The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(54)

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, taking it all in. His Golden Apple signature demurely sat to the right of the last letter.

He slung his arm over my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek, utterly pleased with himself, and rightfully so. “It went twice as fast with you helping. Oh, hold on. Photographic evidence. For Jillian.” He stripped off one glove and navigated to the camera on his phone before snapping several photos.

“I wish we could see it when the escalator is on,” I lamented. “Maybe we should come back tomor—”

Static crackled from inside the station.

We both froze.

It was a two-way radio, sputtering instructions. And footsteps. And voices that said, “Blah blah junction box blah blah escalator—”

BART guards patrolling the station? Was it already time for them to open it back up?

“Crap!” Jack snatched the backpack out of my hand, stuffing his head-mounted light and the rest of the supplies inside. He pushed me up the stairwell, and we took the stairs two at a time, racing to the top—

—only to hear the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up to the curb right outside the temporary plywood walls that covered the street exit. And another two-way radio. And male voices talking about disassembly and barking directions to workers about where to barricade the sidewalk.

These were not BART guards. It was the freaking escalator repair company, coming to reopen the subway entrance and conduct final tests on the escalator before the station opened.

We couldn’t go back down, and we couldn’t leave the way we’d come in.

We were trapped.

Jack zipped his backpack and strapped it on. Then he pulled up my hoodie and whispered against my ear, “Get ready to run.”

Was he serious?

Oh, hell—he was!

As voices approached the makeshift plywood door, Jack reared back, lunged, and slammed his shoulder into it. The door flew open, smashing into one of the workers. Shouts of surprise ballooned behind the door as Jack grabbed my hand and jerked me through the open doorway.

“Hey!” someone roared as we bolted along the sidewalk. “We got transients!”

I didn’t even look at their faces. I just booked it as fast as I could go. Chilled air knifed through my lungs. The rubber soles of our shoes slapped against the sidewalk, the sharp sound echoing off the buildings and the cars rushing past.

“Hustle!” Jack shouted.

Stupid short legs. I was slowing Jack down, which made me a lousy getaway girl. At the end of the block, Jack pulled me around a corner and straight into a covered alcove that harbored a café delivery door.

He held up a finger in warning and then stuck his head around the corner. My heart hammered. Images of being chained at the ankles in a female prison flashed in front of my eyes, along with my life.

Jack turned back around and grinned at me with breathless delight. “That was, I believe, what you’d call a close one.”

We’d made it? They weren’t going to chase us down with guns and crime-sniffing dogs? I peered around the corner to see it with my own eyes, and Jack was right. We were in the clear!

I stood on tiptoes, fisted the front of his coat, and pulled him down to kiss him—firmly, wildly, until our teeth clinked and I nearly bit my own lip. I didn’t care. I was high on adrenaline and in love. I felt invincible. Like the entire city belonged to us. Every fog-ringed streetlight, every neon sign, every jagged crack in the sidewalk. All ours.

“Thank you,” I whispered, smiling against his mouth.

“For turning you on to new criminal possibilities?”

“For making me feel alive.”

“Alive is good,” he said, offering me his hand. “But let’s get you back home before they call the cops.”

22

It was a miracle, Mom didn’t catch me sneaking in that night, because she was still up at 4:45 a.m.—which was when Jack left me in front of my house. I stayed up long enough for him to text me Good morning instead of “Good night.” And then I slept like the dead until almost noon, when Mom woke me up for our lunch date.

Thankfully, her gift of condoms was not a topic of conversation. The graffiti on the BART escalator, however, was.

The escalator repair workers had apparently found Jack’s graffiti after we ran off, and told the police that we were the Golden Apple vandals—we being two guys dressed in black, one tall, one short. I’d have been insulted if I wasn’t busy freaking out.

The local radio station debated the incident while Mom drove us to the Mission. One DJ thought it was a “crying shame” that a brand-new escalator had been defaced. Her partner said it was “urban art” and “inspirational.” And squirming in the passenger seat of the paddy wagon, I embodied both viewpoints, in turns horrified and giddy. In the middle of all this, Jack texted to tease me about my new status as “the short male suspect.”

On top of that, Mom asked me a lot of questions that made me sweat. Like about the student art contest. She wanted to know what I was submitting; the deadline was quickly approaching. But a paranoid part of me was convinced she knew about Minnie, too, and was giving me a chance to confess that I’d blatantly disobeyed her in pursuing the cadaver drawing. It made me realize that I really needed to be more careful. She worked only a few buildings away from the Willed Body lab. All it would take was one ill-timed break on her part to see me with my portfolio, strolling into my next drawing session, and my entire summer’s work would be ruined.