Girl on the Run

by Abigail Johnson

  She’s moving even before she hangs up, throwing my closet door open and grabbing an old backpack that I keep meaning to get rid of. Then she’s at my dresser, pulling drawers out and stuffing random fistfuls of clothes into the bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We have to go.” She doesn’t bother to close the drawers once she empties them. That carelessness from someone who irons my socks on a regular basis is more unsettling than her words. I don’t move. “Katelyn, now!” She crosses to the desk and yanks me away with such force that I nearly topple to the floor. My history book thuds as it hits the ground, and Mom’s grip tightens at the sound.

  “Mom, stop! We’re not moving because I made you a dating profile. It’s gone, deleted. I know you get freaked out by stuff like this.” I raise my eyebrows and add, mostly to myself, “But you’re scaring me.” My heart beats painfully in my chest. I’m about to offer to go buy hot butterscotch for the ice cream and to suggest she take a bath, but she’s not calming down or showing even a hint of embarrassment over her behavior. If anything, she squeezes my arm tighter.

  “What is going on?” I say.

  She raises her eyes to mine and holds my gaze for several beats, a few seconds maybe, but it’s enough to give weight to her words. She releases my arm. “They found us.”

  “Who found us? Who was that on the phone?” I stand completely still in the center of my room, but my blood is racing like I just ran a marathon. Mom is cautious to a fault, and I’m used to her worrying over little things, going so far as to randomly pick me up in the middle of a sleepover or to install tracking software on my phone. Once she even made me “break up” with my best friend when she found out her mom was a cop and kept a gun in the house. Never mind that they had a gun safe, which my friend didn’t even know the location of, much less the code to.

  But this…She isn’t panicked. She doesn’t look scared. She looks scary.

  “Grab only what you need from the bathroom. I’ll explain once we’re in the car.” The thing that keeps me from asking more questions is the sheen of sweat on her forehead, along with the quick, methodical movements she makes as she circles my room, grabbing essentials until my bag is full.

  Mom’s paranoia is not new to me, but we’ve been doing so well lately, and even at her worst, she’s never dragged me out of the house with such hastily packed bags before. Granted, I’ve always followed her strict internet rules until now—well, mostly—but all this because of a dating profile?

  It makes no sense. She speaks again when I fail to adopt her urgency. “Right now. You need to trust me.”

  And I do. I don’t know what’s going on or why she’s having the mother of all freak-outs, but I know something is wrong and that she’s doing what she thinks she has to do to keep us safe.

  And for now, that’s enough.

  I slide past her into my bathroom, grabbing only what I need—but for what? How can I possibly pack for a trip I don’t know anything about? Mom’s breathing is rapid as she darts down the hall to her room. I catch a glimpse of her face, hard and determined…but not surprised. Almost as though she’s been waiting for this.

  I stop hesitating after that. I sweep a hand through the bottom shelf in my medicine cabinet, knocking the contents into a toiletry bag. I get back to my bedroom just as she does. She’s changed into jeans and a dark T-shirt and is carrying her own bag now. She rushes me down the hall, down the stairs, and through the kitchen, flipping every light switch on and detouring into the living room to turn on the TV and crank up the volume. I watch her like she’s a stranger.

  Then we’re gone, not out the front door, but the back, running barefoot through the yard, right up to our neighbor’s seven-foot-high wooden fence. Mom tosses our shoes and our bags to the other side, then bends and laces her fingers together.

  “I’ll boost you.” Every gesture speaks of urgency.

  I place my foot into her hands, and her strength in launching me off the ground draws a gasp from my lips. Mom is five foot nothing and weighs a buck ten soaking wet. Her sudden strength makes my blood race even faster.

  The slats dig painfully into my stomach until I get both legs over the top and jump down. My palms hit damp grass, and before I can turn back and wonder how Mom is going to scale the fence without help, she lands next to me.

