The Awakening (7 page)

My heart doesn’t settle down. Not when we call Leela and not when we prepare for her arrival. We make quick work of packing up our stuff, put all of our garbage in the two plastic bags from Walgreens, and check the place meticulously for any clues we might leave behind that would tip off the housecleaning staff that Motel California was unknowingly aiding and abetting a highly, deranged and dangerous, escaped mental patient. Luka stuffs the leftover food in our bags and waits by the window, staring out into the darkness.

My palms have turned clammy, my fingers cold. I wring them as I pace back and forth in the small room, hoping the red jasper stone on Luka’s hemp bracelet works. Hoping it will protect us from all the things that go bump in the night. On
this
night in particular, when a whole lot of things could go bump.

Luka shifts the blind. “She’s here.”

Headlights do not cut through the parking lot. When we spoke with Leela on the phone, Luka told her to cut them before pulling in. He takes my hand, his grip steady and sure, and we step out into the chilly nighttime air. Our breath escapes in tiny, white puffs. Everything in me wants to sprint, but Luka sets a calm pace. A non-rushed, unsuspicious, maddening stroll. When we finally get to Leela’s car and climb into the backseat, nobody speaks. I think we’re all shocked that our plan worked. At least so far.

Luka breaks the silence first. “Nobody followed you?”

Leela shakes her head, her knuckles whitening as she grips the steering wheel at ten and two.

“Do you think anybody suspected anything?”

She shakes her head again.

I exhale my pent-up breath, then inhale deeply, hoping to still my nerves. Her car smells like sugar cookies. This is Leela’s favorite smell. For Christmas, I bought her a small box of sugar cookie-scented car air fresheners. One dangles now from her rearview mirror. Our eyes meet in the reflection. There are a million things I want to say, a million apologies I want to make, but they all get stuck in my throat.

“Your hair,” she says.

I touch it self-consciously. I forgot how different I must look.

“It looks amazing!”

My smile is uncontainable. So is Leela’s. The wall between us crumbles. Despite everything—the immense danger we find ourselves in, all the unknowns before us—I am happy. I have my best friend back, even if only for a little while.

Luka pulls me down with him in the seat, to the height of small children. Between the dark and our hunched frames, nobody would suspect two teenagers in the back seat. “Make sure to go the speed limit. Not too fast or too slow.”

Her hands tremble as she shifts the car into drive. Bits of gravel crunch beneath the tires. Every loud pop makes her flinch.

“Why don’t you tell us how it went.” Luka knows Leela better than I’ve given him credit for. If anything will set my jumpy friend at ease, talking is it.

She releases a shaky breath and dives in. “Great. Better than great, actually. I cut up an onion in my car before I went inside the station. You know, to make my eyes all watery. I’ve always been really sensitive with onions.”

A fresh wave of affection swells inside my throat.

“By the time I stepped inside, tears were already streaming down my cheeks, and as soon as I sat down in my uncle’s office, I burst into sobs. I’d say I deserve an Academy Award, but I was so nervous and worked up at that point that it wasn’t really hard to break down. I was legitimately sobbing.”

There is something so safe about hearing Leela’s familiar chatter from the front seat, even if it’s about something as crazy as this.

“I told him that I was afraid to tell the truth when the police first interrogated me, but I might know where you went. That’s when I explained about your grandmother and how you were always talking about her and how scared I was that you were going to try and find her and that something bad would happen to you.”

We were hoping this bit about my grandmother would serve two purposes—give Leela a reason for showing up at the station and throw the police off our scent. The story will be made extra believable if the authorities put two and two together and figure out that Luka and I broke into Shady Wood last week. The nurse we tied up and stuffed in the supply closet had to have reported the incident by now. “Do you think he believed you?”

“I think so. As soon as I said it, he thanked me for telling him the truth and then he left super fast to go report it. That’s when I grabbed the key from the top drawer in his desk. I thought my heart would burst out of my chest. I had no idea how long he would be gone. When he came back, I apologized over and over again for being your friend.” Leela shoots me a sheepish look in the rearview mirror. “And for not reporting the information sooner. I ended up crying all over again. By then, I was feeling a little sorry for him. My uncle’s never been too comfortable with emotion and there was a lot of it coming out of me.”

“Did you get the IDs?” Luka asks.

“I think there are a few that might work.” Leela passes her purse back to us. “As soon as I left his office, I went downstairs to use the restroom. The coast was clear, so I opened up the evidence locker, grabbed all of them I could find, and ditched the key.”

Luka pulls out a Swiss army knife from the front pocket of his bag. It has a miniature flashlight attachment he uses to study each of the IDs, searching for two that might pass as us, while I wonder over the fact that it worked. The plan was not an elaborate one. Or even a particularly smart one. But it was all we had, and somehow, we succeeded.

At least so far.

In the front seat, Leela fills us in on everything we’ve missed at Thornsdale—the police interrogations, the crackdown on the students, the wild rumors that are circulating about Luka’s coinciding disappearance, and whatever she knows about our families. My dad has been suspended from his job and my home is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Pete has not yet returned to school. She keeps peeking at the rearview mirror as she talks, as if unable to acclimate to our new appearances. I listen while studying each face on the IDs.

Fifteen minutes in, I think I’ve reached a decision. I hand the card to Luka.

He peers at the picture. Lily Evans is twenty-one, the youngest in the bunch. There’s no way I can pull off anything older. I mean, I can barely pull off seventeen. Her eyes are slightly lighter than my navy blue. Her chin isn’t as pointy, her nose is a little wider, and her honey-brown hair hangs past the frame of the photograph. This, I think, is a good thing. Perhaps whoever looks at the ID will attribute the difference in facial features to the change in hairstyle. She has the same fair skin and the same big eyes and we also happen to be the same height.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“I think I’ll have to get used to calling you Lily.” Luka hands an ID to me.

