Banished

by Sophie Littlefield

  I saw a sign for the restrooms and dragged Chub toward them. Inside, there was one of those changing stations that pull down from the wall. I wondered if it would hold Chub, who weighed forty-two pounds now, according to Gram’s old peeling scale.

  “In here,” I said, pulling him toward the largest stall. There were two other women at the sinks, one washing her hands, one putting on lipstick. I hoped they would just assume that Chub was using the toilet himself.

  I realized I didn’t have any diapers or wipes with me. How I was going to clean him? He was bound to be soaked. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wet them at the sink before we went into the stall.

  Chub said something I didn’t understand and tugged impatiently at his elastic waistband. I helped him out of his damp diaper and then, to my amazement, he clambered up on the toilet.

  A dozen times at home I had put him on the toilet, promising to read him stories or get him a cookie, anything I could think of to get him used to the idea of using it—and he always scrambled right back down and ran away.

  But now he had done it on his own. He finished up, climbed back down and pulled up his pants.

  I helped him wash his hands at the sink—he loved the foaming soap dispenser—and as we were drying our hands, a short woman with frizzy red hair turned to me and said, “Oh, he’s sure a sweetheart. Is he your little brother?” and before I even really thought about it, I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  She gave us a big smile and as we followed her out of the restroom I thought, Well, why not? There wasn’t anyone who was going to argue. We could be related, both of us with pale freckled skin. And later, if he grew up looking totally different, if we were in the habit of thinking of each other that way—maybe it wouldn’t matter.

  Maybe we had a chance to be normal after all.

  At McDonald’s I ordered myself the same thing Prairie had asked for, and hotcakes and sausage for Chub. We ate quickly, and I tried not to look around at the other customers. I figured if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me.

  When Prairie wheeled up with her shopping cart full of bags, I was feeling better. We made our way back to the car, and she handed me a large box.

  “Here’s a car seat,” she said. “See if you can get it figured out while I put the rest of this stuff in the trunk.”

  It ended up taking both of us to set the seat up, Prairie reading from the instruction book and me fiddling around with the straps and the seat belt. Rascal didn’t seem at all interested in the process, barely looking up as we worked. Chub patted the plastic sides of the new seat with a thoughtful look on his face. I crawled back into the front seat. Prairie stuffed the instructions and the packaging back in the box and tossed it in the backseat. Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her purse.

  “I thought …,” she said, and then hesitated. She reached in the bag and took out a small blue stuffed giraffe with glossy yarn forming a loopy mane down its long neck. The legs were loose and floppy, and it had a sweet face, with long eyelashes embroidered above little button eyes. She handed it to Chub, who held it close to his nose, turning it this way and that.

  “Raff,” he said. “Prairie. Raff … giraffe.”

  He really was talking. How was this happening? Was it because of me? Could I be healing him somehow, without even trying? I’d healed three times: Milla, Rascal and Chub, all in the past few days. Maybe it was now such a part of me that I couldn’t turn it off.

  It didn’t seem possible … but so much of what had happened was unbelievable.

  I handed Prairie the paper sack with her biscuit and hash browns. I fixed the coffee cup’s lid so she could drink, folding back the little plastic tab, just like I’d learned to do twenty minutes earlier when I’d drunk my first cup of coffee.

  Prairie nibbled at the food while she drove slowly out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate. She consulted her phone now and then, and I realized she was following downloaded directions.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as she turned onto a multi-lane road lined with strip malls.

  “Well, that’s a little complicated,” she said. “Keep your eyes out for a—Oh, there it is.”

  She turned into a parking lot in front of a row of low-slung buildings and passed a dry cleaner, a Thai restaurant, a bakery. She parked in front of a Hertz car rental agency, then turned to face me with a serious expression.

  “This is going to sound a little strange,” she said, “but we have to make it look like we’re renting a car.”

  “Make it look like? But we’re not really renting it?”

  “Yes. How can I … Okay. Remember when I told you that Banished men used to have visions? That they could see the future?”

  “Yes …” A prickly feeling had started at the base of my spine. I sensed that what was coming was more bad news, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear more. But what choice did I have?

  “Purebloods can still do it. Some of them, anyway. Well, a few.” She bit her lip and stared at her hands, which were clasped tightly. “Rattler can.”

  “Rattler Sikes?” As if there was any other Rattler. Just saying his name dialed up the prickling to full-scale fear.

  Prairie nodded. “Rattler and I have a … history. When we were kids, he used to like to follow me around. Even then he had visions, and they just got stronger over time.”

  “But that means he knows exactly where we are!” The thought made me want to jump out of the car and run.

  “It doesn’t work quite like that. He can’t see all of the future, or even choose what parts to see. He just … opens his mind, and he gets flashes. Pictures, pieces of the future. Sometimes he has visions of things happening at the same time but in a different place.”

  I remembered his unfocused gaze in the kitchen, the way he went very still, as though he was focusing in on something no one else could see. Something’s not right. A car … men. It’s men in it.

  He’d had a vision of Safian’s men.

  “But what are we going to do?” I demanded, panicked.

