Page 124 of Run Away With Me

Lena laughed and opened the car door so I could climb in.

‘Sure. That’s not a request I get very often.’

‘I need to eat a vegetable right now,’ I said.

Eat a vegetable for once, Brooke.

Meredith’s voice came back to me clearly, and a little knot in my chest loosened. Everything was still a mess. Actually, everything was even more of a mess now than when I had left Seattle, much worse, but also so much better. I’d learned over the past couple of weeks that I could trust my instincts. I could make the right decisions. I could take charge, and make things happen. I could fall in love and kiss the girl I liked, and it could maybe, one day, work out.

‘I know a place that does great salads,’ Lena said, and I startled and looked over at her. She’d gotten into the driver’s seat without me noticing. ‘I’ll take you there.’

She pulled out of the parking lot, and I stared out onto the road, wondering what lay ahead.

22

Graceland– Paul Simon

Lena’s house was a beautiful old Tacoma home with a wrap-around porch out front and a huge yard out back where she grew flowers and fruit trees and kept fish in a pond. Inside, she’d painted murals on every single wall, as well as some of the floors, and most of the ceilings. It was like being in a fairy-tale book.

She let me explore in a sort of stunned silence while she sat in her kitchen and drank tea that she’d made in a copper pot. She didn’t seem in a rush to ask me anything, and I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and it suited us both just fine.

When I finally made my way back to the kitchen, she was working on an iPad and looked up at me with a smile.

‘All good?’ she asked, and I nodded and settled on one of the kitchen chairs.

She told me that she used to teach grade school and now taught music, and when I said I played guitar, she pulled one out of a closet under the stairs. She had a pale-greenpiano in the living room with scarred and battered keys, and she said she would get me practicing scales and chords because music was good discipline, and good healing.

My bedroom was on the second floor, and it was the only room in the house not decorated in Lena’s signature style. I liked her murals, but I guessed if she took foster kids in, they might find it overwhelming. One wall of the bedroom was painted light blue and the other three were cream. I had a dresser, a walk-in closet and a queen-size bed, and the bathroom across the hall was just for me. It all felt like luxury, and I was grateful, so grateful, that I’d ended up somewhere that was nice. Not just safe, but nice, too.

Later that afternoon, we went out to a mall to pick up some clothes and essentials, since I didn’t have any of my stuff and I had no idea where it was. Still in Atlanta, probably. I wanted my clothes, and my black dress from Goodwill, and my makeup bag which had grown with items Brooke had bought or stolen for me. And my cropped T-shirt from Target, and my trashy paperbacks, and Brooke. The grief for what had been taken from me swelled in my chest, and I picked up more black dresses and tights and band T-shirts and cutoff jean shorts, determined not to go back to being Mouse. Lena hummed with approval at all my choices and waved away my questions about who would pay for it, mentioning a stipend without offering any details.

That night, I laid awake wondering about Brooke, alternating between fear and anger and deep, aching longing. There was a very real possibility her parents wouldn’t everlet her see me again. Or that the authorities would stop us from seeing each other. Or that she would choose to move to New York to be with her sister and closer to her brother, instead of coming back to her parents. Or, worst of all, that she would come back to Seattle, decide she didn’t want to be with me anymore, and go back to her old life.

I didn’t think that last one was likely, but I couldn’t shift the feeling that we’d created something unique and special when we were alone, just the two of us, in the Mustang, with the whole world laid out for us to explore. Would she even want me now life was getting back to normal? Would she still care about me when she learned that it had all been in my imagination – that the police hadn’t been chasing us, and therefore it was my fault she’d been kidnapped?

I fell asleep when the sun started to peek around the edges of my curtains.

Which meant I woke up late, of course. I figured out how to use the shower and washed my hair with shampoo that smelled wrong, finger-combing out the tangles. I didn’t bother putting makeup on. I had no one to impress and no bruises to cover up.

I stumbled downstairs in one of my new outfits to find Lena at the kitchen table with her iPad again.

‘Good morning,’ Lena said with a warm smile. ‘Do you want tea? Coffee?’

‘Coffee would be great.’

She nodded her chin at the counter. ‘There’s some in the pot. Help yourself.’

Being in someone else’s house – especially living there – was weird. Lena seemed to know this, though, and was trying to make it easier on me.

‘I’ve been reading your notes,’ she said as I moved around the kitchen.

I was surprised by her honesty, and shocked that I had notes for her to look at.

‘Yeah?’

I missed drinking iced coffee with Brooke. Drinking it hot now felt wrong. I leaned back against the counter, cradling the mug to my chest all the same, and Lena twisted around to look at me.

‘You want to see them?’ she offered.

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