Chapter 17

I DON’T REMEMBER falling asleep, but all of a sudden I’m snapping awake to something that sounds like it could be used as a pterodactyl screech in a movie. It’s already getting dark, the bluish-grey evening punched through by streetlamps and headlights. I scowl out the window. Which idiot left their handbrake on?

A second later, I realize the sound is coming from our car.

“Oh my god,” Zahira says, suddenly sitting straight. The car jerks back and forth, throwing me like one of those mechanical bulls I always see in carnival scenes on TV. I sit straighter too and try to see if the engine is on fire, but I don’t see any smoke over the dashboard. I’ve never really thought about what a dying car might sound like. But this gurgling, sputtering, grinding cry seems about right. You’re not supposed to stop on the highway, but Zahira pulls over. The little meters on the dashboard are going nuts, flashing a million different warnings that can’t possibly all be happening at once. The car stops with a bump so forceful I thought we might flip over.

And then the engine dies.

The silence comes so quickly that my ears ring. No engine. No radio.

Slowly, the sound of the outside world leaks in. The drizzle on the windshield. The whoosh of cars passing by. The wind in the trees.

Then Zahira mutters, “Oh, shit,” and shoves the door open.

I thought about following her. But it’s so warm inside the car, and it’s raining outside, and it’s not like I know anything about fixing cars. I sink back in my seat and watch her shuffle to the front of the car with her pink jacket held over her head. She wrenches open the engine hood, which makes an awful creak, the perfect sound for a baby pterodactyl.

I can’t see her anymore, so I wait to hear her start tinkering with the machinery. But I think she’s just standing here because I don’t hear anything happening.

I groan and slink out of the car. Zahira really is just standing there, one hand propping open the hood, one hand holding the jacket over her head. She has a pinched-eyebrows, bunched-lips concentrated look, but I can’t help but notice she’s not actually doing anything. She doesn’t even have a flashlight.

I lean my arms on the edge of the open engine compartment. “Do you even know what you’re looking for?”

She sucks a shivering breath through her teeth. I have a feeling it’s just to delay her answer, which is, “Nope.”

Cold, spidery panic crawls under my heart, but I stomp it out before it gets to be anything more. Panicking is the worst thing I can do right now, right next to crying my eyes out. It won’t get me closer to a solution.

I look down at the machinery, but I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be seeing. There aren’t any sparking wires or plumes of black smoke or anything that looks obviously dislodged.

Marisa would know what to do. She always did.

I squint up at Zahira through the rain. “Now what?”

She sighs through her nose and looks around as if there might be a brand-new engine lying on the side of the road. Another sigh, and she looks down the way we’re supposed to be going. The highway goes on forever and ever.

“Okay,” she finally says. “Okay. Hands out.” I pull my arms back, and she shuts the engine hood. Very slowly, she says, “We are hitching a ride to the nearest exit, and then we are calling an auto shop.”

She nods to herself like it’s a great plan, which I guess it is, considering I can’t think of a better one. I hug my arms against the cold and watch her stick her thumb out.

Hitchhiking is risky. That’s why Marisa and I never did it. If the driver happens to be someone who watches the news, then it’s game over for us. But I can’t explain that to Zahira without also explaining that the cops are looking for me, so every time a car comes towards us, I stare straight at the driver and try to shoot a message through my eyes. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

Three cars have passed, and none have slowed down. I know it’s definitely not because of what I’m doing, but some part of me feels a little accomplished anyway.

What would Marisa do? We’ve never gotten stuck like this before. We have ditched our car-of-the-week on the side of long roads, though, and that’s pretty much the same thing. We would walk, and that’s what Zahira and I need to do right now.

I point to the road sign announcing the next exit. “How far is that?”

She glances over with a scowl, her thumb still stuck out. “Read it. Five kilos.”

“I meant, how long is that going to take?”

She looks at me blankly for a second before she says, “Like, to walk?”

She says it like I asked her to kill a person.

“Unless you prefer standing here freezing your butt off in the rain,” I say. “Nobody’s stopping.”

She makes a face like she ate something sour and blinks up at the sky. It’s overcast, a little orange from city lights, and just like the highway, the clouds seem to go on forever and ever. It was only drizzling a moment ago, but now the raindrops are definitely getting bigger.

“Fine,” she says after a big huff, and flings open the door to grab her stuff. “Five kilometers. That’s, what, forty minutes? You can handle that?”

“I’m not a baby,” I say. I’ve walked for longer with Marisa. I flip up my hood and pull on my backpack, and we begin our walk.

Five minutes later, I realize I made a mistake.

I’m supposed to take a painkiller with food. That’s what the bottle says, and that’s what Marisa always tells me, because otherwise it’ll burn a hole through my stomach or whatever. But I didn’t take one with my lunch because Zahira would have seen it and she would have asked “what is that?” and “are you hurt?” and yada yada yada, and I didn’t want to deal with that. I thought I could make it till dinner, anyway. My side hurts, but it’s more like a low burning. The kind of pain I can grit my teeth through.

Walking for five minutes makes it feel like my insides are ripping open.