  “Mom,” I say, impressed despite the panic nipping at my heels. She ignores me and grabs my hand, just as I’ve tugged my shoes on. We race through another yard, around the side of that house, and then stop. Mom starts up the walkway to Mr. Guillory’s front door.

  “Do not say a word,” she tells me, setting our bags out of sight and slapping a bright smile on her face. She rings the bell.

  Mr. Guillory is well into his seventies, with a generous paunch and a full head of silvery-white hair, which stands in sharp contrast with his dark skin. Even at this hour, he greets us with his usual friendly smile as he opens his door.

  “Well, hello there, Melissa, Katelyn. What can I do for you on this lovely Friday night?”

  “Actually, we’re a little embarrassed,” Mom says, looking indeed as if that were the case. “We’re having a girls’ night junk-food fest, and we decided”—she puts an arm around my shoulder and taps her head with mine—“that we couldn’t rest until we ate our weight in snickerdoodles. Would you be willing to spare a cup of sugar? We’d be glad to share some of the cookies with you.”

  Mr. Guillory is only too happy to gift us with as much sugar as we want. We follow him into his kitchen—or, rather, I follow him. Mom disappears somewhere after the entryway. Before I can wonder if I’m still supposed to keep silent, she reappears. Mr. Guillory straightens up after retrieving a nearly full bag of sugar from one of his lower cabinets.

  “Perfect.” Mom snatches the bag from him a little too quickly. “We’ll bring the cookies over tomorrow.”

  As soon as Mr. Guillory sees us to the door and closes it behind us, Mom retrieves our bags, grabs my arm, and hurries me onto the dimly lit street. She dumps the sugar in a trash barrel on the way and pulls a set of keys from her back pocket. Not her keys. These have a small pocketknife and a Dallas Cowboys star dangling from them.

  Mom has the driver’s door of Mr. Guillory’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercury Comet, open in seconds. She reaches across the bench seat and pushes open the passenger door for me.

  “You took his keys? Why would you do that?”

  The streetlight overhead catches the sharp lines in her face. “Katelyn, get in the car. We don’t have time for this.”

  I know Mom is the way she is because she loves me and wants something for me that she never had as a kid: safety. That’s why I’ve never refused to follow her rules; I’ve just bent them. And, yeah, I still have to deal with her paranoia, but I can tell she tries really hard to keep that from me as much as possible. So I’ve gone along with her social media ban and her need to vet every new friend I make.

  All in all, I think I’m pretty easygoing, but stealing our neighbor’s car? It’s so just plain wrong that it overrides the numb confusion that was keeping me silent.

  “We can’t just take Mr. Guillory’s car. Why can’t we take our car? Or better yet, why do we have to leave at all?”

  “We’ll make sure he gets it back, but—”

  An alarm blares behind me. From our house.

  Mom’s eyes bulge as she stares over my shoulder, and for the first time in my entire life, I hear my mother swear. Then she says, “We’re too late.”

  We’re too late.

  I have no idea what that means.

  All I know is that Mom looks like we’re in the direct path of a tornado. I glance back toward our house and see someone moving past the bedroom windows upstairs.

  I get in the car.

  “Please,” I say in a voice that has gone suddenly hoarse. “What is going on?”


  Mom peels out of the driveway instead of answering, looking more at the mirrors than the windshield in front of her. I crane my neck around and see a shadowed figure leap out from Mr. Guillory’s backyard. It starts running after us.

  We sideswipe a parked car and then careen onto the sidewalk as Mom makes a sharp turn, wrestling with the older car’s lack of power steering. “Put your seat belt on.”

  My hands are shaking so badly that it takes two tries before I can fasten it. I don’t see the other car before it slams into us, sending my head smacking into the window hard enough to cause spots behind my eyes. I blink at the shocking pain and the shower of glass that rains down on me. The other car separates from ours—Mr. Guillory’s—and the scene comes back into focus with a crunch of metal.

