Pinning my lips closed, I listen in disbelief. Yesterday, Arden said we were hanging out, so she wasn’t coming home, and that was no problemo. Wow. He gives about as much a shit as my mom does. They should hang out.
When Arden’s talking to her father, her spine rolls out to its full height. With her shoulders back, her clothes tighten against her skin. Her rumpled tunic clings, and she becomes somebody else—an empty, military version of herself. Her spark, her crazy, beautiful spark, is completely gone. “Yeah, so anyway, I wanted to check in before we headed out to the lake house.”
Arden’s dad hmms, something clicking away behind him. A keyboard, maybe? It sounds like he’s messing with stuff on a desk, barely listening. “Refresh my memory.”
Pointing at the phone, Arden says, “I told you about it at dinner. Last week, when Mona was in Atlantic City.”
“Right, right, of course. It’s been a busy season; I should have put it on the calendar.”
It’s a Jedi mind trick in real life, unfolding right in front of me. Slowly sitting on the edge of the bed, I stare. In awe, for real. Even I couldn’t get away with something like that. My mother couldn’t care less about what I do, but she remembers every single detail of every single thing ever. Mainly so she can throw whatever’s got the most spikes back in my face.
Once, I threw up beside her car—not in it, next to it. All the way home, she wouldn’t shut up about how, when I was little, everybody thought I was allergic to strawberries for the longest time because I puked every time I ate them, and that one time I puked right in the backseat of the car, and it smelled for months after, and that strawberry puke is red and terrifying, and she paid out the ass to take me to the hospital over it. Twice.
She remembers every time I kept her up at night, and every time I didn’t, and every little thing I did that made her life hard and how it was my fault Charlie—my dad— walked out on her . . . If I could give my mother amnesia like this, she’d be catatonic. Staring at the walls in silence, digging at the knees of her polyester work pants like she was haunted.
“Probably the whole week,” Arden says. Her voice is restrained, but she moves restlessly. She take sharp steps as she stalks through the room. Her reflection wavers; the mirror is imperfect. “You only get one spring break, right?”
Arden’s father hums again. His voice trails away, distracted. “Put it all on the Amex. Mona’s saving points to go to Cabo.”
“Yes sir,” Arden says. Silence floats, drifting in the place where somebody should say good-bye. Instead, there’s a click, and the line goes dead.
“He . . . he bought that,” I say, still amazed.
“Always does.” With a flourish, Arden bows to me. She’s a marionette, her motions precise but unnatural. “Ta-da!”
Impulsively, I catch her face between my hands. My touch strays; her hair is softer than it looks. It slips between my fingers, twining, tangling. I can’t take my eyes from her lips, the ones that lied so smoothly, so convincingly. It would be so simple to just lean in and—
She laughs, and it breaks the spell. I raise up on my toes and kiss the tippy-top of her head. In response, she shoves me gently. I tumble back onto the bed, knocked over, knocked out and smiling. I cross my hands over my sternum, a vampire. It’s wrong to be happy right now. Arden’s father sucks. She just proved that. And her car is who knows where?
But it doesn’t matter. I am happy, because this quest goes on. It’s not over—she doesn’t want it to be over, not just yet anyway. Not when we’re still only in Ohio. Pointing a toe, I stretch my leg out and swing it until I bump into her. Bump, bump, I don’t even lift my head. “I’m gonna make this up to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know what we’re going to do now, though,” she admits. She catches my ankle and holds my foot aloft. “I can’t buy a car with a credit card.”
She probably could buy a car with that thing. But chances are her father would get a call about that. Luckily, I have an advantage here. Arden has money and she knows how to spend it, but she doesn’t know anything about getting around without it. Finally, my education in Village Estates is gonna pay off.
Pushing against her grip, I laugh.
“Let me teach you a couple things about slumming it.”
(AVIGNON)
“This is dangerous,” Arden says, clutching the strap of her laptop case.
Shaking my head, I ignore the exhilaration and terror running through me. I believe it when I say, “It’s fine.”
