Chapter Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
Louisa stops abruptly on the steps. She sees the two men by the car down in the street, can smell their cigarettes, she can’t hear what they’re saying but she can tell by the harshness of their laughter that it isn’t anything good. A bad foster home teaches a child a lot of things, but most of all to identify danger. She tastes blood in her mouth before she realizes how hard she’s biting her lip. She glances back up the steps but realizes there’s no point trying to run back up there, any moment now the train will thunder away from the platform, she’d never get back in time. Down here there isn’t anyone else in sight, the nearest houses are a long way away, the world shrinks until it consists of just her and the men. There is nothing more dangerous.
“Wait! Wait! Quiet…,” one of the men down in the street suddenly exclaims.
“What?” the other one grunts, Louisa can hear that he’s drunk.
“I thought I heard something. No. It was probably nothing,” the first one says.
The brain does a lot of stupid things when it’s stressed. It won’t cooperate at all. Suddenly it starts reminding Louisa of her trick in the library bathroom, snaking on the floor, through the gap beneath the side wall, into the next stall, and how disgusted Ted would have been if he’d found out about that. She has to put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud. Stupid, stupid brain. It’s sheer luck that the shadows on the steps are kind, wrapping their long arms around her. She pads down the steps, two at a time, to the street, staying close to the wall and hurrying away from the car. She doesn’t know if the men have seen her, but as soon as she’s beyond the streetlamps, the night is a dark hole.
She can’t see the train behind her anymore, doesn’t hear it leave the platform, but she hopes that Ted won’t hate her for leaving him and the painting. The worst thing about Ted isn’t that he seems kind but might be mean, it’s that he might be kind for real. She wishes he hadn’t said what he did about believing in her. That’s too much responsibility. All she can give him is disappointment.
Sunrise is still many hours away, beyond the lights of the train station the road is pitch-black and absolutely silent, she clutches the straps of her backpack tightly. She’s eighteen years old and alone, not missing, just gone.
Then she hears a man yell. Then another one. And she runs.