Page 27

26.

Her name, she said, was Desi. “Short for Desire—don’t ask—my mom was a hippie and things apparently got real weird on the commune. But believe me when I say that you don’t want guys to know that your name is a synonym for horny. So just Desi, OK?”

I noticed her the minute she climbed on the Greyhound bus in Boise. How could I not? She had hair that was bright blue and fell across one eye, elaborate Japanese tattoo sleeves crawling up her arms, and a pair of hoops winking from the fold of one nostril. She wore head-to-toe black, except for the bright pink lace bra that was visible underneath her strategically shredded T-shirt. The backpack that she had slung over her shoulder had been spray-painted with a giant skull whose eyes were ejecting acid green.

Desi stood at the front of the bus, her eyes sweeping across the other riders—a grim-looking lot, faces gray with exhaustion, breath reeking of Wild Turkey—before finally alighting on me. She made a beeline straight for my row, and then plopped down in the seat next to mine, carrying with her a cloud of cigarette smoke and musk.

“Power in numbers,” she muttered.

“Sorry?” It was unclear if she was talking to me or to the bag that she was currently jamming under the seat with the toe of her steel-tipped boots.

She sat upright, yanking up the front of her top. “You know. If we sit together, then there’s no chance that either of us will get stuck with a creepazoid who’s gonna try to put his hand down our pants. Or a nosy old lady who wants to show you her photo album of her grandkids.”

“Oh. OK. Grandmas are bad. Got it.”

She gave the seatback in front of her a sharp shove, jarring awake the drunk in army fatigues who had reclined his chair as far as it would go. “Hey, don’t be a dick! There are other people sitting here, too. Personal space, yeah?” Then she turned to smile at me. “Anyway, hi! Where you headed? I’m going to San Fran. Oh really, you, too? Coincidence! So what’s your story? Don’t feel compelled to tell me everything, I’m mostly being polite, but if we’re going to be smelling each other’s BO for the next two days we might as well get to know each other.”

I felt like I’d been plowed under by a backhoe. How to respond? I’d had two days to come up with a plausible new life story, but it already felt insufficient. I didn’t want to talk to this girl; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. My only goal was to be inconspicuous, to hide until I figured out how to become someone new. “I’m moving to California to be with my mom,” I said tersely.

“OK, but not your dad? So, what, your parents are divorced? Mine called it quits when I was a baby. I’ve had two stepdads and three stepmoms at this point and they were all total pills.”

“My dad’s dead,” I said.

“No shit.” Her eyes grew wide. “Well, that was insensitive of me, wasn’t it? How’d he die? Or is that rude?”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “He died in a car accident. When I was four.”

She made an exaggerated sad face that I think was supposed to look sympathetic but mostly just looked like she’d swallowed a gumball by accident. “So why the hell were you living in Idaho, the armpit of America, if your mom is in California?”

“College,” I said.

“College? In Idaho ?”

“They had a good…Russian literature department?” My life story was falling apart with only the tiniest poke; this did not bode well.

She didn’t seem to notice, though, as she was too busy screwing her face into a grimace of disgust. “Wow. Sounds deadly.” I nodded, hoping it would end here, because I wasn’t sure how I was going to pretend I knew anything about college life, being as I’d never stepped foot on a campus in my life. I didn’t even know the names of any colleges in Idaho. In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid life story to pick.

I pivoted quickly. “What about you?”

“So yeah, I thought I’d go surprise this guy I’d been seeing? Who moved last month, to Twin Falls, of all godforsaken places. Thought I was doing him a solid by visiting him in bum-fucking-nowhere; you know, interstate booty call. But when I got there it turned out he already had another girlfriend . Some fakey blond bitch. I had to turn around and head straight back to San Francisco and he wouldn’t even pay for my bus ticket. Asshole. You got a boyfriend?”

I felt trapped in the spin cycle of her thoughts, barely able to catch my breath. “Boyfriend? Um, no. Yeah, definitely no.”

I was starting to wish I’d gotten the creepazoid.

Exhaustion was stealing over me like an incoming tide. I’d barely slept since driving away from my father’s cabin two nights earlier. The first night I’d spent driving in circles around Idaho, completely lost and afraid to stop to ask for a map. And then, when I finally pulled into a truck stop for pancakes and coffee just after dawn, I found myself staring at my own face, in the pages of a USA Today that the previous diner had abandoned on the table. FBI Seeks Pair in Microsoft Murder. When I looked up, I saw myself again, on the television just over the counter, which was playing CNN on mute.

I left without even touching my pancakes.

By the time I found myself in Boise, later that day, I had worked myself up into a panicked lather. I checked in to a Motel 6, yanked the curtains tight, and then sat there in the dark, hyperventilating—the horror of my own culpability twisting my insides, leaving a coat of bitter bile on my throat. What have I done what have I done what have I done?

