pay the IRS for the stuff I took. I’ll just send it in. You know. Anonymously.”
“Oh, you’ll do no such thing,” Bea said, sounding irritated. “Everybody says things like that. But then life goes on. You’ll forget.”
Allie opened her mouth to say it wasn’t true. That she would never forget. Never renege on that commitment. But Bea interrupted her thoughts before Allie managed to get any words out.
“Oh, never mind. Forget I mentioned it. You really would remember. I just realized that. How depressing.”
They rode most of the rest of the way to Southern California in silence.
Just as the Ventura Freeway began to back up going through the San Fernando Valley, as traffic slowed to a crawl, Allie voiced something. Something that felt big. Something that had been sitting in her head and chest for a long time, but without words.
It seemed Allie had missed the moment when the thoughts and feelings forged themselves into words. Instead she simply heard the words as they came out of her mouth and thought, Right. There it is. That’s what’s been rattling around in there, all right.
“I keep thinking about the girls who didn’t get away.”
“From that man, you mean?”
“I wish I only meant that. But I guess I mean from that man and all the other men like him.”
“That’s a lot for a girl your age to have to think about.”
“How can I not, though? It could have been me. I got away because the bathroom door was heavy and it had metal on it. And because he was standing too close to it. And because it hit him just right so it rattled his brain and he couldn’t get up right away. It was just luck. It wasn’t that I’m smarter than those other girls, or braver. Just lucky. What really bothers me is that I knew there was such a thing. I knew girls got caught up in . . . what my teacher called ‘human trafficking.’ And I hated it. I thought it was terrible. But I didn’t feel like I just had to try to do something about it. Until it almost happened to me. Why are we like that? Why do we not care enough about things until they happen to us?”
“I have no idea,” Bea said. “Maybe because if we cared that much about everything, all the time, all at the same time like that, we’d die of exhaustion. We’d have no time or energy left to run our own lives.”
“Maybe.” But, truthfully, it sounded like a lame excuse.
“I don’t know what you can do for them.”
“Neither do I.”
But at some point in her life, Allie now knew, she would have to find a better answer than that. Because it’s so much harder to ignore something that almost happened to you.
“Then there are the girls like my friend Jasmine. Or I thought she was my friend, anyway. Nobody kidnapped her exactly. But she stays with that guy on purpose. He hits her and makes her work selling herself out on the street, and she keeps going back. She could have stayed in the group home, but she ran away and went back with him. Why?”
“Lots of women stay with men who abuse them.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“I’m not the world’s foremost expert on human nature. But I’d guess those women are looking for something. Something they never got. Something they figure they need. Maybe this man convinces them he has what they’re looking for.”
Allie shivered, remembering a moment when it had almost worked on her. We’ll get you the best meal of your life. Tell me what else you need to be happy, and I’ll buy it for you.
“And those men know exactly what they’re doing when they take advantage,” Allie said.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know about that.”
But it didn’t matter to Allie. She didn’t need to have that thinking confirmed. It hadn’t been a question in any way.
Allie stared up at her own house. Home. It filled her with an unexpected sense of dread. As if it had always been a place of great danger, but she hadn’t known it. But she knew it now.
In fact, it didn’t look like home anymore. It looked completely familiar. But it did not feel welcoming in any way.
“My goodness,” Bea said. “You really did have everything, didn’t you?”
It felt strange to hear the assessment of her home through Bea’s eyes. Truthfully, she had gone to school with kids who had everything she’d had and much more. She had not felt the slightest bit advantaged at the time.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Allie said, “but you can’t park here while I’m inside. You need to just drop me. And then . . . I don’t know. Go around the block, I guess. I mean, you have to come back for me. But we have a neighborhood watch thing going on around here. And this van sort of . . . stands out.”
A long silence. Allie could feel it crackle with subtext.
“You act like I don’t know my station in the world,” Bea said, her voice crisp and tight.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t want us getting reported. I don’t want to get caught. I want to get some stuff and get out of here. That’s all.”
“Fine. I get it. Just go. Phyllis and I will give you five or ten minutes and then drive by.”
But still she sounded more than a little affronted.
Allie let herself into the backyard via the side gate.
The pool sat uncovered, crispy-looking brown leaves floating on its surface. At one of its concrete sides, near the lounge chairs, three inflatable pool mattresses lay stacked one on top of the other.
“Perfect!” Allie hissed out loud.
She ran to them and grabbed one, opening the two inflation tubes and squeezing the air out.
No more hard metal van floor under my hip, she thought as she rolled it up tightly and left it by the gate.
She circled the back of the house, trying windows. The kitchen. The dining room. The den.
All locked.
Allie sighed. She had hoped to get in and get out without leaving any obvious signs of illegal entry. But what did it really matter now?
She let herself quietly into the garage. There she picked up a rubber mallet her father used for pounding vintage hubcaps onto the vintage cars he restored. Or had used to restore, anyway, before he’d learned that large boats were an even better hole into which to shovel your family’s money. She grabbed a dirty towel off the open hamper in front of the washing machine.