  Prairie laid a hand on my arm. “Stay calm, Hailey. That’s why we’re here. We’re going to create a few scenarios, throw him off. We’ll make it look like we’re renting a car. We’ll drive to the bus station. I’ll take a few different routes, make it look like we could be going south or west. We just need to confuse him so he doesn’t know which way to come after us.”

  “But eventually he’s going to—”

  “Stop,” Prairie said gently but firmly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Rattler can only see me when we’re connected, when there’s some energy between us. Right now we’re scared and we’re bound by what happened at Alice’s, but we will get past that. We’ll put it behind us and the connection will be broken and he won’t be able to find us.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re connected?”

  “The Banished … we’re drawn to each other, like I told you before. And there’s an energy around that. But if you were to leave, that energy would slowly fade. Your mind and your heart would focus on other things and the attraction would die down. The connection would be broken. Not forever, but you’d be functioning on your own, outside the influence of the other Banished. That’s what I did, when I went to Chicago. The energy faded for me, and Rattler was a part of my past, and he couldn’t see me anymore.”

  “But when you came back to Gypsum—”

  “It opened it all up again. The connection, the energy. But we can fight it. I’ve fought it before. I’ve gotten away from Rattler before.” There was strong conviction in her voice, but edged with something I didn’t like at all, something dark and terrifying.

  It almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  But it wasn’t like we had any other options. “What can I do?”

  “You and Chub take Rascal for a walk. There’s bottled water in the trunk and a plastic bowl. Give me five or ten minutes.”

  I did as she directed, glancing in
the plate-glass window as I took care of Rascal. She was having a conversation with the man behind the desk, who was consulting his computer monitor. Chub was happy to be out of the car, and he walked along beside me, picking up rocks and sticks that caught his eye.

  In the bright light I could see that Rascal had blood along his neck and back, and I realized that Chub must have bled on him in the Volvo. I wiped him off with some of the bottled water and a handful of tissues from the box the Ellises kept in their car. He didn’t mind, didn’t even seem to notice. I put my hand in front of his face to lick, but he just stared at the lanes of traffic whizzing by. I wondered if he was thinking about chasing cars, but he didn’t seem interested. He hadn’t wagged his tail or perked up his ears at all, and I wondered again if he was having some sort of reaction to his accident, if something inside him was broken.

  But when I said, “Rascal, come,” he trotted along right away and jumped back in the car. If there was something wrong with him, it wasn’t brain damage.

  When Prairie came back out she seemed a little calmer. “One down,” she said. After consulting her phone again, she pulled out of the parking lot. “Next stop, the bus station.”

  “Prairie,” I asked after we’d driven for a few minutes, “what happened to Rattler? At the house?”

  “Oh, that …,” Prairie said. A ghost of a smile flickered across her face. “I, uh, take kickboxing. That was a roundhouse kick. We’re not supposed to use it in class. Well, anyway, I always wanted to try it.”

  “I guess it worked.”

  “Yeah—I guess so.”

  Rattler wasn’t dead. He’d sold us out and nearly gotten me kidnapped, and as far as I knew, his only injury was from being kicked by Prairie. I wished he was dead—and then I wondered if he was “seeing” us even now. It made me shiver with fear and revulsion.

  I barely paid attention as Prairie took smaller and less crowded streets, driving through a series of neighborhoods that grew shabbier and dirtier, before she turned into the parking lot of a bus station.

  “This time we’ll all go,” she said.

  We left Rascal in the car with an opened can of dog food that Prairie had bought at Walmart. We were gone for about a half hour, pretending to buy tickets. What really happened was Prairie asked a lot of questions about when buses were leaving for various places, and at the end she took a couple of folded paper timetables and tucked them into her purse. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for a while. I read an old magazine that someone had left behind, and Prairie got Chub a lemonade from a vending machine.

  It didn’t take long to get boring. That surprised me. I figured I’d never be able to relax, but when Prairie murmured that it was time to move on, I was relieved.

  Next was the airport. That was a little more interesting, though Springfield’s airport was tiny and didn’t look anything like the ones in the movies. Still, there were people milling around, carrying bags, dragging suitcases—it made me wish I was flying somewhere. I’d never really thought I’d have a chance to, but now it seemed possible. Now that I was with Prairie. It wasn’t just that she had money and experience, either; she made me feel like I could do things I’d never considered doing.

  After the airport, Prairie took us into Springfield’s downtown. There were enough tall buildings to make it seem like a real city. We circled for a while, sometimes barely moving in traffic, and by the time Prairie headed back out of town it was late in the afternoon.

  The final place Prairie took us was a motel, an unremarkable place in a beaten-down neighborhood near the interstate.

  “Okay,” she said as we pulled into the lot. “I have got to get some rest before we go any further. I’m going to get us a room—stay here, okay?”

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to admit to Prairie that I had never been in a motel before. Gypsum had two—a Super 8 and a motor court called the SkyView. I’d walked past them hundreds of times, wondering what it would be like to have a room to myself, everything clean and neat.

  Chub was napping, so I left him in the car and walked Rascal nearby. I watched Prairie go through the glass doors and into the lobby, where I could see her talking to a man behind a counter. After a short while she returned.

