by Zoe Aarsen
The run down the hill was the stretch of my journey during which I’d be the visible to anyone back at Sheridan who happened to be looking out the windows on the east side of any building. I’d have to run about a quarter of a mile in distance before the trees would provide me with a little cover, and despite the fact that it was already dark out, the school property that faced the highway was well lit with floodlights. From where I stood, I could see cars flying by on the road below, and hoped none of the drivers hurrying home from their jobs in suburban Sheridan, Wisconsin, would bother to notice a girl in a navy jumpsuit running away from her boarding school against the white snow.
After counting down from five to get myself started, I jetted down that hill as fast as my legs would carry me. I lost my right shoe only a few steps in, but didn’t bother to backtrack for it. My left shoe came off in the snow as I neared the edge of the pines, and I didn’t waste time retrieving that, either. Instead, I kept wandering through the trees, no longer running, grateful to feel dry pine needles beneath my wet socks instead of snow. I was shaking violently from the cold, and stopped just for a second to get my bearings. Through the treetops, I saw a sliver of a moon above in the dark sky—a pesky reminder that the clock was ticking before the new moon, by which time Violet would have done everything she possibly could to catch up on sacrifices. All I could hear surrounded by trees was the whirring of cars passing by on the freeway, and the sound of my own raspy breath in the freezing night air.
I continued walking, and finally I saw a cloud of exhaust fumes pouring out of the tailpipe of Henry’s truck. My heart filled with relief even though I was too cold to shout for joy. From the pine trees I burst, and as soon as Henry saw me, he threw open his driver’s-side door where he was idling along the side of the freeway. My heart almost exploded with happiness that we’d both made it, we’d found each other and were on our way, and the cab of his truck would be warm as soon as I climbed into it. “You’re here!” Henry exclaimed. “I can’t believe it!”
He gave me a bear hug and lifted me off the ground. “What happened to your shoes?”
“I’ll explain on the way. Let’s just get out of here,” I said, stepping past him to climb into the truck. But then I turned around, confused, to face him again. The cab of the pickup truck was empty. No Mischa, no Trey.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, feeling hot tears form in my eyes. No Mischa. It couldn’t be.
“Get in,” Henry urged me. “Everything’s fine. We just had to modify the plan a little bit.”
I climbed into the truck and scooted over to the passenger side. The truck was amazingly warm, so cozy that my legs stung and my eyelids immediately grew heavy. “But Mischa,” I implored. “Is she okay? Is she alive?”
“Totally alive,” Henry assured me after closing the door on his side and throwing the truck into reverse. He pulled back onto the frontage road from which we could circle the school and then return to the highway. Reaching over to the dashboard, he cranked up the heat, and I savored it as it blew on my knees through the vents. “Right after your mom drove you back up here, we reached out to that girl from Sticks & Stones for advice on what to do to keep Mischa safe until the next new moon. She suggested Mischa stay with her in Chicago until we confront Violet on this trip.”
“Wait. Are you serious? Mischa has been staying with Kirsten for the last three weeks?” I asked in disbelief. “Do her parents know where she is?”
Henry raised one eyebrow, tilted his head, and made a funny face. “You don’t watch the news much, do you? No one knows. It’s better for everyone that way, but the police have been looking for her.”
“Geez!” I exclaimed. He was right. I didn’t watch much news at Sheridan because there was only one TV in the lounge and it was no easy feat to convince the other girls to watch anything other than reruns of Scrubs. “What about gymnastics?” She’d been training for such a long time for the Olympic trials, I couldn’t imagine that she’d willingly agreed to stop going to the gym every day.
“This is serious. Gymnastics will have to wait. Kirsten said she could put some kind of protection spell on Mischa, but it’ll only work as long as she stays in one place.”
I shivered and shook so violently that I could barely fasten my seat belt as I absorbed Henry’s words. “Good,” I managed to sputter through frozen lips. “That’s good.”
