I nodded, unmoved by her predicament.
“I’d give anything, anything, if only I could get away and go live with Ashton,” she said, her voice wailing monotonously up and down like a bagpipes player practicing scales. “He doesn’t know I’m leaving, and they took my phone away from me so I can’t talk to him. They wouldn’t even let me say good-bye to him.”
“So, why don’t you leave?” I asked. “When you get to your cousin’s, you could call him, couldn’t you? Then you could take a bus back, or he could come get you.”
“No!” She was getting petulant. “Because if I ran away, they’d know it. My aunt and uncle would call my parents, and they’d start searching for me. I’m only sixteen. We wouldn’t be allowed to get married or anything. My dad is standing over me like a creepy old vulture, ready to watch me walk onto that plane. And then my aunt is waiting like another vulture at the other end to grab me the second I walk off the plane. There is no escape.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. This female was beginning to bore me. My eyes strayed across the crowded room, looking for another empty seat. There wasn’t one.
So, suck it up, Blondie, I thought. A hot, damp hand closed on my wrist.
“It’s HIM!”
“Him who?”
“Him! Ashton! Oh, isn’t he the most beautiful guy you’ve ever seen?”
I looked where she was looking, my eyes narrowing. Leather jacket, curly hair, short, muscular body. Definitely several years older than his girlfriend—in his twenties, I’d say. I could see why Mom and Dad wanted to ship Blondie out of state. The guy was definitely hot. Truth was, she didn’t deserve him.
“Not bad,” I conceded. “You’re a little young for him, aren’t you? I’m surprised your parents don’t just sic the cops on him.”
“They’re threatening to! That’s the only reason I agreed to go away. But now he’s found out I’m leaving, and he’s come for me! I’ll never get away with my dad here. You have to help me! You have to!” She was still hanging on to my wrist, half looking imploringly at me, half looking at Ashton.
I was looking at her hand on my wrist, about to pry her fingers off one by one, but all the same, my mind had begun to churn. Was there something in this for me? “What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know! You seem really smart. I know you can help me. Oh, Ashton! He doesn’t see me!”
“Stop waving at him,” I snapped, irritated. “Don’t try to attract his attention or call him over here, you dope, or your father will come out of the men’s room and see him. I’ll go talk to him and get him to lay low. Don’t let anybody else sit in my seat, including your father. Now get your hands off me.”
Reluctantly she let go. I rose and went to talk to Ashton, who was scanning the crowded room, looking in exactly the wrong direction. He was cute, all right, but possibly not very smart.
“Hey,” I said when I got close. “Don’t look now, but your girlfriend is behind you, about a hundred feet— Hey! I said, don’t look! Her father’s here somewhere too.”
“Who’re you?” He was chewing gum with his mouth open, looking me over.
“A friend. A friend who’s going to fix everything so that you two lovebirds can be together. Only, are you sure you want her? ’Cause she seems like more trouble than she’s worth.”
He went on chewing, giving himself a long moment to think this through. “You mean Janelle? Sure I want her. We’re in love.”
“Okay, fine, just checking,” I said. Yeah, he was dumb. Too bad. Still, nobody could say I didn’t give him a chance to back out. “Here, c’mon over where we can talk without your future father-in-law seeing us.” I motioned him behind a big cement pillar. “Sit down here. Don’t move,” I said, speaking in short, easy-to-understand sentences. “Wait until Janelle comes for you. We’re going to convince Janelle’s father that she got on the plane. After he leaves, you and Janelle can too.”
He chewed his gum for a while longer. “Okay, I guess. Tell Janelle we can go stay at my uncle’s fishing cabin in the mountains. It’s on a little lake and it’s real pretty this time of year. My uncle doesn’t go there after the last week of July.”
“Fine,” I said. “But remember! Sit quietly here until Janelle comes up to you. That’s when it’ll be safe to show yourself. And it could be a while, so be patient.”
“Uh-huh.” He sat down obediently, and I wound my way back through the crowd to Janelle.
“Oh, did you talk to him? What did he say? Is he upset?”
“Seemed okay to me,” I said. “You and he are going to have a honeymoon at his uncle’s fishing cabin if I can manage it.”
“Oh, how romant—”
“Keep your voice down. When does your flight leave?”
The tears welled up again. “In forty minutes! I have to go through security any second. Oh! Here comes my dad!”
“Fine. Excellent. Go tell your father you’re going to the ladies’ room and you’ll meet him at security when they call the flight.”
“Oh, but . . . shouldn’t I be on the way through security now?”
“Not if you want to catch fish with Ashton, you shouldn’t. You have to wait until the last minute. Your father wouldn’t go looking for you in the ladies’ room, would he? Or at least not until he thought you were about to miss the flight?”
She giggled a little. “Not even then,” she said. “My dad is kind of a prude.”
“Okay, then. We’re in business. Go tell him. Then get to the restroom over there in the far corner. I’ll be inside.”
“But—there’s a closer one, nearer to the security checkpoint.”
“Exactly. You are not going to that one, but if you want to suggest to your dad that you are, like by pointing in that direction, that’d be fine. He’ll be expecting you to be coming from there instead of from way back there, see?”
Janelle looked bewildered.