  “I got us a room near the back,” she said as she drove the car around the corner of the motel to a space that was partly hidden behind a Dumpster. “I didn’t tell them about Rascal. We’ll have to sneak him in.”

  “You’re worried about the cops looking for this car, aren’t you. And … the guys Bryce hired.”

  She nodded. “I smeared mud on the plates this morning before we left, so the number’s hard to make out.”

  I helped her get the bags out of the trunk. Chub held my hand and yawned as we followed Prairie to the last door on the first floor. Then I went back and carried Rascal in with my sweatshirt draped over him, not that anyone noticed us. Our room had a view of the end of the parking lot and a Denny’s next door. Beyond, on the other side of the fence, was the back of another restaurant, with more Dumpsters and delivery doors and trash blowing along the pavement. A man sat on an upturned bucket, smoking a cigarette.

  I knew what motel rooms looked like from TV. This one had a smell, not bad but both chemical and musty. I set my backpack down on one of the beds and watched Prairie unpack the Walmart bags.

  “I hope you’re up for a new look,” she said, and I could tell she was trying to sound cheerful despite her exhaustion. She laid out a box of L’Oréal Couleur Experte on the night-stand between the beds. Next came a plastic comb and a pair of scissors. She upended the two largest bags and a pile of tangled clothing fell onto the bed. The last bag contained a handful of little plastic makeup cases, plus an enormous pair of sunglasses with white frames.

  “Is that all like … a disguise?” I asked.

  “Yes. We need to do what we can to make ourselves invisible. So we can get back to Chicago. And then find somewhere we can be safe.”

  Safe from things I never knew existed before today. From ancient magic and curses and dark secrets, things out of a twisted fairy tale. And at the other end of a spectrum, from a man who wanted to use me to experiment on.

  A scientist.

  I thought about the science class I’d never be attending again. Realized, to my surprise, that there were a few things I’d miss about my old life after all.

  Chub was wandering around the room, touching things, exploring. He found the phone and pushed at the buttons. Prairie sank down on one of the beds, beside her purchases, and massaged her temples with her fingertips.

  “Seriously, Hailey, we need to sleep, just for a couple of hours or so.” She took her cell phone out of her purse and pressed the keys. “I’m setting an alarm. I’ll get us up in plenty of time to do what we need to. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, sighing. It wasn’t worth fighting her over. And I knew she was probably right anyway. Even though I felt wired now, I was bound to crash soon enough.

  “Come here,” I said to Chub. “Nap time.”

  “Nap time,” he repeated, but instead of getting into the other bed he climbed up with Prairie. She must have been mostly asleep already, because she just made a sighing sound and looped an arm around Chub, who snuggled in close. Before even a minute passed I could tell by his breathing he was asleep.

  I tried not to be jealous, to be glad that Chub was as comfortable around Prairie as I was. And mostly, I was glad. Except that now I was alone. And I didn’t want to be. The fears, the anxiety, were simmering inside me, and I was afraid that if I was left alone with my thoughts they’d bubble up and take over.

  I looked at Rascal, who was sitting motionless next to the door. “C’mere, boy,” I said, and he got up and trotted over to me.

  “Up,” I said, and he jumped up onto the bed.

  I wrapped my arm around him and pulled him a little bit closer. He didn’t smell very good, a combination of wet dog and something else, something unfamiliar. But he was still better than nothing.


  I was worried that he wasn’t back to normal yet, but now wasn’t the time to obsess over it. I switched off the lamp. With the heavy drapes pulled shut, the room was as dark as if it was midnight. There was a hum coming from the ceiling, a fan circulating the strange-smelling air. Prairie’s cell phone glowed on the bedside table.

  I was sure I’d never get to sleep with everything I had to think about, but the next sound I heard was Prairie’s alarm.

  CHAPTER 15

  RASCAL WAS CURLED UP against me, oblivious to the cell phone’s beeping. My mouth felt dry as a desert as I slid out from under the covers. In the other bed, Prairie sat up and turned off her phone. She rubbed her eyes and yawned.

  I went to the bathroom, drank two glasses of water and splashed cold water on my face. When I came out, Prairie had gotten up and lined up her purchases on her bed.

  “Well, hello, sunshine,” she said cheerfully.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “Nothing much … other than I think we managed to throw off Rattler. I mean, if he hasn’t showed up yet, I guess we’re doing okay.”

  “You think that worked? All that driving around?”

  “He’s not here, is he? So it seems to me he must have gotten sidetracked by one of our visits. For all we know he’s on a bus to Texas.” She gathered her supplies. “I know a shower would probably feel great right now, but how about if I color your hair first? You’ll need to rinse out the color after it sets, so you might as well wait to get in the tub.”

  The sleep had done Prairie good; in the light of the lamps she’d switched on, I could see that the dark shadows had nearly disappeared from under her eyes.

  I ran a hand through my hair. It was almost perfectly straight, rich brown with natural highlights. I knew people paid a lot of money for color like that.

  “Uh, all right,” I finally said. My hair was the one thing about me that I always knew was special. But if it meant our safety, I’d get over it. “What color?”

  “I thought we’d try to match Chub’s. Make it look like you’re brother and sister.”