Girl on the Run

by Abigail Johnson

  Malcolm.

  I don’t know if I say his name out loud, but I whimper when he drops down beside me without so much as a twitch. I don’t breathe when I press my fingers against his neck until I feel the steady beat of his pulse.

  Unconscious. Not…anything else.

  And then the door is shut, and a blackness surrounds me that’s so complete I can’t stop my hands from digging into Malcolm’s chest.

  In the impenetrable darkness, my other senses fire to life: the damp, musty wood from the floor or the walls, the slight bite of metal lingering on my fingers from the railing in the stairway at Silver Living, and the increasingly rapid breaths from Malcolm. He’s practically shaking.

  “Malcolm?”

  Lurching from the floor, he flings himself at the door, pounding and rattling the knob in a panicked frenzy. The door is solid oak, and the hinges are on the outside—I remember that much from before the light went out—so there’s no way we can break it down. Even if we could, we’d just barrel right into the bounty hunter and Blue Eyes. My tongue instinctively runs over the teeth he promised to pull out, and I can’t think of anything I want less than his hands on me again.

  Malcolm has abandoned the door and is now ricocheting from one wall to the next, like a trapped animal, not caring what he crashes into or if he hurts himself. My hands find him easily in the small space, and I lock on to his shoulders.

  “Stop. We need to think.”

  His movements halt, but his breathing remains frenetic. “I never used to be afraid of the dark. I feel like I’m back alone in my trunk. Tell me I’m not.”

  His muscles are flinching under my hands, and I squeeze. “You’re not in the trunk. And you’re not alone.” We’re so close that even though it’s blacker than pitch, I’m aware of his head when he lowers it as if to look down, because I feel his too-fast breath on my upturned face.

  “I can’t see. Can you see? I can’t—I can’t—”

  “Here.” I slide my hands down his arms to his hands, shift us to what I’m approximating is the center of the room, and lift his arms with my own. “Feel the space?”

  His fingers extend under mine, and for a second they intertwine before his greater reach surpasses mine and he’s not encountering anything else. His breathing steadies some, but not all the way, so I shift his arms straight up, my hands on his forearms because of his extra height. “What do you feel?”

  “Nothing,” he says, in a full-body exhalation.

  That’s the moment I feel his awareness shift—from the claustrophobic space to the inch separating our bodies. He breathes in again, this time not to calm himself. I don’t know how I know it’s different, but I do. He lowers his arms a little until his hands are touching mine again, until a finger slides across my palm and I shiver and pull away.

  “Are you okay now?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to freak the hell out again as soon as you move away.” He very deliberately reaches for my hand again. “So don’t, okay?”

  There’s a tremor in his voice that lets me know he’s not just saying that as an excuse. The warmth from his hand seeps into mine, and my muscles begin to tense. I can’t just stand there and hold his hand. There are too many things that I don’t want to think about. Too many things that I can’t think about. I swallow and hope he can’t hear it. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Okay, that’s not helping. I’m trying not to think about the fact that we’re locked in a dark room barely bigger than your closet.” His breath starts to speed back up, and I force his arms high again.

  “See? Space. More than you remember. You can’t even touch the ceiling. If you could reach,” I say, “all you’d feel is—” I stop. “Wait, what did you say?”

  I’m still touching him, so I feel it when he goes utterly still. The darkness takes on a new weight, and suddenly it’s like it’s pressing in on me, constricting.

  “You told me before that you were in my house, in the hall outside my room, but that you refused go in. So how do you know what my closet looks like?”

  Suddenly, as exhausted and scared and sore as I am, and as much I thought he was the reason I was staying strong, I pull away from him. “You lied.”

  He doesn’t deny it, though I hear his breath catch the moment I stop touching him.

  “I didn’t technically lie. I—”

  “Come on, stop.” I’m too tired to cut him off with anything close to force. The words just fall out of my mouth as I rub my side from where Blue Eyes kicked me. “Are you working with them?” He doesn’t need to see my head nod toward the direction of the door to know who I’m talking about. The darkness may be hiding my face and the tremble in my chin, but my voice gives me away.

  “No, Katelyn. No.” I feel the brush of his fingers as he reaches out for me, and I recoil. “You saw me, touched me. You know this isn’t fake.”

  He means his injuries, but all I can think about is that I did touch him. I held his hand, held him, and, worse, I took comfort from that contact. I even kissed him.

  And he was lying.

  “You just never cared, did you?” That’s the truth. I don’t yell the words or spit them at him; I simply state the facts and let him do with them what he will.

  “When I took this job, I didn’t care about your mom or justice or anything,” Malcolm says. “It was a challenge, that’s all. I wanted to see if I could do it—find her when so many others failed. She wasn’t real to me. It was like a game, one that I got paid to play.”

  Something slimy twists up from my stomach. He has no excuse, none. He was playing with my life, mine and Mom’s, and we lost. It’s little consolation that he lost too. In fact, it’s no consolation at all. It’s justice.

  At least now I know.

