Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Kylie
People donated the weirdest stuff.
And they were remarkably comfortable with leaving their name attached to their items.
Increasingly cold, Kylie found that burying herself between two plastic trash bags wasn’t keeping her warm enough, so she carefully untied two of the larger trash bags, hoping to find blankets.
Instead, she got two extremes: the broken mundane and the horrifyingly bizarre.
It would never occur to her to throw a broken item into a donation bin. That’s what trash cans are for.
“Maybe it broke when they threw it in here?” she muttered, the sound of her own voice calming her as she stared at the child’s toy oven, plastic door ripped off and missing. If she pawed around enough, she’d likely find it, but why bother?
A towel, shredded as if a tiger had mauled it, rolled out of a bag.
Smelled like a tiger mauled it, too.
Most of the cloth items she found were wool sweaters shrunk to doll size, stained sheets that looked like they were last used at a crime scene, and loads of plastic pieces of toys.
The horrifyingly bizarre items made Kylie feel like she lived in a parallel universe.
“Amish Vampires From Space,” she read aloud as she lifted a paperback from a bag, turning the book over in her hands. “How do you suck blood in a vacuum? And what do vampires do about flying near the sun? Wouldn’t they die? And Amish people can’t drive spaceships, so who pilots them?”
She was chattering nervously, wondering how long it would take Luke to free her. Seeing her breath with her words showed her that it really was getting colder.
A teeny, tiny little sleeping bag with a big zipper around the edges, a soft shade of pink but faded around the top, made her smile. This was for a baby in a carriage on cold days. Her frozen feet begged to go in it, so she lifted her boots and stuffed them inside.
And then realized the thing was full of cat hair.
Extraordinary amounts of cat hair.
And Kylie was allergic.
In a panic, she ripped her feet out of the thing, flinging it to the far corner, which only stirred up more hair and dander. Everything in the box was now coated with it. Sneeze after sneeze made her lose her wits, her hands covered in cat cooties.
Don’t rub your eyes, she reminded herself.
Suddenly less interested in exploring, she took a few slow, deep breaths and found the water bottle Luke gave her. Flushing out her system would help with the cat allergy. Fortunately, she wasn’t highly allergic, just a mild case of the sneezes and swollen eyes if she wasn’t careful.
Which she wasn’t.
Not in here, sadly.
A bright red poncho, over in the corner opposite where the baby-sleeping-bag-of-sneezing-doom had been, beckoned. Of course it was red. So were half the items in this donation box.
That’s how it worked when you lived near the small town of Love You, Maine, where every day is Valentine’s Day.
You couldn’t spit without hitting something red, white, or pink.
Victorian B&Bs were painted ladies in the trifecta of colors.
Store signs and crosswalks were red, white, and pink.
Police cars, municipal trucks, curtains, children’s clothing, baseball uniforms, you name it.
You’d better love red, white, and pink.
When Kylie had moved abruptly to Indiana, she’d been shocked by all the different colors the kids wore to high school. Kelly green! Purple! Mustard yellow! Plenty of people rebelled in Love You, but they mostly just wore black.
Indiana was a whole ’nother world, in more ways than one.
She reached for the poncho, surprised by how big it was. A thick Gore-Tex material on one side and sherpa fleece on the other, it was perfect. Centering her head in the poncho hole, she pulled it on, the hood comfortable though severely torn at one seam, her body enveloped by warmth immediately.
Or at least, something more than sub-zero cold.
“That’s better,” she said, looking at her phone.
Fifty-seven percent charge left. And according to the clock, Luke had been gone for thirty-seven minutes. She was burning through her battery keeping the flashlight on, but she didn’t care. The only thing worse than being trapped in this bin would be being trapped in this bin in the pitch dark.
The water bottle Luke had thrown to her beckoned. The icy liquid made her shiver, but she was two-thirds through it before she halted, bottle tipped up, coyotes howling again.
Better save some.
What if Luke ran out of gas on the way home? What if he got in a car accident? What if he decided not to help her?
That last one was stupid. Of course he would.
Despair threatened to take over, flickering at the dark edges of her mind. She adjusted herself on top of one of the unopened trash bags and felt a lump along the side of the poncho.
A scarf.
Ragged and holey, it was baby soft. Cashmere? Kylie wasn’t sure. Held together with stitches and sheer luck, the beige thing looked like moths had had their own Thanksgiving feast on it. She could see why the owner of the poncho had put it in this tiny little zippered pocket.
And forgotten about it.
On impulse, Kylie shoved it in her back pants pocket, a faint waft of perfume tickling her already overstimulated nose.
“Achoo! Achoo!” Her skin began to get that slightly itchy, slightly swollen feeling that followed cat exposure, making Kylie groan. Her nose would fill up soon. Could this get any worse?
And then her bladder said, “Hold my beer.”
The women in Kylie’s family were famous for their thimble bladder, as her Grandma Hood always called it. Kylie looked at the phone again.
Forty-four minutes.
What had Luke said? He was a half hour away?
She could hold it.
Plink!
Plink!
Plink!
The sounds came faster and faster, until a deluge of sleet turned the metal box into a calypso drum.
One with a waterfall attached.
And that’s when Kylie began to weep softly.
While sneezing loudly.
And crossing her legs.
“COME ON!” she screamed, her voice caught in the box, bouncing back louder and sharper in her ears than she liked. The throbbing pressure in her pelvis was doubly cruel. It was a reminder that she had nowhere to pee, and also that the last time her nether regions got this much stimulation was…
Too long ago.
Hearing the sleet made her think of rain, and rain was water, and the sound of water always made her need to pee.
Always. There was no way she’d drop trou in this charity box and go on the donated clothes, but if Luke didn’t hurry back, she was going to start pawing through the bags in hopes of finding a kid’s potty.
Her flashlight glinted off the near-empty water bottle.
Curses. She’d done this to herself.
But maybe it was Luke’s fault. A little.
For taking care of her.