The Rules of Persuasion

by Amity Hope

  Once I began, reality faded away. It was almost as if I could feel Sydney watching over my shoulder. I could hear the echo of her laughter and envision the way her eyes would light up. Maybe I should’ve felt sad, but I didn’t. For the time it took me to complete the mural, I felt free.

  Luke let me work in silence, correctly guessing I would work faster without any interruptions. As I painted he didn’t budge from his spot. A quick glance at him every now and again confirmed he was scanning the street below, watching for any sign of trouble.

  I finally finished and took a step back. I bumped into the guardrail. Luke jumped to his feet.

  “Don’t get so close to that.” He swayed and grabbed the railing. “Yeah. Not a fan of heights.” He twisted around to get a look at my work. “It looks…good. I bet it would look even better from the ground.”

  I laughed but he was right. I knelt down and repacked my bag.

  “We should get moving,” I agreed.

  He scrambled to the edge and began the descent. I shoved my hands back into my gloves and quickly followed.

  We had barely begun when a dog started to bark. At first I thought it was coming from the neighborhood across the street. It was Luke who realized it wasn’t.

  “Uh, Meg?”

  I quickly zeroed in on what he had noticed.

  Wagging its tail and yipping his welcome was an enormous, shaggy beast of a dog.

  “Damn it.”

  “Right,” he agreed. “Keep moving.”

  “Dexter. Here, boy.” The voice echoed through the dark. Even as I continued to move downward, my head swiveled around. I scanned the neighborhood. I didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean anything. The voice sounded far away. I could only guess it would edge closer.

  “Move, move. But don’t fall. I’d rather end up caught than dead,” he called out to me.

  He was right. Getting caught would suck. But I really didn’t want to end up in a casket or with my bones shattered into a billion pieces.

  I had worried the euphoria would fade once my painting was done. I had worried exhaustion would set in, making going down a struggle. Instead, with this looming threat, a new wave of adrenaline coursed through me.

  We moved downward in quick, methodical movements. Each footstep carefully placed. We were moving as much by feel as by sight. The moon shone brightly, and while it gave us the advantage of better night vision, it would also give anyone walking by a better view of us. Not that anyone would even be looking if it weren’t for the damn dog.

  The nearer we got to the ground, the louder and more excited Dexter became. I could see him running back and forth, pacing, tail slashing through the air.

  “Dex—” The owner stopped mid-yell. I twisted my head to the left and saw the silhouette of a man standing on the opposite side of the street. “Hey,” he called. “What are you doing?”

  The back of my shirt was soggy. I was sweating like a cow and cussing like a sailor. The ski mask felt itchy and damp as it became plastered to my face.

  “Hey, you!” the owner bellowed. “You can’t be up there. I’m calling the cops.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Luke grumbled.

  “Stay where you are,” he called. “Dexter will rip you to shreds if you come down.”

  I was sure the only danger we were in from Dexter was being slobbered on. I was thankful that Luke had, for no real reason, swung the gate shut on our way up. The dog couldn’t get too close to us. Not yet.

  I could tell the man was on his cell phone. I couldn’t make out his words. It didn’t take a valedictorian to infer that he had called the cops.

  The solid metal ladder ended, and my feet hit the less stable rung of the rope safety ladder. A siren split the air. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t as far away as I would like.

  “Worried about the dog?” Luke asked.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Dexter danced around happily. Tail wagging, tongue lolling about. Now his barking ceased. “Nah.”

  “Don’t move!” the man shouted.

  “Guy’s probably planning on making a citizen’s arrest,” Luke scoffed. I felt his hands around my waist as he pulled me from the ladder and dropped me to the ground.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I encouraged. “I’ll take my chances with the mutt.”

  A flurry of fur lunged at Luke when he pulled the gate open. He swung his leg out in a sweeping motion. It didn’t hit Dexter but the dog yelped anyway. It was surprised, but not deterred. A moment later his big paws landed on Luke’s chest. He stumbled as the dog’s slobbery tongue slashed out for a lick. Cussing, he pushed the dog away.

  We took off running, and Dexter, despite his owner’s bewildered hollering, was on our heels. I yanked my bottle of pepper spray from my pocket as we raced across the field.

  “Sorry, boy.” I slowed my pace for a moment, aimed, and fired a small puff. Dexter let out an awful series of yips that made me feel like a monster. It did, however, stop him in his tracks.

  The owner let out a cry of terrified indignation. “What did you do to my dog?”

  I faltered but Luke grabbed my hand. “The dog will be fine.”

  This was no time to argue. The silent night had turned into a cacophonous onslaught. The man was screaming obscenities at us, Dexter was yowling in pain, and the siren was shrieking as it grew ever closer.

  Luke pulled at my hand, leading us to the backside of the field, away from his vehicle.

  “Aren’t we going the wrong way?” I huffed.

  “We’re going to take the long way around.” We hit the tree line, and he let go of me. We raced through the woods as quickly as we dared, and I let him take the lead. We stumbled a few times, tripping over fallen logs, tangles of weeds and other debris. I dared a glance over my shoulder. The siren had been silenced. Now blue and white flares cut menacingly through the darkness.

