Slain (36 page)

She scurries over and eases the window up slowly, then peeks out. She looks back at me and nods. There’s a guard.

“Keep watch,” I whisper. “Signal when he leaves.”

I fish some papers out of the trash, letters home that have been discarded as either not good enough or too useless to send. Quietly, I pull a curtain down from one of the stalls and stuff it into the waste basket. I rip the toilet paper off the roll and place it on top of the curtain, then stuff the cardboard tube with the letters.

“Here goes nothing,” I say. Tessa is crossing her fingers. She may not totally believe in a higher power either, but we need as much luck as we can muster right now.

I rub the battery against the steel wool, holding it right above the cardboard TP tube.
 

Nothing.
 

I try again. Just a tiny spark this time, that fizzles out to black before it lands on the tube without any heat.
 

I ball the steel wool up tighter and strike it against the battery as hard as I can. This time it catches, and hard. Before I know what’s happening the entire wad of steel wool sparks to flame in my hand. I drop it into the can, but miss the tube. It’s not hot enough to light the TP yet. I need the flame to grow from the cardboard and paper, and the wool is burning out fast.

I nudge the tube toward the flame with my bare fingers. It smokes for a moment, almost goes out. I blow at the embers gently, evenly. They glow with my breath, then simmer down. I blow again then, whoosh! The cardboard tube lights up.

It spreads to the toilet paper, and the curtain underneath. The smoke is billowing now, riding high up into the ceiling.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
 

The smoke alarm blares to life. I hear the shuffling sound of girls waking and peek my head out into the room, concealing myself in the shadow of the doorway. They’re all awake, looking around, trying to figure out where the noise is coming from, not thinking for a second that there could actually be a—

“Fire! Fire!” a girl screams. She’s pointing toward the bathroom, to the smoke now billowing out the doorway.

“Everybody out!” another girl demands.

Girls scream and cry. They jump out of their beds and panic as they remember that the door is locked. Somebody races to the front door and pounds on it, but it doesn’t open. More girls join her. A crowd surges against the door, banging on it to open.

“Help! Help!”

“Let us out!”

“Please! We’re trapped!”

Smoke is filling the air, and I resist the urge to cough. I look back to the window, to Tessa. She’s motioning for me to come. Come now! The guard must be gone. But I have to be sure the others can escape.

The front door whooshes open, and a flood of girls races through it. All sense of orderliness is gone. I race back to the window and hoist Tessa up to the sill. She sits on it and pulls me up. I glance back. The fire has died down to almost nothing now. Its flames barely lick the edges of the waste basket. It’s the last thing I see as I jump out into the cool night air.

A
S
SOON
AS
I hit the ground I feel Tessa grab my hand and lurch me forward. It’s the first time I realize that without her, I’d have no idea where to go to get out of here. All I’ve seen are the buildings that need cleaning. She’s been here longer. I don’t know the place well enough yet. And it won’t take long for somebody to figure out what’s happened. We have seconds—not minutes—to disappear.
 

I run, holding Tessa’s hand tight as she dodges between buildings and into the darkness. I’m thankful for my sneakers and my lungs, conditioned from years of track and cheerleading and soccer. Tessa is heaving, but she doesn’t stop. After a few minutes I have to slow down so she can keep up, but she pumps along at my side, not allowing herself to quit.

We run for what seems like forever. Through buildings and a field filled with rusting farm equipment. We run past the last buildings and out into the fields. We run past what must be the outdoor chapel she talked about, past the shed that might contain matches. We run and we run and we run.
 

It’s so open out here. The landscape is low, scratchy brush and dust and dirt. There are no trees to obscure our presence. The moon and stars are so bright it almost feels like morning. There’s no point in trying to hide. We are completely exposed. All we can do is put as much space between them and us before anyone notices we’re gone.

We climb a hill, and when we crest it I see a fence. It’s at least ten feet tall. There’s barbed wire on top of it too, as though this was a real jail, not just an overpriced time-out corner. Tessa’s pace is barely running anymore. I yank on her hand and pull her toward the fence, but she breaks away from me, leans over and sucks air.

