Page 65 of Run Away With Me

‘No, hardly ever. Julianne learned how to pick locks after reading Nancy Drew books, though. We all thought we were these super-badass middle-school girls.’

‘I would’ve been absolutely terrified of you. And the rest of your girl gang.’

‘Ha! Honestly, we thought we were so cool. But I never did much, apart from practicing with the rest of them. There’s plenty of places you can learn about it, if you want to. YouTube videos. That kind of thing,’ she said.

‘And now Meredith deals weed and gives her seventeen-year-old cousin a gun and burner phones and cash andfake IDs.’ I didn’t want to sound judgmental, but it still came out that way.

‘She wouldn’t think of it like that,’ Brooke said, shaking her head.

‘Like what?’

‘Like she’s doing anything illegal. Anyway, weed is legal in Colorado. But she’s looking out for me. Making sure I can protect myself.’

‘Do you think she’ll tell anyone she’s seen you?’ I asked. I hadn’t forgotten Meredith’s expression as we drove out of Denver.

‘Maybe.’ Brooke tipped her head to the side. ‘Probably not for a few more days, though. I expect she’ll call Julianne, tell her I stopped by, and say I’m heading toward New York. If Jules calls Mom and Dad, then …’

‘Would she do that?’ I demanded, suddenly worried.

Brooke shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She probably will, depending on how long I’m missing for.’

‘And what will Julianne do?’

‘Whatever she’s told,’ Brooke said softly, and even though her words weren’t hard or harsh, I stopped digging. There was clearly a bruise there and I didn’t want to poke it.

‘So, where exactly did you grow up?’ Brooke asked, neatly changing the subject, and I was happy to go along with it.

‘All over the place.’

‘Like, in Seattle, though?’

‘No.’ Now the cassettes were in an order I was happy with, I toed off my sneakers and put my feet up on thedash, tipping my face up to the sun. ‘All over the place between Washington, Idaho and Oregon. I was born in Portland, and my mom stayed there for a few years when I was little, but we started moving around a lot after my dad left. We never stayed anywhere more than a year or two.’

‘Oh, how come?’

This was another thing I felt like I needed to sanitize for Brooke’s sake. Our families were obviously different – we’d established that ages ago – but I’d still been careful to only tell her things I didn’t mind her knowing. These conversations were nice, though. I wanted her to know stuff about me … as long as it was the good parts.

‘My mom worked a lot.’ I paused, not really knowing where to go next, and Brooke stayed quiet. She seemed to recognize that I needed space to figure out what I wanted to say. ‘We lived in a lot of shitty apartments, the type where the landlord doesn’t care if the carpet is stained or the hot water doesn’t work. When my mom decided she was done with one place, we’d pack everything into the car and skip town.’

‘So she didn’t have to pay the last month’s rent?’

The last couple months’ rent, if I was honest, but Brooke didn’t need to know that.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We moved to Seattle when I was thirteen because I’d begged my mom to let us stay in one place for high school.’

‘And you ended up at St. Catherine’s? That’s some bad luck.’

I laughed, and the tension leaked out of my shoulders. ‘It could’ve been worse.’

I’d ended up at the same school as Brooke Summer. I couldn’t be mad about that.

Living in gross apartments all over three different states meant I knew families whose situations were far worse than mine and my mom’s, so I never really thought we were poor. Not when I was a kid, anyway. It was only when we moved to Seattle, and I saw how some of the other kids from school lived, that it really hit me.

I never spoke to any of those kids about how I’d grown up. If anyone asked, I’d mumble something about moving around a lot, and they’d assume I was a military brat, and I was fine with that. I could keep a lid on that conversation by being awkward, and Brooke was happy to let me do it again now.

When it got dark, we stopped for the night in the middle of nowhere. There was a time of night, I’d learned, when noise peaked in motels. TVs weren’t on full blast but, even so, I could hear what our neighbors on either side were watching. NBC to the left.Jeopardy!to the right. The water clunked in the pipes while someone in the room above us took a shower, and the low hum of traffic in the distance was familiar, almost comforting.

The next morning, we got on the road early to head for Kansas City. The sun blazed as it rose, the haze of early morning quickly burning away to reveal a deep-blue sky and a heat in the air I knew wouldn’t fade until much laterin the day. By early afternoon, we passed the sign welcoming us to Missouri, and in the passenger seat of the Mustang, it felt like we were flying.

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