  We came through the other side of the trees, spilling into a neighborhood. My muscles were screaming and pain shot through my side. My lungs ached but we didn’t stop running.

  I wasn’t sure where he was headed, but I continued to follow.

  “This way,” he instructed over his shoulder.

  He cut across a yard and I jogged after him. He darted toward an enormous wooden swing set. Three swings lined one side, a tower with a slide stood on the other. We clambered up the ladder on the backside.

  We both dropped to the wooden slatted floor. We were both gasping for air, our lungs burning, our chests heaving.

  “Figured,” he said through gasps, “this was…an okay…place to hide.”

  The rough wood felt heavenly beneath my worn-out body. A metal roof covered us, but the wooden sides only went halfway to the roof. Big wedges of sky were visible in between. Blackness was ripening into a deep plum. The sun would be rising soon.

  “We left the ladder,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Can they use it as evidence?” I wondered.

  I felt him shrug beside me. “They can try. But I don’t think it’ll be very useful. It’s not like you can take fingerprints off rope. Unless they trace the sale?”

  “No,” I said. “Mom bought it from a secondhand store years ago.”

  “Good. Then it can’t be traced.” He hesitated and then growled, “Damn, we got lucky.”

  “I know.”

  The seriousness of the situation slammed into me. We had almost been caught. What if Dexter hadn’t been a friendly dog? What if one of us had slipped on the way down? What if the cops had gotten there a few minutes sooner?

  This could’ve ended so differently.

  He brushed his knuckles against my cheek. “Are you okay?”

  Was I?

  “I don’t know.” I rolled my head to the side to look him in the eye. “This time felt different.”

  “Painting the tower will be pretty hard to top.”

  I let his words sink in, and I realized something. “It would be impossible. It wouldn’t make sense to even try.�
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  “So that’s it? You’re done?”

  “I’m done.”

  His hand reached for mine. “Then I’m glad I was able to be a part of it.”

  I squeezed his fingers. “So am I.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Meg

  “I hurt everywhere,” Luke announced. “It’s your fault.”

  I hadn’t expected him to answer the door in nothing but a pair of swim trunks and a lopsided grimace. He gripped two towels under his arm. His biceps bulged around the bundle. I’d learned that he was able to throw a consistent eighty-mile-an-hour fastball with that arm.

  “I know.” I hobbled inside. I tried to concentrate on the ache in my thighs in an effort to distract myself from his obnoxiously chiseled abs.

  School had started a few hours ago. When I first got up, I told Mom I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She excused me for the day, and I went back to bed. Luke woke me up with a phone call and an offer to use his hot tub.

  My muscles begged me to comply.

  I let Mom think I was heading to class. I knew she wouldn’t call. She’d just assume I’d check myself in.

  Luke and I had stayed in the wooden swing set until we were sure we hadn’t been followed. Eventually we’d climbed down and trudged back to the SUV in silence. We’d stuck to the shadows as we looped away from the water tower, adding several extra blocks to our hike, but feeling safer because of it.

  By the time he’d dropped me off, molten streaks of sunlight were cresting the horizon.

  “I have aches in places I didn’t even know existed,” he grumped as I followed him down the stairs. “And that’s really saying something because the coach at the last baseball camp I went to was a sadist.”

  “Imagine how I feel. You are definitely in better shape than me.”

  “It’s the offseason,” he argued. “I hurt.”

  “Poor baby.”

  He led the way through the game room, out a set of double glass doors and onto the patio in the backyard.

  The water bubbled invitingly.

  He tossed the towels onto a lounge chair before climbing the steps to the hot tub. I quickly wiggled out of my clothes, glad I’d thought to come dressed in my bikini. The hot water felt heavenly as I slid in.

  I rested my head against the hard-rimmed edge. “I feel better already.”

  We were quiet for a while, relaxing, allowing our aching muscles to be massaged by the jets.

  Eventually he asked, “Nutmeg?”

  His cautious tone made me suspicious. “Yes, Luke?” I mimicked.

  “I know about Sydney. I know your mural is a copy of her work. But why do you do it?” He squinted at me over the bubbling water. “I get it to some extent. But I feel like I’m missing something.”

  I had to organize my thoughts, trying to find a logical way to answer that.

  “Sydney wanted to be an artist. She was young, so maybe it was a phase. But she said so many times she wanted to see her artwork all over the world. Obviously that’s never going to happen. One night, about a month after she died, it hit me. I could do this one piece, this one thing to honor her memory. Honestly? I was such a mess, I didn’t think about the consequences at first.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I kept talking.

  “The first two I did were on buildings I knew were going to be torn down. I guess you could say they were my trial run. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull off a decent mural. But the design was pretty simple.”

  “How many murals are there?” he pressed.

  “There’s an old barn on a busy road north of town. It’s crumbling, beyond repair. The property is abandoned. I also painted an old wooden fence. It’s up on a hill so anyone driving by will see it. Half of the fence was missing and the rest was in pretty bad shape.” I continued on, listing landmarks I’d hit. “Some of them are as far as twenty miles away. For the most part I’ve chosen surfaces I didn’t think mattered to someone else. Structures that are highly visible, but unsalvageable.”

