How to Disappear (24 page)

So, Nicky, the people you love and adore want to kill you. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

You should have, but you didn’t.

You’d better hit the road and turn into someone who won’t even need that 3.3 to go to college on the Internet because she has to hide for the rest of her life. Fine.

So, Nicky, you can’t go back to looking like yourself or
being yourself, and you can’t get your life back. Ever. Fine.

So, Nicky, this J, who acts like he loves and adores you even though you’re not petite and cute and the purest, funnest girl on the cheerleading squad anymore, well, he’s actually planning to kill you.

Not freaking fine.

I am so tired of rolling.

I am so
punching
.

I liked you, Jack. I really liked you, and I get what happened to you. Plus, it’s slightly a relief that even Boy Scouts with excellent judgment can screw up this royally. I kind of believe you weren’t going to off me because even a total incompetent already would have.

So I mostly forgive you.

But really?

None of this is fine. I’m Nicolette Holland, not Bean, not Cat Davis, Kelly Hill, Kaylie Mills, Cathy, Cath, Catherine—I’m
Nick
.

I’m punching and not rolling.

And as for anyone who’s coming after me?

Watch out.

I keep driving.

I want to talk to her more than I’ve ever wanted to talk to anyone, but she’s got Don’s Glock. It would be stupid to get her riled.

Whatever she does to me, I have it coming.

It’s good the car’s a five-speed, and I have to pay enough attention to shift.

I say, “Nicolette, listen, we should go to the police. You can tell them whatever you want. No one’s going to think you hurt Connie. Just tell them what happened. I don’t know how else to keep you safe.”

“
You
thought I hurt Connie, and you were into me. You
were
into me right?”

“Yes!”

“Fine, so now you’re going to keep me safe. You and your brother’s gun.”

For a second, this gun feels like the hard metal center of the universe. This gun—which I should have left in my mother’s garage, in its box on a shelf behind a bunch of engine parts for Don’s shitmobile—is what defines me and Nicolette and danger and safety.

I want to grab it from her and throw it out the window; unload it, wipe it clean, and drop it through the grate on a storm drain; chuck it into a Dumpster with the chamois it was wrapped in.

I say, “How am I going to do that? I’m the dupe who let Yeager’s guys follow me to El Molino. I mean, your dad’s guys. Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing. I don’t think waving a gun at them is going to get them to stop.”

“Just drive.” Then she says, “Plus, you evaded them. You grabbed me, and we got away. You didn’t totally blow this.”

Without thinking, when we finally get to a town with a couple of gas stations and a traffic light, I pull onto the interstate, driving in the opposite direction of El Molino.

She says, “If you think you’re taking me someplace, don’t.”

“Where are we going, Nicolette?”

“You’re not going to like this,” she says. “But you’re driving me to Cotter’s Mill.”

Jack says, “No.”

“Point the car east. Turn left at Texas.”

“Have you ever been on a road trip?” he says. “That’s not how it works.”

Being made fun of by a guy you have a gun on (it’s actually on the seat, but he has no way to know that) is kind of demoralizing.

“Do it! I want to go home! I want this to end! Do it!”

Jack’s voice drops when he shouts. “Don’t be stupid! Assess your target! If Mendes wants you dead, what do you gain by delivering yourself to his doorstep?”

I tell him what I have to tell him. I don’t care if he likes it. “I’m just going to
talk
to him. Then I’m going to turn him in.”

Jack says, “That’s your whole plan? Turn left at Texas, yell at Mendes, turn him in? That’s not a plan you’ll survive.”

“It is now. Do it!”

Jack pulls off the freeway. I really hope this isn’t a wave-the-gun-to-get-my-way moment.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket—the real one, not the burner. He says, “I need directions to Cotter’s Mill, Ohio.”

The phone says,
“These are directions to Cotter’s Mill, Ohio,”
in its friendly, robotic voice. It’s the only friendly voice in the car.

“Thank you.”

We drive along in more silence, which is better than listening to someone tell me I’m an idiot. Then he says he’s hungry.