Dubious, Arden cuts me a look. But I shrug and step up to knock on the semi’s door. A little while ago, I noticed somebody moving around inside, so it wasn’t like I was waking the driver up. Last I looked, he was leaning back in his seat, a crossword book splayed open on the wheel.
I draw up my nerve. All this is, is asking for a ride from somebody who was fixing to drive anyway. He’s sitting right there, idling and waiting. (Woulda been nice if he’d stopped whoever took our car, but no point dwelling on that.) Stepping up, I tap on the glass to get his attention.
“What?” he asks through the window.
I jerk my thumb toward the highway. “Heading west?”
Frowning, he considers me, then looks past me to take in Arden, too. Maybe I look dangerous to him. I’m the one with sharp eyes and skin tight against my skull. On the other hand, Arden is pure pixie dust, velvety soft and adorable. Like a puppy or something. Nobody’s afraid of a puppy.
“My . . . uh . . . my sister and I. We need a ride.”
Arden gives him the round, innocent eyes. The truck driver, though, gives Arden a look. It’s one that reads loud and clear—how exactly are we using the word sister, here? His judgment flashes by, bright and quick. He doesn’t know Arden; probably what he sees when he looks at her is skewed. He probably thinks Arden looks like a boy in girls jeggings. But for some reason, he considers her, registers his confusion, and then shrugs.
“Get in,” he says.
Delighted, I drop back to the ground and hug Arden to my side. I didn’t know if this would work, and the trucker’s second and third looks at Arden scared the shit out of me for a second. Still, I’m gonna pretend I was sure.
“How about that?” I say.
Arden nods, her curls shivering around her face. “You’re something else, boo.”
It’s honest, at least. And probably pretty fair. Though it feels like victory to climb into the semi, it’s unnerving once we get on the road. The cab is sour with old coffee and cigarette smoke. Ashes roll off the console when we trundle over the speed bump in the parking lot. It’s bigger inside than I expected, full of radios and radar detectors.
“Sit in the back,” the driver says. “Ain’t supposed to have anybody in here with me.”
He’s a thin, scraped-out man with an unshaved face. There are half-moon shadows beneath his eyes, and it’s hard not to notice the way his fingers twitch against the wheel. Either he’s on something, or he needs to get a hit of something.
I don’t point this out to Arden because she’s already queasy from the idea of hitchhiking.
A fuzzy little dog pops out from somewhere behind us, and I yelp in surprise. Where did he come from? I crane around to get a look, and how about it. There’s more room behind us than I realized. Instead of offering my hand for a hello sniff, I curl back to Arden. It’s not that I’m afraid of dogs. It’s like I said, I don’t like surprises.
Still, when a trucker goes driving around with a little poof of a canine, he probably loves the thing. And if we’re going to take this ride as far as it can get us, we probably ought to play nice. As the thing sniffs around my ear, I ask, “What’s his name?”
“Avignon,” the driver says.
It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Arden can, though. She reads my confusion, and leans in to murmur. “It’s a town in France.”
“Fancy-ass name for a dog,” I whisper back.
Arden shrugs. “We can all aspire.”
The driver doesn’t like whisp
ering or he’s bored or something. His eyes dart to the mirror, and he stares right through us. “Where you headed?”
Clutching the seat, I start lying, easily and happily. “It’s hard to say. We’re looking for our birth parents. See, we were adopted out, so we don’t know much. Just that we’re twins, and our birthday’s coming up. April fifteenth, apparently. We were gonna hire a private detective, but Arden was like, let’s just go try to find them.”
“Twins,” the trucker repeats. He frowns; his hand rests on the CB microphone. He’s twitchy again, maybe thinking about calling us in or something. Fair enough, we don’t look anything alike. Arden looks like somebody put her together with art in mind. I’m a tangled-up model kit, half-glued, half-painted.
“Born nine minutes apart,” I say. “I’m older, but that’s only because I was shoving her out of the way.”
“He’s bossier,” Arden offers.
“Anyway,” I say, “that’s the two of us. How about you?”
