Lost Girls(27)

She nodded.

Then I left her there, bleeding and wounded. I got back in my car, wiped the rain from my face and drove away, Molly wordless beside me, my tires spinning over rain-washed streets, gears whining as I pushed the car faster and faster. I didn’t have a destination this time. All I wanted was to get far, far away, as if that could erase what I had just done.

Even though she had been one of the girls on my secret list, I didn’t want to remember Janie anymore.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know who I was, either.





Chapter Sixteen


Molly didn’t say anything for a long time. A thick tension hung in the car between us and I worried that she was afraid of me now. Now that the adrenaline had faded, I tried to focus on driving, but I kept seeing Janie’s face, that expression in her eyes when she was helpless, and it sickened me. I pulled over, right before the entrance to the 210, got out of the car, and curled over the side of the road, heaving.

There was something awful inside of me and I had to get it out. Every breath made my face tingle, a thousand tiny needles of fear that pricked and stabbed, and all the while, rain soaked my back and neck.

“Are you okay?” Molly asked. She’d gotten out of the car and stood beside me, one hand gently holding my arm. “Do you want me to drive?”

“No.” I shook my head, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, then held my face up to the rain, wishing it could wash everything away. I wished I could go back to last year, to that night I fell asleep, when the only thing I was worried about was my geometry test. I wanted my life to be simple again, but somehow I knew that was never going to happen.

“Come on, give me your keys,” she said, her hand outstretched, using a familiar tone that meant do-it-now-or-else.

I reluctantly gave her the keys, and a few minutes later we were driving away from Pasadena—not very fast because we were now stuck in the 210 rush hour traffic that I’d been trying to avoid. Rain separated us from all the other cars, turning everyone else into blue-gray phantoms. Without meaning to, I kept rubbing my left forearm.

“Did you—” she started to say, then paused. “How did you do that? You fought her like, like, I don’t know, what was that—Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do? One minute she was in her house, then she was standing outside the car with a gun, a mother-frigging gun, and then she was on the ground. Blam. End of story!”

“I don’t know how I did it,” I said, glancing at her from the corner of my eye. Molly seemed proud of what I’d done tonight or maybe intrigued, completely different from how I felt.

“What? That skank had it coming.” She gave me a look. “First, she threatened to beat our heads in with a baseball bat just for knocking on her door and then, and then, shit! Once I got back in the car, I had to grab my inhaler and take a hit before I could even watch what was going on. I was ready to dial 9-1-1 when you came running back to the car.”

There was a long pause when we pulled off the freeway and parked in a nearby shopping center. The lights from Target and Dunkin’ Donuts and Supercuts gleamed through the rain, people hurrying to and from their cars, struggling with umbrellas and shopping carts and cardboard boxes filled with pastries.

“You don’t feel guilty for hitting that girl, do you?” she asked. “I mean, I have no clue how you did it, but what were your options? We could both be in the ER right now if you hadn’t stopped her.”

“I didn’t mean to do any of it,” I confessed, my thumb rubbing against my chin. Molly just stared at me. “I was scared and mad and all I wanted was for her to tell me something—anything—about who I am and why I am the way I am.”

“I think we all want that.”

“Maybe. But we don’t all flatten a girl in the street like she’s a bug.”

Quiet, a blanket of silence, as far as the horizon, a long breath and another and still, quiet. And then, when the quiet got so loud that it began to whisper things that sounded like accusations, Molly spoke.

“But how did you do that? I mean, at first I thought you’d slipped a hallucinogenic in my Frappuccino. Then I thought you’d gone to some secret, elite Ninja warrior school.”

I sighed, rubbing my right palm against my left forearm. “I told you. I’m different now,” I said, not meeting her gaze. She was watching me. I could feel her eyes on me, even in the dark. “Ever since I came back from being kidnapped.”

“I thought that meant you were having nightmares or taking antidepressants or struggling with some new phobia, like ‘fear of black cars because the people who took me drove a black car.’”

A short laugh shuffled out of my chest.

“But what, now you can fight like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

Her jaw dropped open and a frown settled on her brow. “Who taught you how to fight like this?” She shifted in her seat to face me. “It’s just, where and when did you learn how to do all that crap?” She paused and looked around, then leaned in closer. “And can you teach me how to do some of it? There’s a girl in my chem class who’s been stealing stuff out of my satchel and I’d love to give her a knuckle sandwich—except these knuckles are so delicate.” She gave her fist a little kiss for dramatic effect.

“Are you asking me to beat her up?”