“Found a guy,” Kis said, her voice a low rasp. “Works at a ranch. Needs help with horses. Room, board, cash under the table.”
Alexis felt a flutter of something that felt dangerously like hope. She’d learned not to trust hope. Hope was a shiny thing that Meadows would snatch away and sell for a bottle of cheap wine.
“Last chance to back out,” Veronique murmured, her breath a ghost in the air.
The "Runaway Love" wasn't a romance. It wasn't a boy with a fast car or a promise of forever. It was the fierce, desperate, unspoken love of survival. It was the way Veronique saved the last apple for Kis. It was the way Alexis taught Veronique how to hot-wire a hairpin lock. It was the way Kis threw herself in front of a swinging fist meant for Alexis. “Found a guy,” Kis said, her voice a low rasp
Kis stood up, stretching. “We’re here.”
Alexis didn’t look back. She grabbed Veronique’s arm and pulled her up the steps.
Alexis dug into her duffel bag and pulled out a crumpled photograph. It was of a woman who looked like her, but older, sadder. Her mother, before the drugs, before the disappearances. Alexis kissed the photo and tucked it back. Room, board, cash under the table
The bus doors closed with a pneumatic sigh. The engine growled to life.
For the first hour, no one spoke. The bus was filled with the drone of the engine and the soft rustle of other runaways, other ghosts. Veronique leaned her head on Alexis’s shoulder and finally let out a shaky breath she’d been holding for two years.
Kis was last. She turned her head, just enough for Meadows to see the hard set of her jaw. Then she dropped a single, folded piece of paper onto the wet pavement. It was a list of every violation, every skimmed dollar, every “accidental” lock-in of the basement. A copy was already in an envelope addressed to the state licensing board, sitting in a mailbox two blocks away. “Last chance to back out,” Veronique murmured, her
She wasn’t being dramatic. The group home on Mulholland Drive had been a gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless. Alexis had aged out of the foster system six months ago, only to find herself shuffled into a “transitional living” facility run by a woman named Meadows. Lindsey Meadows had the smile of a televangelist and the cold, calculating eyes of a loan shark. She took their government checks, skimmed their meager paychecks from the warehouse jobs she forced them to take, and called it “life skills training.”
Through the rain-streaked window, Alexis watched Lindsey Meadows shrink into a furious, pink speck. The bus pulled out of the station, past the strip malls and the pawn shops, toward the dark, open highway.
The runaway was over. The living was about to begin.