Page 23 of Run Away With Me

‘Sure. I’ll eat anything.’

‘They’ve got some good deals.’

I let her call the order through using the phone on the nightstand while I started separating out everything from my bags. I organized stuff into piles on the bed: clean clothes, dirty clothes, wash bag, cash.

Three and a half thousand dollars had felt like a lot of money, but between gas, food and motel rooms, we were spending it quicker than I had expected. I grabbed all the bills from the different hidey-holes and started bundling it in ways that made sense, a hundred dollars at a time.

Brooke flopped onto the second bed and covered her eyes with her arm. ‘I’m going to sleep for a thousand years tonight.’

‘That would be one hell of an achievement.’

She snorted with laughter, then fell silent again. After a few minutes, I decided she had fallen asleep. Or a-snooze, at least.

Every now and then it hit me that I had actually escaped. Freedom tasted sweet. But also like something I hadn’t earned … the sour that went with the sweet was guilt. It swirled in my stomach uncomfortably, forcing me to ignore the emotions that wanted to bubble up. I couldn’t start thinking about my mom, or her now dead boyfriend, or how my mom was going to make rent this month without my usual contribution and after everything that had happened. I knew from painful experience that once I opened those floodgates, it was almost impossible to close them again.

‘I don’t want to stay in the room tonight,’ Brooke said, sitting up suddenly. I hadn’t realized she was awake again.

‘Okay. What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t know. Go out. We can go out, you know, Mouse.’

‘I know,’ I said, trying to placate her. ‘You’re tired, though. You shouldn’t push yourself to be sociable in the evenings, too.’

‘Let’s go down to the bar.’

‘They won’t serve us, Brooke.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I know. I don’t want alcohol, I want company.’

I knew what she meant and tried not to be upset that my company wasn’t enough. But Brooke was always with a group of people at school, and she had siblings at home, and I guessed she wasn’t used to spending time just one on one.

‘I’m gonna get changed, then,’ I said. ‘We can go downstairs after we’ve eaten?’

‘Yes,’ she said emphatically.

The pizza guy turned up while I was in the bathroom trying to do something with eyeliner that didn’t make me look like a kid playing in her mom’s makeup bag. It was stupid, but I wanted to wear my new dress, and I felt like the dress deserved eyeliner, or some kind of effort not to look like the most boring person in the room. That was difficult when I was traveling with Brooke. She looked like a supermodel in jeans and sneakers.

I let my hair down and tried to arrange it in effortless waves around my shoulders, like Brooke’s hair, but it hung limply and had big dents in it from where I’d had it tied up all day. I heaved a sigh of frustration and pulled it back up into a messy bun again.

‘Mouse!’

‘I’m coming,’ I called.

‘You look cute,’ she said as I sat down opposite her at the small table.

‘Thanks.’ I tried not to let her see how much her offhand comment affected me. I pushed the fizzy, excited feeling down, down, into the box with all my other emotions, and slammed it shut.

Brooke had ordered a large sausage-and-mushroom pizza with garlic knots and a huge soda and had it all spread out on the table. It smelled incredible.

‘Hungry?’ I asked, and she looked up at me, her mouth already full. I laughed and took a slice for myself, letting the hot pizza soothe my frazzled nerves.

The bar in the motel was next to the lobby. Brooke walked right up to it like she’d done it a hundred times and slid onto one of the tall barstools.

‘Do you want a Coke?’ Brooke asked as I awkwardly climbed onto the stool next to her.

‘Sure.’

There was a baseball game showing on the TV behind the bar, and my eyes flicked to it automatically. At home, there was often baseball on the TV, and I’d gotten used to having no say in whether or not we watched it.

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