Run

by Kody Keplinger

  And then, without thinking, I was standing up on the hood, trying to keep my balance and the tune as I moved to join her on the roof. I stumbled a little, and Bo grabbed my hand.

  For a second, we both stopped singing.

  I thought she’d tell me to be careful. Tell me getting on the roof was a bad idea. I might fall. I couldn’t see the edge. She wouldn’t have been wrong.

  But she reached for my other hand and pulled me up to join her. To share her stage.

  She started singing again, picking up from where we left off.

  We sang our way through half a dozen songs like that, belting them out from the roof of the car. And even though I almost lost my balance a few times, Bo never told me to get down. She just kept her hands close. Not gripping, not clinging. Just close. Ready to catch me if I started to fall.

  “Hey, it’s our song.” Agnes leans forward and turns up the Reliant K’s radio. “ ‘Laugh with me, buddy,’ ” she sings along with Willie Nelson, smiling at me. She’s wanting me to sing, too.

  I can’t, though.

  I try to smile back, but the corners of my mouth feel heavy, and I’m glad she can’t see my face real well. “Since when is this our song?”

  She stops singing for a second to answer. “Since I decided just now.”

  We’ve been in the car for about an hour, and she’s been talking and singing the whole time, acting like we’re on a road trip instead of running from the law.

  “Maybe we could get a cat,” she says once the song is over.

  “What?”

  “A cat. In our new place. Do you think Utah would get along with a cat?”

  “I … I dunno.”

  “Let’s ask.” She turns in her seat, looking back at the dog. “What do you think, Utah? Should we get a kitten when we find a place of our own?”

  I hear Utah’s tail thumping against the backseat.

  “You gotta promise not to eat the cat, though,” Agnes says. “Can you promise that?”

  The tail keeps thumping.

  “Good.” Agnes spins back around in her seat, laughing and smiling in a way that oughta make me feel happy but instead makes my chest ache. “Utah promises not to eat our future pet cat. So it’s decided.”

  I keep my eyes on the stretch of blacktop ahead, trying hard to fight the thoughts of me and Agnes in an apartment with Utah and a cat. In my imagination, it’s small and white and way too fluffy. And she’s named it something like Waylon or Hank, after a country music singer. And we’ve got a place that’s small but clean, with bookshelves full of poetry and braille books and a kitchen that ain’t never empty.

  I fight it because as nice as it sounds, that ain’t what’s gonna happen.

  But I can’t tell her that. Not yet.

  “Hey, listen,” Agnes says after a minute. “I’ve been thinking. I know we’re headed out to your daddy’s, and it’s a long ride. But we’re not in a big hurry, are we?”

  I glance at her, then look back at the road. “Depends how you look at it. Why?”

  “I was just thinking … I’ve never been outside of Mursey, and no one but Colt knows what car we’re driving now … We ought to make the most of this driving, you know? Make a few stops. Have a little fun.”

  So she does think we’re on a road trip.

  “Agnes, we don’t got much money—”

  “I know,” she says. “And we don’t have to spend it, either. I’m not talking about tourist-type stuff, I just … If we see anything that seems fun, let’s try and actually stop, okay? Just to check it out. We might not get to your daddy’s until tomorrow, but that’s all right. What do you think?”

  I oughta say no. I oughta keep driving and get out east, into the mountains, as fast as I can. The police are looking for us, and a couple bad haircuts and a cheap-bought car ain’t gonna disguise us for long.

  But when I look at her again, out of the corner of my eye, she’s just smiling at me. Her hair’s blowing around in the wind, and she looks beautiful and hopeful. And I realize, even though she doesn’t, that we probably won’t get this chance again. If we don’t take the time to have some fun now, there’s a good chance we never will.

  And I want her to have at least one good memory of me when all this is said and done.

  “All right,” I say. “You spot anything that seems fun, we’ll make a stop.”

  “Yes!” she shouts, and she sounds so much like a little girl that even I gotta laugh through the ache in my stomach and the tightness in my throat. “But you’ll have to do the spotting, Bo. It’s not really my strong suit.”

  I smile. “All right. I’ll keep an eye out.”

  And it don’t gotta be out long before I see something.

  We’re driving through a little town, no bigger than Mursey, when I spot a sign taped in the window of some restaurant as we pass.

  Summer Street Fair!!

  Every Night This Week

  Maple Avenue, 7–11 p.m.

  Live Music! Good Barbecue!

  I slow the car down as we pass, reading the large block letters.

  This town’s tiny enough that it ain’t likely any cops would be looking for us here. And if the street fair gets crowded—and since it’s only one street, it might—it’d be easy to take off and disappear if anybody did recognize us. It’s a little risky, but maybe not too bad.

  And it could be fun, I reckon.

  A couple years back, the week Colt turned sixteen and bought that old pickup truck he’d been saving lawn-mowing and tobacco-field money for since he was ten, he’d taken me to a town half an hour down the road and we’d found ourselves at one of these summer street fairs. We’d wandered around for hours, listening to the band and smiling at strangers who didn’t know us as town trash.

