“So . . . what does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet. But I thought we better be awake and watching until we figure it out.”
Allie got up and moved to the window. She’d been sleeping in her clothes. They both had. In case any fast moves were required.
“See?”
Jasmine pointed to a slim, ethereal figure standing on the house’s walkway, three-quarters of the way to the street. Just standing there in the faint moonlight, as if waiting for something.
“Maybe she called her boyfriend,” Jasmine said.
And on that note—exactly on the word “boyfriend,” as if scripted—they heard the roar of the motorcycle.
“Come on,” Jasmine said. “We need to go.”
“Wait!”
“For what?”
“What if it’s not him? What if it’s some random motorcycle and it goes right by?”
“What if by the time it stops it’s too late?”
They froze for a matter of seconds. Maybe the count of three. The motorcycle stopped a few doors short of the house. Before it even cut its engine, Brick walked in that direction to meet it.
“That’s it,” Jasmine said. “You believe me now?”
They looked at each other, then bolted for the bedroom door. They got there at exactly the same time. So much so that their shoulders and hips slammed together, and they bounced apart again. Allie ended up on her back on the floor.
By the time she’d made it to her feet again, Jasmine had the chair moved and the door open. They tiptoed fast down the hall together. Allie gave one sorrowful thought to the rest of her belongings, but there was nothing to be done about that now. She had more important things to worry about, like whether the four of them were about to meet at the front door.
“Come on,” Jasmine whispered. “We’ll go out the back.”
Just as they slithered out the kitchen door, Allie heard the front door creak open.
She ran through the dark yard behind her friend. They made it to the gate in seconds, but it was locked with a padlock. The board fence was six feet high, with no real way to climb it. At least, no way Allie could see.
“I got this,” Jasmine said.
They were the three most beautiful words Allie could imagine. Every one of her internal organs filled with gratitude and appreciation for Jasmine, who knew what to do. Without Jasmine she could be dead right now. She could have some big guy holding her while Brick . . . She forced the thought away again.
Jasmine dug around in the weeds near a corner shed. Suddenly there was a ladder. Jasmine pulled it upright, as if out of nowhere. Like magic. Or, in any case, the magic of knowing where to find what you need.
Jasmine leaned it against the fence and trotted to the top step. From there she stepped onto the top of the fence boards. She teetered there a moment, all attention to balance. Then she jumped, and disappeared.
Allie tried her hand with the ladder, but she didn’t feel nearly as confident as Jasmine had looked. The higher she got, the less secure she felt. She stalled, convinced she could not negotiate that last step onto the fence without falling back into the yard. But this was life or death. So . . .
She reached high and fast, grabbed the top of the fence, and pulled herself up. She swung a leg over, straddling the ends of the boards. Then she slipped over onto the other side, hung from her arms for a split second, and dropped down.
Her heart pounding in her ears, she ran after Jasmine down the dark alley between fences. For the first few seconds she felt a sense of terror mixed with elation. They had done it. They were out. They had survived.
Before they even reached the end of the block the elation evaporated, leaving only terror.
They were two teenage girls alone in the inner city late at night. And going . . . where?
Chapter Fourteen
To the Victor Goes . . .
By the time they burst out onto a major thoroughfare, a street where she could actually see passing cars instead of just hearing them, Allie felt as though her chest would explode.
They stopped for the first time since jumping the fence, and Allie leaned on her own knees and panted.
When she straightened up she saw Jasmine holding one thumb out to traffic. Hitching a ride. It seemed alarming to Allie. It was late on a Saturday night in downtown L.A. They were two young girls. Didn’t Jasmine have internal warning bells and red flags to tell her what not to attempt?
Even more alarmingly, they already had a ride.
A driver was pulling over and stopping. A big one-ton pickup truck. One single guy. Looked like he might be fifty.
“See?” Jasmine said. “Easy.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, why would I be kidding? We’re out of here.”
“You don’t think this is a little . . .”
“Trust me. I’m a really good judge of people. I can handle myself.”
Maybe, Allie thought. Maybe you can handle yourself, Jasmine. But now it’s not just you you’re affecting with these decisions. Now it’s also me.
But Jasmine had already climbed into the front seat. She was holding the door open for Allie. Allie didn’t want to be left out on the street alone. To put it mildly. For a brief second she closed her eyes and allowed herself to be overwhelmed with that unlikely image again—being wrapped in the safety of her mother’s arms. When she opened her eyes, she was still out in the world with no one but Jasmine. So she climbed in, glad to have a whole person between herself and the stranger.
She slammed the door and the truck surged forward with a frightening roar of its engine. As if the guy needed to show off. Show that his truck had horsepower, and he wasn’t afraid to gun it.
“Where you lovely ladies headed tonight?” he asked. Definitely on the flirty side.
Handle it, Jasmine.
“Well,” Jasmine said. She drew it out long. Just kept saying it. There was no mistaking it, no missing it—she was being flirty right back.
Jasmine was flirting with a fifty-year-old stranger. Jasmine had just turned into someone else entirely. Someone Allie had never guessed she could be.