“Come on. We’re almost there.”

Beyond the fence there are trees, real trees, which means there has to be a source of water nearby too. Maybe a lake, or maybe even a river we could get in and let carry us off to somewhere. I wonder if Tessa knows how to swim.

She stands back up, and I tug her toward the fence. I climb up first, but Tessa’s not far after me. The barbed wire looks sharp, but I’m not staying on this side just to avoid getting cut. Just as I’m about to reach for the top, Tessa speaks up. “Your robe! Throw it over the barbed wire!” She struggles up until she’s next to me and helps me out of it, then I help her do the same. We toss the contents of our pockets over the fence, then double-layer the bathrobes over the sharp barbs.

I go first. As I swing my leg up and over the fence, I hear something that turns my blood cold. Voices. Shouting.

“Go! Come on!” Tessa says.
 

I launch myself over and climb down. Tessa makes it across, then gently pulls our robes off the fence before climbing down herself. She’s smart. I would have left them, signaling to whoever is looking for us exactly where we escaped.

We barely make it to the trees before we see the bounce of flashlights crest the hill just before the fence. Tessa and I scramble behind a huge trunk just in time. A giant beam scans the area beyond the fence. The light is slow, searching.

“Check the entire perimeter,” I hear someone say.
 

Someone else says, “They couldn’t have made it far yet.”
 

I hold my breath, which is impossible with my chest pounding, my blood pumped so full of adrenaline. Gasps of air leak out and betray me, and I know, just know, that someone must hear us, must see us, must be climbing over the fence right now.
 

But miraculously, the voices and the flashlights pass on, scanning out even farther, heading away from us. I barely register it when Tessa takes my hand again and guides me farther into the trees. I follow her lead.

Dawn is moving into full-on morning by the time we hear the cars and nearly stumble right onto the highway. We ditch the robes and nightgowns, pat our choppy hair down as best we can, and stick out our thumbs. It doesn’t take long. Even two dog-faced girls our age could hitch a ride in no time. But with Tessa? It doesn’t take long at all.

A grungy-looking guy in his late twenties picks us up. I have to shove fast food bags off the backseat in order to find a place to sit down. Tessa insists on sitting in back with me. The guy seems disappointed. Once again, I’m glad she’s here with me. One of us, he could drive anywhere he wanted. But two of us together? He may think about it, but he knows it wouldn’t work. Tessa grabs my hand and squeezes it tight for support. I don’t miss seeing the guy lick his lips in the rearview mirror, churning up who knows what kind of gross fantasies.

“You guys girlfriends or something?”

“No,” I say. I let go of Tessa’s hand. Why do some people have to turn something perfectly innocent into something gross? Even though I’m not into girls, I wouldn’t care if somebody thought I was gay, at least not anymore. But this guy?

“It’s cool if you are, you know. No judgment here.”

“We’re not,” Tessa says firmly.

“Okay, okay. Just sayin’. Where you girls headed?”

Tessa looks over to me, and I realize she has nowhere to go. I hadn’t even asked. I just assumed that she was escaping to get to a girlfriend or a cousin or something. But her look tells me that’s not the case.
 

“Denver,” I say. “Where are we now?”

“Wyoming, just outside of Powell. I can get you as far as Cheyenne,” he says.

“Thanks.”

He mostly leaves us alone after that. We drive all morning, him chatting away, us trying to play along like we give a shit what he’s chatting away about. Once we hit Casper he buys us some lunch at a diner and offers to get us a hotel room. He backs down after we tell him no, but just to be safe we sneak to the bathroom and go out the back and hitch another ride.
 

The next guy is older, a cowboy, probably sixty-five. We slide into his pickup cab, and he doesn’t say a word. I hated the last guy’s chatter, but it’s scarier, this guy not talking. I’m in the middle seat and expecting his hand on my thigh at any second, but he never does. He just drives, eyes on the road and the sun cutting a line across his face where the visor hits. Tessa grips my hand the whole time. He gets us to Cheyenne. As we’re leaving, he forces a wad of cash into my palm.

