Full Ride

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Or—even worse—they might have been some of his victims.

  “Daddy didn’t kill anybody,” I whispered to myself, whispered into the wind.

  And wasn’t that awful, that that was the best thing I could come up with for comfort? If he had killed somebody, would I have been saying, He only killed one person. It’s not like he killed two or three. It’s not like my father’s a serial killer or anything.

  My daddy didn’t kill anyone. He just lied and tricked people and stole millions of dollars.

  Oh—and computers. He also stole laptop computers.

  That was how it started. At least, the way he tells it. Or sort of tells it. He had to do some work near Emory University one day, and it made him mad to see that all those rich college students just left their laptops lying around. They’d leave their laptops behind to hold a table at Starbucks, or to hold a study carrel at the library, and then they might get busy talking to a friend and take forty-five minutes or an hour to get back to it.

  So one day, just to teach some kid a lesson, he took one of those laptops.

  That, by the way, was the only crime Daddy ever admitted to, even to Mom or me. He couldn’t very well not admit to it, considering that J. Cooper Eddington III’s MacBook Pro was found in Daddy’s car.

  The thing is, J. Cooper Eddington III’s grandparents, J. Cooper Eddington I (naturally) and his wife, Mary Lou, also got a call at three a.m. on the first Friday night that J. Cooper Eddington III (known as “Coop”) spent at college. Mary Lou picked up the phone, and someone she thought was Coop was sobbing hysterically (and possibly drunkenly) on the other end of the line: “Grammy! You’ve got to help me! They’re going to charge me with DUI if I don’t pay for all this damage right now! Mom and Dad are going to kill me if they ever find out!”

  And Mary Lou, who had always secretly considered Coop her favorite grandchild, jumped up out of bed and drove to an all-night drugstore and wired $7,500 to the number “Coop” gave her.

  Later, on the witness stand, Mary Lou Eddington blinked back tears from behind her magnifying-glass-size frames and said in her whispery old-lady voice, “I’m not stupid. I know there are scams. But the man on the phone knew that I drove a Cadillac, and he knew that I call my car Josie, and he knew that I once backed into a trash can myself, one time after I had a little too much merlot at bridge club. . . . How could I not think it was Coop? How could I not help my Coopie?”

  Is it wrong that, sitting in the courtroom, I almost hated tiny, ancient Mary Lou Eddington for not thinking clearly when awakened from a sound sleep at three o’clock in the morning? For not remembering that she herself had posted a picture on Facebook of her new Cadillac, affectionately nicknamed Josie? For not thinking that her own daughter-in-law might have e-mailed her grandson, newly away at college, “Grammy had a little fender bender last week. Nothing serious, just hitting some trash cans, but Dad and I wonder if we need to start talking about taking her keys away. When you were there visiting, did it seem like Grammy’s glasses were strong enough?”

  The federal prosecutors said Daddy stole cell phones, too, and hacked into people’s voice mail. He wasn’t the first person who ever ran a computer or phone scam preying on grandparents wanting to protect their college-age grandkids. But, as Time magazine put it, he was “the most thorough researcher, the most convincing liar, the best at covering his tracks.”

  And, as far as the law enforcement officials could tell, he made the most money at it. And then he evolved the most, from being a small, two-bit scam artist to being a millionaire criminal entrepreneur. He started a company to make it look like he’d earned the money legitimately, and the company’s supposed purpose was—wait for it—computer security. And then he used those connections for more crimes, scamming people who’d hired him to protect them against scams. He laundered money for other criminals; he began taking investments and used new investors’ money just to pay the old investors. And even after he moved on to more complicated, more sophisticated, more lucrative crimes, he kept doing the cruel, heart-rending ones: calling up people in the middle of the night and telling them their loved ones were in trouble—send money now.

  Until he got caught.

  Even then maybe he could have stayed just an ordinary criminal. Richer than most, but still ordinary. Maybe nobody outside Mom and me and the people we knew—and, okay, the people he tricked and stole from—would have known or cared about his case.

