He pats my back, all sloppy and uncoordinated. And I wouldn’t mind being held—not groped, held—even by a comatose bear. But more than that, I want to get away.
I scan the crowd, but who am I looking for? Anyone could be the bad guy. Except for this guy. He’s too tanked.
“You got a car?” I’m under his arm all the way to a five-speed Honda Civic. He doesn’t complain that I’m hijacking him. He’s too far-gone to hear me grind the gears.
“Oh, baaaaabe,” he says. Large guys can be so trusting and moronic.
A girl who does what he’s doing—gone forever. But he’s asleep and I’m driving, so I’m not that unfortunate girl. I’m the girl he won’t remember when he wakes up in the parking lot facing the beach, keys in the ignition.
I used to get in trouble for TPing trees and making over girls whose mothers make them dress like Pilgrims.
I’ve moved so far beyond taking candy bars and licenses and money. I’ve traded what Steve would have called “playing with fire” (if he’d known what I was up to, which he didn’t) for real fire. I’m barely recognizable inside. And I’m working on my outside.
If your life was at risk, would you commit arson in an apartment building?
That would be yes.
Would you risk your soul to save your body?
Yes.
This tops the list of things I wish I didn’t know about myself.
I walk along the beach until sunrise. The waves hit the shore so much louder than at Green Lake. Then I run as if I could outrun what I know.
As if.
It feels like the end of a marathon. That’s how tired of this I am.
What would Xena, Warrior Princess do?
What she had to do, that’s what.
I cut back up to the edge of the road as shades start opening in the houses. I hang behind a gas station on the end of a beach strip mall.
Change into a pink tee I’ll never wear again.
Part my hair with my fingernail. Plan what color curly mop it will be a couple of hours from now.
Wait.
Two girls with a San Diego State decal and an empty backseat pull in.
“My ride was supposed to meet me here an hour ago. Could I possibly hitch a ride south? I could chip in for gas.”
I sleep all the way down the coast. When they let me off, it feels like the morning after I got monumentally trashed at cheer camp and woke up hungover. I pass an electronics store. This time I find out which phone has GPS and buy the one that doesn’t, never did, and couldn’t. I don’t even steal it. Still, it seems like lots of money for a thirty-second phone call.
“Are you alone?”
“It’s Sunday morning—where do you think I am?” Olivia says.
“Drive the phone somewhere and crush it. Get yourself a new e-mail and write to Cinderella, okay?”
Cinderella3472 is from when we made up a college girl named Desiree to play with online. Not that we got past setting up her e-mail account and an unfinished profile on TrueLuvMatch.com. Who’s going to be able to find a nonexistent single who never goes to one website where I ever visited, posted, or scrolled past?
Olivia’s voice drops. “What happened?”
“Later.”
Then I trash the phone.
I have totally freaked out my best friend while she was sitting in church, and I don’t even feel bad about it.
I finally get how to do this. Lying and stealing didn’t feel that great, but this was a fire, and I don’t even feel guilty. On the bus back north, winding through farmland, I’m remembering Steve going, “Don’t you think that might have been a wee bit reckless, Nicolette?” I’m thinking, Freaking-A, I’m reckless.
Also, still alive.
I’m on the bus in different sunglasses and a marching band shirt, chomping on a bag of mini Kit Kat bars and a half-quart carton of whole milk to get my fat on.
You can circumnavigate the globe on your tabletop, Steve, but no one, not anyone, not whoever texted me, not a platoon of Texas Rangers or the FBI or a band of scary thugs (or you) will ever find me.
By the time you walk past me on the street, I’ll be some whole other girl you don’t even recognize or know.
Even I will hardly know it’s me.
I feel so maniacally in power, I can’t even sleep anymore. So I sit back in this half-dazed state, scanning the bus for bogeymen and obsessing about where Catherine Grace Davis can get a gun.
25
Jack
When it happens, I’m alone in the motel room that by now is strewn with bottles, KFC boxes, and dirty clothes. Nicolette is using Gmail—great for security, bad for me—but Calvin’s instructions are gold, and the privacy of the computer Nicolette is using is protected by the functional equivalent of a chain lock made of paper clips.
The computer is in the John Muir Branch of the public library in El Molino, California, a hick town in the Central Valley above Fresno.
Yelling “Gotcha!” to myself would be too much like going over the edge. Instead, I start cleaning up and packing with a vengeance. From this point on, it’s all about self-discipline: the kind Nicolette doesn’t have.
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