I want a burger and a fistful of Tylenol. I don’t know how Nicolette plans for us to drive for thirty-seven hours and forty-three minutes—according to my phone—to get to her house, but at some point she’s going to have to let me eat and sleep.

She says, “Is your headache getting worse?”

“Why?”

“I have to look this up.
Gently
drop your phone into the back.”

“I’m not dropping my phone. Shoot me.”

“Obviously, you’ve become deranged. Look up a doctor. You might have a concussion.”

“You knocked me unconscious. Good call.”

“Pull over. Find an urgent care on your phone. Like, in a shopping mall.”

Bakersfield is crawling with urgent cares. I pick one as far out of town as possible, on the edge of the middle of nowhere. Every portion of my head has its own separate, insistent pain: throbbing here, aching there, my forehead trying to tear itself off my face.

Nicolette is walking along slightly behind me, beyond arms’ reach.

“Don’t look back at me like that. Come at me, and I’ll seriously shoot and make up why.”

“You’d really shoot me in cold blood?”

She doesn’t answer.

It’s probably my head, but I feel as if I’m standing outside of myself, watching the weirdest situation imaginable unfold, knowing I created it but unable to take anything like control over it.

“Don’t even.” The scorn coming from behind me could knock over even someone less concussed. “You thought I cut somebody’s throat. How do you know what I’d do? Maybe being hunted down by a preppy jerk turned me into the very thing you thought I was. Think about that.”

I would think about that, but my head hurts too much.

So great, I gave him a concussion.

He tells the doctor he’s Gerry Rheingold, which he signs so messy, you can’t tell what his name is. He says he was horsing around with some guys over football, and it got out of hand. Go, Niners.

The doctor is old and dried-up and couldn’t care less how it happened. I’d be a better doctor after two weeks of online medical school. I, at least, would know to sweep the rabbit-size dust bunnies out of the waiting room.

I say, “Don’t you have to check his blood pressure and take his temperature and everything?” So he does, but he doesn’t like it.

When he touches Jack, bare-handed, I wonder if he washed.
If he’s an old drunk who came looking for drugs and tied up the real doctor in a broom closet in back.

Bottom line, it’s okay for Jack to sleep. Which is all he wants to do besides eat. I have to wake him up every two hours to make sure he can talk straight and his pupils match. If he gets worse, I have to haul him to another doctor.

Which means I have to put down the gun. Let him have the backseat. Drive the car myself. Trust him a little.

I don’t mind.

It feels like the right penance for doing what I did to him. For once, I feel morally superior. I bashed him when I didn’t have to, and I’m cleaning it up. Because I’m not actually scared of him. I’m more pissed off at him. Which, now that I wrecked his head, I’m calling off and driving.

Even with a concussion and no power, Jack is bossy.

“You’re sure you can drive manual?”

“Guess what? Girls can drive stick. Just last week, ladies got the vote. Get in.”

“The gun can’t be in the car.”

“Says who?”

“Hide it in the trunk,” he says. “And if you play Autobahn and we get stopped, no mouthing off.”

“Just so you know, that’s not how girls get out of tickets. Mouthing off isn’t even close to what I’d do if I got stopped.”

“Never mind. I’ll drive.”

“That’s not what the doctor said.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t a weed dispensary?”

I stick him in back, put my hoodie over him, and hide the gun under his gear in the trunk. Pissed off that I’m doing what he told me to do, but still doing it.

He’s the one with the impulse control and the sensible advice, but I’m the one who’s getting us out of this.

He’s asleep before I pull away from the curb.

We drive past desolate, sad square stucco apartment buildings. Small wooden houses with falling-down porches. Fields of wilted plants I can’t even identify.

If I don’t get back to Cotter’s Mill and take care of this, I could end up being the receptionist at that doc-in-a-box, hiding out for the rest of my life. I could make that doctor coffee on his old, sorry coffee maker and stare at his dirty fingernails every day until he dies.

I could get out of the car and lead a small tiny anonymous life right here.

Not go anywhere.

Not do anything.

If I don’t get my life back, that could be my story.

That or premature death.

But (thank you, stupid inspirational poem) there’s another path in Jack’s stupid woods.

This better work.

