3 #2
That new leather smell that once wisped through the dorm room from this very bag is gone now.
Now, the bags—and even we—smell like airports, travel, clammy sweat threaded through overworn clothes, cheap motel rooms, stale coffee, and fast food.
It permeates the old car, layered with a stale cigarette smell, as I fiddle with the phone.
And fiddle.
And fiddle.
I hit buttons and the pixelated green screen flickers onto something new. Emails, a blank screen, a screen with a scoreboard and a moving tail of pixels that I think is a game.
The truth is, I just don’t know how to use these things.
But I keep trying, hitting the up and down buttons with arrows printed onto them, the crooked arrow button that’s bigger than the rest, and the middle one, over and over, until—
I wince. “I think I called the number.”
Or deleted it.
Maybe both.
It’s hard to tell with the midday sun glaring into the car, glaring over the phone screen.
“What?” Serena’s shout is so pitched that I cringe. “Just text it—you know what? Stop. I’ll do it.”
She pulls over to the side of the road, then turns off the engine. She swipes the phone from me, her nails scraping my hand as she does.
I bite down on the insides of my cheeks, biting down on the sharp words rising up in me.
My dark gaze slides to her, and I watch as her thumbs clack the buttons.
Words come up on the screen.
Then, “Done.”
That’s all she says before she starts to pull the phone apart.
My eyebrows lift.
She takes out a black brickish thing from the back of the phone, then slides out a tiny chip—which she bends until it snaps.
“Roll down your window.”
I do.
It’s hard work. The little roller that turns and turns and turns, until the window is down and letting in all the heat.
Serena chucks the pieces of the phone out of the window—and I sink back into the seat so the shards of it don’t strike me on the way out.
“There’s a notebook in the bag, it’s black with golden trim.” She pulls back onto the road, blending into traffic that spreads across three lanes in either direction. “There’s a page marked armour. There’s an address on that page.”
I roll up the window first.
The hot wind hits me on the face, and I feel the dehydration of the past week parching my skin. Only when the window is shut all the way do I start to dig through the bag.
The notebook is tucked away in the pages of the atlas. But there’s no local map to go with it.
And we don’t need it yet, apparently.
What we do need is petrol.
So we stop at a filling station off the road, the kind with a café attached to it and a lot more food on offer than there was at the filling stations in Zurich.
But that’s nothing either one of us is excited about. Pizza, chicken strips, burgers. Just more crap to stuff into our bodies.
I need a detox.
Mother would probably find some way to clean out my arteries if she was here, watching me stuff the tasteless, soggy pizza into my mouth.
The thought of my mother is a punch to the gut—and I lose whatever scraps of appetite I had.
The pizza goes abandoned on the table in the café, and we get back to the drive.
The road is busier now.
But my mind isn’t on the traffic or Serena’s slow and steady driving style, like she’s more nervous on the road than she lets on.
My mind is on my mother.
For the first time since we ran, and I saw Mother in passing on our way to the gondolas, the reality of leaving her actually strikes me. Like a hook catching on my heart.
This whole running away thing has been so intense and chaotic that I actually haven’t had the chance to feel the loss—until now.
It’s a long drive.
It’s a quiet drive.
And that cold ache spreading through my chest is undeniably grief.
I face the window to hide the silent tears falling down my cheeks.
Everything in me wants to run back to Mother and throw myself into her arms and cry on her shoulder.
I have to force my mind to hold onto the reasons I ran in the first place, that Mother is supposed to protect me but dismisses me instead, that she was so cold about Dray and all the pain he’s put me through, and that our meeting at Bluestone if I didn’t run wouldn’t have gone in my favour at all.
Maybe once we reach the shield witch and get settled, and it all slows down, I’ll feel better.
No more motels, bad food, airports and flights. No more chasing our shadows.
The shield witch is our reprieve.
“I can have the baby there,” Serena told me back at the last motel. “It’s safe and remote. I can trust her.”
It’s a relief that we won’t be on the run while she’s pregnant. But once she has the baby, we go back on the road.
That’s a whole other problem for another day.
Right now, I just need to stop and stand still for a while.
I distract myself in the car.
Once I fight back the tears, and wipe the evidence away from my cheeks, I switch back and forth between two radio stations.
One plays a pop song that Serena likes, humming along with it like she knows the tune, but I think it’s sort of hollow and the singer sounds lazy, the melody is lazy, and it’s all very bland.
The other is weird yell-singing.
And honestly, I don’t know which is worse.
Serena hits my hand away, annoyed by my constant back and forth of the stations. She makes the decision for me, and that traps me in the car with hollow pop music.
And it’s a long ride to Mexico.