Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
CASH
Iwasn’t dumb. When the guy in the pickup went inside just after Chase did and neither of them came out right away, I knew what was happening. But I fought the urge to go inside and tell Chase he didn’t need to do this, because what were our choices?
I clutched our backpacks to my knees instead and buried my face in the space there to hide from the cold, doing my best to ignore the heaviness in my chest and the tightness in my lungs while I tried to figure out how long was too long.
In the end, they didn’t take long at all.
Chase shook my shoulder and said, “I got us a ride.”
He gave me a pasted-on smile, and I looked right past it to make sure he was really okay. He gave me a tiny nod, and something in my gut settled.
There was a guy standing next to him who was maybe forty. He was holding a paper bag from the truck stop in one hand and his keys in the other. He didn’t offer his name—but I didn’t give him mine either. It wasn’t anything either of us needed to know.
“You ready to go?” he asked, nodding at the lone pickup parked by the fuel pumps. “I can take you boys as far as Richmond.”
I went to stand, but as soon as I was on my feet, the world started spinning.
I had to lean against the wall until Chase slipped an arm around my shoulders and helped me stay upright.
Every breath carried a sharp, jagged edge, and by the time he’d led me to the pickup, my lungs burned and I’d broken out in a cold sweat.
I shot Chase a panicked look when a coughing fit overtook me—I couldn’t lose us this ride too, not when I knew what it had cost him—but when I could finally draw breath again, the guy just reached into the bag and pressed a bottle of NyQuil into my hands with a gruff, “Your brother said you’re sick. ”
He stared at me like he was waiting for me to acknowledge him or thank him or something, but I wasn’t going to do that.
“He doesn’t talk,” Chase said, and the guy nodded.
I wouldn’t have thanked him even if I did, because I already knew what the NyQuil had cost.
I swallowed the NyQuil, grimacing at the taste. I couldn’t wait for the tight bands around my chest to ease.
“Better?” Chase asked quietly.
I nodded, and Chase opened the back door of the pickup.
He helped me up, then closed the door behind me.
I had just a second to feel a panicked chill at being left alone before I realized he was climbing into the front with the guy.
I pulled my seat belt over my body and clipped it shut as the engine of the pickup rumbled into life loudly.
I guessed we were gonna roll coal all the way to Richmond.
At least it was warm in here, though.
The driver handed Chase the paper bag, then turned the stereo up, and we took off with a roar.
I gripped the seat belt hard to stop from sliding sideways.
Chase passed the bag back to me, and when I opened it, I saw a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice. I almost cried at the sight of it, imagining how nice and cool that would feel on my raw throat. I raised my eyebrows at Chase.
“In case we get hungry,” he said, and I wondered how he’d bullied the guy into buying us dinner. Chase could come across as pretty threatening, but it was all an act. Underneath he was just as scared as me. He just kept the fear buried deeper than I did.
Or maybe he hadn’t bullied him. Maybe the guy wasn’t a total asshole, just as long as I didn’t think too hard about what he’d done with Chase in the bathroom.
Because I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that Chase had done it.
I didn’t like that either the guy had asked or Chase had offered, and that I couldn’t tell which one was worse.
I took a sip of apple juice and decided to save the sandwich for later. The warmth of the pickup was making me sleepy—the NyQuil was too—so I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Not even the blast of the stereo could keep me from dozing.
I had weird dreams, the sort that felt more like vivid thoughts, caught in a place between awake and asleep where nothing was too crazy for your mind to come up with.
I was awake enough that I was aware I was in the pickup, staring out the window into the dark, watching the lights flash by.
But I was close enough to dreaming that, once, I thought I saw a herd of horses galloping right beside the highway, keeping pace with the pickup.
Sometimes I heard Chase and the guy talking, but it was like listening to an old radio with the dial stuck between stations. I heard the sound of it but not the words.
I dozed a little longer, then actually slept properly, and when I woke up it was still dark and we were still driving, but there was a faint glow at the edge of the sky that said dawn was coming.
I unwrapped my sandwich and ate half before the pain in my throat made me quit. At least I could breathe a little easier than before. I drank some more of the apple juice.
The guy was talking, but not to Chase. He was holding his phone up to his ear as he drove. “Yeah, yeah, baby. I’ll be home in a few hours, and you and me and the kids can all go out for breakfast, huh?”