  He’s still talking, though, which baffles me. Why would he think I want to hear a single thing more from him?

  “Do you know how long it took me to find you after you uploaded that pic?”

  Yeah, I know exactly, tired or not: two hours from post to pursuit. The consequences of that foolish decision blaze over my face before searing deep in my chest.

  “About six minutes,” he says.

  The hot blood coursing through my cheeks chills.

  “That’s how long it took my program to flag you, trace you, and RAT your laptop.”

  “What? You did what?”

  “I saw you through the camera when you opened your laptop and pretended to be doing your homework,” he says. “You were smiling, happy, and I—it wasn’t a game anymore. I was supposed to send the location to the investigator as soon as I found your mom, and then he would send whoever was closest to grab her. But the bounty hunter decided to cut out the competition as soon as he heard I’d been brought on, by setting up a camera in my house. He was at my door within ten minutes of your mom’s face filling my computer screen, which is nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds longer than it would have taken me to send her location to the investigator.” His voice shifts into something quieter, as though he’s reliving the memory. “I was having doubts from the minute I found out that you existed. Not about your mom, not then, but about you and how I might be destroying your life. I refused to give him your address, and I held out as long as I could. It was only a couple of hours, but…”

  Two hours. That’s how long it took for Mom to get home and for us to run. If they’d gotten to us even five minutes sooner, we’d have never escaped in time.

  “It’s still my fault, but I wasn’t depraved about you.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Nothing,” he says, raising a hand. “I just—I’m sorry. For everything.”

  I’m thinking about him getting beaten. I’m thinking about him living in a pitch-black trunk for three days. But I’m also thinking of him watching me through my laptop, and search
ing for Mom without a care until he was forced to stare at me face to face. I’m thinking about Mom, wherever she is, separated from me because Malcolm did point the way.

  And he’s asking me to be better than him, to view his life alongside mine. Because he grew a conscience at the eleventh hour.

  I don’t know what to do with that. With any of it.

  I look at the direction his voice came from. “I hate that you watched me. That you spied on me. You cannot understand what that feels like.”

  “Katelyn, I—”

  “No,” I say. It’s a guttural whispered word. “If you’d told me back at the motel, it would have been just one more part of what you did to me, but you lied. You waited until I started to trust you, to care about what happened to you.”

  “I should have told you about watching you, okay? I was going to at the gas station before the cop came. Not because I thought you’d find out, but because I wanted you to know, even if you reacted just like this. I don’t know how else to tell you I’m sorry. I don’t even know what’s true anymore.” He’s talking faster now, and I can hear the panic laced though his voice. He’s moving a lot, twitching again, and I’m pretty sure his hands are still outstretched, searching for mine so that a simple touch can remind him he’s not alone in the blackness.

  “Katelyn?” He trying but failing to whisper. “Katelyn!”

  “They’re going to hear you,” I say. My voice is watery, and I hate that.

  I tell myself it’s just to keep him quiet when I lift my arm and allow him to seize my hand with an audible sigh. His breathing has steadied when he starts talking again.

  “I wasn’t sure before, about your mom’s guilt, but now, I honestly don’t know. If Derek is your father, then everything the Abbotts said about the night he died is a lie.”

  All the thoughts that I’ve held at bay since finding my grandfather crash over me. My back is already resting against a wall, but I push harder against it, not caring that it causes pain to flare out from my bruised ribs. I tug my hand free from Malcolm’s and wrap my arms around my chest.

  I won’t break in front of him. I won’t. But my lungs fill and empty in rapid succession, and I know it’s not sweat dripping down my cheeks. If Mom were here, I wouldn’t be falling apart like this. I’d be raging, yelling, having the biggest, loudest knock-down, drag-out fight of our lives, worse than the time I found spyware she’d installed on my phone. Worse than the time I spotted her car outside my friend April Lancaster’s house during my first-ever sleepover.

  Every part of my life might be a lie. My name, my age, even my father. I double over at that last thought. When I think about my dad, I don’t conjure up a beach-blond young man with a perfectly white smile and a sailboat bearing his name. I think of a man with perpetual coffee breath and a bit of paunch who carried me up to bed when I fell asleep watching TV.

  All the lies. All the lies. Everything.

  Malcolm may have doubts about Mom’s guilt, but for the first time, I’m no longer sure of her innocence.

  I don’t push him away when he moves so that our shoulders are touching. The proximity to another person calms him instantly, whereas I feel like every part of me is fraying, splitting, disintegrating.

  “We need to get out of here,” he says.

  I don’t answer.

  “Did you see anything when they brought us in?”

  More silence from me.

  “Katelyn? Come on. You can’t shut down now.”

  But I can. I sink to the ground, and Malcolm has no choice but to follow me.

  “No, no, no, no,” he whispers. “You still want answers, right? You still want to know what happened. You’ve got the sonogram and this”—I flinch when his fingers brush my neck and he lifts my necklace from inside my shirt—“which prove that the ‘infatuated teenager’ who supposedly turned homicidal when she was rejected never existed. At the very least, there was a lot more involved with your mom than the Abbotts let on. He was planning to marry her.”