Sleepless hours passed as I tried to organize my thoughts. The good news, I realized, was that the news media seemed to only have the black-and-white images from the Microsoft surveillance cameras. Nor did the grainy still of the blonde in the tight dress look anything like the Jane Williams I saw in the mirror. And yet it still felt inevitable that I would eventually be recognized by someone eagle-eyed and civic-minded.

What would my father do if he were in my shoes? I kept returning to this question as I sat there in the dark, listening to the other guests pass back and forth just outside my door. My father would not be blindly driving across the country without a plan, just waiting to be stopped and caught. My father would not be hiding in a motel room, cowering and afraid and riddled with guilt. He would think strategically. I needed to do the same.

The truck, I realized, was going to be a problem. If the feds knew exactly who my father and I were—and I had to assume they did—then they would also know about the existence of the truck. Driving it would be like wearing a neon sign that said HERE I AM . The truck had togo.

My appearance, too, had to change. And my identity. I needed to become someone else entirely.

In that grim motel room, I decided that instead of thinking of myself as running away, I should think of this as running toward. Toward Esme Nowak, a version of me with far less baggage . Toward my mother, who would surely help me resolve my crisis, because wasn’t this what mothers did? Protected their children. Performed magical jiujitsu to make their problems disappear. Her elation about being reunited would surely trump any dismay that her long-lost daughter was a fugitive criminal.

I just needed to make it to San Francisco without getting caught, I told myself. I would sort the rest out when I arrived.

I spent two nights in Boise, coming up with a plan of attack and then executing my reinvention. I drove myself to a Kmart and emerged a few hours later with a new wardrobe of generic-brand jeans, zip-front hoodies, and crisp white tennis shoes. No flannel shirts or utility boots, no flimsy dresses, and definitely nothing red: nothing that might connect me with either my Montana persona or the wanted criminal in the slip dress and the tattered parka.

I took care of the rest in the bathroom of my motel room: the brand-new haircut, dyed muddy brown and cropped to my chin, only a little crooked in the back where it was hard to reach with the scissors.

As for the truck, I scoured every surface with bleach spray to rid it of fingerprints, then left it parked on a grubby-looking side street not far from the motel, unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. I figured, if no one bothered to steal it, it might at least go unnoticed for a few months.

When I was done, I made my way to the local bus station and bought myself a one-way ticket to San Francisco.

—

In the seat next to me, Desi had finally stopped talking and now was just studying me, her eyes narrowed in silent judgment. Could she have recognized me? She didn’t strike me as the type to watch the news, but how was I to know? I willed myself to disappear, to become invisible, the kind of person you’d have a hard time describing to authorities later.

Her stare went on for so long that I was on the verge of jumping up and making a dash for the bus door. But then Desi’s face suddenly lit up, with a toothy smile of delight that unexpectedly shot warmth straight through my veins. “Hey, you’re pretty, you know that? Your hair could use some help and you really need some mascara—God, your lashes are almost white —but I bet you’d be a hit with guys if you put some effort into it. You kind of look like Liz Phair, with those big blue eyes of yours.”

“Who’s Liz Phair?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “You don’t know Liz Phair? Jesus, where have you been living? Under a rock?”

You’re not far off, I thought, but I didn’t even have to respond because she was already digging in her backpack. She emerged with a Walkman and an enormous pair of headphones, which she clamped over my ears without bothering to ask permission. I flinched as the music began to blast: a cacophony of jangling guitars, a woman whose voice spoke of damage, as though she had been scraped raw by life.

I pried a headphone off. “What kind of music is this?”

Desi raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Indie rock?”

I replaced the headphone and listened some more. I’d never heard music so intimately; it felt like an invasion of my brain. Especially this kind of music, the kind that made my father wince whenever we spun past it on the radio. ( If you want atonality, try Schoenberg, at least that has intellectual merit .) And yet. Something about the song made my skin tingle, its plaintive minor key opening up something at the center of my chest. A triumphant ache, a determined defiance.

It’s cold out there

And rough

And I kept standing six-feet-one

Instead of five-feet-two

I can do this, I found myself thinking, for the very first time since I’d left the cabin. I can reinvent myself entirely, and no one ever has to know that I used to be Jane Williams. I can be someone I haven’t even imagined yet. A girl who listens to indie rock and makes friends with strangers. A girl with a living mom and a new kind of life waiting for her in San Francisco. A girl without a father at all.

“By the way,” I said, realizing too late that I was shouting to hear myself over the music, “I’m Esme.”

Desi smiled, squeezed my hand, and returned to digging through her backpack. I turned to look out the window, Liz Phair’s voice washing over me as I gazed west, past the frost-ravaged plains and the stone-colored sky, and toward the infinite blue promise of San Francisco.