Chapter 24 The Street
It’s dark.
Quiet as the heat recedes. I gulp down a lungful of cool air. For a second there, I couldn’t breathe. Now I’m . . . sweating?
Am I sweating, or am I still covered in a sheen of milk?
I’m on my hands and knees. I must have blacked out. I lift a hand and find tiny black rocks stuck to my slick palm. The ground under me is cold and hard. And black.
I raise my head, groggy as I blink at my surroundings. There’s a streetlight thirty feet away.
I scramble to my feet.
I am not in my bathroom. I am in the street. I clamp a stone-littered hand over my mouth.
My toe catches a book—the journal. The journal is in the street with me. With the garter back around it.
I’m leaning over to pick it up when I realize I’m naked.
I am naked in the middle of the street.
A street that could be Reed’s.
My gut falls through the world and out the other side.
Oh my god.
Why didn’t I put on clothes? Where the hell is my towel?
I snatch up the journal and position it over my vag, fumbling out of the road and onto the sidewalk with my other arm across my boobs, squinting at the street sign on the corner.
I gasp in a breath that feels like a thousand little cotton balls being forcibly shoved down my windpipe as the words come into focus, confirming my location.
Beverly Glenn Blvd. & Greenly St.
My cheeks collapse into each other, lips puckering like the cartoon on a Warhead candy wrapper.
My body is having a visceral reaction as I bumble backward, away from Beverly Glenn, a main road with lots of traffic, toward where I originally appeared, eyes bulging, shuffling sideways so my bare ass faces away from the street.
I clock the house numbers via their mailboxes. 1885, 1887—
I come to a halt outside 1889 and crouch against some bushes like an awkward, naked sorority girl posing for a group photo. Hyperventilating, I shove the garter off the journal and throw open the snap. The pen has returned to its little loop. I slip it out.
The top is red again. The charge is gone. I flip to the destination page where I wrote down Reed’s address. The ink shines silver in the streetlight. It changed color.
All signs seem to be pointing to—yes, that happened, Rikki—160 dollars’ worth of milk well spent.
I’m in front of Reed’s house.
An enormous hedge and an elaborate, six-foot, solid-black gate block off the driveway.
The house itself looks like one you’d see in a movie that’s set in California.
Two stories. Spanish style? I’ve never looked into buying a home, so I don’t know the official names of the styles.
The roof is made of those squiggly burnt-orange shingles.
Some sections of the house are white stucco, and there’s a castle-looking column made of tan brick.
It looks new. It looks nice. Nice enough that there’s most definitely a camera embedded out here somewhere.
Probably a Ring. And . . . I am hunched, tucked into a ball at the edge of Reed’s hedge, shivering in the wind.
I am . . . sweaty and naked, off a main road in California with no car, no wallet, no ID, and no phone, crouching in front of a guy’s house. A guy I went on two dates with and haven’t spoken to in three weeks.
He cannot find me here.
I twist open the teleport pen, shaking as I flip to a fresh page. The milk-vault task has gone silver as well. The page across from it now reads:
Feedback?
I need a new destination page. I flip again.
Feedback?
Another page.
Feedback?
A flustered groan slips out of me as I press the pen to the page.
There was nothing in those directions about appearing naked!!!
I turn the page.
Rikki, it’s a metaphor.
My eyes bulge as I fumble the notebook, suppressing the urge to chuck it into the bushes.
You need the creepy journal.
I flip again.
2) Where would you like to go
X _____________________________
I scribble down my current home address at record speed and squeeze my eyes shut, dreading whatever awaits me on the next page.
And turn.