  There’s something strange about the way Malcolm says that last part, something I would have pounced on even a few hours ago, but now I ignore it. “She lied about everything and now you believe her?” I say. “Or not even her. She’s not the one standing here proclaiming her innocence. She left me, promised I’d be safe, and never came back. Maybe the truth is that she’s running, even from me, because she is guilty.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t know what I believe.” It hurts so much to say that, because it’s true.

  “No,” Malcolm says. “I’m not asking you if you believe that. I’m telling you. Do you even know what you’ve done since she left? You outran a trained hunter. You basically took me hostage and extorted every dime I have to my name to get where you needed to go. You blackmailed me into sneaking you inside a surveilled building. Yeah, we got caught and locked up, but you wouldn’t have done any of that if you thought for a moment your mom was a killer. And even though it’s probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done to bring this up again, I watched you two together before any of this started. I’ve never seen love like that. Not with me and my dad. Not even with me and my gran, because she’s always still afraid that…well, that I’ll do something like I did with this job. Your mom didn’t have that with you. She lied about a lot of stuff, but not about loving you. And you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?”

  I think about Mom wriggling out of her Spanx as we laughed over her terrible first date, the one she’d gone on not because she wanted to, but because I’d asked her to try. I think about the fear in her face when we ran from our house, when she tended my injured head at the motel, when she had to leave me there. She’d been afraid for me, not for herself—not because her past had finally caught up with her, but because it had caught up with me.

  I think about hiking instead of going to Disneyland, about the survival “games” she taught me, like locating possible exits in every building we entered instead of playing Candy Land or Guess Who? like other kids. I think of the miles we ran together every morning—even when it was raining, even when I didn’t want to.

  Because she knew that one day I might have to run, and hide, and escape.

  “Tomorrow’s my birthday,” I say. “Tomorrow, I’m turning eighteen, not seventeen. Tomorrow, I’ll be a legal adult.” My heart pounds harder with every word. “She told me that when the time was right, she would be the one to pay for her mistake, not me. I think I know what she meant. Tomorrow’s the day her actions, past, present, or future, stop blowing back on me.”

  Malcolm swears, and not quietly.

  “Is she turning herself in?” I ask.

  “I obviously don’t know her like you do, but I don’t think so.”

  “Because you don’t think she did it?”

  “Do you?”

  I hesitate. “I know she loves me. That’s enough for now. And I know I’ve got to find her before she does something that will take her away from me for the rest of her life.”

  Malcolm squeezes my hand and pulls us both to our feet. “If you can use all the stuff your mom taught you to get us out of here, I swear I can find her. But, you know, keep talking, okay? I’m trying to keep it cool here, but it’s like I can feel the walls and ceiling closing in.” I know he’s not faking the tremor that shudders through him.

  “The man who brought me here said an investigator is coming to question me. How long do you think we have?”

  He doesn’t answer, and my pulse skips.

  “Malcolm, we can’t be here when he gets here.”

  “Then how do we get out?”

  I close my eyes even though I can see nothing with them open. I envision the room in the brief time I saw it before the door was shut. There was a futon and a small wooden chair with spindle legs. No windows. I tilt my head back, opening my eyes t
o no avail, trying to remember if there was anything beyond the bulb hanging above. I find the switch right away, but flipping it does nothing. I turn away from Malcolm and have to ignore the sound of protest he makes when I start shuffling forward. When my shins bang into the side of the futon, I scramble on top, standing with my free hand stretched to the ceiling while the other is being squeezed way too tightly by Malcolm.

  “Katelyn? What are you doing?”

  I pause my exploration of the ceiling and reach blindly in front of me, stepping down to the floor and inching forward until the fingertips of my free hand brush against Malcolm’s head. I glide them down to his shoulders, bending forward until my mouth accidentally bumps his ear.

  “Hey, hey!” he says, leaning back and standing. “That’s a little more distraction than I need, but—”

  I pull his head back to my mouth, rising on my toes and not caring when my lips graze his ear again. Dropping my voice to a barely audible volume, I say, “I’m trying to talk to you without being overheard.” Just because we can’t hear anyone outside the door doesn’t mean they aren’t there, especially after the way our voices rose when we forgot ourselves. “I’m checking the ceiling for an access hatch to the attic. I can’t remember if I saw one or not. Do you?”

  Malcolm is shifting under my hands with every word, and it’s only when he turns his head to whisper in my own ear that I understand why. We’re practically cheek to cheek. His breath is warm, and it stirs the tiny hairs along my neck, making me shiver just as he had. “I didn’t come to until they shut the door.”

  “It’ll be faster if we both search. Will you be okay if I let go of you?”

  “Are you going to think less of me if I say no?”

  “Probably,” I say with a slight smile he can’t see. The fact that he can joke about it means he’ll keep it together.

  Without further need for communication, he steps up on the chair and I return to the futon. The quiet scuffing I hear is him moving the chair around.