“I got you this,” Henry said, taking his eyes off the road to hand me a red paper Starbucks cup. “It’s hot chocolate. I figured you’d be freezing.”
“Henry, I love you,” I said, taking the cup from him. Only after I’d taken a sip of the burning-hot tasty stuff did I realize what I’d actually said. “I mean… You know what I mean. Thank you. That was really considerate of you.”
“I was going to get food, too, but I don’t know what you like, so I figured we could just hit a rest stop.”
I took a few more sips of hot chocolate before I dared to ask, “What about Trey?”
“Slight change in plans there,” Henry told me. “The more I thought about picking him up on my own, the less likely it seemed that the people who run his school would let him just walk out alone if his aunt was supposed to be picking him up. I mean, if I got all the way there and they wanted the aunt to go inside and sign something, we’d be busted. Sorry. I couldn’t get in touch with you to tell you in advance, but that part of our plan needs some work.”
“Oh,” I said numbly. How could I tell Henry that there was no way I wanted to go to Mt. Farthington without Trey, without seeming incredibly childish and ungrateful for him already having driven all the way to Sheridan to get me? Although I’d had three regularly scheduled calls with Trey since returning to Sheridan, I hadn’t been able to tell him about what had happened at Violet’s house, or mention anything related to the ski trip. I desperately needed to discuss with Trey the spell that I’d discovered in the back of Mrs. Emory’s diary. Just when I’d been convinced over the holiday break that I could trust him and he was committed to stopping Violet, I had found new evidence to make me wonder if he’d been intentionally keeping information from me that was vital to our plan. I’d been thinking about that sheet of paper I’d found the entire time I was at Sheridan; I’d even printed out the photo of it at home before driving back to school so that I could continue studying it after my phone was taken away.
“Not to worry. Mischa called the school pretending to be his aunt and told them that due to some car trouble, Trey can expect her to pick him up in the morning instead of today. She was tricky about how she phrased it because you’d said they monitor the phone conversations. Hopefully, he knows that this leave of absence you requested is our big adventure in Michigan and not a real family emergency.”
“I’m sure he does,” I said, instantly relieved. But then the reality of us driving all the way from Sheridan to northern Wisconsin, where Trey’s school was located, hit me. “But his school is so far away!”
“It’s a five-hour drive from here,” Henry told me matter-of-factly, “but only two and a half hours back to Willow. So we’re going to drive back to my parents’ house tonight, get a good night’s sleep, and then pick up Trey in the morning.”
As he pulled off the freeway toward a rest stop, I said, “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for us to go back to Willow. People from my school are going to be looking for me in less than an hour. They’re going to call my mom, you know. And she’s going to suspect you.”
My mom’s reaction to the news that I’d disappeared from school was something I hadn’t let myself imagine. She would be devastated and suspect instantly that I had betrayed her trust in favor of sneaking off with Trey. She would make incorrect assumptions about our reasons for escaping from our schools, and she’d be furious with me for making her look like an irresponsible parent, for wasting the money she’d paid our attorney to deal with my legal issues in November, and for further ruining my chances of getting into college. Allowing myself to even consider how much my actions were g
oing to hurt her would distract me from what we needed to get done in Michigan, so as callous as it was, I tried to steer my thoughts away from her.
“I know, I know, it’s not ideal,” Henry admitted. “But I’ve factored that in too. That’s part of why it’s perfect that we go back to town—my parents will see that I’m home and tell your mom I couldn’t have had anything to do with your disappearance. Right now they think I’m playing tennis at the indoor courts in Ortonville.”
“Okay,” I agreed. Our carefully laid plan seemed so immature and ridiculous now that things were in motion. It was going to be easy for anyone looking for three kids poking around in a resort area of Michigan to find us. How were we ever going to evade the cops long enough to get our hands on Violet?
