How to Disappear(21)

Dunked my head into the sink. Ran a weak stream of water over it.

“You taking a bath in there?”

I wrung out my hair. Wiped out the sink. Put on jeans and gym shoes.

Walked out the back door into the pitch-black alley.

Tossed my wadded-up dress and fake-leather sandals in a trash can.

Walked away.

You get spotted. You evaporate like dew on a leaf. The sun rises, the leaf dries off, and even if someone can tell you were there, you’re gone.

Ask me who I hitched a ride to San Antonio with. How I found the bus station there. How I bought a ticket on the next bus out. How I managed to calculate the exact number of calories in the junk food I kept shoving down my throat.

I don’t know.

The new plan was to alter the shape of my body—put on weight, and quick—before I hit Tallahassee. Because obviously, cheap disguises didn’t do the trick. It crossed my mind that with all the greasy frosted doughnut residue, the cream filling and oozing cheeseburger fat clogging my arteries, I’d probably keel over dead before anyone got me in his crosshairs anyway.

So I’m sitting in this bus heading east, eating a chalupa. Wide-awake. Jolted into a perfect state of clarity.

Then it gets worse.

Then it’s not that if I keep messing up, they’ll find me.

I’m found.

Then comes my first and only text. Luna says: Your biker’s back with some muscle. Two guys with shoulder holsters. Looking for you. They have pictures. I said I never heard of you. Get outta Dodge. I’ll box your stuff. Xo.

I’m tagged online for two damn days, and guys with holsters are swilling iced tea in the lobby of the Bluebonnet.

How many screw-ups between Galkey and here? I picture two guys in an Escalade following the bus, biding their time, listening to the radio.

Someone opens the latch on the bathroom door in the back, and I stop breathing until the bus stops at a multiplex of gas stations and fast food and showers you pay for.

The driver is standing outside, smoking, shooting the breeze with a guy in a T-shirt. No holster. A lady with a half-asleep kid wants off the bus to buy some food.

I slide down the aisle. My pulse and breath and heartbeat are so loud. Out the door and fast over to the on-ramp to a highway going north.

Catch a ride on a truck carrying groceries to Topeka.

Get off. Get on. Change direction. Repeat.

Sleep for a couple of hours in the bushes behind a McDonald’s near Memphis.

Wake up.

Stick out my thumb.

Go west.





21


Jack


Two and a half more days on the road, and I slink back across the state border into Nevada, hoping no unhappy coincidence puts Enright or my mother next to me at a red light. I’ve driven thirty-eight hundred miles without coming six inches closer to finding this girl beyond a phone number I have no strategy for calling.

“What are you doing here?”

I’m in Calvin’s room via the ground-floor window next to his closet. I’ve gotten in this way since we were kids. But that’s not his usual response.

I say, “Hello. How’s it going? Fine. How about you? Also fine.”

“Not fine. Monica can’t go to prom with a senior unless she’s in a group.”

“Sorry. Go with Dan Barrons and Scarlett. Scarlett always liked you.”

Calvin pantomimes heaving. His geekier friends think prom is crap. I was his group, and I’m supposedly rock-climbing in Yosemite.

“I was hoping for technological assistance.”

“Tell me what’s going on first.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

He groans. This question comes from Boy Scouts, when I rowed us into rapids he wasn’t expecting. I wasn’t expecting them either, but I was slow to admit it. When you know someone long enough, all your history turns into jokes.

I say, “I just need to know. If you call up a burner, is there a way to trace the location of the person who picks up?”

“If you’re the NSA. Not if you’re you.” He rubs his palms together. “That was easy.”

This gives rise to Plan B.

Calvin runs his hand through his hair. “Six years of El Pueblo, and all you want is to get As, beat Barrons at everything, and leave for Mercer in a blaze of glory. Now you’re gone before graduation. You like cars, but you’re driving Don’s thing. Your mother’s a prosecutor, but you want me to show you how to put illegal spyware in a girl’s computer? And of course this has nothing to do with the mysterious errand for Don. One more time, why do you want this?”

“Maybe I’m stalking a girl.”

Calvin gapes. “Sorry, man. You have to give me more than that.”

“Maybe I’m obsessed with her. Maybe I want to read every e-mail she gets and every word she writes back.”

“Doable but illegal.”

“Like tapping into Courtney Gan’s computer?” Courtney is Monica’s older sister, who has bigger everything but no appreciation of smart guys. Calvin wanted her first, explaining the four days of cyber-intrusion. It took him two years to figure out that Monica was the self-proclaimed nerd of his dreams. “Show me how you did that.”

“That was ninth grade,” Calvin says. “Gerhard found out. I’ve reformed.” Gerhard has a long history of busting us.