Chapter 9 #3
She smiles faintly, which makes me feel guilty because she’s only trying to help. “Cheap works better. Too nice and people remember.”
That makes sense. I am learning to hate how often practicality feels cruel.
I head into the small bathroom off the room and stare at myself in the mirror before I start.
No makeup. No jewelry except the tiny studs I never took out because I forgot they were there. My hair, long and dark and impossible to miss, falls over my shoulders in a way I have loved my whole life and suddenly resent with surprising force. It looks like me. That is the problem.
I gather it up with shaking hands and pin it flat as best I can.
The woman comes in to help with the rest, fitting the wig over it and tugging the baseball cap low after.
Then come the sunglasses, big enough to cover too much of my face indoors but useful if anyone catches a glimpse of me under streetlights or gas station fluorescents.
When I look back in the mirror, a stranger stares out at me.
The blonde is wrong. Too pale, too flat, too fake.
The cap hides most of it, but not enough to make it convincing up close.
The shirt hangs loose to my thighs. Without makeup, my mouth looks paler, my skin tired, my eyes too big in a face that suddenly seems both older and younger than it should.
I look diminished somehow. Like someone who has been sanded down.
Trying to look forgettable has never felt so humiliating.
I touch the edge of the wig near my temple and swallow hard. Ridiculous and raw. That’s the only way to describe it. I feel like I have stepped out of myself and left the stronger parts behind.
The woman behind me meets my eyes in the mirror. “It’ll do.”
I nod because that is all I can manage.
When she leaves, I sit on the edge of the bed and wait with Lexi curled beside me, Bunny tucked under her arm, a little backpack at her feet with the few things she insisted on carrying herself.
My own bag sits by the door. It contains less than a person’s life should.
Some clothes. Essentials. Papers. The things I could not leave behind.
Every time footsteps pass in the hall, my body tenses.
Every time they keep going, I make myself unclench.
Night comes slowly and all at once. The room darkens around the edges.
The television throws blue light across the walls.
Lexi gets sleepy and fussy in that boneless way toddlers do when they’ve had too much change and not enough routine.
I help her use the bathroom, brush her hair, settle her on the couch with her bunny and a blanket while promising we are leaving soon.
“You stay with me, okay?” I murmur as I kneel in front of her.
She nods solemnly. “Okay.”
“No wandering.”
“Okay.”
“You hold my hand unless I tell you different.”
“Okay.”
Her trust nearly cracks me open again.
There is another knock on the door. My pulse kicks hard. I stand too fast and smooth my hands down the front of the oversized shirt even though it doesn’t help anything. Lexi looks up at me, then back toward the door, her face curious and sleepy at once.
When I open it, my father is standing there. And beside him is the man who is apparently going to take me north.
For a second, all I can do is look.
He is bigger than I expected, though I’m not sure why I expected anything else.
Broad shoulders. Thick chest. Dark shirt stretched over a body that looks built more for damage than comfort.
His beard is trimmed but rough enough to make him look meaner, and his hair is cut short enough to stay out of the way without softening anything about him.
He has the kind of face that probably would be handsome if it wasn’t so clearly shaped by violence and a complete lack of concern for anybody’s good opinion.
There is ink disappearing beneath his sleeves.
Rings glint against one hand. His eyes land on me and stay there just long enough to make my stomach knot.
Not because he’s leering. Because he isn’t.
He looks at me once, fully, taking in the wig, the cap, the oversized shirt, and something unreadable moves behind his gaze before it goes still again.
This is not a man people say no to easily.
That thought arrives whole and immediate, with a strange certainty that has nothing to do with size and everything to do with presence. Some men take up space because they want attention. Some men take up space because they’ve never needed to ask for it. He is the second kind.
He feels dangerous in the way storms do. Quiet, right until they’re not.
My father steps back half an inch and says, “This is Joker. He’s taking you north.”
I drag my gaze from his face, aware in a painfully vivid way of my own rumpled disguise, of Lexi behind me on the couch, of the fact that my entire future for the next several hours is standing in front of me in scuffed boots and a black shirt with a patch over the chest.
My first thought is as swift as it is unhelpful.
That man looks like violence in boots.
And somehow that does not scare me as much as it probably should.