I want to go home, Allie thought. She squeezed her eyes closed. But of course when she opened them she was still in some stranger’s truck in the middle of the night. Or maybe she was in the company of two strangers.
“If you’ll do me a big favor,” Jasmine continued, “it would make it easier for me to figure that out. I have to call my boyfriend and find out where he wants us to meet him. So if I could just use that phone . . .”
The phone was sitting in a cup holder on the dashboard, and Jasmine reached for it and took it into her hands. As if there were no possibility that her request could be denied.
“Knock yourself out. I’m just disappointed you have a boyfriend. If I’m being completely honest.”
Jasmine flashed a set of dazzling white teeth. Allie had never seen Jasmine’s teeth before. Jasmine had never showed them off at New Beginnings.
“Well, don’t be too let down. Victor and I have a good understanding.”
Where am I and what’s happening to me? And how do I get it to stop?
“Victor,” Jasmine said into the phone.
A pause while Victor talked. Allie couldn’t hear his end.
“Yeah, I’m out. Where do you want to meet up?”
Pause.
“Yeah, I think I know that place. We ate there once. Just tell me the street again.”
Pause.
“Okay. Whenever. We’ll eat something while we’re waiting. I’m bringing another girl.”
A longer pause fell. It hurt Allie’s stomach. What a ridiculous idea, to think he wouldn’t mind. Allie had known in her heart such a thing wasn’t possible. Known it all along. It didn’t make any sense. Plus, on a larger scale . . . what if Jasmine was simply . . . unreliable? What if her understanding of the world was not something on which Allie should try to depend?
“I think so,” Jasmine told Victo
r. “We’ll see.”
She clicked off the call and dropped the phone back into the cup holder.
“We’re gonna meet at Auggie’s. The restaurant. You know where that is?” Jasmine asked the driver.
“I might.”
“You make a right at that next light. Unless you want to drop us off at the corner and we’ll walk.”
“Let me take you to the door. Two young girls in the city at night. It’s safer.”
A silence fell.
Allie broke it.
“What will you see about me?”
“Oh. What I said to Victor? Did you think that last part was about you? No, change of subject. We were on to something else by then.”
“But what did he think about me coming too?”
“He’s totally fine with it. I told you he would be.”
She followed Jasmine and a hostess to a table at Auggie’s, still too stunned to voice her apprehension. It was a fairly nice restaurant. Not dress-code fancy, but not fast food or a dive, either. A real dining establishment.
The hostess handed her a menu, which she took, because that’s what you do in a restaurant, especially when you don’t want to explain that you have not one cent to your name.
Then it was just Allie and her new . . . what? Was Jasmine her friend? Should she be? Did Allie dare be friends with this new person, this strange, bold, flirty girl only just now coming out of hiding?
“He’s coming from Sherman Oaks,” Jasmine said. “So Saturday night traffic and all, we have probably forty-five minutes at least. Maybe an hour. That’s why we’re sitting down and we’re gonna eat.”
Allie leaned closer and spoke quietly near Jasmine’s ear.
“We can’t order food.”
“Sure we can.” Jasmine resumed scanning her menu.
“I have no money. Do you have money?”
“Victor will pay the check when he gets here.”
“How do you know? Did he say that on the phone? Did he definitely say that in words? In those words?”
Jasmine set her menu down. Looked directly into Allie’s face.
“I know because I know him. Because all this’s happened before, just like it’s happening now. Look. Allie. You need to take a deep breath and calm down. We’re fine. You’re letting yourself get all in a panic over nothing. You didn’t eat any dinner and that’s probably not helping. Order something nice. After you eat you might feel better.”
“Oh,” Allie said, and picked up her menu. “That’s a good point, actually. Not only did I skip dinner, but all I’ve eaten for the last . . . I don’t even remember how many days is bread and salad and pasta and oatmeal. All those carbs and no protein. Makes me feel kind of scattered. Makes it hard to calm down.”
Was it possible that all this was okay and Allie just wasn’t able to see that yet?
“Have a good meal. It’s on Victor.”
Allie ran her eyes down the menu. Auggie’s had a whole section of vegetarian dishes, most with a vegan option. It wasn’t just pasta, either. There was a stuffed portobello mushroom, and a black bean and barley veggie burger. There was even a dish called Beans & Greens, with a tahini sauce topping.
“I can’t believe this,” Allie said. “This is amazing. There are three or four things here I can actually eat.”
“Feeling better?” Jasmine asked over dessert.
Jasmine had ordered tiramisu. Allie, who didn’t want to mess up her newly found tranquility by eating sugar, had asked for a bowl of fresh berries.
“I really am. I have to say. It’s kind of amazing how a full belly calmed me down. I couldn’t eat at New Beginnings. Not right, anyway. I’m sorry if I was being weird.”
“No problem.”
“I mean, I still have things I’m kind of worried about. Like, for example, I have absolutely nothing except the clothes on my back. I don’t even own a toothbrush. But I’m not totally freaking out about it like I was a few minutes ago.”
“Good. You’ll get what you need again.”
