“I saw them. I heard them. Please believe me.”
Liv says, “Sweet Jesus Christ!” And it’s not like she’s taking it in vain. It’s more like she’s trying to invoke divine intervention. “How did this happen? Stop wailing or someone’s going to notice you. Focus. If your hair’s still red, you need to get off that bus.”
But my hair isn’t still red, and I’ve been completely focused ever since Piper Carmichael said, “Come on, Nicky. I’m not that drunk.”
Absolute terror will do that for you.
I could hear blood flow past my ears inside my head, could hear myself breathing, could hear the words left foot, right foot, left, right, forming in my head. Directing me out through the front door and into the night.
Picked up my daypack and kept going.
Walked straight into the ladies’ room at the first bar I came to.
Cut five inches off my hair. Buried it in the trash.
Standing there in my bra, I pulled a box of dye out of my pack. Squirted foam through my hair. Spread Vaseline around my hairline. Kept spraying room deodorizer to cut the smell, which could have made birds fall out of the sky.
All I needed was twenty minutes for the dye to set.
I got fifteen, then some girl started rattling the door. It was my night for hogging bathrooms.
I yelled, “Just a sec, y’all!” As if I thought if I said y’all enough, people would believe I was from Georgia. Or wherever I said I was from.
Dunked my head into the sink. Ran a weak stream of water over it.
“You taking a bath in there?”
I wrung out my hair. Wiped out the sink. Put on jeans and gym shoes.
Walked out the back door into the pitch-black alley.
Tossed my wadded-up dress and fake-leather sandals in a trash can.
Walked away.
You get spotted. You evaporate like dew on a leaf. The sun rises, the leaf dries off, and even if someone can tell you were there, you’re gone.
Ask me who I hitched a ride to San Antonio with. How I found the bus station there. How I bought a ticket on the next bus out. How I managed to calculate the exact number of calories in the junk food I kept shoving down my throat.
I don’t know.
The new plan was to alter the shape of my body—put on weight, and quick—before I hit Tallahassee. Because obviously, cheap disguises didn’t do the trick. It crossed my mind that with all the greasy frosted doughnut residue, the cream filling and oozing cheeseburger fat clogging my arteries, I’d probably keel over dead before anyone got me in his crosshairs anyway.
So I’m sitting in this bus heading east, eating a chalupa. Wide-awake. Jolted into a perfect state of clarity.
Then it gets worse.
Then it’s not that if I keep messing up, they’ll find me.
I’m found.
Then comes my first and only text. Luna says: Your biker’s back with some muscle. Two guys with shoulder holsters. Looking for you. They have pictures. I said I never heard of you. Get outta Dodge. I’ll box your stuff. Xo.
I’m tagged online for two damn days, and guys with holsters are swilling iced tea in the lobby of the Bluebonnet.
How many screw-ups between Galkey and here? I picture two guys in an Escalade following the bus, biding their time, listening to the radio.
Someone opens the latch on the bathroom door in the back, and I stop breathing until the bus stops at a multiplex of gas stations and fast food and showers you pay for.
The driver is standing outside, smoking, shooting the breeze with a guy in a T-shirt. No holster. A lady with a half-asleep kid wants off the bus to buy some food.
I slide down the aisle. My pulse and breath and heartbeat are so loud. Out the door and fast over to the on-ramp to a highway going north.
Catch a ride on a truck carrying groceries to Topeka.
Get off. Get on. Change direction. Repeat.
Sleep for a couple of hours in the bushes behind a McDonald’s near Memphis.
Wake up.
Stick out my thumb.
Go west.
21
Jack
Two and a half more days on the road, and I slink back across the state border into Nevada, hoping no unhappy coincidence puts Enright or my mother next to me at a red light. I’ve driven thirty-eight hundred miles without coming six inches closer to finding this girl beyond a phone number I have no strategy for calling.
“What are you doing here?”
I’m in Calvin’s room via the ground-floor window next to his closet. I’ve gotten in this way since we were kids. But that’s not his usual response.
I say, “Hello. How’s it going? Fine. How about you? Also fine.”
“Not fine. Monica can’t go to prom with a senior unless she’s in a group.”
“Sorry. Go with Dan Barrons and Scarlett. Scarlett always liked you.”
Calvin pantomimes heaving. His geekier friends think prom is crap. I was his group, and I’m supposedly rock-climbing in Yosemite.
“I was hoping for technological assistance.”
“Tell me what’s going on first.”