Jacob Denton. Age twenty-five. It’s an age that would make me nervous if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes how well he pulled off being a doctor when we broke into Shady Wood last week. There’s something about the way Luka carries himself—with authority, like his father. If any seventeen-year-old boy can pull off a man in his mid-twenties, it’s this one sitting beside me. Plus, his buzz cut adds a maturity to his face that wasn’t there before. He looks older somehow, more serious without the shaggy hair.

I study Jacob’s picture. His face is thicker, his hair longer. Both of which are easily explained away by weight loss and a haircut. The essentials are there—green eyes, dark hair, and olive skin. Jacob’s face, of course, does not measure up to Luka’s, but perhaps people will think he’s simply not photogenic. “Jacob, huh?”

“I prefer Jake.” He flashes me that crooked smile of his and takes back the ID when red and blue lights swirl in the back window. Luka clamps his hand over mine and pulls me all the way down to the floor. Everything in me seizes—my heart, my muscles, my lungs.

“Oh my gosh, what do I do?”

Luka tells Leela to pull over. Trying to out-race them will do nothing but confirm our guilt and get us all arrested. So Leela does. And the squad car races past us. None of us speak. Luka and I do not move. We crouch in the car on the shoulder of the dark highway, our hearts crashing into the silence. When the police car is long out of sight, Luka and I sit back on the seat and Leela pulls onto the road.

We don’t say much after that. We’re all too busy catching our breath. I wish Leela would resume her chattering, but I’m pretty sure the flashing lights gave her a miniature heart attack. My sense of urgency grows. We need as much space between us and Northern California as possible. And yet, with the urgency comes dread. Because what if this car ride is the last time I get to see my friend? What if I never see my family again? I’m used to moving around, but not without them.

By the time Leela pulls into a parking space in the parking lot of Eureka’s Greyhound Bus station, my teeth chatter with nerves.

“Thank you, Leela,” Luka says. He reaches up and gives her shoulder a squeeze, then takes his bag and steps out of the car to give us our privacy, but not before giving me a telling look. We have fifteen minutes to get tickets and catch the bus. We can’t miss it, especially since the next one doesn’t leave until later the next morning. Time is of the essence. Even so, he knows I need to say this goodbye.

Leela shifts around to look at me.

There are so many things I want to say. So many thank you’s I want to give, ones that far exceed what Leela has done for us today. Before her, I didn’t know what it was like to have a friend. She’s the best one I could have ever asked for. With a lump in my throat, I lean forward between the two front seats and wrap my arms around her neck. “I should have told you everything from the beginning.”

She squeezes back. “I understand why you didn’t.”

When we finally let go, her eyes are watery, only there’s no onion in sight. “You’ll be back, okay? Somehow, this will all get worked out and you’ll come back.”

Leela, the eternal optimist.

I want to believe her. So I cling to that hope with everything I’ve got, reach into the front pouch of my backpack, and pull out three letters. One for my mom. One for my dad. One for Pete. “These are for my family. Can you make sure they get them?”

“I will. I promise.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“I won’t get caught. I’ll wait until Pete comes back to school and find a way to slip them to him.”

The thought makes me smile. Perhaps this is the silver lining. Maybe this fiasco will bring my best friend and my kid brother together. Maybe Leela will get to know the real Pete, the one unencumbered by darkness. The one who is not moody or taciturn or dark, but the one who is lighthearted and charming and the life of every party. How much more will she fall in love with that Pete? Somehow, with this possibility in mind, it doesn’t feel so much like I’m losing Leela. It feels a little bit like she’s becoming a part of our family. I wrap my arms around her neck again. “Best friends?”

“Always,” she whispers.

After one final squeeze, I climb out of the car and close the door softly behind me. Luka grabs my hand, threading his fingers with mine, and leads me to the ticket booth. I don’t look back.

Resurrected Pills

I
’m twenty-one-year-old Lily Evans. He is twenty-five-year-old Jacob Denton. And if anybody asks, we’re running away to New York to elope. I’m supposed to text into the phone Luka purchased from Walgreens and do my best impersonation of bored while he purchases our tickets. The key is hiding my face as much as possible without being obvious about it.

He asks for the tickets to New York City. They are twice as expensive, but we don’t care. If anybody discovers we got onto a Greyhound bus, this will lead them to the east coast. But we will be in Detroit, one of the many stops along the way.

“Identification, please.” The ticket lady is a beady-eyed woman who speaks in an impatient, annoyed voice. Like the customers who keep her employed are one giant inconvenience.

My stomach knots into a small, tight fist as I dig through my backpack in search of an ID that is right there. The feigned flightiness is all part of the plan. Luka thinks that looking unprepared will make us appear less suspicious. I pull it out after a couple seconds and hand it over with a breathless apology. I make brief eye contact with the lady, then quickly retreat to my phone, letting my short hair fall in front of my face.

Seconds upon seconds tick by.

I imagine her looking from the IDs—to us—the IDs—to us. The fist in my stomach clenches tighter. What if she’s an avid news watcher? What if she’s been on the lookout for Teresa Ekhart—a deranged and dangerous fugitive. What if, after all this work, we’re caught before we even escape? I’m positive she’s on to us. I’m sure she’s pushing some sort of emergency protocol button beneath the counter and at any second we’ll be surrounded by police wielding guns and shouting for us to put our hands up. And all I can do is stand there, typing fake texts into a cheap phone.

Finally, the woman speaks. “Cash or credit?”

Luka slips some bills from his wallet and slides them over the counter.

She hands him the tickets, the change, and our IDs.

Luka thanks her, then takes my hand and leads me toward the bus we will be boarding, casually swinging my arm back and forth. As if we don’t have a care in the world.

*