I really will be a statistic if I don’t get my shit together.
My hand is on the door knob when the phone rings. I freeze, then turn in slow motion toward the nightstand where the phone rests. But it keeps ringing, and I have to accept that I’m not imagining it.
I dart across the room and grab it, pressing it to my ear. "Yeah. Lucy?"
"Cliff," she sobs. "Is it really you?"
A relieved sigh escapes my lips. "It’s me," I say with a smile. She sounds so different, yet I’d know that voice anywhere.
"You’re really out? I can’t believe it. I thought you had another five years."
"Yeah, I got lucky. Overcrowding and good behavior." Mostly. Plus I had a lawyer that was really good at talking judges into dreamland.
"Cliff, holy shit. Where are you? I mean, I know where, but when are you coming home?" She’s talking so fast, I can barely understand her. I love every second of it.
I hate to disappoint her. Even after all these years. "Luce . . ."
I can almost hear her shoulders slump. "You’re not coming home?"
"Not likely. At least, not anytime soon. I’m broke, kid. And I—"
"I’ll PayPal you some money," she says, and now she’s really talking fast. I strain to understand her, the words like a foreign language. At least her accent is Connecticut.
I let her finish, again wishing I had a cigarette. Something to calm my nerves.
"Cliff? You there?"
Swallowing past the dry lump in my throat, I tell her I am. "I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about, Luce."
"Okay, just give me your email address."
She’s going to think I’m an alien, that the games we played when she was a kid were real. "I don’t have one."
She barks out a laugh. "What? Oh. No Wi-Fi in prison."
"Wi-Fi?" My head starts to throb.
"Um . . . Like AOL, but wireless." She laughs again. "Wow, this is so funny. You’re like a newborn."
It’s good that she can be so positive about this—about anything.
"All right, let me think." She hums a little. "No email address, and I’m guessing you don’t have a bank account either. Jesus, prison is inhumane. Well, there’s only one solution."
I shrug, because seeing as how I can barely grasp this Wi-Fi stuff, I’m probably going to be blown away by whatever she comes up with.
"Cliff, text me your address."
The throbbing between my eyes intensifies. "Luce, I don’t—"
"Fuck," she yells. "You probably don’t even know what a cell phone is."
"I know what a cell phone is," I shoot back.
"Yeah, the clunky TV-remote-looking ones from the early 2000s," she jokes.
Both of my eyebrows lift. "Everything is different now, huh?" My voice is low, but not that flirtatious purr I used on the girl at the front desk. I sound sad. I need to man the fuck up.
"It is," she agrees. "But don’t worry. I’m gonna take care of you, reintroduce you to the wild. And teach you how to play Pokémon GO."
"I know how to play Pokémon," I grumble.
She laughs again. "This is way different, trust me. It uses GPS and—"
"Okay, mercy. My head hurts."
Her giggle, however, is a soothing mother’s stroke across my forehead. It reminds me of better times. "I’m gonna come down there, okay?"
"You don’t have to do that," I tell her. I’m supposed to be a man. It should be me taking care of her, not the other way around.
She snorts. "Dude," she says, "trust me. You need a guide. And I’m currently on vacation, licking my wounds."
I suddenly remember what the receptionist read to me. "You got married?"
"No," she says, almost sadly. "It’s against my rules."
"What are you, a nun?" For a second, it feels like I’ve gone back twenty years in time, like we’re just kids busting each other’s balls.
"Nuns," she says, "don’t have one-night stands."
I nearly choke. "I don’t ever want to know about your sex life."
"You sure? You don’t want to live vicariously? Must’ve been awfully lonely in prison." I can practically hear her smirking.
"No," I tell her firmly. A few seconds pass. My voice softens. "Hey, Luce? Thanks."
Her voice is so small when she finally responds. "No, Cliff, thank you."
I shake my head, wondering if other people have these kinds of conversations. Sighing, I let her direct the conversation for a few. She rattles off times and schedules, then promises to be at my room before checkout time.
"Please set a wakeup call," she begs.
"Yeah, yeah." I smile, though. "Hey, Luce? What’s Facebook?"