I wake up in the parking lot of a motel outside of Primm, Nevada. You can’t miss Primm: motels in the form of molded plastic castles with roller coaster scaffolding all the way around them and factory outlets as far as the eye can see.

Nicolette says, “What do you mean, ‘It’s too close’? Too close to what? Are you hallucinating?”

I open my eyes, and she’s peering at me over the front seat, the car lit up with acid greens and pinks from the motel’s looming sign. It takes me a while to register that the hallucination question isn’t an insult.

“Close to Las Vegas, home sweet home.” The flickering green and pink lights hurt my eyes and make my stomach lurch.

“You come from here?” she says. “Well, that explains a lot.”

“If you knew me, you’d see what a solid citizen I am. I go to high school in a tie.”

She pulls out a brush and starts fixing her hair. “I could check us in and you could pass out for a couple of days. They’ll take cash, right?”

This motel has the neon signs but not the amusement park, and it’s off the highway. “How old is Catherine Davis again?”

“Nineteen.”

“Knock yourself out.” I’m too dazed to be worried enough. Then a horn honks, and I start to worry. This car, for one thing, should have been ditched. And we shouldn’t be here.

Nicolette comes back with a key.

The motel’s sign has an eerie neon screech.

I say, “Open the door and mess up the bed, stick the key somewhere, and we’ve gotta go.”

She shrugs. “If stopping here was
your
idea, we’d be asleep by now. You know we would.”

Jack’s in the backseat, retching.

I’m driving us to Utah on roads that cut through mountains I wouldn’t like the look of even if this was a vacation. Even if all these 5-hour Energy shots and black coffee in cups the size of Big Gulps made me happy and energetic instead of just jumpy.

All I am is jumpy.

Saint George is where Jack’s going to ditch the car and then somehow acquire another one. He isn’t clear on the specifics. Whenever I look at the scenery or weave and check the rearview mirror for company, he tells me to watch the road.

Princess of Paranoia, meet Careful, Careful, Careful Boy.

I say, “See, I knew you were going to keep me safe.” So he
won’t succumb to total misery while throwing up into a paper bag. He says it’s the chili cheese fries we bought in Primm.

I’m the one who drove through the night, pulling over and checking his iPad for car rental places that take cash. There aren’t any. Then I found a nine-year-old Toyota on Craigslist. Made the call from the burner. Drove us there. Got cash out of the trunk. Handed him a wad of it and told him to go buy a car.

Jack salutes. “Anything else?”

We ditch the old car in the desert, clear everything out of it.

I say, “Shouldn’t we be pushing it off a cliff or burning it or something?”

“Should we be adding pyromania to your list of talents?”

I’ve been up all night. My whole body is buzzing like there were locusts in it, flailing like crazy, trying to get out. I have no sense of humor left.

Jack unscrews the license plates and tosses them out the window into some actual tumbleweed.

He says, “We have to get out of here before they find us.”

“I swear to God, no one was following me. Ever. I looped all over the place.”

He sighs his you’re-an-idiot-but-I-know-everything sigh. “Could be those guys who let me have it in El Molino put on a tracker. You wouldn’t see them.”

I want to smack him. I swear to God, the self-control it takes to keep my hands on the wheel and off him could keep the entire Cotter’s Mill Unified dance team virgins until
marriage. We’re in a car in the desert with no one around. I can’t keep hitting him, but I can scream all I want. “You took me in a car with a
tracker
?”

He’s so out of it, he can’t even shout back. “I just thought of it. But let up—even if I’d thought of it before, do you have a better alternative to offer?”

Duh.

“How about, we could have ditched the car in Bakersfield? Taken a bus. Gotten on a train. Gone camping. Rowed a boat to Canada.”

He just looks confused. “Jesus, maybe this was stupid.”

“You need to drive faster! We need to get away from that car! If you’re going to wuss out at sixty-five, get out of the driver’s seat.”

He keeps going speed limit, taking the curves like he was driving a school bus.

“Jack!” I punch him on the arm. Not hard, just to get his attention. He doesn’t need two arms for an automatic anyway. “Pull over. I have to drive.”