Page 35 of Riot Rules
I don’t want to leave, though. To most of the students at Wolf Hall, the academy’s walls feel like they’re closing in on them. The place can feel like a prison, perched on its vantage point at the top of our little mountain. Not for me, though. This place has been my sanctuary for the past three years. My home. I decided a long time ago that I would only leave if my very life depended on it. And it might come to that if Wren doesn’t mind his own business.
16
CARRIE
SIX YEARS EARLIER
“You look half starved. And where, for the love of God, are your clothes, child?”
I sit in the passenger seat of the car, shivering, staring blankly out of the window. I killed that man. I stabbed him in the eye with a syringe full of heroin and he died. And now it’s the middle of the night, and I’ve done something even more stupid. I’ve allowed myself to be scooped off the side of the road, looking like some half dead animal, and there’s a man sitting next to me, staring at me with this strange, curious look on his face that makes me…
I don’t even know what it makes me. All I know is that his expression has remained the same since he sat me down on the seat next to his, and I’m too numb, and cold, and tired to do anything about it. After all that’s happened tonight, my mother leaving me in that house, with those savages breathing down my neck, Jason selling me to his friend for drugs, being so fearful of what was going to happen to me, then the needle, and the panic, and the flight… God, now I’ve ended up here, nearly naked, sitting next to a man dressed in a fancy suit who may well rape and kill me anyway. What a mess.
“What’s your name, girl?” the man asks. He seems solid. His skin, which was a light brown/tawny gold in the headlights of his car, is darker and richer now that the only light is that being cast off from the instruments on the car’s dash. I look in his eyes—Whoa. So, soblue!— for a moment, sneaking a breath, sucking it in between my teeth like he might not catch me doing it. Like it somehow isn’t allowed. “Hannah,” I tell him. “Hannah Rose Ashford.”
“Okay, Hannah. You can call me Alderman. Wanna tell me how you ended up running down the side of the road in the middle of the night?”
I shake my head.
Alderman drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “Okay. I suppose we just met, and that could be considered a personal question. You gonna tell me where you came from, so I can take you home?”
I shake my head.
“Want me to drop you off with the cops?”
I shake my head.Emphatically.
“I think maybe…we should stop and grab you some clothes, Carina. That hoody you’re wearing is soaking wet. And if I get pulled over by the cops right now, my ass will be thrown in jail. They’re going to think I hurt you.”
He's too kind to mention the fact that I’m clearly naked beneath the hoody. He’s right; if a cop were to pull him over and see me, showing all this bare skin, teeth chattering together, just a little kid, then they’d arrest him on the spot. For a second I say nothing. And then I say, “Hannah.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s Hannah. You just called me Carina.”
“Oh. I did. I’m sorry. You remind me of a girl I used to know. Her name was Carina. She had eyes just like yours.”
A thick, patient silence floods the car after. I stare out of the window, listening to the rhythmic wom, wom, wom of the tires as they spin over the blacktop, wondering as the seconds flicker on by how much distance I’ve put between me and that scary man’s dead body. The lights that streak through the black night, flitting through the trees, hypnotize me, quieting my thoughts.
“I was visiting family back there. I know this area pretty well. There’s a twenty-four-hour CVS coming up,” Alderman says. “I’ll run in and grab you something warm and dry to wear. It’ll do for now. We can get you something better in the morning, okay?”
He reallyisn’tgoing to hand me off to the cops? Relief swells over me. I’ve been waiting for him to go against his word…
“I’m driving all the way to the west coast. I won’t be stopping much,” he says. “If you wanna come with me, you can. If you want me to take you somewhere, I will. But I’m going to need to know what happened if you want me to help you further than that, Hannah. Do we have a deal?”
It's as if he can read my mind. I dare a sideways glance at him, and this time he’s not staring out of the windshield at the road. He’s looking at me. Our eyes meet, and he raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to respond.
“Yes, sir,” I say softly. “I understand.”
He nods. “Then I guess we have ourselves a deal.”
17
DASH
I donottalkabout my family.
Not to anyone.
