Tarnished (13 page)

Now it was time to start taking.

W
e’d been walking for a little over three hours when we finally straggled up to the motel. The sky wasn’t pitch black anymore, but it wasn’t light out either. Morning was just an idea that night was considering, a blush-colored dream.

We stopped at the edge of the parking lot and stared up at the shabby two-story building with its rows of faded orange doors and flaking metal railings.

“You steal thousands of dollars and you choose to stay here?” Penn asked. “There were a bunch of places that were way closer and ten times as nice.”

Missy completely ignored him as she sat down on a low cement railing and began counting out twenties from her stack of bills.

Penn just shook his head.

“I think it’s perfect,” I said. “We would have looked kind of suspicious showing up in the middle of the night at someplace too nice. This…” I looked up at the faded sign. The bit of neon writing below it fizzled on and off and back on again. “This looks like the kind of place where people come to hide.”

“Well, let’s just hope my father doesn’t think the same thing.”

“Here,” Missy said, shoving a stack of bills into Penn’s hand. “Stop complaining and go get us a room. Just be sure not to put it in your real name.”

“I’m not that clueless,” Penn said with a smile. “Don’t worry. These places don’t care about names as long as you’ve got cash, which we definitely have, thanks to
you
.”

He winked at her, stuffed the money in his pocket, and trotted off across the parking lot.

Missy lifted her chin, a satisfied smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “Your boyfriend’s not
completely
terrible.”

If I wasn’t so exhausted, I would have laughed.

T
he room was on the bottom floor, just down from the Dumpster with a view of the parking lot, but none of us cared. We hardly noticed the stained carpet or the dingy comforters after we closed the door behind us and collapsed onto the beds.

Missy didn’t even bother kicking off her shoes. “Don’t wake me up,” she said, pulling the covers up over her. “Ever.”

Penn scooted up onto the pillow and pulled me in close so that my back was pressed against his stomach. His arm curled tight around me and before I even had a chance to pull the blankets up over us, his breath had slowed. His hand stretched out across my stomach twitched softly.

I closed my eyes. “I love you, Penn,” I whispered.

He moaned and buried his face into the back of my neck. “Ella,” he breathed, as if my name alone was enough. And it was.

It didn’t matter that the room was dark and musky and smelled of stale smoke and too much air freshener. This was the only place I wanted to be. Outside, an orange light flickered, hypnotizing me. I closed my eyes, too, letting myself rest as if I’d finally found my way home.

W
hen I woke, sun was streaming through the crack in the blinds, and Penn was propped up on one elbow, smiling at me.

“If I could wake up to this view every morning for the rest of my life, I think I’d die a happy man,” he said, brushing a wisp of hair off my cheek.

I rolled onto my side, facing him. “Good morning.”

“I hope I didn’t creep you out…just staring at you like that.”

“No.” I smiled. “I like it.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m going to be staring at you a lot today. It was dark last night, so I didn’t get the full effect of this new look.” He ran his finger across my forehead, tracing the fringe of my hair. “You look different.”

“A good different?”

He laughed softly. “Yes, a good different. I don’t think there’s anything you could do that I wouldn’t adore.” He stopped talking and studied me, cocking his head just a little to the side. “You kind of look like a badass. I either see bass player in a punk band or assassin as viable career opportunities in your near future.”

“Hmmm…” I tapped my chin, considering. “You don’t see classical piano playing assassin?”

He laughed. “Hey! I don’t want to pigeonhole you.”

I stared up at the ceiling, smiling. For a second it seemed possible to imagine that my future was wide open.

Penn pulled me closer. “I freaked out for a second when I woke up,” he said.

“Why?”

“You know when you first open your eyes and you’re still stuck in whatever dream you were just dreaming and it takes a minute for reality to sink in?”

I nodded.

“I guess I was waiting for that to happen. Like everything that happened last night was just a dream. But it wasn’t.”

He pinched my arm.

“Ouch,” I giggled, pulling it away. “Why are you doing that?”

He pinched me again. “I know I’m supposed to pinch myself to see if I’m awake, but you’re much more fun to pinch.”

I squealed, pinching his arm in retaliation and he rolled onto his back, pulling me on top of him.

“Will you two stop acting happy,” Missy moaned from her bed. “Some of us are still trying to pretend that we exist in a different reality.”

“All right,” Penn said, kissing me gently on the forehead before he scooted out from under me. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. There’s a little gas station next door. I’ll go see if I can rustle up something resembling a breakfast.”

