Perfected (Entangled Teen) (10 page)

Thirteen

N
o one called after me as I ran. I headed for Penn’s garden, taking the long way past the carriage house. Maybe he’d look up and notice I was gone. If he did, I hoped that he would think to look for me there. It was the only safe place I could think to hide.

I turned onto the Kimballs’ gravel driveway well out of reach of the light from the front porch. The wind rustled softly through the trees and I picked up my pace. Being out on this part of the road at night made the hairs on my neck stand on end. The shadows were so dark inside the trees that almost anything could be hiding there, but I’d take my chances with the shadows before I would go back to Collin.

At the end of the driveway a dark car sat idling in front of Ms. Harper’s lane.

“Hello?” a voice called from inside the car.

I stopped short. In front of me, the car door opened and the light from the dash illuminated Ms. Harper’s surprised face.

“Ella, is that you?” She peered past me toward the Kimballs’ driveway.

I started to turn back to the house before I reconsidered. Ms. Harper was peculiar, but she didn’t frighten me the way that Collin did.

“It’s so nice to see you again, dear,” she said, climbing out and slamming the door behind her. “I’ve been wanting to apologize about the last time I saw you. I can be kind of abrupt. It’s not my best quality.”

She smiled apologetically. Out here in the dark, she seemed so much older and smaller than I remembered.

“Thank you. It’s nice to see you as well,” I squeaked, trying to compose my voice. Ms. Harper certainly wasn’t someone I’d choose to talk to on a normal occasion, but at the moment her presence almost calmed me.

“Taking a break from the party?” she asked. “I don’t blame you one bit. All that merriment can be a bit overwhelming, can’t it?”

I nodded.

“I’m more of a homebody myself, but then again, I’m an old lady.” She paused. “Speaking of being an old lady, can I ask a favor of you, dear? My nephew was supposed to help me unload something from my car, but he’s hasn’t arrived yet, and I just can’t do it by myself. Would you mind climbing in the backseat and grabbing it for me?”

I glanced down at my dress. I wasn’t used to people asking this sort of favor of me, but it seemed rude to refuse.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, opening the back door. “It’s back there on the floor, below the passenger seat.”

The backseat of the car was dark. I slid across the cold leather, reaching out blindly with my hands along the floor.

“I don’t feel anything,” I called. “What is—”

The door slammed behind me and I sat up, fumbling for the doorknob.

“Ms. Harper, it’s locked.” My voice came out shrill and small. A moment later she slid into the front seat and slammed the door.

“It’s locked,” I said again, louder this time.

The car roared to life and we started to roll forward out of the driveway. My stomach sank. Something bad was happening.

“Wait!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

She pressed on the gas and the car peeled out onto the dark road. “For God’s sake. Don’t scream,” she said, glancing back at me in the rearview mirror. “I don’t react well to distractions while I’m driving.
Please,
don’t do that again.”

My hand fumbled once more for the door. “Where are you going? I can’t just leave.”

“Of course you can leave. They’re all so busy with their rich friends and their champagne, they won’t notice for hours. We’ll be long gone.”

Long gone? Surely someone would notice that I was missing before then. But who? The congressman had already showed me off to his friends, and his wife certainly wasn’t going to seek me out. That only left Penn, and he would probably just think I was hiding from his father somewhere.

“Please,” I begged. “I don’t want to go.”

“I’m sorry, but this is for your own good. You might not understand now, but you will. I promise.”

The car careened around a bend, sending me sliding against the far door.

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “Do you know how long I’ve been protesting this law? It’s been almost twenty years. And now…to have the chance to finally
do
something about it instead of just holding a picket sign…”

She adjusted her mirror and tightened her grip on the wheel.

“I’ve opposed this thing since they started letting those breeders in Nevada mess around with genetic engineering. And that was when they were claiming that they were only going to use it to make companions for the elderly and people with disabilities, but I saw this whole thing coming. Every last sick bit of it.” She hit her hands against the steering wheel with each word.