  We’d danced and laughed and a cute boy had even given me his phone number. Not because he thought I’d blow him in someone’s hayloft, either. Just because he thought I was pretty.

  I’d never called, but it still felt real good.

  And every now and then Colt and I talked about going back to that street fair. We never made it out there, though. Something else always came up. But I still think about it. About how nice it felt to have fun with strangers who didn’t know my name, didn’t know my story.

  Didn’t know what a horrible, lying bitch I was.

  I am.

  “Bo?” Agnes asks. “Why’d you slow down? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I say, swallowing hard. I turn to look at her and try to smile, even though it hurts. “You up for some barbecue tonight?”

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  It was the first thing I heard when I walked through my front door. Bo had just dropped me off after spending a couple hours down by the river. And in the couple hours, apparently, Mama had gotten up and Daddy had come home.

  And they were furious.

  “I … was with Bo,” I said. “I left a note. Didn’t you see it?”

  “We were worried sick,” Mama said. She was standing in front of the couch. Like she was just too angry to entertain the idea of sitting down. “I woke up and you were gone, and you hadn’t taken your phone with you. I was on the verge of calling the cops.”

  “I was just down the road,” I told her. “At the river. What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal? The big deal?”

  “Honey,” Daddy said from his seat in the recliner. His voice was a lot calmer than Mama’s. It almost always was. “Your mother and I are a little worried about you. We heard about your outburst in church the other day. Christy’s parents told us. Christy was real upset about something you said to her. And that just … It doesn’t seem like you.”

  “And now you’re taking off without warning.” Mama sounded like she was teetering on the edge between fury and heartache. I couldn’t tell if the cracks in her words were tears or barely held-back rage. Or both. “And going to parties? Is this because of Bo Dickinson?”

  “What? No.”

  Altho
ugh, I guess, it sort of was.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, twisting my cane in my hands. “I’m sorry I forgot my phone, but I left a note. I told you I’d be back soon.”

  “You think a note is enough?” Mama demanded. “You didn’t say where you were going. We didn’t have a way to check on you if we needed to. You could’ve gotten hurt or lost or—”

  “I was with Bo,” I said. “I told you—”

  “We barely know Bo, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “We don’t know yet how much we can trust her with you.”

  I frowned. Trust her with me. I knew what that meant. He didn’t know how well he could trust her to take care of me. To babysit me. Was that how he saw my friendship with Christy, too? Had she just been my responsible babysitter?

  “You know her better than you knew a lot of Gracie’s friends,” I pointed out, trying to keep my voice calm. “And she was allowed to go out with them after school. You didn’t always know where she was, but—”

  “That’s different,” Mama said.

  “How?”

  I knew the answer. I’d have to be a fool not to. But I wanted to hear it from them.

  They didn’t respond, though. Instead, Mama ignored me. “You haven’t been acting like yourself,” she said. “And your father and I think—”

  “How?!” And this time, I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. That same anger that had filled me the other day in church was back, but without the hint of meanness. And for the first time in my life, I was back talking my parents. “How am I different from Gracie? How?!”

  I didn’t have to see their faces real well to know they were both shell-shocked. Gracie was the one who yelled, not me. Never me.

  Until today, at least.

  And they didn’t even know about the beer.

  Daddy was the one to recover. And this time, he was the one to do something he’d never done before. In a voice quiet as a snake’s hiss he said, “You’re grounded. For a month. You go to school. You come home. And that’s it.”

  “Daddy—”

  “That’s. It.”

  And no matter how mad I was, I knew better than to question him anymore.

  “How much longer you grounded for?” Bo asked.

  “Eight days.”

  In the three weeks since my parents had locked me up, the season had fully changed. It was early October, and the wind was getting cold.

  I’d been worried, at first, that my new friendship with Bo would blow away, fall like one of the leaves on our maple trees, while I was trapped in my house. But she’d surprised me. Bo had been at school every day. And even though she never said so, I liked to believe it was because she wanted to see me. We ate lunch together, walked together in the hallways, and even managed to get seats next to each other in English. Which was great, since Bo understood poetry so much better than I did.

  There were lots of rumors going around about me. Some people thought I must’ve gone crazy. Others called me a slut. Not because of anything I’d done. Just because when it came to the Dickinsons, all their friends were guilty by association. But Bo seemed more bothered by what people were saying about me than I was. For me, none of it mattered as long as I got to spend every free minute of the school day with her.

  And then, when I got home, I only had to wait an hour or so before Bo would call me. My parents hadn’t made any rules about the phone, so I’d sit at the kitchen counter, doing homework, and waiting for the ring.

  Sometimes we’d talk about a million things, and sometimes we’d just sit with the phones pressed to our ears, not saying much as we did our homework together.

  “Fuck,” Bo said. “I feel like you’ve been grounded forever.”

  “Me too.”

  “Colt was asking about you the other day.”

  I sat up straighter. “He was?” I glanced toward the sink, where Mama was washing dishes. Then I lowered my voice. “What … what did he say?”

  “Nothing much. Just asked where you were. Told me to say hi.”

  “Oh. Well … That’s nice. Tell him hello for me, too.”