“Good idea,” Missy mumbled. Under the covers she dug into her pocket and pulled out some of the leftover money that Penn hadn’t used on the hotel room, tossing it blindly at him before she pulled the covers back up over her head.

Penn shook his head, gathering the money off the ground before he came to stand next to the bed. He cupped my face in his hand.

“It’s hard to leave,” he said. “Even though I know I’m coming right back.”

I pressed my hands over the top of his and closed my eyes, trying to breathe him in. I knew he’d be back, but by now I also knew not to count on anything. Each moment was its own tiny wonder, but that didn’t mean that it would last.

When the door latched behind him, I rose and pulled back the two layers of blinds, watching as he strode across the parking lot and disappeared around the side of the building.

The parking lot was full of cars. A few rows away, a man and woman leaned against the trunk of a blue sedan. They were too far away to see the expression on their faces, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of them, the relaxed way they stood next to each other. The woman reached out, placing her hand on the back of his neck. It only rested there for a moment, the most fleeting gesture, but from the ease of it, I guessed that she’d touched him that same way a thousand times.

I had no idea what sort of lives normal people lived, but I wanted to know. It was almost impossible to believe that out of all the people in the world, these two had found one another. It seemed impossible, but I wanted to believe it.

Chapter Thirteen

H
alf an hour later, Penn returned with three bags full of food.

He dumped the contents out in the middle of our bed. “I might have gone overboard, but this is what happens when you ask a guy to go shopping when he’s hungry.”

Missy sat up, throwing the blankets off of her as if the packages spread out on the bed were actually plates full of fine meats and steaming loaves of fresh bread, drawing her to them with their irresistible aroma.

Penn sat down on the edge of the bed. “All right, let’s see what we’ve got. I might not have covered the four main food groups, but I think I at least came close.”

I sat at the head of the bed, tucking my legs up underneath me.

“For our grain group we’ve got two kinds of granola bars, goldfish crackers, and a box of cereal,” he said, plucking the items out of the pile and laying them in front of Missy like an offering.

“For our all-important meat group—at least, I think that’s a group—the meat group. It sounds right.” He laughed uncomfortably. “I learned this in like third grade, so I can’t totally be expected to remember. Anyway, for the meat group, we’ve got a jumbo bag of beef jerky—Teriyaki flavored, of course—and a bunch of these beef stick things, although they look a little sketchy, and a can of sardines, which I realize might be gross, but I don’t know what you guys like.”

Missy and I stared at him, transfixed.

He blinked at us and cleared his throat. “So, um…okay. Fruits and vegetables were kind of tricky, but I got a couple bags of trail mix that has dried fruit in it, and some of these yogurts with fruit on the bottom. That’s gotta count for fruit and dairy, I think.”

He finished organizing his haul and leaned back on his palms, looking at all the packages a little sheepishly.

I reached for his hand. “I think you got enough food to last us for a month.”

“Are you kidding?” Penn snorted. “We’ll be lucky if this lasts until dinner.”

Missy rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “I didn’t realize we were going to be feeding an elephant when we brought him along. I should have stolen the gold bars, too.”

“Be thankful that you didn’t,” Penn said. “I bet those things are heavy.”

I grabbed one of the cups of yogurt and an individually wrapped plastic spoon and leaned back against the headboard, peeling back the yogurt’s thin silvery wrapper. I’d never tried one before. I’d had plain yogurt with flaxseeds, but this was different. It was the softest shade of pink and when I dug my spoon in, a dark, purple syrup rose to the surface. I licked the sweetness off of the spoon and closed my eyes. Maybe I was just hungry, or maybe now that Penn was with me again, the world had regained its color, and brightness, and beauty, because it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.

Missy grabbed a box of granola bars and switched on the TV before she plopped back down on the bed.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to be able to do this,” she said, unwrapping one of the bars and shoving half of it in her mouth.

“What? Stay at a crappy motel?” Penn asked.

“I couldn’t care less if it’s a piece of crap,” she said. “I’ve stayed in some of the nicest hotels in Europe and never once was I able to do this.”

“Eat on the bed?”

“No! This!” she said, pointing to herself and then to the rest of the room in wide circling gestures, as if she was trying to scoop the whole scene into her arms. “This! This! This! There’s no one here expecting me to be anything or do anything. I mean look. Look at that,” she said, pointing to the TV.

