Escaping Perfect (2 page)

Without thinking, I got on my knees and shoved myself through the open window that divided the driver's seat from the rest of the car. Within seconds I was behind the wheel—thank God the Tank convinced my mom that my learning to drive was necessary for my safety. The crowd was at least six or seven cars behind me to the left, eyes and lenses riveted on the senator. There was nothing in front of me but open road.

I clicked the car into drive, put my hands on the wheel, and pressed my foot down on the gas pedal.

*  *  *

I had been on the road for fifteen minutes when my phone began to ring, but I refused to look at the screen. I gripped the steering wheel with slick fingers, hardly able to take a full breath. But even in all my panic and elation and terror and sadness, my logical side was still functioning, and it was telling me that the cops were going to be on me in about
thirteen seconds. A scrawny black girl behind the wheel of a stretch limo with livery plates?
That
was something people were going to notice.

I had to get off this highway. But where the hell was I supposed to go?

I had barely asked myself the question when a sign appeared before me. An actual sign for Everglades National Park. Gigi used to take me there every December 26 for a picnic at a secluded spot near the water. No one would ever look for me there, and there were enough trees to hide the limo, even if my mother somehow got NASA to train a satellite on the area. Which she could totally do.

I just had to find the right turnoff once I got inside the park area. Then maybe I could stop for a while, give myself some time to think, figure out what I was going to do next. I eased the limo off the road.

A few drivers peered curiously out at me as they blew by in the other direction. I noticed that the driver had left his black hat on the passenger seat, and I jammed it down on top of my hair. Not the greatest disguise in the world, but better than nothing.

More signs pointed off to various sections of the park. Fishing piers, wildlife preserves, designated water sports areas. Finally, I found what I was looking for: an old, chipped sign
that read
PICNIC GROUNDS
with a red sticker slapped across it—
CLOSED
. I ignored that, just like my grandmother always had. I almost laughed, remembering how her irreverence had stressed me out, how I'd spend the first half hour of any picnic worried that we were going to get caught. Never the rule breaker, and now I was breaking every rule in the book.

As soon as I turned onto the packed dirt road, the trees and undergrowth bent in around me. High above, the canopy of leaves blocked out the sun, and long green grasses swished against the sides of the car. I eased my foot off the gas and realized that my ankle hurt from being in the same tense position for so long. Finally I found myself able to breathe. Able to think.

What the hell was I doing?

Did I really think that this stunt would prove anything? That I could escape my mother? No, in fact, I didn't. When I'd crawled through that window, I hadn't been thinking at all. I'd been working on instinct, hopped up on emotion. I had wanted to get away, plain and simple. I'd seen my chance and I'd taken it.

The question was, what to do now? I took a deep breath and considered my situation. I had a ton of cash in my backpack—the bag I never left home without—from the tutoring services I offered at school. Okay, the flat-out
writing-papers-for-other-kids business I'd been lucratively running behind Tim's back for the past five years. Most of the money was hidden under a floorboard in my room back home in Boston, where I made deposits every break, but I'd brought my latest haul—about two thousand dollars—­with me, in case the school did one of its random sweeps while I was away at the funeral. If I could just get somewhere, somewhere off the grid, maybe I could really and truly be free.

I came to the end of the road and hit the brakes. The car stopped soundlessly. Fingers trembling, I shoved the gearshift into park. Before me was the bog where Gigi and I had picnicked just this past December. Where we'd tossed out a couple of lines and sat munching on cold fried chicken, not catching anything and not caring. I'd leaned my head against her shoulder and we'd daydreamed about going to Europe together. We'd talked about how once I turned eighteen, I could do anything I wanted, I could escape, and she'd be here to do it with me.

Except that she wasn't. Thanks to one tiny blood clot, she was gone.

I leaned back in the seat and cried. I cried in total earnest and abandon in a way I hadn't since Tash had called me to tell me Gigi had passed. For the first time in forever, I was truly
and completely alone, no bodyguard hovering, no driver or personal assistant or tutor listening in. I cried with everything I had in me.