I press a hand to my side through my hoodie pocket and pray that my guts won’t fall apart. Is that where my spleen is? I wonder how long it’ll take before it turns into runny-egg-sludge and leaks out. That’s disgusting. I don’t know why I thought of that.

Just keep going, Dany. You can do it. One foot in front of the other.

“Dany,” Zahira says. My hearing is going all muffled, and she sounds far away.

“Yeah?” I say. It’s not exactly freezing cold, but my breath comes out in a puff of white.

“Are you okay?”

I look up from the white painted line I’ve been following and realize Zahira doesn’t just sound far away. She is far away. When did I lag so much? Raising my head makes me dizzy, so I stop walking.

“Fine,” I call back, and wipe the wet, stringy hair out of my eyes. “Guess I’m just tired.”

She gives me that I don’t believe you look again. To prove her wrong, I start walking again. That makes the edges of my eyes turn black and my side throb like it’s about to explode. But I must have been convincing enough because Zahira goes back to walking, too.

“I can’t remember the last time I had to walk this much,” she grumbles, adjusting her bag strap. “Didn’t have much time for exercise in school. Campus was big, so sometimes it took ten minutes to get to my class. I think that’s the most I did. Sometimes I had to run. That was a real workout.”

I can tell she’s just talking to fill up the space between the rustle of rain on leaves and passing cars, so I don’t say anything and just focus on holding my gut together through willpower.

Zahira talks about school and coursework and annoying things that happened on campus, like the massive lineups at the bookstore at the start of school years, or the time they got a new cafeteria but the food was worse and somehow cost twice as much as before, or the absolute horror show that was waking up at 7 a.m. to register for courses before they all filled up. Somehow, I don’t want her to stop talking. It feels like a lullaby, taking my mind away from the pain and the cold and the rain sogging up my socks. I guess some part of me is curious, too. About university and college life and all that. Marisa never talked about it. I’ve never seen movies about it. And I don’t think I would ever get to live it.

Zahira talks and talks, and I try to picture it. Zahira walking around with her friends, carrying her heavy and expensive textbooks, hanging out with Aaron before he turned out to be a douchebag, smacking her alarm clock when her dorm is still dark so she can make her 8:00 a.m. classes. She said she was a med student. I wonder if she ever dissected any frogs.

We finally get to the bottom of the exit ramp, and Zahira asks the nearest store for the auto shop’s phone number. I sit on the curb, hugging my stomach, and a few minutes later Zahira scrapes down beside me, holding her dialling phone to her ear. I half-heartedly listen to her talk to the auto person who picks up. Mostly I’m looking at a pool of shiny, rainbow oil on the wet asphalt.

“Seventy-five?” Zahira says. “Okay. And to fix it? Oh. Okay.”

Seventy-five. That’s a lot of money. It’s money we can’t afford to spend. How much did we take from Man #1 and Man #2? I don’t think I ever asked Zahira. But her car breaking down definitely wasn’t part of our budget.

“Okay,” Zahira says, and explains where to pick us up. “Thank you.” She hangs up the phone and gives a full-body sigh.

“Seventy-five is a lot,” I say without really thinking. I feel like my brain turned to soup along with my spleen.

“And that’s just for towing,” she says, putting her phone away.

“How much is it to fix?”

“They said it depends on the problem. They’re low on staff and low on parts.”

“Do we have enough money?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if we don’t?”

I hate how helpless I sound.

What would Marisa do?

The rain is picking up, slapping so hard on the asphalt it sounds like hail. The awning above the shop entrance protects us, but when the wind is strong I can feel a cold mist.

“We’ll figure it out,” Zahira says with a wrinkle between her eyebrows. “I just got to get my car in first. Can’t leave her on the side of the road.”

My brain says yes we can but my mouth says nothing because I just had the horrible realization that I made another mistake. What would Marisa do? She would not call the auto shop. She would not waste the money. She would take us to the nearest parking lot and pick a car and I would spark the lock and we would be back on our way and we wouldn’t be here, sitting on the curb, waiting for the tow truck to come pick us up.

Zahira’s phone rings again, and this time I try my hardest to hear the other end of the call. Tow Truck Guy’s tinny voice says something like we tried a jump start and didn’t work and take a closer look in the shop and are you still in the same location?

“Yes,” Zahira says.

Tow Truck Guy says, Perfect, we’ll be there soon.

“Ask him how long it’ll take,” I say.

Zahira scowls. “Huh?”

“Ask him,” I say harder, “how long it’ll take to fix your car.”

She’s still scowling, but she asks, “How long do you think it’ll take to fix my car?”

The rain got bigger and now I can’t hear what Tow Truck Guy is saying. But I can tell by Zahira’s unchanging scowl that it isn’t anything good.

“What did he say?” I ask the moment she hangs up.

“He said,” she says in a way that also doubles as why the hell are you in such a rush, “that he’s not sure because he doesn’t know what the problem is yet, but they will look at it tomorrow, and they will probably get it fixed in the next few days, depending on if they have the parts.”

That might be the worst string of words I have ever heard. “Did you pay them already?”

She looks at me funny. “I can’t pay over the phone.”

Good. That’s good. Then we haven’t lost anything yet, except the time we spent sitting here doing nothing.