  “In eight days, you can tell him yourself,” she said. “Also, Colt and me were talking, and I think the three of us oughta take a road trip down to Tennessee. What do you think? We could go to Nashville. Just take off for a few weeks. What do you think?”

  I thought she was crazy. My folks grounded me for going down the street without proper permission. They’d never let me leave the state. Not with Bo Dickinson or anyone else. But I didn’t want to say that to her. Didn’t want her to get bored of me when I was so close to being released.

  So I just said, “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Agnes.” Mama had turned around from her spot at the sink and was looking my way now. “Only fifteen more minutes on the phone. Then I want your help making dinner.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I didn’t think Mama was real happy about me talking to Bo every day. She never came out and told me not to, but I could tell she was still mad at Bo for taking me down to the river. Every time I got off the phone, she’d make a point of asking why I didn’t call Christy more often.

  When she’d left the kitchen, I pressed the phone back to my ear, just in time to hear Bo say, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

  I smiled. “All right. I … really, really hate cooking.”

  Bo laughed.

  “Mama always wants me to help her. And I do, but I hate it. And not because I can’t see real well so it’s hard. I hate it because you spend all this time making something and half the time eating it. It drives me crazy.” I sighed. “Just another reason nobody’s gonna want to marry me, and I’ll be stuck in my parents’ house forever.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You ain’t gonna have any trouble finding someone to marry you. I think the hard part’s gonna be finding someone you wanna marry. Ain’t nobody in this town good enough for you.”

  I felt myself blushing. It was insane, of course. There wasn’t exactly a line of boys banging down the door for a chubby blind girl who didn’t like to cook. But the fact that Bo thought that way about me, that the boys in Mursey didn’t deserve me, it felt real good.

  “Your turn,” I said. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

  “I … One time I punched Nolan Curtis in the face.”

  “That doesn’t count,” I said. “Because I knew that. Everybody knows that.”

  Bo sighed. “Fine. All right … Um … I …” She hesitated, then swallowed, so loud I heard it through the receiver. “Sometimes, I miss my daddy.”

  I was quiet for a second, because I wasn’t quite sure what to say to this. Bo hadn’t told me a whole lot about her parents. I got the sense that she didn’t like talking about them much. So all I knew was that her mama did meth and her daddy had left when she was young. Other than that, she’d never seemed real comfortable sharing much about them.

  “Everybody in town thinks he’s this awful guy,” she continued. “But he ain’t so bad. Or, at least, he wasn’t when I knew him. Sure, he drank a little too much and he broke some laws, but … we used to cook together, speaking of. Mama don’t cook, but Daddy used to. All the time. And he always let me help him. He’d pull a chair into the kitchen so I could stand on it and reach the counter. Then I’d help him mash the potatoes or … sorry. It’s probably stupid. I just miss shit like that sometimes.”

  “It’s not stupid at all,” I said. “And … I know it’s not the same, but if you ever wanna come over and cook with my mama, I’m sure she’d like that.”

  Bo snorted. “Yeah, right. Your folks probably hate me.”

  “No, they don’t,” I said. “They just don’t know you real well. If they hated you, they wouldn’t let me talk to you like this every day … And I bet Mama would like you a whole lot if you did cook with her. I’m sure you’re more help than me. I’m just saying, if you ever wanted to …”

  Bo was quiet for a second before, in a soft voice, she repeated my earlier words ba
ck to me. “Yeah … maybe.”

  We wander around the tiny town for a few hours before heading over to Maple Avenue around seven. The street’s blocked off, so no cars can drive down, and there are tables covered by little white tents all up the sidewalk. Some of them are selling food—the promised barbecue, some lemonade—and others are just cool, shady places for folks to sit until the sun has gone down.

  In the middle of it all, there’s an open trailer, set up like a stage, and a few guys with guitars are strumming chords and checking speakers there.

  It’s early, but there are already plenty of people out, greeting each other in the street and filling paper plates with food. Agnes and me ain’t got much money, but we spend a little of the cash on some barbecue chicken that we split with Utah.

  By the time we finish eating, the band’s done started. They’re playing covers of country songs. Upbeat stuff all about honky-tonks and good-looking girls. And there’s a crowd around the stage, people singing along and dancing.

  “We should dance,” Agnes says.

  I laugh, thinking she’s kidding at first.

  “I’m serious,” she says. “You said we were gonna have fun. Dancing is fun.”

  “I don’t dance,” I tell her.

  “But you will,” she says. “You know how I know? Because you’re Bo Dickinson, and you’ll do anything for me. And all I’m asking for is to dance.”

  I sigh.

  “Come on,” she whines. “These people don’t know us. Who cares if we embarrass ourselves? We’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  She’s smiling at me. Grinning, really. And I remind myself again that this might be our last shot at a good time. And I want Agnes to remember me at my best. As the kind of friend who gave her her first beer, who shared secrets in her dark bedroom, who danced with her at a street fair in a town we didn’t even know the name of.

  “Fine,” I say, standing up from the picnic table we’ve been sitting at for the past hour. I tether Utah’s leash to the table leg and take Agnes by the arm as she folds up her cane and drops it on the bench.