I could see the tightness in Chase’s jaw even in the darkness of the cabin.
The guy laughed. “Yeah, love you too.”
He ended the call and put his phone on the dash. The light from the screen reflected in the windshield for a moment before it went black.
Sometimes, before a hurricane, everything goes deathly still.
It’s not just the absence of wind—it’s like the world has drawn in a deep breath and sucked the air out of everywhere else.
Chase was like that. It wasn’t just silence he was sitting in now.
There was a storm brewing. If he’d been a hurricane, right about now every little critter would have been seeking shelter and all the birds would have gone quiet.
Hurricanes all start with one bit of wind too.
Chase rolled his shoulders and said, “You got a wife and kids, huh?”
The guy threw him a sideways glance but didn’t say anything.
“Real family man,” Chase continued with a smirk, lifting his chin the way he did with our dad, like he was giving him a target. Then he stretched, like a lazy cat. “That’s nice. Taking the wife and the kids to breakfast. Real wholesome.”
“You got a fucking problem, kid?” the guy asked.
“Nope,” Chase said, drawing the word out so long that anyone in the world would be able to tell it was total bullshit. And then, because he could never leave anything alone, he said, “You take ’em to church too?”
The guy slammed on the brakes so hard that I was thrown against the seat belt. A cloud of dust exploded around the pickup as he steered onto the shoulder. “Get the fuck out.”
I was fumbling to undo my seat belt before we’d even come to a proper stop.
I tumbled out of the pickup onto the side of the highway, my juice clutched in one hand and my backpack in the other. Chase joined me, and he flipped the guy off as the pickup roared away from us.
The taillights slowly receded into the distance.
“Asshole,” he said, sounding as satisfied as he always did when he’d goaded Dad enough to punch him in the face.
Like it took bleeding to prove something to himself.
Then he shot me a guilty look, as if it had only just occurred to him that we were stranded in the middle of nowhere because he had to run his mouth. “You okay?”
I swallowed, and it hurt. “Left my sandwich in the back.”
“Shit.”
I shivered in the cold. After the warmth of the pickup’s cabin, we might as well have stepped out into a blizzard, even though there wasn’t any snow here like there had been back in Boone.
There was mud, though, and clouds, and the air was as sharp as razor blades.
Cut like them too, when I inhaled. I wondered if the clouds meant snow was coming.
What the hell did we know about snow? We were from Macon, Georgia, where it hardly ever snowed.
Chase unzipped his jacket and made me put it on over mine.
“You’ll get cold.”
“Shut up,” he said, still wearing that guilty look as he tugged the zipper up. “You’re sick.”
It was an apology, if you knew how to speak Chase. So I nodded and let him take my backpack to carry.
It was freezing and it was dark, and it seemed like I had to stop every minute to catch my breath. I wanted to curl up and sleep, but I knew that wasn’t an option. We had to keep going until we found some place to shelter.
It felt as though I dozed again, even though I was still walking.
I imagined a clearing suddenly appearing in the tall trees that lined the highway, and there’d be a little house there, with the lights on and light from a fireplace flickering on the front windows.
And because it was a dream, the people who lived there would be nice, and they’d invite us in and let us take hot baths, and feed us a homemade meal that looked just like the Thanksgiving dinners you saw on TV—a turkey straight from the oven, hot rolls with real butter, and whole serving dishes of green beans and mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables.
It was the kind of fantasy that would have been nice to fall all the way into, except I had to keep stopping to cough and then catch my breath again, and my chest felt so heavy that my lungs couldn’t pull in any air, and my throat was on fire so bad that I wanted to cry.
“Look,” Chase said and pointed.
Ahead of us there was a clearing in the trees.
There was no little house, though. Instead, there was a big lit-up sign that said GOOSE RUN GAS.
The gas station looked pretty old and ugly, but the sign was illuminated and the lights inside the store were on, and it was real.
And suddenly I didn’t give a fuck about cozy houses and Thanksgiving dinners anymore.
Hell, a shitty gas station hot dog sounded like heaven right now.
Not that we had the money for that.
“Okay,” Chase said as we reached the cracked concrete driveway that led to the pumps and the store. “Let’s go around back before someone sees us.”