Chapter 5
I’d slept through my alarm. Shit.
I took off through the forest at full speed, cutting east past the high school, running until my legs weakened and ached, my duffel bag slamming against my hip, heart pounding with so much violence I feared it would give out.
I kept going until my lungs burned badly enough to bring tears to my eyes.
By some miracle, I spotted them at a busy intersection in the heart of town, approaching a stoplight.
Between us were several lanes of fast-moving traffic, each going a different direction, semis storming past with a roar.
I can call it nothing less than a stupid act of faith, my throwing myself into the oncoming traffic, racing the red light as I sprinted after them.
A car slammed on its brakes, a semi blasted its horn, and I stumbled into the deep gouge of a median between traffic, wading through the biting high grass and waist-high thistles as fast as I could.
But I was too slow, out of shape, and even though I waved my arms and screamed at the top of my lungs, the rush of passing traffic drowned me out.
The RV rolled forward, the pickup truck and station wagon close behind, me still a few yards back.
Panicked, I lunged so fast I almost stumbled out of my shoes and just barely managed to catch the lip of the pickup truck.
It rolled forward, oblivious to my presence, and as I held on, my shoe skimmed the asphalt, the friction burning through the leather of my flat, down to my bare toe.
By the skin of my teeth, I managed to scramble up into the truck bed to safety.
I lay there on my back, panting and laughing and staring up at the sky for some time before I collected myself and sat up.
The wind tore at my hair, and the green scenes of rural Michigan smeared past in a sick blur.
I turned, tapped the glass on the back of the truck, and saw Shiloh’s gaze flicker up to the rearview mirror. She didn’t look remotely surprised, and I would wonder later if she’d known I was there all along, spotted my reflection, and said nothing.
Shiloh reached behind her to slide open the window. I pulled myself through with some difficulty and climbed into the passenger seat. “Where are we—”
“None of that,” said Shiloh. “You’ll know when we get there.”
“And when will that be?” I inquired, slipping my phone from my pocket to fire off a quick text to my mom letting her know I was on my way.
“Like I said, you’ll figure that out when we get there,” said Shiloh, impatient now. “What phone numbers do you know by heart?”
“What?”
“Phone numbers. Which ones do you know? Off the top of your head?”
“Um…my mom’s. I know 911. Everyone knows that one, I guess. And I think I know my dad’s number. I mean, he changed carriers recently, so—”
“Good enough,” said Shiloh, and she snatched my cell phone out of my hand and tossed it into the back seat with a jerk of her wrist.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s a distraction,” she said. “You’ll get sucked into whatever content is pushed through your screen, and you won’t be able to focus.”
I couldn’t even argue with that. The months after Adeline died had been, in large part, a bright blur of me scrolling through the posts of people whose lives were better than mine. “Focus on what?”
But Shiloh didn’t answer the question. It was like she hadn’t heard it at all. “We always have a few phones charged. You can ask Naomi for one if you need to call home. You should keep some contact with your family. You know, for appearances.”
I bristled at the idea of asking anyone for permission to use my own phone when I wanted to.
Especially because that phone held some of the last photos Adeline had ever taken, the last texts she’d ever sent.
“Well, that seems strangely cultlike and controlling. You do know you’re supposed to ease people into these things, right?
Frog in a pot of boiling water, that sort of thing? ”
Shiloh smiled, a deep dimple formed in her right cheek, and I had the abrupt and alarming compulsion to touch it, fitting my index finger into the divot.
She braked at another red light, peeled her gaze off the road to look at me, and caught me staring.
“If you don’t like it, you can leave. Door’s unlocked, Roslyn. ”
I didn’t move.
We kept driving for hours, through the green-gray smear of the Indiana suburbs, bumper to bumper, never weaving in and out of traffic or allowing other cars to merge into the lane, driving west against the sun at a steady clip.
We didn’t talk much during that time on the road, but the silence between us felt easy, and I liked the fact that Shiloh didn’t feel compelled to fill it with small talk or indirect questions about Adeline—or worse yet, my grief.