A silence. A few spoonfuls of raspberries, which were amazingly good. Blindingly good. They forced Allie to realize that she had been shut down to the simple experience of being alive. Those berries woke her up again.
Still, a few details played on a loop in her mind.
“How?” she asked Jasmine.
But it had been too long since the original statement.
“How what?” Jasmine asked around a mouthful of tiramisu.
“How will I end up with everything I need? What do you do out here? How do you buy things? Am I supposed to work some kind of job now? I would. I don’t mind. I’m not lazy. But I’m . . . you know. Fifteen. I’d have to have working papers. Which I don’t have and can’t possibly get.”
“You’re getting all amped up again.”
“Not really. I just wondered.”
“There’s plenty of stuff to do where nobody asks for working papers.”
A shadow fell across their table. Both girls looked up.
A man was standing over them. Looking down and smiling a broad smile. The smile was . . . Allie couldn’t quite decide. Reassuring? Oily? A little of both? And he wasn’t moving along. Just standing there.
He was at least in his late thirties. Maybe even forty. He had pale hair that could have been blond or it could have been gray. Or it might have been transitioning from one to the other. It was long and sparse, combed along his head so its length mostly showed where it touched his collar in the back. His skin was tan and divided with smile and frown lines. He wore an expensive-looking black leather jacket despite the warm night.
“Well, here are a couple of lovely ladies,” he said.
Please don’t let Jasmine start flirting back with him, Allie thought.
Jasmine leapt to her feet and threw her arms around his neck. They kissed. On the mouth. Not briefly, either. Long enough that Allie would have squirmed uncomfortably no matter who these two people were.
When they finally, finally broke off the kiss, Jasmine turned to Allie, her arms still around this nearly middle-aged man’s neck.
“Allie, this is Victor. Victor, Allie.”
Chapter Fifteen
Knowing for What, Exactly, You’re Not the Type
Allie woke suddenly, jolted out of a dream she could not remember. It took a minute to orient herself—to know not only where she was but where she expected to be. Neither half of that equation was a given anymore.
She sat up, wincing into the light.
She had been sleeping on the backseat of a vaguely familiar car. She looked out the window at her surroundings. The car was parked in the fenced-in front yard of a neighborhood Allie assumed to be Sherman Oaks. Because that’s where Jasmine had said Victor lived. The house was a two-story stucco, a sort of faded salmon color, and huge. Not well cared for. The vegetation was ridiculously overgrown and the house hadn’t seen a decent coat of paint in decades. But still, it was not a cheap property nor a bad neighborhood.
Allie rubbed her eyes and tried to pull together what she could recall.
Victor had ordered three glasses of wine, winkingly swearing to the server that all three were for him. The server had delivered them, though he must have known better. Allie had been encouraged to drink one, and she had. Normally she would not have, but her nerves had been jangly and raw, and she had felt stuck in a nightmare with no exit. And as most any adult will tell you—or at least betray by their actions—alcohol is the exit in a fully closed and locked room.
There had been another glass of wine, and the drive here. Allie had sat in the backseat to stay away from the energy of them, and to give them something like privacy. Jasmine had ridden with her arms around Victor’s neck. Every few minutes Victor had turned to kiss her with an intimacy and focus that not only embarrassed Allie but made her want to shout, “Watch the road!”
Then it had all caught up to Allie. The fear. The stress. The lack of sleep. The near starvation, at least of protein, followed by the groggy solid
ity of her first decent meal in days. The wine. She must have fallen asleep before they arrived home.
Still, it seemed strange. They couldn’t have wakened her and asked her to come inside?
She opened the door of the car and stepped out into the green jungle of yard. The morning was dense, the air close. It was already warm.
She walked to the front door as if it were a bomb she had just been ordered to defuse. If she’d had any other place to be, she would have run from this house in that moment. But life had been stripping Allie’s options. There was nowhere else to go that she could think of.
She tapped lightly on the door.
She had no way of knowing what time it was, and didn’t want to wake anyone. Her senses told her it was early.
A split second before she gave up and collapsed onto the stoop, probably in tears, Allie heard footsteps on the other side of the door.
It clicked open, and a girl stared out at her, blinking into the light. A girl Allie had never seen before. She was older. Maybe nineteen or twenty. She had blonde hair done up in a style that might have been fancy the night before, but had devolved. Her dress was turquoise, tight, and surprisingly short. She wore a lot of makeup, and under her eyes it had smudged.
“I think I have the wrong house,” Allie said.
She meant it in that moment, but it made no sense. Because it would mean Victor had parked his car in somebody else’s yard.
“Who were you looking for?”
“Jasmine.”
The girl’s face fell slightly, as if she’d just heard sad news.
“Oh, sorry. Jasmine’s gone. She got popped and had to spend five months in juvie, and then the county sent her to live in one of those group homes.”
“No, she’s out. She got out of the group home last night.”
“Really? Oh. Okay. Maybe she’s here, then. I just got back. Come on in.”
Allie stepped inside.
She followed this strangely calm girl into the kitchen as if walking through a dream. Which might have been wishful thinking on Allie’s part.
“I’m Desiree,” the older girl said.
“Allie.”
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