And by the time I stopped, I had a plan. By the time I stopped, I knew I wasn't ever going back.

Chapter Two

Lia Washington. My name is Lia Washington.
Hi! I'm Lia Washington.

The fingers on my left hand twitched atop my knee the following morning as I sat on the edge of my seat on the half-empty bus. It was an old habit from when I played the violin as a kid. I used to stay up nights, fingering scales and concertos under the covers, hearing the notes inside my head. I hadn't touched a violin in four years, but my fingers still remembered everything, and considering my current freak-out level, they were twitching like crazy.

It took some concentration, but I stilled them.
Lia Washington,
I thought calmly.
That's my name.
I'd chosen my grandmother's maiden name, and I knew she'd approve.

Outside the window, the green hills of Tennessee rolled
by; horses raced across an open field in the distance. It was all so peaceful, a serious contrast to the pounding of my pulse. I couldn't believe I was here. I couldn't believe I was doing this. I'd daydreamed about this moment my entire life—the day I would finally break free. When I was nine, I'd envisioned a distant foreign princess cousin swooping in to bring me back to her castle. Around age thirteen, I'd devised a plan to break out of Worthington and hire someone off Craigslist to pick me up and race me across the country to California, where I'd spill my secrets to a filmmaker, become an instant millionaire, and file for emancipated-minor status. Of course, I'd never truly believed any of those plans were plausible. And now, here I was. Without a plan. And it had somehow worked.

For now, anyway. How long would it be before my parents or their security team or the FBI found me? What would they do to me when they did?

My fingers were twitching again, and now they started to shake. I had to get a grip. I reached up to crack the window and let the scent of fresh, wet earth fill my lungs. For half a second the panicked rate of my heart slowed.

You're doing the right thing. For the first time in your entire life, you're free.

“Lia Washington,” I whispered, trying to make them sound like words I'd said every day, forever. “I'm Lia Washington.”

The bus's brakes squealed, and I almost threw myself into the aisle, ready to run. But when I looked back, there were no police cars, no black vans bearing down on the bus. We'd simply come to a stop sign.

“Pull it together, Cecilia,” I muttered under my breath, sitting back again. I wasn't even going to make it one day if I was this on edge.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. What was my mother doing right now? My father? Had they found the limo at the bottom of the bog yet? My crushed and drowned cell phone? Did they realize I'd run away, or did they think I'd been kidnapped again?

My mother was probably frantic, trying to deal with the press and figure out what her official statement would be. And Dad . . . well, I'd be surprised if he even noticed I was gone.

A lump welled in my throat, but I swallowed it down. I'd long since adjusted to the fact that my family didn't actually care about me as a person, didn't care to know who I really was or love me for it. There was no reason for me to get all sentimental about it now, when I didn't have to think about it anymore. In fact, if everything went as planned, I'd never have to think about it again.

We hit a bump in the road, and when I looked up, I was
staring at the big, white sign with its scrolling green letters—
WELCOME TO SWEETBRIAR, TENNESSEE, POP. 5698
—as it slipped by the window. My exhausted heart fluttered with excitement. Make that 5699.

I sat forward as, within seconds, the buildings of downtown rushed by. This was it. I was home.

I had only been to Sweetbriar once before, when I was six years old and Gigi had brought me here to visit with her best friend, Daria, and her grandson Jasper, who was two years older than me. It had only been for a couple of days, but the place had made an impression, and everything was exactly as I remembered it. The clapboard storefronts. The fat, pink blooms on the magnolia trees bobbing in the light breeze, casting shade over the brick-lined sidewalks. I gripped the back of the seat in front of me, scanning the stores for Daria's place. I hoped it was still here. Please, please let it still be here.

Daria had a salon on Main with an apartment above where she and Jasper lived. It had been the home base for the best two days of my life. Gigi and Daria had taken the two of us kids to a park nearby, where we'd been allowed to climb trees and jump from monkey bars and eat peanut butter sandwiches without first making use of the hazmat kit my mom always kept in her bag.

I had never felt so free.

