Page 19

The Stranger – Billy Joel

Brooke fell asleep quickly, curling up on the side of the bed closest to the window and throwing her arm over her face. I’d noticed that was how she liked to sleep, hiding her face from the world.

I laid on the other side of the bed, leaving as much space as was humanly possible between us, and tried to calm my still-racing heart.

I couldn’t help but run the night over and over in my head, replaying each of the wallets and how I’d lifted them, the men I’d stolen from, the woman with her wine glass and bored expression.

I’d been nothing to them – either invisible or not worth paying close attention to – but I’d made sure they would remember what I’d done more than any boring lecture at the convention.

The power felt electric in my veins. They shouldn’t have ignored me.

Brooke snored softly from the other side of the bed.

She had looked so pretty and so much older than me tonight.

With red lipstick and her hair pulled back instead of loose around her shoulders, she could easily pass for someone in her early twenties.

I liked her more like this – bare-faced and relaxed.

This was the version of Brooke I had gotten to know, and I had a feeling it was the purest, most condensed version of her.

She was different with me than she was at school.

In a good way. Then again, I was different with her, too.

I tried to reason that sharing a bed wasn’t a big deal. It was probably something girls who were friends did all the time. It didn’t need to mean anything. It didn’t mean anything to Brooke .

I tried to extinguish the fiery feeling in my belly that wanted to flare bright. I wasn’t going to force myself on her, or convince myself that maybe she had feelings for me. She didn’t. And that was okay.

It was late before I fell asleep and Brooke had stopped snoring. The peaceful rise and fall of her shoulder, her skin pale in the moonlight, convinced me to let it all go and sleep too.

During the night we must have both moved, because when I woke up the next morning and opened my eyes, Brooke’s sleeping face was inches from my own. I startled back, terrified that my subconscious had done something inappropriate in my sleep.

As slowly as I dared, I rolled over and away from her, edging back to my side of the bed.

The bed was huge. This was ridiculous.

Slowly, my heartbeat returned to a normal rhythm, and I decided to get out of bed before Brooke woke up and noticed me being weird.

When I was in the bathroom, I heard her moving around the room, and that was a relief.

I wanted to let her sleep as long as she liked, but I couldn’t read very well in the dark – this fancy hotel had good blackout curtains, unlike the cheap motels we’d been staying in up until now.

Brooke was sitting in the armchair when I came out of the bathroom, her long legs stretched out in front of her.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked me with a smile.

‘Yeah,’ I lied, and smiled too. Brooke didn’t need to know the truth.

While I was getting dressed, Brooke got ready in the bathroom, then I packed up everything and left the pillowcase with the wallets hidden inside by the door, ready to dump them in a trash can when we left.

Brooke came out with a cagey expression on her face. I immediately tensed, wondering what high jinks she was planning next.

‘So,’ she started, ‘how would you feel about catching up with my cousin today?’

It took my brain a second to follow her thoughts – Brooke’s cousin, who lived in Denver, because she’d chosen to come here instead of going to college in Utah.

Reaching out to someone who knew either of us sat uneasily in my stomach. Maybe Brooke trusted her cousin wouldn’t turn us in, but I didn’t know her. What if she decided to join our road trip? I didn’t want that at all.

I sat down in the gray chair, and Brooke took the bed opposite me, reversing our positions from yesterday.

‘Do you know where she lives?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, kind of. Me and Julianne visited her last year.’

I chewed on my bottom lip, and Brooke watched me intensely.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said gently, reaching out to squeeze my knee. ‘You’ll hurt your lips.’

I stopped, startled, and stared at her. Brooke kept talking, apparently unaware of how much her casual touches affected me.

‘If we follow the signs for Denver Zoo, I should be able to find her neighborhood from there,’ she said.

‘Why do you want to see her? Won’t she, like, immediately call your parents? Or the cops?’

‘Nah,’ Brooke drawled. ‘Meredith isn’t like the rest of them.’

‘The rest of who?’

‘My family.’ Brooke straightened up, combing her fingers through her loose hair.

‘I want to go see her because I think she’ll help us.’

I sat with that for a moment. ‘Do we need help?’

She shrugged. ‘She used to live with a bunch of theater performers, and I know at least some of them are interning at theme parks. Meredith almost signed up for the same program. So they might be able to help us when we get to Orlando.’