On the screen, a woman was spinning a huge colored wheel while a man with a microphone stood next to her. The colors on the screen didn’t seem quite right. The people were too orange and the blues all looked muddy.

“
The Price is Right
?” Penn asked.

“No!” Missy shouted. “I mean yes, whatever. It doesn’t matter what the show is. What matters is that I picked it and no one is going to come in here and tell me to turn it off, or switch the channel to the thing they want to watch because their opinion matters and mine doesn’t.”

She scooted to the end of the bed and took another big bite out of her granola bar.

T
he morning passed in a lazy haze of game shows and sitcoms. Missy and I had spent our lives learning how to be idle, but this was different. We knew how to be beautiful doing nothing at all, but we’d never known how to enjoy it. We could be the perfect showpiece while our master did the most mundane tasks. We could sit still for hours with impeccable posture and a content look upon our faces while he talked business with colleagues or plucked his eyebrows. It didn’t really make a difference to us. But that was a different sort of idle.

Now we lounged back across the bed without thinking about the shapes our bodies made. Instead we thought about comfort. Missy lay on her stomach with her arms dangling off the edge of the bed while I lay on my back with my feet propped up on the headboard, my arms crossed behind my head.

“I could get used to this,” I said, reaching out to run my hand through Penn’s hair for the hundredth time.

I couldn’t stop touching him. Sometimes my hand moved on its own accord, like my body wanted reassurance that he was still next to me even though my eyes could see him there.

“I almost feel like a normal person,” Missy said.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Me, too. But I bet normal people don’t even know what it’s like to be normal. They probably just take it for granted.”

Of all the millions of people in this country, how many of them even thought twice about their freedom? Or did they just move through their days thinking of all the things they didn’t have—the jobs, the cars, the big TVs—instead of all the things they’d already been given, just by being born who they were? Maybe they thought of their lives as a prison, too, not knowing how lucky they were just to be able to drive their beat-up cars and shop in grocery stores and wake up next to the people that they loved.

“Maybe we could stay here,” Missy said. “At least for a few more days, while we try to figure out what to do. There was a commercial for a Chinese place nearby that has takeout. Or we can order pizza.”

It sounded perfect. I wouldn’t mind sealing off the door and living inside this little room for ages. Let the outside world keep spinning. Let the sun rise and fall, let the cars rush past on the freeway, let the kids go back and forth to school while husbands and wives fought their million tiny battles. None of it mattered inside this room.

Missy crumpled up the wrapper to her fifth granola bar and tossed it at the garbage can. It bounced off and rolled onto the floor.

Penn sighed, rolling off the bed to pick it up. “You know none of this can last, right?” he asked.

Missy groaned. “Oh, come on, don’t spoil things.”

“I’m sorry to interfere with your ‘vacation,’” he said. “But someone has to be realistic.”

Missy switched off the TV and the room went silent. From somewhere above us we heard the muffled sound of voices and the hollow thud of feet. Pure silence would have been better. Then, maybe we could have kept pretending that we were alone in the world, that our actions didn’t have any consequences.

“Penn, do we have to—”

“I’m not trying to be mean,” he said, “but we can’t keep pretending that we’ve gotten to some happy ending. We might be together for a minute, but none of this is going to last. It’s not.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but I couldn’t find any words. He was right. Missy and I both knew it, even if we didn’t want to admit it. How long could we hide in this motel? A week maybe? At some point people would start to get suspicious. At some point we would have to move on. And then where would we go?

“So let’s make it last,” Missy said.

“How?” Penn asked.

“We get back to Canada. It’ll be safe there for both of you.”

“Yeah. We tried that once already,” Penn said.

“Fine then, not Canada. I don’t care where we go, just so long as we get out of this stupid, messed up country,” Missy said.

“I think Penn’s right,” I said.

Missy folded her arms and raised her eyebrows. “Big surprise there.”

“If we run now, we’ll just have to keep running. Our whole lives. I don’t know if I can live that way,” I said. “I want a real life.”

Missy’s jaw clenched. She turned away from me, pulling back the sheer blinds so that she was staring out into the parking lot, like she was going to find an answer there amid the oil stains and bits of gravel.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“Fight!” Penn said.

“The three of us?” Missy said. “Look at us. What good are we going to do? Two pets and a teenager.”