“Don’t think about the police,” Henry said, as if reading my mind as he pulled into a rest stop parking lot. The illuminated fast-food signs hanging over the entrance made my stomach growl with hunger: McDonald’s! Panda Express! Pizza Hut! “I have a feeling that they’re going to stay more focused on the cute little gymnast who went missing three weeks ago than on two teen hoodlums who ran away from their reform schools.”
He winked at me as he parked. His insistence on being positive about even the most depressing parts of our predicament made me even more grateful that he had taken the lead in planning this adventure to Michigan. Anything—no matter how outrageous—seemed possible in Henry’s opinion. This was in sharp contrast to Trey’s reluctance to believe that we might succeed, and his concern for how high the stakes would be if we failed. Although I’d continue my efforts to stop Violet no matter what the consequences were for me, Henry’s steadfast optimism made me feel less like the burden of breaking the curse was mine to bear alone.
Despite his mild joking about Mischa’s current whereabouts, her parents were probably freaking out. I wondered if Kirsten could get in trouble for aiding and abetting a runaway if anyone were to find out that Mischa was hiding out with her.
“Now, what’ll it be, ma’am? A burger? Pizza?”
I looked down at my wet socks. “I lost my shoes in the snow,” I said, as if realizing it for the first time.
“I can see that,” Henry reminded me. “But you’re not coming inside, anyway. People are likely to remember a shoeless girl in a reform school uniform stumbling into a rest center with a devastatingly handsome older man.”
“You’re crazy, Henry Richmond,” I said, grinning for the first time in the three weeks since Mom had dropped me off at Sheridan. “Pizza, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“One pizza for the shoeless lady, coming right up.”
CHAPTER 15
EVERY HOUSE ON CABOT DRIVE looked peaceful and settled for the night as Henry and I drove slowly toward the Richmonds’ house. Most of January’s heavy snow had melted already, and sad snowmen drooped in several front yards. It was a very strange sensation to be in my own hometown and yet feel like I was trespassing. I felt paranoid enough to slide lower in my seat to avoid nonexistent passersby from seeing me in Henry’s truck.
“Just wait here until I come back,” Henry instructed after pulling into his driveway and shutting off the truck’s engine. The windows of the Richmonds’ house were illuminated—not surprisingly, since it was almost nine o’clock at night.
“What time do your parents usually go to bed?” I asked, alarmed. I didn’t know Randy and Beth Richmond too well, but if they were at all like my mom, there was no way they were going to approve of Henry inviting a girl who he’d busted out of boarding school to spend the night in their house.
“Not until eleven, but they’re probably watching TV upstairs. And sometimes my mom just hangs out in the kitchen drinking tea, so I don’t want to take any chances. I’m just going to run inside and open up the back door from the laundry room. I should probably grab a pair of Olivia’s old shoes, too, right?”
I looked down at my damp socks and nodded, preferring to not traipse through slush around to the back of the Richmonds’ house in my socks. Henry offered me a quick smile and then slipped out of the truck, closing the door as quietly as possible behind him. He trotted up the Richmonds’ front path leading to their landing, and then he unlocked the front door and disappeared into the house.
Then I was alone in the rapidly cooling cab of the pickup truck. The street was painfully silent, completely free from passing traffic. For the first time I wondered what Henry would have been doing with his life if it weren’t for this ski trip shenanigan we were plotting, since there was really no reason for him not to have gone back to school that semester. I’d been so absorbed in my own plight at Sheridan and in trying to uncover as many details as possible about Violet before this ski trip, it had never once occurred to me to ask him what was going on in his own life and if he ever planned to go back to Northwestern.
More than two minutes passed, and the house showed no signs of life inside. I shivered in the front seat of the truck and wondered if Mischa knew the details of our plan, or if she was being tormented by curiosity about our progress. Surely, at that hour, both the Portnoys and my mom had been alerted by the respective authorities that we were missing. Phone calls had probably been made to my dad to inform him that I was on the run. He was probably pointing fingers at Mom and doing his best to make her feel like an inadequate parent for not having had any idea that I’d obviously been scheming my escape for quite some time.
