Page 63 of Run Away With Me

I grabbed more boxes and paused when one rattled.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, holding up a box I hadn’t seen before. It had a plain white paper insert, no album artwork, and it felt way too light. It must have been buried at the back of the glove box.

‘Oh, that’s … You can put that back,’ Brooke said quickly.

Brooke was a lot of things, but evasive wasn’t one of them.

‘Is it drugs?’ I asked, shocked.

She snorted with laughter. ‘No, it’s not drugs. Fine. Open it, if you like.’

‘I’m not going to touch your stuff if you don’t want me to, Brooke.’

‘It’s a very small car, Jessie,’ she said drily. ‘There’s no point in me hiding stuff from you.’

I watched her for another second, waiting to see if she’d change her mind, then I pulled the top of the case open with a satisfying click. Inside was one shiny bronze bullet. I didn’t touch it.

The game had changed again.

I had been going along with Brooke’s suggestions since we’d left Seattle, because it felt like she had things under control, like she knew what she was doing, and I definitely did not. I wanted to be mad at her for keeping me in the dark – about the gun, then the plan to pickpocket, then Meredith, and now the bullet. And I wanted to be frustrated that she still didn’t trust me. But mostly I was resigned.

‘Just one?’ I asked.

Brooke nodded. ‘It’s … insurance.’

‘I thought the gun was insurance.’

‘It is. Yeah, it is,’ she said, quietly confident, and glanced over at me. ‘I keep the bullet separate and hidden. I’m not going to do anything stupid with it, and there’s no chance of having an accident because I’m not going to even put it in the damn gun.’

A gun on its own wasn’t necessarily dangerous, I knew that, and neither was a bullet. I didn’t like guns all thatmuch. Having one changed how much trouble we could potentially get in. Shouting at Brooke would be easy, if I wanted to. We could yell at each other for a few miles while we sped down the highway, but at the end of the road there would still be a gun and a bullet in a cassette case, and accepting that now was the easy way out. Brooke had fallen silent after her little rant, and I could feel the tension slowly smothering the car.

‘Okay,’ I said with a sigh that blew the tension away.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Did Meredith get this for you too?’

Brooke laughed, a little nervously. ‘All my sketchy shit comes from Meredith. You must have figured that out by now.’

‘You look a lot like her,’ I said, putting the bullet cassette back into the glove box.

‘I know. I look more like her than either Julianne or Hope. People always used to think she was my sister when we were growing up.’

‘I bet.’ I stuck a new cassette into the deck. ‘How are you related?’

‘Her dad and my dad are brothers,’ she said, her voice ticking up so I could hear her over the music. ‘Meredith’s dad is my uncle Tony. He’s the black sheep of the family.’

‘I can’t believe your family is big enough to have black sheep.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah. My dad is a family court judge, and his older brother is a surgeon. A pediatric surgeon. Uncle Tony used to race cars.’

‘No way!’

‘Yeah. He was good at it, too, took a couple NASCAR titles back in the day. My dad always talks shit about him, but Uncle Tony is, like,loaded. He made good investments with what he won from racing, and now he sits around and occasionally buys vintage cars to fix up when he gets bored.’

‘Is that how you got into cars?’ I asked, remembering how Meredith had said her dad had originally bought the Mustang.

Brooke’s expression fell. She gave me a fake smile – I could tell it was fake because I knew her real smiles now – and nodded. ‘Yep.’

---