“I don’t know what you two are doing out here on your own, but the road’s no place for two young ladies like yourselves. Why don’t you catch a bus the rest of the way?”

We thank him and wave as he drives off, but I’m in too big of a hurry to catch a bus and it’s too risky besides. They could already have police out looking for us, or e-mailed our pictures around or something. In this case, a stranger is safer.

We get lucky on the next car. It’s a woman, middle aged. She tells us she sells pharmaceuticals and talks about girl power and tries to get us to tell her all our hopes and dreams. I think she thinks we’re prostitutes. She probably imagines getting an “all-because-of-you” letter ten years from now with pictures of us super-successful at our non-slutty careers. But whatever. I put on my pastor’s daughter smile and keep the lady talking the whole time, making up a story that we got lost camping and just need to get home. It’s only a couple hours between Cheyenne and Denver, and she takes us straight to my neighborhood. She seems confused by the area when we get there. It doesn’t match what she thought about us. With our awful hair and dirty clothes we can’t seem like we belong.

Eventually, though, we thank her, and she drives off and we’re standing at the end of my block. The sense of relief that washes over me is physical. But I don’t feel stronger; I feel suddenly weaker. I can see it in Tessa too, a shift, as though she’s just grown smaller. We’ve been up almost a solid twenty-four hours now, and it’s the first time we haven’t had to put on a show. We need sleep. We need food. We need shelter. We have none of it. And I have questions that need answers fast.

I tell her to wait there, then walk toward my house. It’s just after one in the afternoon on a Friday. My parents should be at church. Should be. But with everything that’s happened lately, who knows? Maybe they’ll finally take a day off. I peek through the tall windows on the garage door and see that mine’s the only car inside. Good.

I use the electronic keypad on the garage door to get in. Inside, I throw a couple things into a duffle bag. Two sleeping bags. Some food from the fridge. Clothes for me and Tessa. A couple of mementos I can’t bear to leave behind: a photo of me and Paige at camp last year, the Statue of Liberty figurine Jackson gave me. I look for money from my parent’s dresser, but there is none, and I have to go before anyone figures out I’m here.

I get in my car and pick Tessa up on the corner. We drive. She’s asleep as soon as the car starts moving. I want to sleep too, but there’s too much to figure out. I have no idea where to go from here. I know Jackson would help if I asked, but what if the police are watching him? It’s too risky. There are no friends left, no family to call, nothing. All we have for money is $40 the guy gave us for bus tickets, not even enough for a hotel room tonight.

It makes me think of June, alone out in the world, broke, nowhere to go. I always thought of her as fragile, weak, but you have to be some kind of strong to survive that kind of life. Am I? I don’t know.

Eventually, I decide it’s wasting gas to drive around. I only have a half tank, and I don’t want to spend what little money we have on filling it up. I drive to City Park, the place Jackson and I used to meet. It’s one of the biggest parks in Denver and has a golf course and a zoo and three lakes. I park near the biggest of them, Ferril Lake. It’s warm, and the fountain in the center is going. There are runners out, moms with strollers, teenagers from East High School across the street, eating lunch on the long green lawns.

Tessa stirs, stretches awake. “Hey. What’s up?”

“I’m gonna take a walk. Want to come?”

“Okay.”

We lock up the car and head to the lake path. I need to think things through, figure out what to do next. She probably does too. We make it halfway around the lake before either of us says anything.

“I love this place,” Tessa says.

“You’re from Denver?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t want to go back to your family?”

“No. They hate me. There’s no place for me there anymore.”

“Any ideas of where else we could go?”

She shakes her head. Whatever happened to her has made her just as alone as I am. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes from her hoodie pocket, cigarettes she picked up at a truck stop in Wyoming. Taps one out. Searches her pockets for something.

“You don’t have my lighter do you?” she asks.

“No.”

“Must have left it in the car.”

We turn around to go back for it, and see, racing through the five-mile-per-hour park streets, four police cars, lights flaring.

They come to a screeching stop next to my car, and the shape of a person I recognize gets out: Detective Boyer.