2
Olivia
"Are you sure you want to do this?" my sister Lucy asks me for the thousandth time. She lifts a man’s shirt on its hanger from a rack and examines the price tag. It’s one of those super soft henley shirts—the ones that belong on Calvin Klein models but look good on anyone.
I peg her with my best baby sister look, the wide-eyed "Please play Barbies with me" one. Works every time. She sighs, shaking her head.
"You’re going to miss class, Livvie. And I don’t know how long this is going to take." It’s a half-hearted attempt. She tucks a curl behind her ear and tilts her head.
"It’s like a free vacation," I tell her, grabbing the cart she’s pushing and leading it toward a table of men’s jeans. "Is he a bootcut kind of guy, do you think?"
Lucy frowns, a crease forming between her eyebrows. "I’m not sure. And Pennsylvania is cold this time of year. It’s really not like a vacation, kid."
Even though we’re both in our twenties, Lucy is seven years older than me. Sometimes it feels like an eternity—especially when I was still into Barbies and she was experimenting with makeup. She’ll be thirty before I hit twenty-five, which is usually prime marriage age, but not for Lucy. She’ll never get married.
"Well," I say, drawing out the word, "it will be, if he’s hot."
Lucy nearly chokes. Her face streaks through with red, and the tips of her ears practically glow. "He’s like your cousin," she hisses.
I think of all the ways our parents will disapprove of this, how they already disapprove of him. This morning, when Lucy filled me in on what she was doing, she made me promise not to tell Mom and Dad. I’m twenty-one and yet apparently still have to swear to little sister secrecy. Other than that, she didn’t tell me much. Just that our cousin Cliff needed some help because he just got out of prison. And then those cherry red lips of hers clamped shut.
It’s weird, because Lucy and I tell each other everything. Seven years is a lucky number. We were meant to be.
"Dude, I’m dying to know. What did he go away for?" I start unfolding jeans, checking sizes and seeing how they fall. I’ve never dressed a guy before. It’s kind of turning me on, and I haven’t even met him yet. I don’t know what to expect, so I imagine that he’s tall and muscular, with dark eyes and long hair. A beard, for sure. And he’s broad. He could throw me around in bed like a rag doll. I smirk.
"Stop that," Lucy hisses. She throws me a glare.
I sigh. The past three years of college were fun, but this new semester has me in a bit of a dry spell. Everyone is focusing on their GPAs, which is odd considering we’re all legal drinking age now. You’d think they’d all be at the bar with me. Not that I don’t want to graduate and get a good job. But this is it, the last semester before we’re shoved into adulthood. Real responsibility and all that. Not only am I curious about the ex-con, but I’m also bored. And when I get bored . . .
"Please try not to get into trouble," Lucy continues, reading my mind. It’s her superpower. "Mom and Dad will kill me if they find out I dragged you into this."
"Dragged me into what?" I toss several pairs of jeans into the cart, then face her. Crossing my arms, I give her another baby sis look. It’s almost too easy—usually, anyway.
But this time, Lucy ignores me. She takes back control
of the cart and marches toward the checkout queue. Frowning, I follow her, grabbing a makeup palette off a shelf as I pass it and chucking it into the cart. She owes me, damn it.
"We’ve got to catch our train," Lucy reminds me again over her shoulder as she piles everything onto the checkout counter. "So no time for smoke breaks, understand?"
It’s like I’m seven again and our parents let us go to the mall alone for the first time. I hold my hands up, backing away. "All right. If you’ve got this, then, I’m going outside." There’s no way I’m getting into a car with her for forty-five minutes and then hopping on a train for twelve billion hours without a cigarette first.
Outside, the icy air blasts into me and I huddle deep into my coat. Cupping the flame, I light the cigarette, wishing it could warm me up. A gust of wind whips around the corner of the building, and I turn, shivering.
Maybe this whole thing is a bad idea. Lucy is right—I would be missing classes. Call it a case of senior-itis, but I’m desperate to stretch my wings. I need a break from the monotony of sleep-class-food-class. And I’ll be honest: Lucy got my curiosity going. As I smoke, I run back through the tidbits she’s given me. I know his name, that he just got out of prison in Pennsylvania, and that Lucy was the only one he could call. I guess he must be the black sheep of the family—maybe got busted for drugs. It is kind of weird that he wasn’t serving in Connecticut, though.
