Chapter 5
IN THE HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM, Dez reads the Acheron acceptance letter for the hundredth time.
It holds words she’s dreamed about reading—It is with great pleasure …
full tuition … state-of-the-art facilities …
unparalleled opportunities—but it makes her uneasy.
She’s never heard of Acheron. Has no idea how they got their hands on Glimpse.
And Rafe’s answers seemed more designed to confuse than clarify.
Dez has always wanted to be seen, even chosen for her work, but now that it’s happening, she finds it hard to trust.
There’s a new desire rising within her, something she’s never felt before: the urge to disappear. It’s the opposite of wanting to be recognized for her art. Ever since she hurt Mo, what Dez really wants is to run away.
She reloads the Acheron website on her phone.
The simple landing page bears the school’s coat of arms, the word Acheron …
and nothing else. No information about its founding date or founder.
She checks Reddit and the film school Wiki page and finds only one reference to Acheron, a link to a comment on an obscure blog from three years ago saying the author had been selected but wasn’t sure whether to accept.
There are two comments. One says: You’re set! The other reads, Run.
Run. The meaning on the blog is ambiguous, but as a sign to Dez it couldn’t be clearer. Her heart thrums with anxiety. Run because they think you did it. Run because this could be your only chance.
Her mom’s gone to talk to the receptionist again, but she left her purse on the coffee table.
Dez knows what she keeps in there. She finds the bottle of Xanax, twists the cap.
She swallows one, and then, gauging the diameter of the orange tinted bottle, she gets a strange idea.
She spills the pills out into the cavity of her mom’s purse, then takes off her Dairy Barn apron, and feels the eye within.
It’s still slimy, still somehow vilely warm.
She gags, her mind barely forcing back the flashback.
She hates this eye. She needs it, too, if not today then at some point when it comes down to proving her innocence.
Her heart pounds. With a glance around the room, she slides the eye into the pill bottle where it fits like a glove.
She pockets the bottle, throws her apron in the trash, and zips up the purse just as her mom returns, sinking into a chair one away from Dez, not next to her.
“Anything?” Dez says, feeling the Xanax do its lovely work. Her chest loosens for the first time after so many thousand caged breaths.
“Still in surgery. That’s all they’ll tell me. I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”
They’ve been at the hospital now almost twenty-four hours. Dez has less than two hours left before the midnight deadline Rafe gave her on the roof, and she still doesn’t know what to do.
“Can I show you something?” Dez says, and passes the Acheron acceptance letter to her mom.
With red-rimmed eyes, her mother scans it so quickly, Dez knows she’s barely reading.
“It’s your dream,” her mom says vaguely, passing the letter back.
“It starts tomorrow.” In other words: impossible. She’s not even going to get into Rafe de la Cruz with her mom.
“You should go.”
“What?” Dez is stunned.
“You should go, Dez.” Her mom sounds so tired, and she hasn’t once looked Dez in the eye. “We’ve got enough on our hands here.”
Enough, Dez realizes, without having to deal with Dez. Her heart breaks at how much distance she’s put between herself and her mom.
Dez knows she can’t expect her family to give her more right now. But selfishly, she wants someone to be excited about her news—not just trying to get rid of her. She thinks of calling Silas, who’d be thrilled for her, but how could she without telling him about Mo?
Mo is who she really wants to tell. And she’s the reason that can’t happen.
She thinks of Rafe’s words on the roof, that Mo would want her to accept.
It felt like a presumptuous thing to say, but now Dez remembers showing Mo her final cut of Glimpse.
It was just a few days ago, Saturday afternoon.
She’d jerked his pillow out from under his head to wake him up, flopped onto the bed beside him, and pressed Play.
She watched his eyes the whole time he watched her film.
He made no outward expression, but she could tell he was impressed.
When it was over, when the credits rolled, he closed her laptop and turned to her. He looked … what? Was he angry?
He said, “When you get your chance, Dez? Whenever it comes? Don’t miss it. Not for anyone or anything here.”