  “You all right? Katelyn, answer me!” The car spins as she brakes suddenly and shifts into drive.

  “I’m okay.” But of course I’m not. I’ve never been less okay in my life. Even once she loses the other car after several terrifying minutes, Mom continues to check all her mirrors in a pattern of rapid glances that make my head throb viciously trying to follow. I don’t say anything else, even some twenty minutes later when she pulls into a Walgreens parking lot.

  “I’ll be back in eight minutes. Do not move.”

  And she leaves me there. I watch her walk past half a dozen cars before she stumbles, catches herself on the hood of a white minivan, and throws up. Then she straightens and walks into the store.

  Dazed, and bleeding from dozens of tiny cuts along my arms, I feel something warm and wet trickling down the side of my head. I touch it, then look at my fingers and barely have enough time to fling my door open before I’m sick.

  I give up trying to get the crumpled door shut afterward, instead staring into space, in total disbelief. I’ve only just resolved to try again when I see Mom emerging from the store, laden with bulging plastic bags. She walks not to her door but to mine, opening it fully without difficulty. She slides a hand around my back and helps me out, carefully avoiding my vomit. My head spins, but at least I’m not sick again.

  She holds up a set of keys with the hand that’s not supporting me, and the double beep of a car unarming sounds. Mom leads me to the passenger seat of this new vehicle—something silver—and buckles me in. She hesitates for a second before shutting my door, clearly looking at the blood that has dripped onto my shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” she says, jerking her chin firmly, but I can hear the bags shaking as she loads them into the backseat.

  I feel so far from fine, especially when I see the massive supply of protein bars and water bottles, and enough first-aid supplies to open a hospital. Mom slides into the driver’s seat.

  “We’re stealing another car,” I say. I must be in shock. No way I could have spoken so calmly otherwise. “Some customer we don’t even know.”

  “No.” She adjusts the mirrors and pulls out of the parking lot. “Not a customer, an employee.” Before I can ask what difference that makes, she goes on. “A customer would finish shopping a lot sooner than an employee would finish their shift. Hopefully. I need at least two hours before this vehicle is reported stolen.”

  My hands feel like ice. “I don’t…” My teeth begin to chatter. Mom turns on the heater and aims the vents at me.

  “Katelyn, I’m so sorry.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t even know where to start….”

  The events run through my head as she speaks: Someone broke into our house. We stole a car.

  “But I’m going to keep you safe.”

  Someone tried to run us off the road. We stole another car.

  “I need you to do exactly what I say, and I promise everything will be okay.”

  “Mom, who were those people, and why were they”—the thought of the car slamming into us sends ice water trickling down my spine—“after us?” Talking makes my head pound, but I knew not asking the questions would hurt worse.

  Everything I say makes her wince. “I will explain what I can, but I can’t do that while I’m driving. Right now, I need to get us somewhere safe and I need to think.” She glances at me. “Please, Katelyn.”

  I want to give her that, but I can’t. “Should I be this scared?”

  She’s supposed to say no. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She pauses for what feels like an eternity. “And I’m the person who loves you more than anyone else alive.”

  My head hurts badly enough to make it difficult to think clearly. “Are we in some kind of witness relocation program?” She knew to run. She knows how to steal a car without getting caught. She’s not shaking at all anymore. “Mom? Why do you know how to do all this?”

  She breaks her pattern of checking the mirrors to look at me. “No, we’re not in witness protection. I made a mistake when I was younger, and I had to learn.”

  I make the mistake of turning in my seat to check the road behind us, and my head makes it feel like the car is spinning around me. It takes a full minute of focused breathing before I can speak again. “A mistake? What kind of mistake?”

  “The kind I can’t run from anymore.”