I suck the cigarette down, toss it into the parking lot, and nearly crash into Lucy as she comes through the doors.
"Shit, sorry." I touch her arms to steady her.
"Cold?" she asks with a smirk.
We throw ourselves into the car, the heater on blast but not nearly hot enough. Lucy makes a barely livable wage as a teacher. Her car is a decade old and sometimes the warm air coming out of the vents smells like burning rubber. She also has to get out and slam her fist into the left headlight to get it to work.
But she has a car, which is more than I’ve got.
We drive to the train station in New Haven, and I say a silent prayer that it isn’t the one with no walls or anything. It’s way too cold for that shit. But as we pull into the Union Avenue parking lot, relief washes through me. It’s the bigger one, the one with heat and bathrooms. Not that we have time to even enjoy it, according to Lucy. You’d think the world was going to end if we missed this train.
Lucy parks, and I wonder if it’s safe to leave her car unattended in New Haven for a week plus. It might be a lemon but it’s all she’s got. But there is a gate and a guy sitting in the booth, so I try to convince myself that no one will jack it. Older cars are a lot easier to steal. All they’d have to do is pay the parking fee.
"How much is this gonna cost you?" I ask as she hauls our suitcases out of the trunk. She plunks mine down in front of me, then hands me the shopping bags full of Cliff’s new clothes. I’m not at all surprised that she’s doing all this, though. Lucy may be afraid of commitment, but when it comes to people she loves, she’d give you the shirt off your back. Still, it’s kind of odd that she’s never mentioned Cliff before if she used to be so close with him.
Lucy shrugs. "It doesn’t matter."
Eyes narrowing, I scrutinize her face. It’s hard to tell in the dim lighting of the parking lot, but she looks funny. I can’t put a name to her expression, though. She almost looks pained, but happy—like she just got a bullet in the leg but told she won the lottery right after.
I follow her, frowning at her back. She’s acting so weird. And I’m not used to there being secrets between us. I resolve to flirt the truth out of Cliff the second I’m alone with him. He may be my cousin, but there’s nothing wrong with a little flirting.
"This way," Lucy says, pushing through the entrance. Wishing I’d smoked one last cigarette during the walk over, I hurry after her. The station doesn’t look at all like I’d pictured it. I bite my lip, realizing that I’ve never been on a train. Or a plane. I’m like a travel virgin.
"What if I have to pee?" I chase her to the departure list. It flips, a loud clacking sound echoing through the lobby.
My sister studies the times, nodding to herself. "It’s not that bad. You’ll get used to it."
"So there is a bathroom on this thing?"
She takes off again, heading toward our track. I have no idea how any of this works. With my luck, I’d get on the wrong one if I had to do this alone. There aren’t even people to ask, unless you want to go all the way back to the front desk or find someone at a track. This whole thing is totally DIY, and I don’t like it. It’s too much of a reminder that in three months, I’ll be doing all of it myself, every day.
"Status is 'Boarding,' so hurry!" Lucy breaks into a brisk walk-jog thing. Groaning, I step up my pace.
We run through a freezing cold tunnel that’s connected to the rest of the station by a wide open archway. The state must pay an arm and a leg to keep the rest of the place warm. The air smells heavy with body odor, exhaust, and cigarette smoke. My fingers twitch toward the pack in my coat pocket, but Lucy glances back at me, a fierce glare on her face. I run faster.
Finally we reach our train. She leads me onto it, and my legs shake with gratitude for the seat I’m about to plop into. But every single row is full.
Gaping, I turn toward her. "We’re not that late!"
She smiles a little, shaking her head. "Come on."
Lucy leads me toward a door on an end of the car. Then she disappears into it, lugging her rolling suitcase behind her. I dart after her, and find myself in a small connecting tunnel, encased from the elements with heavy vinyl flaps. Through the window in the door of the next car, I see Lucy plowing forward. Every seat in that car is full, too.