A sickening feeling washed over me. My parents were not idiots. As soon as the administrators called them to notify them that I was missing, my mother would have called Trey’s mom, assuming that the two of us had taken off together. And if Mrs. Emory had called Trey’s school to ask them to keep a close eye on him, our little caper to boost him out of there for a “leave” would have been immediately revealed. If Henry and I drove to Michigan in the morning intending to pick Trey up at nine as planned, we’d be directly entering into a trap. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were Wisconsin state troopers as well as local police waiting for us, and a news crew too—that’s how much of a big deal our little police car chase in Willow back in November had been.
We couldn’t just pull up to the front doors of the school and expect him to come running out. Even if we had someone with us who could convincingly pretend to be his aunt Nancy and make their way inside to speak with administrators, he’d never be cleared to leave school grounds. I groaned. I was relieved that Mischa was in a presumably safer place for the time being, but changing the timeline on our plan had put the whole thing in jeopardy. We were going to have to figure out a different approach for retrieving Trey in the morning.
Finally, I saw a dark body moving around the side of the Richmonds’ house, and when it reached the driveway, I saw that it was Henry, looking nervously back at his house over his shoulder. He walked around the rear of the truck and opened the passenger-side door, holding a pair of black snow boots in his hands.
“Sorry about that,” he said in a low voice, as if someone nearby was eavesdropping. “My mom is awake in the kitchen. I had to create a bit of a decoy.”
I slid my right foot into the right black boot.
“Does it fit?” Henry asked.
“Amazingly, yeah,” I said. I hadn’t been close friends long enough with Olivia to know what size shoe she wore, but I would have assumed her feet were smaller than mine. I quickly tied the laces at the tops of the boots and stepped out of the truck. “What kind of decoy?” I asked.
“Laundry,” he said. “I threw some clothes in the washer. It’ll cover any noise we make on our way into the house.”
We scurried around the back of the house toward the cement stairs that led to the Richmonds’ basement laundry room, and once we were inside the steamy, overheated room, my body shook uncontrollably as I recovered from the deep, bitter cold outside.
“Listen, Henry,” I said, grateful for the mechanical sloshing noise coming from the washing machine, masking my voice. “I don’t think we can just go straight to Trey’s scho
ol to pick him up. If my school has figured out that I’m missing, and I’m sure they have—I mean, they’d never skip bed check before lights-out—then my mom is going to know that the first thing I’ll try to do is get in contact with Trey. If we just show up at his school tomorrow, they’re going to be waiting for us.”
Henry bit his lower lip, considering this. “We’ll have to figure out another way to get him out of there.”
I sighed, leaning against the washing machine and suppressing my urge to cry. “We should have known this was going to be a disaster. What happens if Trey can’t come with us? What happens if we never make it as far as Michigan?” I was worried about playing the game with Violet again before Friday, which was the twenty-fourth, for the sakes of both Mischa and Tracy, but also because I had a sickening suspicion that the predictions Violet had issued at her party meant that she had something much, much more catastrophic planned for the ski trip. The pendulum hadn’t given me a clear idea of just how bad it was going to be.
If I failed this time around to get Violet to play the game, there was no telling what my punishment would be for running away from Sheridan. Violet would probably be able to keep playing her game for as long as her heart desired.
“You can’t think that way, McKenna. We’ve already gotten this far. We’re a third of the way there, if you choose to look at it that way,” Henry said with hope in his voice.
I wanted to be as optimistic about our chances for the next day going smoothly as Henry was, but I wasn’t good at rolling with the punches. I preferred having an ironclad plan.
“If we want to get up north right around nine or ten in the morning, we should leave here before six thirty, when my dad gets up to drive to the fitness center. If we’re still here by then, it’ll increase the odds that he’s going to find you down here.”
I raised an eyebrow at Henry. “What do you mean, down here?”
“I mean, in the basement,” he said. “I brought blankets down for you to sleep on the couch.”