  “The overpass?” he asked.

  “Someone had already tagged the opposite side. I guess at the time I felt justified.”

  I braced myself for the question I knew he was going to throw my way.

  “Why the school, Nutmeg? It’s almost like you wanted to get caught.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  I’d suffered through dinners with Luke’s family. I knew how imperfect his parents were. Because of that it wasn’t hard to tell him the truth.

  “The school is the one place I did on impulse.” I rolled my lower lip through my teeth, trying to figure out how to explain this. “My parents haven’t been the same since Syd died. They either fight or ignore each other completely. The night I painted the mural they had a horrible fight. Mom couldn’t stop crying. Dad locked himself away in his room.”

  I felt tears burning in my eyes and my throat was tight.

  “I knew I was being reckless but part of me didn’t care. In the back of my mind I thought so what if I got caught? Maybe then my parents could focus their anger on me, instead of each other.” A sarcastic laugh bubbled up. “The irony? The moment I crashed into you I knew I never wanted them to find out. I knew it would make things worse. It was stupid and impulsive and when you caught me, it was the worst kind of reality check. I’ve regretted that decision every day.”

  “Guess you’re lucky it was me.”

  I nodded because yeah, I really was.

  “The water tower?”

  I dropped my gaze. “That’s different. It was worth the risk.” The water tower was more visible than all of the other places put together. People could see it for miles.

  “That’s about Sydney.”

  “Yes. It’s in a place everyone can see. They might not know what they’re looking at, but I know.” I shook my head. “I’m sure this all sounds so stupid to you.”

  “I’m not judging. Not when I’ve done things I regret, too.”

  I assumed one of the things he regretted was helping me with the tower.

  “What would your parents do if they found out about last night?” I asked. “Bail you out? Pull some strings? Cover the whole thing up?”

  “Probably.” I had been joking, but he sounded serious when he answered. He also sounded disgusted. “Dad wouldn’t allow me to tarnish the family name. Ironic considering the sleazy way he makes a living.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “I think it is. Most of his clients are guilty. These corporations have enough money to pay a top lawyer to help them weasel their way out of trouble.” He made a sound of disgust. “I realize it’s the nature of the business, but that’s not the kind of life I want to live. I’d rather struggle to pay my bills than be rolling in blood money.”

  “Have you told your dad this? That you don’t want to work for him?”

  “I talked to my mom. She’s the more reasonable one. She said Dad would probably cut me off. I asked her how good of a lawyer I could possibly be if I hated my job. She said Gabe isn’t crazy about his job, and he does just fine.”

  “Basically she was telling you to suck it up and deal with it.”

  “Pretty much. They don’t know this yet, but Gabe’s had enough. I think he’s going to walk away soon. He said he’d rather be a construction worker than spend another year at the firm.”

  “If you don’t want to be a lawyer, what do you want to do?”

  “I want to go into sports medicine. A few years ago I sprained my ankle. It ended up not being a big deal, but I was really worried at first that I wouldn’t be able to play. I saw a physical therapist, and he really helped me.”

  “That’s something your dad wouldn’t approve of,” I guessed.

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong with going into the medical field?”

  “He sees it as a personal insult that I don’t want to follow in his footsteps. He rattles on and on about how hard he’s worked. How he’s paved the way for his sons.
He thinks we should be grateful because if we follow his plan, our futures will be set.”

  “You’re not supposed to live your own life?”

  “Not if he can help it.”

  “You should talk to Miss Perez.”

  “The guidance counselor?” he asked skeptically.

  “She’s pretty awesome. Tell her you want to explore college options without involving your parents. She’ll help you. She has a knack for looking at things from a different perspective.”

  It appeared as if he was actually thinking it over.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he finally said. “That’s enough serious talk for now. How do you feel about going to another party?”

  “What kind of party?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “If it’s a party that involves your parents, I’d rather decline.”

  He laughed lightly. “No. No parents.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Adam’s dad owns a big chunk of land north of town. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. It’s beautiful, really. A river runs through it, and a few times a year we camp out there.”

  “Camp?”

  “Camp. With tents.” He rushed to add, “Well, Adam has a camper set up, so there are some amenities. But the rest of us rough it.”

  I mulled the idea over. I didn’t hate it. But I didn’t love it, either.

  “Who will be there?” I asked.

  “Me…hopefully you. Adam and Julia. Leo and maybe a couple of other guys. Trevor usually comes but I’m not sure what he’ll do.”

  I wrinkled my nose at the thought of Trevor. Wherever he was these days, Jaclyn tended to follow.

  “When you mentioned tents, you meant sleeping in them. Overnight?”

  He held up his hands and shot me an innocent look. “Just two friends, sharing a tent.”

  “Right.” Could it really be that simple?

  He nudged my foot. “Hey, don’t read too much into this. I don’t have an ulterior motive. I’m offering because I know how much you like to get away. You’ll have a good time. I promise. It’s pretty laid back. We have a bonfire. Adam never invites a lot of people. That way it stays pretty mellow.”