I stand up as quickly as I can without disturbing my side and say, “We have to go.”

She stands too, bewildered. “Go where?”

There’s a small parking lot across the street. I look both ways before I cross towards it.

“Dany, they’re picking us up here,” she calls behind me.

“We’re not waiting for them.” I call back. I shouldn’t be yelling. It draws attention.

“What? No! My car!”

“We don’t need it.”

She makes a sound like a cross between a choke and a laugh. “Of course we do.”

I’m all the way across the street before she decides to run after me, as much as she can run in her heeled boots. There are twelve cars in the lot, and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to pick. I don’t know how Marisa picks. I should have paid attention.

Zahira clops to a stop beside me and says, a little out of breath, “Dany, what are you doing?”

I pick a blue minivan that looks new enough to not be in risk of problems but old enough that it won’t stand out. I spark the lock and pop the door open, and Zahira actually gasps.

“Dany,” she hisses. “What are you doing?”

What am I doing? Isn’t it obvious? This is our way out. No need to pay. No need to wait. But she just doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get that we can’t waste the time and money and I don’t know how to explain it to her. I have to get to Suddence. I don’t know what I would do if I can’t get there.

I spark open the panel under the steering wheel. I’ve seen Marisa hotwire cars before. I’ve seen it on TV. But when I pry the panel away and look into the compartment, there are too many wires and I don’t know which ones I’m supposed to use. Marisa makes it look so easy, and she’s not here and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

Zahira pulls on my arm. “Dany.”

I want to fling her off. I want to snap at her—let go! If she can just stop bothering me, I can figure this out, and we’ll be back on our way.

But suddenly I feel so tired and weak and lightheaded and tired and I can’t get the words past my mouth. My chest is low and heavy, and hot tears are pushing their way up. I bury my face in my hands and try not to sob, but that makes it hard to breathe and I can’t catch my breath and I just want to scatter away into nothing.

“Dany.” I feel her hand on my shoulder. Her voice is soft now. She guides me out of the car and sits me down on the curb. I keep my face buried. I don’t want her to look at me.

“Dany,” she says again. “Tell me what the problem is.”

It’s raining and cold but I feel all hot and sweaty. My hands are staticky fuzz, and I feel so, so weak. All I can say is “I need to get there.”

“I’ll get you there. I promise.” She rubs my shoulder. “But not like this, okay? We don’t need to go that far.”

She says it like a hypothetical. Marisa and I have already gone that far.

I wish I could tell her everything. It’s exhausting holding everything back.

“I can’t wait a few days.” My throat feels swollen and the words sound thick and wet. “I can’t.”

“Okay.” Her teeth chatters as she sucks in a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s just think about this, alright?” I hear her shift around to sit beside me. Her shoulder shudders against mine. I feel cold now, too, like all the heat left in a big rush and now I’m all clammy and shaky. “They’re already towing my car. I have to pay them for that. We might be able afford the repairs, but then we’ll lose the money we need for gas and motel and food.” She huffs and rubs her shoulders. “And we lose a few days, and you can’t wait that long.”

She doesn’t ask me why. That’s a big relief.

“So.” She thinks for a while, and then laughs. Just the sigh of a laugh. “Well. I do have an idea.”

I sniff and scrape my hands up to my forehead. “What?”

“It’s a last resort. You’re not going to like it.”

I sniff again. “Why?”

“It has to do with Aaron.”

My head snaps up. “No.” I should have meant, I don’t want to get anyone else involved, but it’s actually, “He’s a douchebag.”

She raises her eyebrows along with her shoulders. “We don’t have a choice.”

“Yes, we do. We take this car and we go.”

“No. We’re not stealing.”

“And you said you didn’t know where Aaron is. I heard you.”

“Well. I lied.”

That shocks me. Genuinely. “Why? He ditched you. He was going to let you get kidnapped.”

“Look, I hate his guts.” She says hate like haaaaate. “But he lives with his brother now, and his brother is nice.”

“You thought Aaron was nice.”

“JJ is actually nice. And there’s no way I’m getting him into trouble with those skeevy loan sharks. So I lied.”

I still feel bitter about it, but it makes sense. I scrub my nose and stare across the lot. “So what’s the plan?”

“I can call JJ. He lives maybe half an hour out. He can pick us up, we’ll spend a night at his place, and then first thing tomorrow, we go. We borrow his car, and we go.” She folds her arm atop her knees and glances down at me. “How does that sound?”

It sounds like getting two more people involved. Getting Zahira involved was bad enough. But she’s right. We don’t have a choice. I don’t think I can last long like this.

“First thing tomorrow?” I say.

“Promise.” She knocks her knee against mine. “And I promise I’ll protect you from Aaron’s douchebaggery.”

That steals a laugh out of me. It comes so suddenly that I hiccup, and then Zahira’s laughing, and I’m laughing even harder, through all the hiccups and the tears still in my eyes. For a scary moment I want to hug her, or I want her to hug me. But luckily, across the street, a tow truck rumbles in with Zahira’s pink car.

“Come on,” Zahira says, craning her neck that way. “I need to talk to him about my car. And then we can get the hell out of here.”