  Several hours later, I’m not even sure what state we’re in when Mom pulls into a roadside motel with a forest of birch trees behind it. The building is nondescript, save for the flashing neon sign of a girl diving into a pool, and it’s remote enough to be unsettling without the circumstances that led us there. The closest sign of civilization is a tiny strip mall we passed a mile back, whose highlights included a pawnshop, a secondhand clothing store, and a gas station with only one working pump. Mom smooths her hair and checks her lipstick in the rearview mirror before climbing out and telling me to stay in the car.

  “Your shirt,” I say, and she pauses with the door open to look down at the blood on her shoulder. My blood from when we’d switched cars at Walgreens.

  She removes the pins holding up her long auburn hair and arranges it carefully over one shoulder. Then she’s gone, disappearing into the office and returning minutes later with a key for room 5.

  The chill from the air conditioner sets my teeth chattering again, and I let Mom steer me to the bed and sit me down on the salmon-colored bedspread. The curtains are already drawn, but she pulls them together again before hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside knob.

  She leaves me again but returns quickly, carrying my backpack, her duffel, and the bags from her eight-minute shopping trip. She speaks while she removes various first-aid items and starts cleaning the nicks on my arms before moving to my head. Warm fingers prod around the source of the pain along my temple. “I can’t take you to a hospital. We’re going to have to do the best we can on our own. It’s not deep, but I have no way to stitch you up, so it’s likely going to scar.” Her fingers slide an inch to my hairline. “Are you dizzy?”

  “Not as much as I was.”

  “Good.”

  It takes another five minutes before she sits back at my feet and lifts her hand to chew on her thumbnail, a gesture so familiar in such an unfamiliar situation that I get a lump in my throat. “You may have a concussion.”

  I’d had one once before, from falling out of a tree. This feels worse. “You promised to explain. Mom—”

  “Stop.” Her back snaps tight. “There isn’t time to tell you everything. I need to get rid of that car and—”

  “Then tell me some of it. Anything.” She doesn’t want to, that much is obvious, but perhaps because I’m literally bleeding in front of her, she starts talking.

  “I’ve been hiding for a very long time, since before I had you.”

  “Did Dad know?”

  She hesitates, as though the answer might reveal more than she wants. “He…No, he didn’t know.” The bed dips as she sits next to me. “I was careful, always careful. Sometimes I could almost believe they weren’t looking anymore—” She bites off wh
atever she was going to say next. “But now it’s different. We can’t hide. They know what we look like, where we live….”

  Because I showed them. That’s what she isn’t saying. I created a dating profile with a picture of the two of us standing in front of the house they’d broken into. There was no house number in the photo; it was mostly a tree and the side of the house. And I didn’t even use her full name. But someone found us. Less than two hours after I posted it.

  That isn’t possible. People can’t be found like that, can they?

  I’m going to be sick again.

  She brushes the hair back from my head again, careful not to press too hard. “With a concussion, you need to be woken up every hour, so I’m going to set an alarm on this phone.” She moves to reach into another bag and presses a disposable cell phone into my hand. I try to give it back to her.

  “Why can’t you just wake me?” I clamp my free hand down on her forearm when she doesn’t answer right away. “Mom?”

  She flinches. “Because I have to go.” She extricates herself from my grip. “Listen carefully: You are not to leave this room for any reason. Do not open the door. Do not peer out the window. Do not use the room phone. Do not answer the room phone. Do not make outgoing calls on this phone.” She hesitates, then rips the cord out of the wall. If I were inclined to ignore her demands—which I’m not—she just took the choice from me. “It’s only for a few days. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  I stare at her. “You’re not seriously leaving me? Why can’t we go to the police?”

  “Because the police can’t help us!”

  I recoil at the sudden volume of her voice.

  In a softer tone, she says, “I’m sorry, but there’s no time anymore. There are people looking for us right now. Think how fast they found us from that profile. They probably already have Mr. Guillory’s car, which means they are way too close to finding that car.” She points behind her to the silver car parked outside our room. “I have to go, and you aren’t coming with me. You can’t.”