The trucker is from Louisiana, by way of Kentucky. He doesn’t have an accent that matches either place, so my guess is, he’s lying too. Settling back with Arden, we listen to trucker fables and I savor the vibration of the road beneath us.
Riding in a semi isn’t what I expected. The bedroom area is comfortable—there’s a desk attached to the wall, a television and a computer. Everything moves, but it’s like floating. The road bumps, and it makes a sound. The cab just sways, like it’s on a cushion or something. The mattress smells like a stranger’s sweat, but I guess after we leave, it’ll smell like our strange sweat instead.
Arden’s fingers slip into mine like they belong there. Thumb trailing along my skin, she lifts her head to ask the trucker, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” he says. He glances into the mirror again, his blue eyes narrowed.
“How long would it take to drive from . . .” Arden trails off, still stroking my thumb with hers. She chose it; she reached for me. How did this happen? In a semi, with a little noodle dog bouncing all around us? It’s bizarre, and I don’t care. It’s a sign, not from god. From Arden, that she didn’t spoon me on accident, that she didn’t let my hand rest on her collarbone for no reason. She took my hand; she’s holding my hand. And she’s still talking. “Let’s say, Dayton to San Diego? He says four days; I think less.”
“Depends. How long are you driving every day?”
“I don’t know. How long would it take you?”
The cab fills with laughter, knowing and low. Avignon barks, a high-pitched counterpoint. “My logbooks say I drive eight hours, no more, no less. So, about four days, give or take.”
My heart races, and I chase Arden’s thumb right back with mine. It’s a stinging, teasing touch—distracting in a good way. Curling my fingers, I shiver when Arden does too, her smooth skin slipping against mine. It’s nothing, it’s barely a stroke, but I’m starving for it. “Where are you stopping next?”
“Columbus,” the trucker replies.
I think this is when I realize we really are going. This really is happening. It’s not a walk through computer-animated forests, it’s a trip through real ones. Across plains and mountains and I don’t even know what else. It’s the two of us, on a real adventure. There’s a quest marker down the road—find the Pearl Ship—but the part that excites me more than finding it is getting there.
We’re gonna get there. I squeeze Arden’s hand tight, and right now, I could fly.
(2491.08)
Even though he said he was stopping in Columbus, the trucker actually dumped us in Orient, Ohio.
The good news was, there was a buy-here-pay-here car lot sitting right there off the road. The bad news was, they took one look at Arden and her credit card, and said no. The salesman was a skinny little guy; his suit fit real nice. He probably wasn’t ever gonna help us, just based on how long it took him to finally come over and ask if we needed something.
It was the credit card, though, that did it. (I wanna believe it was just the credit card; I do.) Arden showed the guy her license and everything to prove the names matched. But all of a sudden, they didn’t do credit and he suggested we move on.
We thought about trying the rental place across the street, but it was more talking than actual doing. Arden said you had to be twenty-five to rent a car, and there was no way either of us was passing for that.
“I don’t think we’re going to get a ride out of here,” Arden said as we trudged back toward the exit. Hitchhiking worked before; that was my thinking. Still, the traffic coming through here was thin, and mostly just people in work trucks. Me, I still feel guilty for letting the Mercedes get stolen. I feel guilty for dragging her out here on a quest when I didn’t even think through the path.
So I’m gonna fix this. And I’m gonna do it the low-down way.
“C’mon,” I say, leading her up the road where the intersection has actual stores and shit. I’m hot, I’m tired already, but we gotta get this done.
Arden carries her laptop bag with my stuff in it, slung over her neck. (That way, nobody can snatch it off her shoulder and run off with it. See? Facts you can use; Village Estates says you’re welcome.) Out in muddy sunshine, this place ain’t great, but it’s perfect for what we need. As I march Arden toward a strip mall where a guy in a Statue of Liberty costume is waving a sign for Payday Loans, I feel like I’m Arden’s tour guide into my world.