Glancing down, I’m shocked to see a flash of the track, lit by the lights of the train station. I hope I won’t have to walk through one of these once we’re moving, then hurry to catch up.
Eventually we find a pair of empty seats. Lucy shoves her luggage into a compartment above our heads and I mimic her like a good little sister. Then we collapse.
The seats are surprisingly comfortable. I snuggle into mine and wiggle my toes in my boots. Then I peer around our car.
The whole thing is full. There are still people wandering the cars, looking for a place to sit. The train starts to move, and everyone who is walking grabs onto something to steady themselves as they continue their trek. I’m super grateful that we found seats at all, never mind two together. Looking around, though, I start to worry that I really will have to walk between cars to pee.
"Uh, Luce?" I turn toward her.
She stares out the window, her brown hair a veil around her face. "Hmn?"
"Where’s the bathroom?"
Lucy shifts in her seat. A soft smile plays on her lips. "At the back of the car. If you have to pee, I’d go now. It gets pretty rank after about six hours."
I glance back and notice the door on the left. "Won’t it stink up the whole car?"
She shakes her head. "There’s like a squirt of Febreze every so often coming through the air vents. Plus we’re far enough away from the door. This is the best spot, trust me."
"I’ll deal with anything as long as I don’t have to hop cars while we’re moving," I tell her.
"Why do you think I hunted for seats?" she asks with a grin.
I start to tell her it’s pretty obvious, since they were all taken, but instead I smile back. Truth be told, I’m nervous about spending half a day on a train—overnight. Adjusting to the dorms at school was cake compared to this. I don’t know how I’ll sleep or where I’ll get coffee in the morning.
Reading my mind again, Lucy pats the purse balanced on her knees. It’s more like a tote bag. "I’ve got Starbucks fraps in here. They’ll be room temp by morning but they’ll do the trick."
"Have I told you lately that I love you?" I quick-hug her by resting my head on her shoulder for a second, pressing our arms together.
Lucy exhales, a long breath. For a second, guilt flickers in her eyes. Th
en she smiles, and like the sun after a storm, all of the clouds scatter. "I love you too, Livvie."
My gut twists. This trip is not going to end well. I just know it.
Morning rises and my eyes feel like sandpaper. Just as I’d thought, I didn’t sleep. It’s impossible to drift off when you’re rocking and jolting over bumps. Lucy didn’t sleep either, so I don’t feel too bad. We can be miserable together.
But my sister is anything but miserable as the train lurches into the Amtrak station. She’s practically chipper as she gets our luggage down from their compartment and practically skips toward the exit. I shamble after her, reminding myself that at least we’re here.
"Hey, how did you get time off anyway?" I ask her as we step off the train and into fresh air. I step to the side, letting go of my suitcase long enough to light a cigarette.
"Toss it," she instructs in her teacher voice.
I lift an eyebrow at her while taking a nice, long drag. There’s nothing like a first cigarette after hours of deprivation.
"Our ride is here."
Rolling my eyes, I point the cigarette at her. "It can wait. It’s not like we have far to go."
Lucy presses her lips together and smiles guiltily, eyebrows lifted.
"We don’t have far to go . . . right?"
With a shrug, she grabs her suitcase and heads toward an Escalade idling in the parking lot. "We’re in Harrisburg, about an hour away from Lewisburg."
My shoulders slump. Smoking as quickly as possible, I chase her to the Escalade. She must’ve called an Uber. I pray that the driver doesn’t have a non-smoking policy, but the dirty look he gives me as we near pops my little bubble. Taking one last drag, I toss it onto the pavement.
The closer we get to Lewisburg, the more keyed up I feel. Lucy had the driver stop at a Starbucks, so I feel slightly more human now. Curiosity is what’s really fueling me. Using a compact mirror, I touch up the makeup that was smudged by our harrowing overnight train ride and smooth my hair. Lucy raises an eyebrow at me but says nothing, and the driver lets us pick songs from his iPod. Not a bad deal, considering he made me waste my cigarette.
A Disturbing Prospect (River Reapers Motorcycle Club Book 1) Page 2