  But even as he wasn’t confessing, wasn’t cooperating with the investigation, and wasn’t agreeing to a plea agreement, he was also commenting on how crazy people were to put their whole lives out there on social media and then be surprised when criminals used it.

  He made people hate him. He made them love to hate him.

  And then, while still not confessing or cooperating or agreeing to anything, he speculated about why someone who’d started out poor like him would feel justified running computer and phone scams against foolish rich people: for the sake of their own kids.

  “How else would someone like me ever be able to send his own kid to college?” he asked. And this was caught on camera, so it was played over and over again, and quoted and requoted and YouTubed and Facebooked and tweeted so many times that I was sure everyone on the planet knew about it.

  “Daddy, were you trying to make me hate you too?” I whispered into the wind whipping over and around our car.

  I felt Mom’s hand on my arm, and for a horrible moment I was afraid she’d heard me. Her grip tightened like a vise, her fingernails digging into my skin. I jerked away, popped the earbuds out of my ears, and started to protest, “Mom—”

  She took her hand off my arm to put it over my mouth. Then she pointed at the car radio.

  I reached over and turned it up, so the announcer seemed to be shouting over the thundering sound of air rushing in my window: “—speculation about why Jones’s wife and daughter didn’t show up for his sentencing—”

  “You said the lawyer said we shouldn’t, because then it’d be harder to hide,” I complained to Mom. “Now they’re going to criticize that, too?”

  Mom shook her head warningly and put her finger over her lips.

  “Now sources tell us Jones’s family has abandoned their multimillion-dollar mansion,” the radio announcer continued. “Neighbors reported seeing a U-Haul in their driveway early this morning. . . .”

  I burned with hatred for our neighbors. For a moment I was too mad to hear anything, and when I started paying attention again, a second radio announcer was wisecracking, “Oh, so now the Joneses have to move the same low-class way as the rest of us? Renting a U-Haul? Anybody know where they’re going?”

  I flashed back to the U-Haul rental guy. I’d been so sure he hadn’t recognized us. But what if he had? What if, the whole time he’d been talking to us, he was secretly calculating what he could get for selling us out?

  The first radio announcer chuckled.

  “Of course we know where the wife and daughter are going,” he said. “Do you doubt our crack news-gathering team?”

  “Mom!” I cried out in panic.

  The color drained from Mom’s face. She jerked the steering wheel to the right and slammed the brake. I lurched forward, the seat belt locking and cutting into my shoulder. Then we were stopped by the side of the highway, practically in the ditch. Without the sound of the rushing air through the windows, the radio announcer’s voice boomed out so loudly it seemed like everybody in the world should be able to hear it.

  “The Joneses did a one-way rental,” the announcer said. “They paid with a credit card. Don’t they know these things are traceable?”

  I closed my eyes. It was useless. We couldn’t hide. Everything was traceable.

  “Roger Jones’s wife and daughter are moving to . . .” The announcer hesitated dramatically. In his radio studio, wherever he was broadcasting from, he began tapping his fingers in a cheesy drumroll. “Bradenton, Florida!”

  My eyes flew open. I let out
a great gulp of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in. I laughed.

  “He’s wrong!” I said. “They don’t know anything! They’re just joking around!”

  Relief made me giddy. What had I been worried about? This was some stupid radio show, not a team of hard-hitting investigative reporters.

  Then I looked over at Mom. I wouldn’t have said it was possible, but her face was even paler now. Her lips looked gray. No, there was a thin line of bright red, too, where she was biting down so hard, she’d drawn blood. But she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Mom?” I said doubtfully. I reached over and flicked off the radio. The sudden silence felt painful in my ears. Then a semi zoomed past, making the whole car shake. I jumped, all my fear returning.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear—they don’t know where we’re going.”

  But my voice sounded uncertain.

  “I thought he was overreacting,” Mom mumbled. She seemed to be in shock.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Mom turned to face me.

