Page 38

Nevermind – Nirvana

While Brooke was in the shower, I forced myself to do what had become normal – packing up our stuff, moving some cash into our wallets for the day and hiding the rest of it among our bags, checking on what snacks we had left.

I wanted to still be riding the high of the open mic night and being here in Nashville, but the news story had stolen my excitement and filled that space with uneasy foreboding.

‘All good?’ Brooke asked when she came out of the bathroom. She walked over to me and tucked my hair behind my ear.

I was almost certain that she believed I hadn’t killed the Creep, but I also couldn’t blame her if she still had some lingering doubts.

‘As long as I have you,’ I replied.

She smiled and leaned in to kiss my cheek. ‘Well, you do have me.’

That felt impossible, and huge, and incredibly precious.

‘I really like you, you know,’ I blurted, and I felt Brooke’s lips stretch into a smile against my skin.

‘I like you too,’ she said softly.

I opened my eyes and looked at her and my whole body went hot. Brooke was wrapped in just a towel. It wouldn’t take much, not much at all, for us to stumble back into bed.

She caught the look in my eyes and hers went dark too.

Then she laughed, a little embarrassed, and stepped back. ‘I’ll go get dressed,’ she murmured.

‘Okay,’ I croaked.

So she wasn’t ready for that. Whatever that was. It wasn’t out of the question, though. That much was clear.

I was fine with giving her time. To be honest, I needed some myself. I wasn’t sure I was ready to take this any farther. Not yet, anyway. But maybe soon.

To distract myself, I reached for the TV remote and flicked it on out of habit, not thinking about what could be waiting for me.

It hit me, like a punch to the solar plexus, when a picture of me stared out from the screen.

It wasn’t particularly recent – two, maybe three years old, when I’d had bangs and my long hair had covered my face.

I looked young. The picture was one my mom had taken the summer before ninth grade, one Saturday when we’d taken a rare trip to the beach.

I wasn’t that girl anymore. That was Mouse.

The two hosts were talking about her, not me. I started breathing a little faster, right on the precipice of panic.

‘Police have come under fire for not issuing an AMBER Alert for Jessie Swift .’

The screen was still showing my picture, disembodied voices speaking over the top.

‘There are a few reasons why that wasn’t appropriate in this case.

Jessie is seventeen, and there was nothing to suggest she’d been forced to leave the city.

The AMBER Alert system is an incredibly valuable tool to inform the public about missing children, but there are specific circumstances for its use. ’

The image changed, to one of me and my mom. She had her arm around my shoulder and was beaming at the camera. She looked beautiful, as always, and I looked up at her with a slightly awestruck expression.

That photo had been taken the summer before the Creep, when, despite our rocky relationship, I’d still thought my mom would protect me from anything.

‘Why has the information about Jessie been so slow to be released?’

‘As her mother’s boyfriend was murdered, the initial investigation concentrated on whether Jessie was in any danger, either to herself or someone else, and establishing how she left Seattle.’

‘I can’t listen to this,’ I whispered, turning the TV off again as Brooke walked back into the room. ‘Please can we get out of here?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Of course we can. Just give me ten minutes.’

‘Do you think I need, like, a disguise?’ I asked, feeling off-kilter from the news report. Seeing myself on TV was bizarre and disorienting and really, really scary.

‘Do you honestly think you still look like the girl in those photos?’ she asked, gesturing at the blank screen.

‘I don’t know.’

Brooke smiled and reached over to ruffle my new streaky blonde hair. ‘You look nothing like the girl they’re after,’ she said. ‘But we still have those glasses, from Denver, if you want them.’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, still unsure.

‘Jessie, it’s not just the way you dress now, or your hair. They’re looking for a shy girl in a baggy T-shirt, and that’s not you. Not anymore.’

‘I guess.’

‘Trust me,’ Brooke said confidently, straightening up. ‘No one at St. Catherine’s would recognize you right now. The police have no chance.’

We checked out of the hotel, packed up the Mustang, and then fell into step with each other as we headed out into the city to explore it one more time before the next leg of our road trip.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Brooke said. Then rushed to add, ‘But if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s totally fine …’

‘Go on,’ I said, wondering what she had to say.

‘About your mom.’

I froze, and I could tell Brooke had noticed. ‘What do you want to know?’