I dangled my legs over the side of the bed. They didn’t quite touch the ground. I stared down at them. Yes, I was small, but I wouldn’t let that define me. Yes, I was a pet, but that wasn’t who I was, that was someone else’s idea of what they wanted me to be.

“I think you’re underestimating us,” I said.

Missy snorted. “I guess it’s my turn to be the realistic one here.”

“Maybe this isn’t the sort of thing to be realistic about.”

“Come on,” Missy said. “You don’t even have a plan.”

“Not yet.” I shrugged. “We may just be two pets and a teenager, but maybe we can use that to our advantage. I mean, who’s going to expect people like us to make a difference? Nobody, right? But all that means is they aren’t going to expect it. They aren’t going to expect us to fight back.”

“What does that even mean?” Missy said. “You say fight back, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean guns and tanks? Do you mean war? Are you planning on blowing something up? Because it’s not like we can plant a bomb in every NuPet Kennel in the United States. There are hundreds of them.”

Penn studied me. “Maybe it means blowing things up a different way.”

I nodded, grinning. “A figurative explosion. One that blows things up from the
inside
.”

P
enn and I left Missy in her snack food induced stupor and walked outside into the warm sun. We needed time to think and the motel room’s stale air and fluorescent light weren’t doing much to inspire us.

I grabbed Penn’s hand and we meandered across the parking lot. The street was busy with traffic, hundreds of faces passing by. Each one looked like a threat.

I pressed myself close up to Penn’s side. “Maybe it’s not safe out here.”

He paused, and glanced around us. “No one will see us back there,” he said, and pulled me behind the rickety fence that ran between the motel and the gas station parking lot. Behind the buildings, a narrow canal wound through the slender trees.

We sat down on the edge of the bank, removing our shoes, as if out of habit, so that we could dip our toes into the cold water that flowed past. Time and again we seemed drawn to water: the pool, the pond, and now this.

“We need a scandal,” Penn said. “One so big my dad won’t be able to hide from it.”

“But we can’t just make up a scandal,” I said.

Penn shook his head. “We won’t need to. Look at NuPet! He’s their puppet. He worked harder to get their stupid bill passed than just about anything else. I’ve heard the way he talks on the phone with them. He’s wrapped around their little finger. They’re all hiding something, and they’re terrified that someone is going to find out. I just wish I knew what it was.”

One by one, the faces of the murdered girls wavered in and out of my memory, each frozen in one final pose, immortalized on film, and now, inside my head. Those faces. I couldn’t shake them. It didn’t matter whether they were pressed down in the dirt or partially covered with matted hair, charred by fire or waterlogged and swollen, I saw the girls they must have been and they haunted me.

“I think I know what they’re trying to hide,” I said.

I pulled the pictures from my pocket. They were crinkled and bent, but the images were still clear. I smoothed my palm over what was left of the girls and handed them over.

His fingers shook as he stared at the top photograph. “I can’t…” He shook his head, his jaw clenching tightly before he shoved the pictures back into my hand. “I can’t look at these. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Where did you get those?”

“I stole them,” I said. “From an office in one of the black markets.”

“Wait, what?” He jumped to his feet and took a step back. “The black markets are real? And you…you
went
to one?”

“It was the only way,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

His hands clenched. “Did they hurt you? Did they—”

“No.” I shook my head. “Missy did all the jobs. She’s been there before, knew how it worked. It was the only way to get back here.”

Penn closed his eyes and his shoulders slumped. “I didn’t even think those things were real. I mean, I’ve heard people talk, but I always assumed it was a rumor.” He took a few steps down the bank, then spun around, his eyes a little wild around the edges. “This is so messed up, Ella! And now that I’ve seen those pictures, it’s getting really,
really
scary. Shouldn’t we give those to the police?”

I placed the pictures gently on my lap. The images didn’t scare me anymore. They had taken up residence inside of me. These girls were a part of me now.

“The police already know. Someone is paying them to keep it quiet. The people at the market don’t know what’s going on either. Missy said they think it could be the owners, but would they really spend all that money on a pet and then just kill her?”

Penn digested my words and his eyes clouded. I could almost see the thoughts churning in his brain. I wanted him to shake his head and tell me no, of course not. No owner would ever kill their own pet. But we both knew what people were capable of when they were scared of losing whatever they valued most. Their secrets. Their money.

Their power over others.

“Nothing they could do would surprise me,” Penn said quietly. “Ella, we can never let my father find you.
Never
. Do you understand?”