How to Disappear(24)

Every cell in my body is screaming, Get out! Get out! Get out!

Or do they want me to run? Hope I’ll be spooked and charge into the open, too scared to think or fight? A moving car’s door opens, there’s a hand, I’m taken.

The ice pick is in my hand like a sixth finger. I keep it under the pillow.

The phone pings again: I know.

Cold hands, cold feet, my right knee bouncing a staccato rhythm on the bed. I’m trying to think, but I can’t—not over the sound of silent screaming.

Get out!

Get out!

Get out!

This phone felt like a lifeline. Turns out, it was the human version of the locator chip we put in Gertie when she was a puppy.

Luna has my number. What did they have to do to get her to fork it over? And I gave it to Clark, too, to pass on to his UT fake ID friend.

Damn.

What if Law & Order was wrong? What if this phone has been pinging my location every three inches?

This phone dies now.

There are footsteps in the outside hallway. The upstairs neighbors shouting at each other. Music coming through the walls.

I hold the phone that knows where I am, waiting for it to tell me something else. I grab my pack and slip out to the walkway that rims the building. Black sweats, faded hoodie, shoulders folded inward from fear. A shapeless gray ghost.

At the corner of the building, a party is overflowing. I stay low, under the railing, slide in the other direction toward the trash room. Open the heavy metal door. Stomp my phone under my heel and toss it down the chute.

How easy would it be to light the paper in the stainless-steel recycling bin on fire? Just enough smoke to trip the alarm and empty the building?

For one second, I see myself waving the lighter over my head at night at the arena in Columbus, swaying to the music with Connor. Feel the flames of the homecoming bonfire throwing heat onto my face, see myself tossing a branch into the conflagration, watching it ignite.

Orange plumes shoot up from the recycling can, and I’m back in reality. The reality in which I just started a fire. Which is bad, for the obvious reasons.

How can I still be this impulsive, how?

But it’s a sealed cement room with a fire door. A spritz of an extinguisher, and this will be over.

I smash the glass on the fire alarm with the handle of the ice pick to speed things up. The alarm blasts fast and loud.

I close the fire door behind me as licks curl upward toward the smoke detector. The party crowd heads down the open stairways toward the courtyard as sirens wail. I am indistinguishable from all the other girls who live behind identical apartment doors.

I glom on to a beer-scented guy. Shaved head and heavy-lidded eyes.

I can so do this. Walk away from the fire trucks and the fire fused to the side of an anonymous drunk guy.

He pats my back, all sloppy and uncoordinated. And I wouldn’t mind being held—not groped, held—even by a comatose bear. But more than that, I want to get away.

I scan the crowd, but who am I looking for? Anyone could be the bad guy. Except for this guy. He’s too tanked.

“You got a car?” I’m under his arm all the way to a five-speed Honda Civic. He doesn’t complain that I’m hijacking him. He’s too far-gone to hear me grind the gears.

“Oh, baaaaabe,” he says. Large guys can be so trusting and moronic.

A girl who does what he’s doing—gone forever. But he’s asleep and I’m driving, so I’m not that unfortunate girl. I’m the girl he won’t remember when he wakes up in the parking lot facing the beach, keys in the ignition.

I used to get in trouble for TPing trees and making over girls whose mothers make them dress like Pilgrims.

I’ve moved so far beyond taking candy bars and licenses and money. I’ve traded what Steve would have called “playing with fire” (if he’d known what I was up to, which he didn’t) for real fire. I’m barely recognizable inside. And I’m working on my outside.

If your life was at risk, would you commit arson in an apartment building?

That would be yes.

Would you risk your soul to save your body?

Yes.

This tops the list of things I wish I didn’t know about myself.

I walk along the beach until sunrise. The waves hit the shore so much louder than at Green Lake. Then I run as if I could outrun what I know.

As if.

It feels like the end of a marathon. That’s how tired of this I am.

What would Xena, Warrior Princess do?

What she had to do, that’s what.

I cut back up to the edge of the road as shades start opening in the houses. I hang behind a gas station on the end of a beach strip mall.

Change into a pink tee I’ll never wear again.

Part my hair with my fingernail. Plan what color curly mop it will be a couple of hours from now.

Wait.

Two girls with a San Diego State decal and an empty backseat pull in.

“My ride was supposed to meet me here an hour ago. Could I possibly hitch a ride south? I could chip in for gas.”

I sleep all the way down the coast. When they let me off, it feels like the morning after I got monumentally trashed at cheer camp and woke up hungover. I pass an electronics store. This time I find out which phone has GPS and buy the one that doesn’t, never did, and couldn’t. I don’t even steal it. Still, it seems like lots of money for a thirty-second phone call.