Page 25

Jagged Little Pill – Alanis Morissette

I panicked.

My instinct was still to panic, to shout her name, to draw attention to myself until someone else ran over to help. How could she have disappeared into thin air?

I jogged over to the restrooms to check them out, to see if I’d made a mistake and it wasn’t Brooke who’d walked out of them a few moments ago. But she wasn’t there. Only a woman with a small child were washing their hands, and the stalls were all empty.

Where the hell had she gone?

I grabbed my phone and called her number, and while it rang and rang, I went back outside and looked around again, straining for a glimpse of her ripped jeans and thrift store Giants T-shirt.

We cannot connect your call. Please hang up and try again.

I tried again.

And again.

Then, out of nowhere, a strange detachment settled over me. I’d experienced this feeling only once in my life, the day that I’d seen a dead body for the first time and decided to pack up my shit and get the hell out of Seattle, and feeling it again now was unsettling.

Brooke had either wandered off, or someone had forced her to go somewhere with them. Those were the only two possible options. I made myself go to a bench and sit my sorry ass down. Sit down, breathe, think.

My heart was going crazy, beating so hard against my chest it hurt, and I was grinding my back teeth and couldn’t stop.

She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.

I forced that voice down until it was just static noise in my ears. Then a thought hit me – had Brooke left me on purpose?

No. She wouldn’t. A few days ago maybe she would’ve considered it, but not anymore. Not after Denver.

If I went to the cops, I’d have to tell them who I was, why I was in godforsaken Kansas City in the first place, and I wasn’t ready to have that conversation.

I couldn’t. Everything that had happened back at home was two thousand miles and seven whole days away from me, and that was almost, almost enough distance that I could handle it.

On the bench, my fingers curled into fists, and I stretched each of them back out, one at a time, before bunching them up again.

I checked the time on my phone.

Brooke had been gone for twenty minutes.

This wasn’t normal.

I called her phone again, and it rang out, eventually switching over to the standard automated voicemail.

There was no getting around it. I was on my own.

When I was absolutely certain Brooke wasn’t going to walk out of one of the nearby stores and laugh at me for being ridiculous, I made my way back to the motel.

It was getting dark now, and that seemed like both a good idea – finding somewhere safe – and stupidly irresponsible – to leave the area.

But what else was I supposed to do? Brooke was gone , and I had to figure out what I was going to do about that.

The motel room was cool and quiet, only the whirring of the ceiling fan providing any noise. Everything looked just as we had left it. The keys to the Mustang were on the table. She definitely hadn’t left on her own, not without the Mustang.

I sat down on the end of my bed, and cried.

I’d never been much of a crier – I’d become good at bottling up my emotions in the past few years, scared of what would happen if I ever let them out.

So I hadn’t cried when I was packing to leave Seattle.

Or that first night, when I was totally terrified and convinced I was going to get caught.

I hadn’t cried in those dark moments just before falling asleep, when I remembered everything that had led to me running away in the first place – all the blood and the anger and the gut-deep regret that I had never had the courage to stand up for myself.

And that no one had ever stood up for me.

Not until Brooke.

And now she was gone.

I couldn’t even find the energy to lay down, or move, or wipe the snot and tears from my face. I was a pathetic, sobbing mess. And I didn’t want to be alone. I really, really didn’t want to be on my own.

I forced myself to pick up the phone and call Brooke one more time, just in case, but she didn’t answer.

The silence on the other end of the phone was almost enough to tip me over the edge, but I was determined not to start crying again.

I got up and went to the bathroom to blow my nose and wash my face, though I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror.

What would Brooke do in this situation? Probably not sit around crying over it. She was more of a get shit done kind of person.

But I was feeling very Mouse, and not very Jessie, and I had no idea how to flip the switch back.

I wandered over to the window to stare out of it aimlessly, and to check that the Mustang was still where we’d left it. The keys were on the desk, so unless someone had hotwired it, the chances were it hadn’t moved.

And it hadn’t. Obviously.

Staring out the window, something felt off, a creeping fog of wrongness . The parking lot was still a motel parking lot – that hadn’t changed. But something had.