“If you wanted some beer, you could ask somebody like that,” I say, pointing out the woman busking at the intersection. A cup from Burger King warms between her feet. Her cardboard sign is limp between her fingers—it claims Two kids, lost job, please help, god bless. Just like the Little Dylan needs chemo flyers. Like being poor means we’ve got Jesus on our side or something. Anyway. “Show ’em thirty, have ’em to go into the grocery store with half. When they come out with your beer, they keep the change and get the rest for their trouble.”
“And you know this how?” Arden asks. She’s not challenging me; it’s like she’d be taking notes if she wasn’t lugging all our crap.
I shrug. “These guys that lived down the street from me, the Cunninghams, they used to do it all the time. Gave me my first beer when I was seven.”
“Bet you loved that,” Arden snorts.
Shuddering, I remember the foamy warmth in my mouth, how bitter it was—how bad it tasted. And that was back before chemo ruined everything for me. But I drank the whole thing behind the maintenance shed in the complex. They gave it to me, it was mine—nobody was taking it.
“Okay, interesting,” Arden says. “But how does that help us?”
“It doesn’t.” I smile. “Not right now, anyway. What we’re looking for right now is a jackass just like Bobby.”
Turning to walk backward in front of me, Arden goes ahead and asks. “Your mom’s boyfriend?”
“And everybody made out of the same grease.” Scanning the parking lots, I search for a familiar kind of face. Busy eyes, constantly searching. A body, constantly in motion. A shark in denim, looking for a mark or a make or a hustle. It’s broad daylight, so they’re a little more elusive. But I’m pretty sure if I watch one of these body shops long enough, a Bobby will appear.
It’s not that mechanics are inherently dishonest—I’m not saying that at all. It’s just, these guys tend to be gearheads. Look behind the wheel of a beater Trans Am, and there’s a good chance you’ll find a Bobby.
“Somebody like that,” I say, catching Arden’s sleeve.
There, strolling out of a muffler shop, is exactly the kind of guy I’m looking for. Expensive boots and cheap jean jacket, a lean and feral look about him as he slowly circles his car. I’m guessing it’s his car, anyway. I hope he’s not about to boost it.
“I don’t know about this,” Arden says.
With a shake, I tell her, “Trust me,” then I let go. I sound braver than I am. I’m burning with adrenaline. Shit like this happens in my neighborhood all the time, but for me, it’s academic.
/> I watched other people do this on the corner of my street. Lynne and my mother talk about guys at work pulling this kind of crap. I grew up surrounded by it. With Arden, I’m feeling ballsy enough to try it. Next to Arden, so sheltered and soft, I feel like a bandit, man. My bandit hands tremble, though.
Getting ahead of Arden, I catch the Bobby’s attention first, simply by existing. Maybe I woulda been built-out if I hadn’t taken a side tour through Cancerville the last couple years. Instead, I’m rangy and twitchy, and I look dishonest. That’s actually a good thing, believe it or not. To a guy like this, a dirty sheen is what I need. Everything about me telegraphs: I’m not a narc.
Squinting, I pretend to push my hair out of my eyes as I veer closer. “Hey, do you know what time it is?”
The Bobby has a cell phone, but he looks at his watch instead. It’s gold tone and flashes—he wants me to think it’s expensive. “A little past noon.”
It’s easy to pretend I’m distressed. My heart pounds in my chest, and a desert slowly overtakes my mouth. Knowing how people do this and actually doing it are two different things. The space between them is terrifying.
Still, I manage a convincing, “Damn it, seriously?”
The Bobby crosses his arms on the roof of the car. Leaning out long, he exposes the reptile pattern on his boots when his jeans ride up. This is where he measures me. Searches for my soft spots, tries to figure out if I’m scamming or looking to get scammed.
It makes a difference, it really does. Guys like this want to wring every last bit out of somebody. They want to borrow your car and your last two hundred dollars. Sleep it off on your couch and eat your food when you get a check from disability. But they don’t want to use up their energy or their money or anything else.
With a Bobby, everything goes in. Ain’t nothing that comes out.
Studying me intently, he says, “Afraid so. Something the matter?”
“We need to get to Cincinnati,” I tell him. Finally, I gesture back at Arden. “We were making real good time on the bus, but we got off to stretch at the last stop and it left without us.”
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