This is her chance. She missed the AFI deadline, and Rafe was clear Acheron wouldn’t ask again. Would Mo really want her to go, even now?
She tells herself she can come back anytime to see him.
She can come this weekend even. With her tuition covered, money would be, for the first time in Dez’s life, not an all-consuming worry.
And when the police come around with more questions, she’ll have Acheron’s lawyers in her corner.
Dez hasn’t told her family that part yet; as far as they’re concerned, it might be the most important piece of all.
She looks up the address Rafe gave her. It’s a private airplane hangar and landing strip, fifteen miles away. Seeing it on the map sends a flutter through Dez’s chest. This is how someone gets to the Colorado Rockies to start classes tomorrow. This is how Rafe might be for real.
She looks down the long, fluorescent-lit hospital hallway, where somewhere on the other side of walls and surgeons and lifesaving machinery lies her brother in crisis.
Mo, is this okay?
But he can’t tell her that it is. No one can. Dez will have to decide for herself.
If she’s ever going to seize her destiny, she’s got to seize it now. By midnight.
Forty minutes until midnight, Dez takes a rideshare to the landing strip.
She’d taken so long to make the decision that there’s barely time to swing by home and grab her things.
She stuffs a duffel bag with clothes, a toothbrush, her camera equipment, and computer.
She hasn’t showered or changed since last night.
She can change clothes on the plane. If this is real.
At first, the road out of town is empty. Nothing but the occasional coyote’s eyes. But once she reaches the sign on Highway 50 that raises the speed limit to sixty-five, Dez feels them behind her—headlights on a following car.
She turns and confirms the feeling. A car is keeping a safe and steady distance of about a hundred yards.
Dez’s driver—a middle-aged desert rat with an unkempt beard—locks eyes with her in the rearview mirror. “You need to lose them?”
What is it about the desert that attracts the criminally inclined?
“Yeah,” Dez says.
The driver turns off his headlights, turns off all the lights inside his compact car. He stares into the rearview mirror, watching the car behind them.
Sirens sound, and red flashing lights appear on the following car, which now draws rapidly closer.
“Hold on,” Dez’s driver says as he jerks the steering wheel sharply left, causing their car to U-turn so quickly they go briefly onto the passenger side’s two wheels.
The police car slams on its brakes, spinning out onto the highway shoulder so that the cop car sits diagonally, its white hood jutting into the desert.
“What I’m about to do … it’ll help if you relax,” her driver says.
“What?”
“Get as loose in your neck and shoulders as you can. Now.”
Dez grips her thighs, takes a breath, and tries to comply as her driver speeds up and uses the nose of his car to glance the edge of the police car’s rear bumper, spinning the cop car completely into the desert sand, too deep for its spinning wheels to grip.
Now Dez’s driver does a hundred down the dark and empty road. They reach the address Rafe gave her in under a minute and come to a stop outside an iron gate.
“You okay?” her driver asks. “I think that worked.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
As Dez rolls down the window, sirens sound in the distance.
She reaches for the button on a call box by the gate. Before she can press the button, the gate opens just enough for the car to drive through.
They enter through a hangar, dark and empty, lined with crop dusters and old Cessnas.
The car slows to a stop as they come out the other side, at an airstrip.
Dez thinks she sees a narrow-bodied jet on the tarmac, facing west. It’s obsidian black, the color of night, so dark she can barely make it out, but she senses it’s nicer than anything in this hangar, and possibly in this state.
The driver looks at her like they’ve made a wrong turn. “No one’s here. Did you get the address wrong?”
But when a light comes on inside the plane’s interior and Rafe’s silhouette appears in the open doorway, Dez shoulders her backpack and her duffel and opens the car door.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says.
“Are you sure about this?” the driver asks.
“Nope,” she says. “What are you going to do now?”
“What I was doing before,” he says. “Wander.”
“Good luck,” Dez says.
“And to you,” he calls.
