Page 54 of Run Away With Me

‘If we follow the signs for Denver Zoo, I should be able to find her neighborhood from there,’ she said.

‘Why do you want to see her? Won’t she, like, immediately call your parents? Or the cops?’

‘Nah,’ Brooke drawled. ‘Meredith isn’t like the rest of them.’

‘The rest of who?’

‘My family.’ Brooke straightened up, combing her fingers through her loose hair.

‘I want to go see her because I think she’ll help us.’

I sat with that for a moment. ‘Do we need help?’

She shrugged. ‘She used to live with a bunch of theater performers, and I know at least some of them are interning at theme parks. Meredith almost signed up for the same program. So they might be able to help us when we get to Orlando.’

It hung between us in the air, then, that thing we weren’t speaking about.

Running away was one thing.

We’d done that.

We knew where we were going, and we had a plan – sort of – for when we got there.

But it wasn’t like we were going to walk right into Disney World and get jobs, not without any experience, and no resumes, no references.

I wanted to shove that unspoken thing out of the room, to go back to planning how to steal from drunk businessmen, because at least that was something tangible. I could see myself pickpocketing much easier than dancing through a theme park wearing a stylized ballgown, even though it would mean dealing with a guilty conscience.

Brooke raised her eyebrow at me, asking a silent question. I was pretty sure if I said no, I didn’t want to go see Meredith, she would let it go. There might be a little argument about it, but she wouldn’t force me to if I felt strongly about it.

And I wanted to go to Disney World, goddamn it. Brooke had put the idea in my head, and it had grown and gathered speed and turned into my daydream now too.

‘Okay,’ I said, kicking my legs up in a move that sent my chair spinning. ‘Maybe she can help.’

‘She’s the one who taught me how to … you know.’

Pickpocket. Right.

‘And the –’ she lowered her voice – ‘you know,gun, is hers.’

‘Why do you even have it?’ I asked, finally voicing the question I’d been burying.

‘She gave it to me.’

There was so much more I needed to know. Why did Meredith think her seventeen-year-old cousin needed a gun? What the hell was Brooke running away from? Was there a possibility that something as bad had happened to her back home … someone just as bad as the Creep?

I really didn’t think Brooke had killed someone. But then, she probably didn’t think I was being chased by the police becausetheythoughtIhad killed someone. Most teenage girls didn’t run away from a murder charge.

As the moment stretched between us, I knew I could break our original promise not to ask each other what we were running from. If her answer had something to do with the gun, though, would that change what we had now? If she knew about the Creep, would it change things for her?

I wasn’t going to ask. Not yet.

‘All right,’ I said eventually. ‘Let’s go find Meredith.’

‘Great,’ Brooke said with a huge sigh, then checked her watch. ‘We need to move. Check-out is at eleven.’

‘Holy shit, I thought you were dead.’

Brooke’s cousin looked a lot like Brooke. They had the same heavy eyebrows and thick dark hair, though Meredith styled hers a lot shorter than Brooke. She had a septum piercing, the silver hoop looping between her nostrils. I found myself staring at it for a moment too long, wondering if it had hurt, and whether the hurt was worth it.

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