“You can’t just steal me,” I said. But my voice was not nearly as forceful as I wanted it to be.

She fumbled with the radio until she found the station she was looking for. A bit of light jazz filled the car. The sound confused me, so different from the discordant babbling in my mind. “I’m not stealing you, my dear. I’m
freeing
you. Our country decided decades ago that it’s immoral for one human to own another, but apparently some people have chosen to forget it.”

Immoral? Wasn’t it immoral to steal someone’s property? Wasn’t it immoral to take a person away from the life they’d been raised to lead? I turned around in my seat, climbing up on my knees as the entrance to the Kimballs’ driveway faded away behind me, leaving only a dark tunnel of trees.

My fingers fumbled for the door handle, but I didn’t pull it. What good would it do? I already knew it was locked.

I propped my head against the glass, wiping at the tears that slid down my cheeks. They blurred the shadows of the trees and fields whipping past in the dark, and my mind moved to other shadows, an image of another girl, another pet. “Did you try to steal her, too?”

“What?”

My heart pounded. “The other pet? Did you try to steal her, too?”

The car slowed just a bit and she turned to look at me for just a moment. “They told you about her?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t really the truth, either. Yes, I knew she existed, or that she
had
existed, but that was almost all. What else did I know? That she was good at coloring pictures. That she’d gotten sick.

“I was under the impression that she’d been swept under the table. Out of sight, out of mind,” Ms. Harper said.

I was silent. What was that supposed to mean? Swept under the table?

“Clearly they realized that keeping her while she was in that condition was a mistake,” she went on. “But I would have taken her. I would have made sure she had a real life afterward. Instead of…” Her voice trailed off.

Instead of what? Instead of what they’d done to her at the kennel? A tight ache crept up through my chest and I clamped my hands over of my heart, trying to push away the pain.

“So, to answer your question, no, I didn’t try to take her.” Her voice changed. It sounded softer, sad even. “I didn’t, but I should have.”

The tires hummed against the pavement, moving me farther and farther away from the Kimballs’ house. Every once in a while a light would cut through the trees, reminding me that there were homes back there, with people asleep in their beds. But after a while the combination of the hum of the tires against the pavement and the drone of Ms. Harper’s music made my eyes close and I drifted off into sleep.

W
hen I woke, my eyes were tight and swollen from crying. Even the soft light of dawn was too bright, and I blinked, trying to stop the pounding that thrummed against my temples. I rubbed my eyes and stared out at the sunrise peeking from behind the edges of the buildings that sat on the horizon.

We were driving along a huge road. On either side of us the city rose up, a giant sea of cement and windows. I didn’t recognize anything. My shoulders ached from the awkward position I’d been in, pressed against the door with my hands curled up near my cheek. I moaned and rubbed at the sore muscles that ran down my back.

Ms. Harper must have seen me moving. “We’re almost there. Twenty minutes, tops.”

In the rearview mirror, the dark circles stood out underneath her eyes. Her normally wild hair stuck out in an even more radical mass.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“A safe house,” Ms. Harper replied. “They’ll be able to help you. There are whole organizations of people who have found ways to smuggle pets out of the country. It’s an underground movement, but it’s been picking up steam for a while.”

“Underground?”

“Not literally under the ground,” she said. “It means secret. These people are putting their lives at risk. It’s illegal to free a pet, you know.”

She sounded proud, but it didn’t make any sense. Why would someone put themselves at risk just so that they could free a pet who didn’t want saving?

“I guess I could try calling them again to let them know we’re almost there. I didn’t get a hold of them last night and I called about fifteen times. What sort of person doesn’t have voicemail?” She sighed.

The thumping of my heart picked up pace as Ms. Harper exited the main road and pulled on to a side street. She stopped the car in front of a long strip of run-down buildings and rooted around in her purse.

“I printed off the instructions.” She came up with a crumpled piece of paper and slouched over the steering wheel, running her finger down the words and muttering to herself. “You’d think they’d make it easier to find,” she said, pulling back out into the street.