I pressed my hands to the cool window, resisting the temptation to press my nose against it and watch my breath fog the glass.

The parking lot was emptier than it had been earlier, which made sense – people had probably checked out and moved on. A few more family-type vehicles had replaced the big trucks and the utility vans.

The black van was gone.

My whole body went cold.

The black van.

I furiously scanned my memory, trying to figure out if the black van that had been parked two spaces over from the Mustang was the same black van from Salt Lake City.

‘Come on , Jessie,’ I muttered.

I couldn’t be sure. Not 100 percent. Not even 20 percent sure. But there had definitely been a black van parked near the Mustang earlier, and now it was gone, and so was Brooke. I couldn’t discount that as coincidence.

I wanted to call the police, to report this new nugget of information, but that was still a stupid idea, even if I used a fake name so they wouldn’t know who I was. I couldn’t tell them about the van without telling them everything, and I didn’t have enough evidence to prove my point.

Oh, yes, officer, we ran away from home and drove halfway across the country, and there’s people following us, and now my runaway companion has disappeared.

Can you check the database for the entire United States for a man named Chris who owns a black van?

No, I don’t know the make, model or license plate number. Or his last name.

It sounded more ridiculous in my own head than it would to a police officer.

I couldn’t even call Meredith or Julianne because their numbers were in the call log of the phone Brooke had had with her when she disappeared, and I hadn’t thought it was necessary to add them to mine.

If I could get hold of the CCTV for the motel, I could check. Now I knew what I was looking for, I felt like I’d be able to tell for sure whether it was the same van. If they had a room for that kind of thing, I could sneak in and check the tapes.

I bounced my knee anxiously.

I couldn’t do it now, of course. There would be people wandering around for hours yet. I could maybe do it later, though. Or in the middle of the night. I could set an alarm, get up at, like, three in the morning and go downstairs to find the CCTV room.

So, that was the plan.

I didn’t sleep in the end.

I couldn’t sleep.

Panic-induced adrenaline was pumping through my body, and I curled up under the thin sheet, covering my head with a pillow to block out the noise of my own thoughts.

It had completely settled in that Brooke was gone – like, actually gone – and I was the only person who knew that.

Part of me kept expecting her to knock on the door at any second and demand to be let in, but as the minutes stretched into hours, I was still alone.

If I was going to find her, I had to be more Jessie than Mouse and do whatever sketchy shit was necessary.

I’d never really been responsible for someone else before. Not like this. I’d always done what I could to help my mom, especially when I was old enough to earn some money and help out around the house, but I wasn’t responsible for her.

I carefully and very purposefully didn’t think about where Brooke could be right now, or what might be happening to her. If I let my thoughts go in that direction, I knew I’d lose it again, and Brooke needed me to pull myself together long enough to figure this out.

In that moment, I realized that nothing hurt right now. All my bruises had healed, and since I’d been gone for seven days with no one hitting me, I didn’t have any fresh marks that stung.

Instead of thinking about Brooke, I let myself wonder what would have happened if Jessie, not Mouse, had faced up to the Creep. It was a stupid game, not only because he was dead, but because he would have never let me fight back.

I was starting to think of Mouse as a temporary state.

I hadn’t been her when I was born, and I wasn’t her now.

It had been too many years of my life, but what was that in the grand scheme of things?

A wasted childhood, for sure. If whatever I did next put Mouse behind me, I could probably live with that.

This trip, and Brooke – mostly Brooke – had let me close the door on that part of my life.

At three in the morning, I put the key card in my back pocket, pulled on my sneakers and slipped out of the room.

The night air was cool but not cold. Even so, the hairs on the back of my arms stood on end – more a reaction to my nerves than the temperature.

Stick to the plan, Jessie.

I’d stuffed a couple of dollar bills in my back pocket, too, so if anyone stopped me and asked where I was going, I could ask for directions to a vending machine.

I’d studied pictures of the hotel lobby online, so I had a better idea of the layout.

And I had a plan for causing a distraction, if I needed one.