At sunset, the vehicles ahead veered toward an exit in the middle of nowhere, to the parking lot of a by-the-hour motel overlooking the great gash of a quarry, its cliffside wrapped tight with a tall fence topped with whorls of barbed wire.
Shiloh parked the truck, and I stepped out into the soupy heat of the evening. Riley followed suit, sliding out from behind the wheel of the RV with a stretch and a yawn. She twisted at the waist, and her back gave a gnarly crack that was so loud I thought she might’ve actually broken her spine.
“It freaks me out when you do that,” Iona grumbled, hopping out after her.
“I’ve got the bones of a fifty-year-old with osteoporosis. I can’t help it if I—” Riley stopped short at the sight of me and frowned.
The other girls noticed me at the same time. Skye came stumbling out of the station wagon, airborne, lunging for me, her arms wrapping tight around my neck. “I knew it! I knew you’d come.”
The other girls joined—sans Riley, who stood scowling at a distance—Naomi, Chloe, and Iona drawing me into a group hug.
“We were betting on whether or not you’d show.” Chloe pulled away to look at me but grabbed one of my hands as she did. “Riley over there bet twenty bucks that you’d bail.”
Skye caught hold of my other hand, and her fingers were about as cold as a corpse’s despite the thick summer heat. “Well, I knew you’d come. Never once doubted you.”
We unloaded the bags all together. Despite what Riley called her old bones, she made a point to carry all the heaviest items, slinging a backpack over each of her frail shoulders, dragging not one, but two suitcases across the parking lot with gritted teeth, pulling hard when the wheels caught on cracks in the pavement.
I moved to help her, but she just shouldered past me. “I can do it myself.”
Shiloh made for the front desk of the motel, where she appeased a bewildered clerk with a credit card and that dimpled smile of hers that seemed to have the same effect on the clerk as it did me.
I realized how it must’ve seemed, to be on the other side of us.
This band of teenage girls checking into a motel, no parents or guardians in sight.
The motel clerk, for his part, seemed conflicted.
Scanning us in search of someone who looked…
older—and in charge. I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to give us the room Shiloh’d requested, but that smile of hers won out in the end.
With some reluctance, he passed the keys over the countertop. “You girls have a good night. Stay out of trouble.”
Shiloh’s smile dropped the moment she took the keys. “We will.”
On the floor of a large motel suite, we ate a buffet spread of gas station snacks—hot dogs and honey buns and overlarge bottles of blue Gatorade, a bag of wrinkled oranges and strips of beef jerky, steaming cups of ramen boiled in the pot of a coffee maker.
Skye talked rapidly through mouthfuls of Doritos as if against a running clock.
“Jesus Christ, this is delicious.” She licked the orange dust off her fingertips. “Nothing beats it. Swear to god, I could live on Doritos alone. I don’t know why they don’t sell the dust as, like, a shake-on seasoning. Million-dollar idea, I’m telling you guys right now.”
Someone turned the TV on, maybe to drown Skye out, and flipped to a nature channel, where a reality survival show was playing. A handful of contestants dumped naked in the middle of the wilderness, scrounging for grubs under rotten logs.
Riley sneered and gestured to the screen with a stick of jerky. “It’s so fucking weird how people choose to suffer—not for money or any real clout, just to prove that they can.”
Chloe nodded in agreement. “I think I’d rather die than be stuck out there. Like, if it came down to it, and I had to drink boiled giardia water and shit in a hole to live? That’s it for me. I’m out.”
Iona struggled to twist open a jar of Nutella.
Shiloh took it from her, twisted the top off, and passed it back.
Iona, barely even registering the gesture, stuck a spoon right into the jar and began to eat it, speaking thickly through a sticky mouthful.
“You’re saying that, after everything we’ve been through, camping would do you in? ”
“Easily,” said Chloe. “Hell, two nights and no hot showers would be enough to do me in. I’d just keel over in the middle of the woods, and they’d find me weeks later rotting out there.” Her eyes flashed wide when she realized what she’d just said. She looked at me, appalled. “I am so, so sorry—”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, and to my surprise, I really meant it. “It’s nice, actually. You know, to talk openly about death and stuff like that.”
Naomi looked less skeptical than concerned. “It doesn’t bring up bad memories of…her?”