For an hour we snaked through the neighborhoods. I stared out the window at the people who were starting to emerge from the buildings. You could tell from looking at them that they didn’t have much. Their clothes were ill fitting and dingy. Even our cotton dresses from the kennel had a sort of simple, clean elegance compared to what they wore. They must have been the kind of working-class people that Miss Gellner had told us about. They weren’t like the rich. These people worked hard all day just to make enough money to live in one of these shabby old buildings.

I waited for the buildings to change, to turn back into the elegant estates that we’d left behind, but they didn’t. What would I do if Ms. Harper was taking me here, to one of these buildings? I didn’t fit in here. I was bred for refinement, not this.

Finally we pulled up in front of a three-story, red brick building surrounded by cracked cement and old cars. The small metal balconies that lined the front of the building were full of old plastic chairs and dead plants. Ms. Harper gazed up at the building and then back down at her paper.

“This is it?” She shook her head. “It might not be very nice on the outside, but that’s probably just a cover. I’m sure they don’t want people to suspect they’re helping runaway pets.”

She stepped out of the car and motioned for me to follow. Outside, the air was heavy and humid. Without the relief of trees and grass it was sweltering even this early in the morning. As we walked up a short set of stairs to the door at the front of the building, I tried not to stare at the old man sleeping in the alleyway between the buildings. His face was covered in a dirty beard, crusted with something brownish around his lips. A few sheets of newspaper covered him like a blanket, but his legs stuck out the bottom and his bare feet were black with grime.

Ms. Harper pressed a button beside the door and a bell buzzed. A moment later the little intercom beside the door crackled. “Who is it?”

Ms. Harper glanced over at me and shrugged. “Yes, hello,” she said. “My name is Rhonda Harper. I’m a member of the N.R.P.A. I have a rescued pet and a source told me that this is a safe house.”

The speaker crackled again. “Who told you that?”

Ms. Harper cleared her throat. “Beth Reynolds. She was speaking at a meeting in Connecticut and mentioned your name.”

There was a muffled curse. “Connecticut?”

A moment later the door buzzed open and an overweight woman in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt stared out at us. “That her?” she said, pointing at me.

“Yes, this is Ella.” Ms. Harper pushed me forward.

“Why’d you come all the way from Connecticut?” the woman asked. “We only take pets moving north toward Canada. What are you doing bringing her farther south? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I believe there’s been a mistake,” I said, stepping forward. Ms. Harper wouldn’t listen to me, but maybe this woman would. “I didn’t ask to come. So if you’ll just—”

“This was the contact I was given,” Ms. Harper interrupted, flapping her arms, flustered. “I’ve driven all night long and my nerves are shot. I’m sorry if I didn’t do things to your liking, but I was a bit more concerned with this girl’s freedom than with which direction I was headed.”

She started to back down the steps, leaving me standing alone on the landing in front of the strange woman.

“Please, I—” I started again, but neither of them even glanced at me.

“Well we can’t take her,” the woman said. “You can’t just show up here without an appointment and expect me to take her.”

“I tried calling last night.” Ms. Harper’s voice was a high squeak, almost breathless with annoyance.

“Did you talk to anyone?”

Ms. Harper huffed back up the stairs, her knotted finger pointed angrily in the woman’s direction. “I can’t believe this. We’re fighting for the same thing here. You can’t possibly be telling me that you’re unwilling to help, simply because I didn’t make an appointment. This isn’t the DMV. This is a girl’s freedom we’re talking about.”

“Listen lady—”

“No, you listen,” Ms. Harper said. “We can’t keep letting these corrupt bastards rule our lives. Besides.” She sighed. “I can’t take her back now. They’ll know I stole her. And believe me, these people will press charges.”

The woman put her hands on her hips, clearly unsympathetic. “That’s hardly my problem.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I can’t afford to take her back,” Ms. Harper said and tromped back down the stairs. She opened the door to her car and slammed it behind her.

“Please, Ms. Harper, don’t go,” I called after her. “I’m sure if we just tell the congressman that this was all a mistake, he’ll…”