The bus screeched to a stop at a small bus shelter—a pretty white structure with a green shingled roof—and I held my breath until the noise died down. Then, shouldering my battered backpack, I shakily made my way down the aisle and out into the sunshine, into my new life.

I froze.

Up until this very moment, my goal had been to get to Sweetbriar and find a job and a place to stay. But now that I was here, staring at Main Street, the panicked questions I'd been trying to ignore crashed to the front of my mind, demanding to be heard.

What if I couldn't find a job that didn't require me to share a social security number or a valid ID? The ones I had belonged to the daughter of the senator from the great state of Massachusetts. The second somebody typed my digits into a computer, I was toast. How long would my two thousand dollars last me? Truth be told, I had no clue what rent or food or anything else cost. Would it last me a month, a week, a day? My palms started to sweat in the awful way they did back at school every time someone had knocked on my dorm-room door. How could I have ever thought this was going to work?

“Hiya!”

I flinched and turned around, instinctively tugging my hood forward to hide more of my face. I was greeted by the
wide, toothy smile of a bottle-ginger grandma in a floral dress and cowboy boots, pushing a stroller as she walked by.

“Welcome to Sweetbriar, hon!” she said with a nod.

In my entire life no stranger had ever said hello to me out of nowhere, possibly because I had never been allowed to encounter actual strangers. Even though I didn't answer, she kept right on smiling and walking, her stride wide and purposeful. I glanced into the stroller and found a little pink pig in a bow tie staring up at me. I swear it scoffed when it caught my eye.

A door across the street opened, releasing a burst of piano music as two girls my age spilled out in full-on cotillion dresses, looking back over their shoulders like they were being chased. They ducked into Hadley's Drugs next door, giggling, just as a pack of guys chugged by in an old red pickup, two of them hanging in the back, singing at the top of their lungs to the country music that blared from inside.

Clearly, the people-watching in this town was going to be distraction enough.

I took a deep breath and let it out.

“It's okay,” I told myself, trying as hard as I could to believe it. “Everything's going to be okay.”

Slowly I let the hood fall off my hair, looked both ways, then crossed the street. Daria's was somewhere on the far
side of Main, facing the park. I wasn't sure whether I'd even go in. If Daria recognized me, the jig would be up before it even started. But I wanted to know it was there—that she was there. As a safety net, I guess. I needed to know that if I screwed it all up, I'd have somewhere to turn.

“Morning!”

A middle-aged man with a black beard to his navel tipped his cowboy hat at me. I managed a small smile back. His eyes flicked over my outfit, and I self-consciously tugged up the zipper on my hoodie, hoping he hadn't noticed the swipe of blood on the white shirt underneath. After I'd used that rock to weigh down the gas pedal and put the car in drive, it had moved a lot faster than I'd thought it would, and I'd scraped my stomach pretty badly trying to get out before it submerged itself in the water. At present I was sporting a mud-stained black skirt and blood-spattered white shirt and the blue Hilfiger hoodie I kept in my bag. I'd be lucky if I wasn't run off the street. Or arrested.

Keeping my head down, I shakily tucked my hair behind my ears. Clothes. I was definitely going to need some clothes. Where was a Target or a Walmart when you needed it? But I shouldn't have been surprised. Sweetbriar wasn't the big-box-chain type of place.

Suddenly a girl on a bike came careening around the
corner and almost mowed me down. She had a guitar strapped to her back and black-painted fingernails, and she wore a white football helmet instead of a bicycle version. I yelped and jumped backward, colliding with the window of Hadley's.

“Sorry, miss!” the kid shouted as she tore down the street.

I covered my eyes with one hand. I couldn't do this. I couldn't. How could I ever have thought I could? Thanks to my effing mother, I was a total basket case.
Maybe
if she hadn't hidden me away in a maximum-security private school for the past ten years I would be able to, I don't know, walk down a damn street in broad daylight without having a panic attack. God, I hated her. I hated her for turning me into this skittish loner freak with few friends and no life and no future.