Then his car is backing up, pulling out, and very soon, he’s gone. Dez is alone with Rafe de la Cruz and the crazy decision she’s made.
“Salutations,” Rafe says, ambling down the stairs of the jet. “I was starting to think you had better things to do.”
In place of his leather jacket, he now wears a tightly tailored suit—black, almost seamless wool, with a light gray oxford shirt and a dark gray tie. Dez has never thought of men’s suits as revealing, but this one leaves little to the imagination.
Or rather, it leaves a lot to the imagination.
“You’re trembling,” he says. “Scared of flying?”
“I just need a minute.” Dez puts her things down and takes a breath. She tucks her hair behind her ears, closes her eyes, and checks in with her heart. With her brother.
She wants this. And she isn’t sure.
“Want to flip a coin?” Rafe asks, leaning against the stairway railing.
She glares at him, ready to argue, but then something strange happens.
Out of nowhere, a golden glow suddenly limns his silhouette.
It’s different from the light that shines from the plane’s interior.
This is like Rafe has a spotlight inside him, shining out.
Making him look suddenly, well, the words that come to mind are fine as hell.
And he’s not even Dez’s type. Too pretty.
It’s hardly the moment to get thirsty, but Dez cannot help staring. She feels warm inside, as if her heart is expanding. It’s there—the light, the feeling—then it fades.
Then it’s gone.
Thank God.
She points at him, accusing. “What the hell just happened? That light.”
“Did I stumble into some flattering lighting?”
“What did you do?” she demands. “Stop doing it.”
“I didn’t do anything. You did. Don’t tell me it’s your first time breaking?”
“What did you say?”
“Breaking.” Rafe sounds the word out like she’s two. “You’ve never even heard of it, have you? Wow, you are a rube. It happens all the time. At least, to those of us with natural talent.”
“Make it make sense, Rafe,” she says, impatient.
“Think of an act break in a movie. You know the final beat between Acts One and Two, when the world turns on its head?”
“I’m aware of the three-act structure.”
“Well, you just broke toward your destiny. And before you deck me, I’m not saying I’m your destiny.
I’m saying that, for some reason, your intuition broke on this moment because it’s going to mark a shift in your life.
A pivot point where you moved inexorably into the next timeline, and the world as you know it will never be the same. ”
“Yeah, that’s not what happened,” she says, but she finds she’s been holding her breath, because in a way, that is what it feels like.
“Movies give us cues with music and lights and camera angles,” Rafe says, “so that the audience never misses the break. But life doesn’t come with special effects, so most people don’t even notice their act breaks. But filmmakers do.”
“I am a filmmaker.”
He gestures toward the plane. “Then get in the jet and prove it.”
Dez swallows. So strange this invitation, this man, the past twenty-four hours.
“If I do accept tonight, I’m going to need to be able to see my brother.”
Rafe nods. “Anytime you want.”
Dez blinks, surprised by the simplicity of his answer. “Really?”
“You’ll be amazed by our resources at Acheron.”
Does he mean the school would fly her back here? This is more than she’d been hoping for. “Thank you.”
“You and your brother must be close.” It’s the first thing Rafe has said that doesn’t sound like he’s daring her to rack him.
She feels a pinch at the back of her throat. “I can’t help loving him. Sometimes I wish I could.”
He nods, showing unprecedented restraint in making a dickhead remark.
Dez looks around the quiet airstrip and shakes her head in disbelief. Is she leaving now, for good? For an actual bigger, better life? It feels impossible. Like she doesn’t deserve it after what she did to Mo.
She wishes he were here so he could tell her what to do and she could ignore him, like old times. The thought sends a stabbing pain through her chest, and then she hears Mo’s voice.
When your chance comes …
Her eyes burn, but she doesn’t cry. If Mo comes out of surgery, if he survives and heals and she tells him this story, and what she said no to in order to sit by his hospital bed, waiting to get arrested? That would make him furious.
“Let’s fly,” she says, walking past Rafe and up the stairs of the obsidian jet.