It hung between us in the air, then, that thing we weren’t speaking about.

Running away was one thing.

We’d done that.

We knew where we were going, and we had a plan – sort of – for when we got there.

But it wasn’t like we were going to walk right into Disney World and get jobs, not without any experience, and no resumes, no references.

I wanted to shove that unspoken thing out of the room, to go back to planning how to steal from drunk businessmen, because at least that was something tangible.

I could see myself pickpocketing much easier than dancing through a theme park wearing a stylized ballgown, even though it would mean dealing with a guilty conscience.

Brooke raised her eyebrow at me, asking a silent question. I was pretty sure if I said no, I didn’t want to go see Meredith, she would let it go. There might be a little argument about it, but she wouldn’t force me to if I felt strongly about it.

And I wanted to go to Disney World, goddamn it. Brooke had put the idea in my head, and it had grown and gathered speed and turned into my daydream now too.

‘Okay,’ I said, kicking my legs up in a move that sent my chair spinning. ‘Maybe she can help.’

‘She’s the one who taught me how to … you know.’

Pickpocket. Right.

‘And the –’ she lowered her voice – ‘you know, gun , is hers.’

‘Why do you even have it?’ I asked, finally voicing the question I’d been burying.

‘She gave it to me.’

There was so much more I needed to know. Why did Meredith think her seventeen-year-old cousin needed a gun? What the hell was Brooke running away from? Was there a possibility that something as bad had happened to her back home … someone just as bad as the Creep?

I really didn’t think Brooke had killed someone. But then, she probably didn’t think I was being chased by the police because they thought I had killed someone. Most teenage girls didn’t run away from a murder charge.

As the moment stretched between us, I knew I could break our original promise not to ask each other what we were running from. If her answer had something to do with the gun, though, would that change what we had now? If she knew about the Creep, would it change things for her?

I wasn’t going to ask. Not yet.

‘All right,’ I said eventually. ‘Let’s go find Meredith.’

‘Great,’ Brooke said with a huge sigh, then checked her watch. ‘We need to move. Check-out is at eleven.’

‘Holy shit, I thought you were dead.’

Brooke’s cousin looked a lot like Brooke.

They had the same heavy eyebrows and thick dark hair, though Meredith styled hers a lot shorter than Brooke.

She had a septum piercing, the silver hoop looping between her nostrils.

I found myself staring at it for a moment too long, wondering if it had hurt, and whether the hurt was worth it.

We’d left the hotel without stopping at the front desk, not wanting to give any of the staff the chance to recognize Brooke from last night. We’d paid in cash, anyway, so it wasn’t like they needed to process a credit card payment.

Finding Meredith’s apartment had taken slightly longer than we’d anticipated. Brooke kept driving in circles, trying to find somewhere that looked familiar, and I started regretting throwing away our phones. And not having a map.

Not that I knew how to read a map.

She’d eventually found the zoo and drove the couple of blocks to Meredith’s neighborhood. We parked the Mustang in a shady spot under a tree before we went to find the apartment block on foot.

‘Surprise,’ Brooke said, making a little jazz hands gesture.

‘Come in,’ Meredith replied.

On the front step of her apartment building, wearing a man’s shirt and black cycle shorts, and with her toenails painted neon orange, Meredith looked amazing – cooler even than Brooke, and I’d been holding Brooke up as ultimate girl goals. Meredith held the door open and gestured us both inside.

‘This is Jessie,’ Brooke said.

‘Hi.’ I gave a little wave.

Meredith’s apartment was tiny, which made sense because she was a college student, and she’d hung beads and fairy lights from the ceiling and covered the walls with brightly patterned fabrics.

One sad, brown corduroy couch slumped in the corner, behind a low coffee table that was covered with baggies of weed.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Meredith asked.

She took a seat on a huge beanbag, and I sat down next to Brooke on the couch, trying not to stare as I took in the apartment.

‘I needed some space,’ Brooke said, and Meredith rubbed her hands over her face and groaned. ‘I’m guessing you heard.’

‘Your dad called my dad a couple days ago,’ Meredith said. She sat upright and reached for a mug that looked like it was hand-made. By a six-year-old. Who only had a vague idea of what a coffee mug was supposed to look like.

‘Oh, good,’ Brooke muttered.