Trembling from head to toe, I tried to look around, tried to focus, but everything seemed blurry. I needed to calm down. I needed to get a grip, and fast.

“You okay, miss?”

I let out a yelp and staggered back a step or two. A dark-skinned man wearing a crisp white apron over a bright-orange button-down leaned out the door of Hadley's.

“I'm sorry. Didn't mean to spook ya,” he said, holding up a steadying hand. “Why don't you come inside for a second? You look like you could use a sit-down.”

Through the plate-glass window I saw the cotillion girls sitting at an old-school ice cream counter, perched on vinyl stools as they ate from silver dishes. Even in the midst of my nervous breakdown, my stomach grumbled. The only thing I'd had all day was the granola bar I'd bought from a vending machine at the bus's last pit stop. I was about to take him up on the offer—maybe food would help chill me out—when something caught my eye, and my heart dropped to the sidewalk.

On the ground outside the drugstore was a stack of newspapers held down by a half a brick. Peeking out from underneath the end of that brick was a curly brown pigtail held by a big red bow. I recognized that bow.

Holding my breath, I crouched to the ground and picked up the brick. There was my smiling eight-year-old face, big gap where my two front teeth should have been, my plaid pinafore tight over my starched white shirt as I posed in front of the standard school-pic backdrop of faux bookcases. My skin looked darker, and with the grainy print my dark green eyes appeared brown somehow, but it was me. The headline read:
KIDNAPPED! DAUGHTER OF AMERICA'S FAMILY PLUCKED FROM GRANDMOTHER'S FUNERAL.

Well. At least they didn't think I'd run away. Although why that should make me feel better, I had no idea. Maybe
because my default setting was to avoid defying my mother at all costs. But this way they weren't looking for a runaway. They were looking for a criminal, maybe waiting for a ransom note. Somehow I felt like this was a positive development. My fingers itched to grab the paper and read the whole article. Had they found the car? My phone? Did they have any supposed leads? But the man from Hadley's was watching me closely, and I couldn't seem to make myself move.

If I held this picture of eight-year-old me too close to my face, would he recognize me? Would anyone?

I let the brick fall over my huge smile and stood up again, finding my hazy reflection in the store window. For the first time ever, I was grateful for the strict rule against public use of cell phones at my school, in place to prevent photos of the children of dignitaries and billionaires and (rumored) drug lords that went there from getting out. There was always a slim possibility that someone had snuck a shot of me somewhere, but not that I knew of. And if this was the only photo the press had—the last school picture taken before my attempted kidnapping—there had to be a reason. If my mom wanted them to have a new picture, they would have one.

But how much did I still resemble that girl on the front page? Would anyone look at tall, skinny Lia Washington and see little, pudgy Cecilia Montgomery?

The breeze shifted and tugged a stray curl across my face. I reached up and pulled it taut. My hair. I loved my hair. Always had. But it was my only defining trait that hadn't changed. If I wanted to be inconspicuous, I was going to need a makeover.

The man tsked quietly. “Such a shame, that story. Like that family hasn't been through enough? And that girl . . . to survive one kidnapping only for this to happen.”

The kidnapping.
Whenever someone mentioned it, which was rare—since the topic was verboten in my family—the same set of images flashed through my mind. My mother shaking hands with the crowd at the local spring festival. The shimmery red fish in their tiny spherical bowls that had enticed me to wander off. The dirty fingernails of the man whose hand had come down over my mouth. The white van with the dented side he'd dragged me toward. That van still appeared in my nightmares, because even then—even as a naïve, coddled eight-year-old—I instinctively knew that if we made it to that van, I was dead.

The whole thing had lasted ninety seconds, but it had defined the rest of my life. Inside the apartment of Scott Smith, my would-be kidnapper, they'd found a room he'd prepared for me, a video camera, and various drafts of his ransom demands. He'd been stalking us for weeks, just waiting
for his opportunity. It was because of Scott Smith that I was enrolled at the Worthington School that fall. Because of him that my mother turned warden on me.

“Miss? You're shakin'.” The man reached for my arm, ostensibly to help me inside, but I flinched away.