“As soon as we’re able,” I answered, dancing around the promise.
“Fine,” Jilly reluctantly agreed. To Dylan, she asked, “Where’s this place?”
“It’s an underground for runaways. You have to know someone to get in. Lucky for us, I know the right people but let me do the talking.”
We accepted the plan, loose as it was because we didn’t have a choice.
We were an unlikely trio, bound by trauma and grief, none of us too happy about it. We knew the rules of the street — there was safety in numbers — and we needed all the protection we could gather if we were going to dodge Madame Moirai’s grasping fingers.
The shadowy woman had a long fucking reach.
For all we knew she had cops on the payroll, too.
I agreed with Dylan…we couldn’t really trust cops.
We could only trust each other.
And even that was sketchy.
Fuck, we were probably screwed.
20
“I have to stop,” Jilly declared with a pained expression. “I just need a minute, please. I have to sit down for a second or I’m going to collapse.”
Both Dylan and I stopped, neither of us wanting to slow down but we could see that Jilly was at her breaking point and we didn’t want to end up carrying her. “Fine, we can take a short break,” I said, gesturing for everyone to hide in the tree line, away from the road. I wasn’t taking any chances even though we hadn’t seen another car pass by in almost two hours.
Dylan eased herself to the ground, grimacing as she settled. Of all of us, Dylan was the most visibly hurt. The bruising stood out in garish, mottled patches across her body, up her arms and her face. Yet, she trudged on like a soldier, as single-mindedly focused as me and I had to respect her strength.
I mean, the girl had an iron will that rivaled my own and that was saying something. It’s probably why we butted heads so much, too.
Jilly shivered and we crowded around her for warmth. Hugging her knees to her chest, she sat shaking between us for a good two minutes before the quivering in her body slowly stopped.
An owl hooted in the distance, echoing into the stillness. “The forest is creepy at night,” Dylan said, glancing around, peering into the darkness. “The quiet gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“I don’t mind it,” Jilly said. “Reminds me a foster home when I was younger. They were the nicest couple I’d ever met. Different from the rest. They lived out in the country. The crickets helped me sleep at night.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“They died in a car accident,” Jilly answered dully. “Just when I thought I’d maybe found a place to call home with nice people, they went and died. All of their fosters were thrown back into the system and that was the last nice place I ever had.”
Dylan nodded, Jilly’s story seeming to resonate but she didn’t share.
“Sometimes I used to wish child services would show up and remove me from my mother’s custody but it never happened. We moved around too much for them to catch us,” I said. “Carla had a knack for knowing when they were starting to close in, asking questions. Then, suddenly, we were moving again.”
“I don’t know what’s worse, a shitty foster parent or a shitty parent. They both suck,” Dylan said. “My dad was a mean drunk but he wasn’t much better sober. I didn’t wait for child services to rescue me. I bailed on my own. Been on my own since I was fifteen.”
We fell silent, digesting each other’s stories. My eyes burned. The adrenaline rush that’d fueled our mad dash to the road had long since evaporated, leaving me drained. I winced at the crusted blood on my big toe where the toenail was ripped off and knew I needed to clean it or it was going to get infected. Tough titty, I guess. Nowhere to clean up around here. I struggled to my feet, stiff from the cold ground. “We should get moving,” I said.
Jilly didn’t look happy but climbed to her feet. She cast a concerned look toward Dylan. “Are you okay to keep going?”
“Don’t worry about me, worry about yourself. I’m fine,” Dylan said, the only indication of her pain in the subtle wince as she rose. “If we keep walking, we should hit the city limits by dawn.”
I agreed. I ignored the agony in my feet and started the pace.
We didn’t want to talk but the silence was too much to bear. Silence only encouraged the crying in our skulls, the rage in our hearts and the murder in our veins. I needed a distraction, anything to keep from remembering Tana lying on that slab.
“What were you going to do with the money?” I asked.
Jilly answered wistfully, “I was going to get a plane ticket somewhere warm and tropical, find a tiny apartment and just live by the beach. Everyone always seems happy at the beach. How about you?”
“I was going to go to college with my best friend, Lora.”
“College? College isn’t for people like us,” Dylan scoffed. “That’s just a waste of good money.”
I liked to learn. School had always been my escape, my way of getting away from Carla and her endless tyranny. I had better grades than Lora but I didn’t have the money to pay my way. I also couldn’t apply for financial aid because we technically didn’t have a physical address. We weren’t on the lease at the shitty apartment where we lived. My mom had hooked up with some guy and talked him into letting her sublet the apartment. Lora had been on me to apply for the FAFSA but I knew it was a dead end so I was stalling. I figured I wouldn’t need financial aid once I got paid from Madame Moirai.
What a colossal nightmare.
I turned to Dylan, throwing the question back at her. “Okay, what were you going to do?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe go to a restaurant and order the most expensive thing on the menu without worrying about how I was going to pay. I didn’t have big plans. I just wanted to feel what it’s like for everyone else for once.”
It was hard not to get where she was coming from. When you’ve lived in extreme poverty, things that most people take for granted seem so much bigger to you. Necessities like toilet paper, tampons, food, shoes…they seem like luxuries when you’re not even sure if you’re going to have running water or electricity from one day to the next.
“I planned a trip to the mall,” I admitted. “I wanted to walk into a store and buy something new without looking at the price tag. I wanted to buy something for my best friend, too. I thought it would be nice to be the one being generous to someone else for once. I’m tired of being the charity case.”
Both girls nodded. Even if our stories were different, they were the same.
“Where are you from?” I asked, looking from Dylan to Jilly.
“Brooklyn,” Dylan answered.
Jilly said, “All over but mostly Queens.”
I nodded, adding my own, “The Bronx.”
Jilly asked, “Did Tana say where she was from?” I shook my head. Jilly’s expression dimmed. “Who’s going to tell her grandmother?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Her grandmother was losing her marbles, she ain’t even going to notice,” Dylan said, her tone sharp. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”
I glared at Dylan. “It does matter. Everything fucking matters, you hear me?”
I wouldn’t let Dylan be part of the collective system that told the world we didn’t matter. If no one else cared about us, we had to.
“Whatever,” Dylan muttered. “Pick up the fucking pace, would you? I don’t want to freeze out here because you two are dragging your feet.”