Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
Fish always said that kind people were the worst, because at least with mean people you know what you’re dealing with. There’s no limit to how dangerous someone who seems kind can be.
Louisa slips off the train and out onto the platform, it’s easy to be invisible when you know you don’t matter, her outline dissolves in the darkness like sugar in warm water. She turns around and sees Ted’s sleeping face on the other side of the train window one last time. She raises her hand and waves, which might seem silly, but she feels she should make the most of the opportunity. She doesn’t know when she’ll have someone to wave to again.
She’s left the painting on the train with him, she was never thinking of keeping it, she just knew he wouldn’t accept it voluntarily. Now he has no choice. It isn’t a perfect plan, Louisa doesn’t have a perfect brain, she had actually been thinking of leaving him a few stations back. To be honest, she only really stayed because she wanted to hear the rest of the story about him and his friends. She would actually have liked to stay a few more stations, but doesn’t dare, because right now, Joar is still alive. And she knows how stories about people like him end.
“Don’t run. When you want to disappear, you walk, like you’re just going to the bathroom!” Fish whispers in her head. Fish was the best at disappearing, she got chased by security guards and the police hundreds of times after various break-ins, but always slipped out of their grasp. “The trick is relaxing and making all your muscles soft, that makes you slippery, pretend you’re a bar of soap!” Fish had explained, and when Louisa pointed out that bar soap isn’t particularly soft, Fish had snapped: “Liquid soap, then! Stop spoiling my story!”
She liked stories, she would have enjoyed being on the train with them, and that’s why Louisa knows she has to run away now. It felt too nice, sitting there next to Ted. Nothing that nice happens to someone like Louisa unless it’s a trap.
She hurries away from the tracks without even knowing which station she’s at, it doesn’t matter, she has nothing to go back to. If she’s going to disappear, she may as well disappear here.
Be soap! Fish is giggling in her head, and Louisa wants to yell at her that this isn’t the right time to be making jokes. But instead she whispers, “I miss you, you moron,” right into the darkness. Then she walks through the deserted ticket barrier and turns a corner very nonchalantly, skipping down some steps without noticing the echo, and doesn’t see the two men until it’s too late.