  “The lawyer,” she said. “Mr. Trumbull. He insisted on renting a second trailer. So we could switch. Overnight, when it was dark, while you were asleep . . . I did tell the U-Haul guy I’d be returning my trailer in Bradenton, Florida. Mr. Trumbull’s having someone else do that for us. To throw everyone off our trail. And Mr. Trumbull used a fake name, he paid in cash, so the trailer we’re actually using can’t be traced. . . .”

  I squinted at Mom, my brain working at a snail’s pace. Daddy’s defense attorney, Mr. Trumbull, had known the U-Haul guy would recognize us. Mr. Trumbull had known the U-Haul guy would tell the media. Mr. Trumbull had saved us from being exposed before we even got to our new home.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” I protested.

  Mom winced.

  “I didn’t want to scare you,” she whispered. “I didn’t think . . .” She glanced toward the radio I’d silenced. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

  Another truck zipped past us, and this time Mom scrunched down in her seat as if she was trying to hide.

  “What good is that going to do?” I snapped.

  Mom didn’t answer. She just hit the accelerator, spun the steering wheel, and sped back onto the highway. She pulled out too close to a green minivan, and the driver blared his horn.

  “Mom—watch out!” I screeched.

  Mom sped up, struggling to keep control of the car.

  “I should have done everything Mr. Trumbull suggested, right from the start,” she muttered. She hunched over the steering wheel and turned her face to the side, away from the minivan swerving past us. An exit appeared to our right, and Mom veered toward it. She barely managed to stop at the bottom of the ramp. She sat there clutching the steering wheel and gasping.

  “We’ll take back roads from now on,” she said.

  • • •

  Miles later we came to a Walmart on the outskirts of a pathetically tiny town. Mom made me wait in the car while she ran in—her head down, her hair hidden by a raincoat hood, even though it wasn’t actually raining. Then we both sneaked into the filthy restroom of an ancient-looking gas station next door. Mom pulled out a box of Clairol Nice ’n Easy.

  “What color is that?” I asked. “Dried mud?”

  “It’s something that won’t look too weird when it grows out,” Mom said. “So I won’t have to keep buying hair dye.”

  Did she mean this was her natural hair color?

  I reached for the Walmart bag.

  “What’d you get for me?” I asked.

  The bag was empty. Mom frowned apologetically.

  “Mr. Trumbull said there were at least a dozen pictures of me floating around out there with the news articles about your daddy,” she said. “Remember—in Vanity Fair, in Time, all those online stories. . . . But they just kept using the same one of you over and over again. And—Becca? You don’t really look like that anymore, anyhow.”

  I knew the picture she was talking about—I’d seen it with the news stories and spread all over the Internet and on TV, too. It was one that I’d kept as my Facebook profile picture for more than a year because I’d liked it so much. My friends and I had all gotten our hair cut and styled and then we’d gone for professional photos. The stylist had told me if I went supershort, I’d look like one of those perky, pixie-cute gymnasts in the Olympics. I’d look like a model. Everyone would want to look like me.

  I glanced at myself in the hideous gas-station mirror with its scratched-off splotches and painted-over graffiti. Mom was right: I didn’t look perky or pixie cute anymore. My hair had grown out into a shapeless, untrimmed mass that hung down below my shoulders. In the fluorescent light, my skin was greenish, the unsightly color relieved only by the dark circles under my eyes.

  Even I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

  “But, Mom,” I protested. “Shouldn’t I dye my hair, too, just in case?”

  Mom winced.

  “We can only afford one box of hair coloring, okay?” she said. “We can’t use the credit card anymore. Gas is three cents more a gallon here than in the last town we went through, and we’re going to have to fill up at least once more. . . .”

  She was serious. A cheap little box of hair coloring, three cents—things like that could ruin us. Without the credit card, we were that close to being penniless.

  I turned my face toward the wall.