She brushed her hand down my arm. ‘Did she know? About the Creep?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

I didn’t know how much I could tell Brooke. How she would react.

She took my hand and squeezed it, flooding me with calmness, and in that moment I realized:

Everything.

I could tell her everything.

‘Me and my mom aren’t that close,’ I said. ‘She was only sixteen when she had me. Just turned sixteen.’

‘Wow, that’s really young,’ Brooke said sympathetically. ‘It must have been hard for her.’

Sixteen and pregnant. It was such a cliché now that I barely gave it much thought, but back when she was a teenager, it was a big deal.

She made sure I knew that. My mom thought she was doing the right thing by having me, but the decision hadn’t worked out so well for her in the long run.

I was pretty sure she resented me a lot of the time, and I was certain she ended up with guys like the Creep because they made her feel like she could relive the youth she’d lost while busy being a single mom.

I didn’t know much about my grandparents – my mom’s parents – other than that they had encouraged her to give me up for adoption.

My mom had left Oregon when I was still a toddler, and I could just about remember going to see my grandparents when I was really little, back before she cut them out for good.

On top of all that, I wasn’t like her at all .

My mom was bright and sociable, and she loved talking to people – the original extrovert.

She was like Brooke in a lot of ways. Pretty and vibrant.

The sort of person other people were attracted to because of their looks and personality.

I was none of those things. Instead of getting a kid she could take to dance class and sing karaoke with in the kitchen while making dinner, she’d gotten a quiet, mousey child who cried at fireworks because the noise was scary, and who hid behind her mother’s legs at the store when someone tried to make conversation.

She got frustrated with me when I became shy and introverted, which only made the shyness and introversion worse.

‘I think she struggled,’ I said. ‘We went to church a lot, especially after she stopped all contact with my grandparents. The church has always been like a surrogate family to her.’

‘And to you?’ Brooke asked.

‘I guess.’ I didn’t know what it was like to have a big, extended family like Brooke’s, so I didn’t know how different it was to having a church family. ‘As soon as we moved to Seattle, my mom found the church we’re with now, and that’s where she met him.’

‘The Creep?’ Brooke asked, and I nodded. Her eyes widened. ‘Do you think she did it? To him?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think she’s capable of something like that.’

‘Really? You’re her kid. And he’s the scumbag boyfriend who abused you. I think any mother would do something like that to protect her child if she found out that had been happening.’

‘Maybe.’ I shook my head. ‘But either way, she didn’t know what was going on.’

‘I’m so sorry, Jessie. This is all so wrong. You should never have …’ Brooke trailed off, lost for words, and I tilted my head so I could kiss her bare shoulder.

‘It’s okay. Honestly. I feel so much better now that I’m out of there.’

We retraced our steps to the bar from last night, then kept walking with no obvious destination. I felt more relaxed here than I had anywhere else on this trip, except maybe the cabin in Illinois.

‘Is there anywhere specific you want to go?’ Brooke asked.

I wanted to go to the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Grand Ole Opry, and explore Music Row, and go to the Johnny Cash Museum and maybe see the replica of the Parthenon.

I wanted to stay in Nashville for weeks, not hours, but that wasn’t on the cards.

The joy of being here, when it had been merely a dream of mine for so long, had been completely destroyed by the news reports. It sucked.

‘Let’s just walk for a while,’ I suggested, hoping to rediscover some magic along the way.

We walked around the city for an hour, stopping to pick up iced coffees but taking them to go. I paused outside the Country Music Hall of Fame and looked up at the giant building with a sour feeling in my stomach that I tried to chase away with coffee.

‘We can go in,’ Brooke insisted.

I shook my head. ‘It’s, like, thirty bucks each. It’s too expensive.’

‘We’ll make it work. This is important to you.’

I took her hand and tugged her away. ‘I’ll go another time. We need food and gas money and motel rooms more than I need to look at Dolly Parton’s sparkly stilettos.’

‘I’ll bring you back here one day,’ Brooke said, finally following me. ‘I promise.’

‘That works for me,’ I said with a smile.

She smiled back, and my whole body lit up in response.

‘Have you always been into girls?’ she asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

She threw her arm around my shoulders and I smiled as I leaned into her side. We’d been this close for a couple of days now, but I still reveled in it, the feeling of her bare arm against mine, the feeling that she’d chosen me.

‘I guess,’ I said.

‘Will you tell me when you figured it out?’