  “Becca?” Mom said. “We’re going to be fine. There are thousands and thousands of Susan Joneses out there, probably almost that many Becca Joneses. Mr. Trumbull told me everything I need to do. I change my appearance a little; no one’s going to know who we really are. It’s true that we’re not going to have much money. But we can handle that.”

  I made a sound that could have been a snort, could have been a gasp. Mom sighed.

  “I needed to have this talk with you, anyhow,” she said. “Without a credit card, we won’t ever be able to buy anything unless we have the cash in hand. I know it’s not what you’re used to, economizing, but . . . I remember how it works. It’s how I grew up. And I survived.”

  Mom’s stories about her childhood—about her entire life before she met my father—were about things like eating squirrel stew and being grateful for it, or about getting blisters on her feet from outgrowing her shoes, but not wanting to tell her parents because they couldn’t afford new ones.

  I started to complain, “Mom, you were miserable growing up.”

  Then I looked at her.

  She had such a death grip on the Nice ’n Easy box that the sides were caving in. And her expression was resolute but hollow—her clenched jaw, pursed lips, and narrowed eyes might as well have been a mask. I could tell: All her determination was paper thin. If I said one thing wrong, just the sound of my voice could pierce her mask and her resolve and everything holding her together.

  What if there’s nothing underneath? I wondered. What if there’s actually nothing holding her together except the mask?

  “You survived,” I said, parroting Mom.

  Mom rewarded me with one curt nod.

  “We will too,” she said. “We’ll be poor but honest. Nothing wrong with that.”

  Poor but honest . . .

  The words struck me as strange somehow. No, worse than that—wrong. It was the “but.” “Poor” and “honest” seemed to go together fine. Of course, if you were honest, you’d end up poor. It was rich people whose honesty would be surprising. Most people couldn’t be rich if they wanted to be honest; most people couldn’t be honest if they wanted to be rich.

  Oh . . .

  Oh . . .

  Oh no.

  I was thinking the way Daddy thought, the way he’d taught me to think.

  I was so horrified to find Daddy’s thoughts in my mind—practically his voice in my brain, doing my thinking for me—that I reeled to the side, hitting my head against the wall.

  “Becca?” Mom said, panic in her voice,
the mask slipping.

  “I can be honest,” I said, as if clutching for a mask of my own. I might as well have been trying to hide behind tissue paper. I gulped. “But how can we keep Daddy a secret if we’re being honest?”

  “We won’t lie,” Mom said. “I guess we just won’t talk much. Except to each other. We can say anything we want to each other.”

  I was fourteen, remember? Maybe all mothers of fourteen-year-old girls want to believe their daughters can tell them anything. Maybe Mom wasn’t as blind as she seemed, huddled in a filthy bathroom, about to dye her hair the color of mud on our way to a new city and a new life where she thought we could start fresh, the past left behind and forgotten, our futures rosy, both of us bursting with joy at the thought of being poor but honest.

  But maybe most mothers had always been their daughters’ favorite parent. Maybe most fourteen-year-olds and their mothers had used all those years to build up to the deep, important teenage confidences.

  Me? I’d always been closer to Daddy.

  Still Then

  We crossed over into bland, boring Ohio on a one-lane, out-of-the-way bridge. I kept sneaking glances at Mom with her newly mud-colored hair. She’d also hacked a lot of it off. Considering she’d styled it using nail scissors in a gas-station bathroom, she didn’t look as bad as you might expect. But she didn’t look like herself. She just looked . . . wrong.

  It felt wrong to be in Ohio, too. Back in fifth grade when we had to memorize the states and know how to find them on a map, Ohio was one of those states I always forgot.

  But now I would be living there. That was where Mom had found a job.

  It was late in the day when we arrived in Deskins, Ohio. It looked like it’d been built about five minutes before we got there. Everything in the downtown looked new, and many of the housing developments we passed were still just half-finished. In the dim light of dusk, it looked like the new houses were marching across the fields, taking over.