“Just do it. Point at the ladies’ room near the checkpoint, and then kind of sidle around back to the other one. I’ll be waiting for you there.” I got up and left. Either she’d do it or she wouldn’t. I’d wait for ten minutes.
The ladies’ room was crowded, but there was a bench near the mirror and I sat down.
Two minutes later she pushed through the door. “Oh, he’s so mad! He wanted me to go through security, like, immediately. He said I could use the ladies’ room in the gate area or on the plane. I said I had to go really, really—”
“Good. Now get into a stall and take off your clothes down to your underwear.”
“What?”
“We’re going to change clothes, dummy. I’ll take your place on the plane, and you wait here until the flight has taken off and your father has gone home. Then you go find Ashton, see?”
“But—”
“But nothing. It’ll work. We’re the same height. We’re both blondes. You’ve got a scarf around your neck that I’ll wear on my head. I’m going to come running out of here at the last minute, wave to your father, and disappear into the security zone. Got it?”
“Oh, but . . . but what about when you get there, when you get to Albany? My aunt and uncle will be waiting for me.”
“When’s the last time you saw them?”
She wrinkled up her face, thinking. “Um . . . I think when I was about seven? Yeah. We went to stay with them for a week one summer. It’s kind of outside of a small city—not like Los Angeles.”
“Perfect. You’ve changed since you were seven.”
She looked at me critically. “Your eyes are a deeper blue than mine,” she said.
“Contact lenses,” I said.
“You weigh maybe fifteen pounds less than I do. I’m curvier.”
“So I’ve been on a diet.” Actually, it was more like twenty-five pounds.
“My mom might have sent photographs—”
“Look, none of this is a problem. I’ll disappear as soon as I get there. They’ll never see me and I won’t see them. Go on, get in there and start handing over
your clothes. When I’m not waiting for them at the airport, and they do start looking for you, they’ll see by the passenger list that you traveled on that flight but slipped away before they spotted you. So they’ll be looking from there, not LA, see?”
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “I guess so.”
In the end we got adjoining toilet stalls, so it was easy to hand blouses and jeans under the partition wall. Eventually we emerged and looked at each other. We laughed.
“Not too bad,” I said.
“I guess,” she said. “We are a lot alike.”
“It’ll work from a distance, anyway,” I said. “I just can’t let your father see me up close, that’s all.”
She opened her mouth to wail about something or other, but the announcer came on, talking about her flight. She gasped. “Go! They’re calling my plane!”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I said. “This is the first time they’ve announced it. We’re waiting until the last minute, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Okay.”
“I need your ticket. Oh, and some identification.”
Janelle fished the ticket out of her purse. This she handed over without hesitation but was less happy about the ID.
“My learner’s permit!” she mourned. “I waited so long to get it!”
“You’ll have to assume a new identity anyway,” I pointed out. “You couldn’t have used it.”
“Yeah, well. I guess.”
“What do you call your father? Dad? Daddy? Popsie?”
“Dad, of course. Are you going now?”
“In ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes! You’ll miss it!”
“No I won’t. I run fast.” I sat down and pulled out a magazine from my carry-on luggage. As I leafed through it, Janelle fidgeted. I could tell she was mentally pushing me out the bathroom door, whispering Go! Go! in her head.
A woman came in and laid a squalling baby on the changing table. She cooed at the kid in an unsuccessful attempt to make it stop shrieking while she wiped its dirty butt. I turned a menacing stare onto the infant, and it hushed abruptly. You’d think the woman would have been grateful, but she got huffy, bundled the kid back up, and left, shooting resentful looks in my direction.
Janelle kept checking her watch and sighing.
At last I got up and said, “Well, it’s been nice knowing you. Better hang on for another half hour in here. For all you know, your dad might wait to see the plane actually leave.” Not that I particularly cared about Janelle and Ashton’s future, but I didn’t want Janelle’s family calling ahead to have me detained as I walked off the plane. I was hoping we could pull this off so I’d have some breathing room for a few days until I decided what to do next.
I held the ticket and learner’s permit in one hand and my carry-on in the other—I realized that I was going to lose my big suitcase, checked in for Phoenix—and shot out of the ladies’ room, plowing into a bevy of flight attendants.
“Gangway! Coming through,” I yelled. I scanned the area for Janelle’s father. Yep, there he was, looking anxiously at his watch and peering nervously in through the door of the other ladies’ room. I bellowed “Dad! I’ve got to run,” waved frantically—taking care to keep my threshing hand in front of my face—and bolted past him, pounding through the rope line in front of security. I thrust my ticket and ID at the agent, gasping, “I’m gonna miss it! Please hurry!”
She took one quick look at the photo, one quick, irritated look at me, and then processed the ticket.
“Better not cut it so close next time, young lady,” she called after me as I raced toward the scanner machines. The flight attendant looked pretty annoyed as I flung myself in through the door to the airplane, but she helped me to my seat and stowed my carry-on for me.
Almost immediately after I sat down the door shut and the engines started humming. The plane slowly eased out of its position against the gate and began to taxi toward the runway.
And off I went.
3
“ARE YOU JANELLE? WELL, YOU must be. You look exactly like your picture. And of course I’m your cousin Brooke. It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other; I bet I look totally different from what you remember, right?”
“Sure,” I said. She was another blue-eyed blonde like me and Janelle, on the plump side. And as dim as her cousin, if she thought I looked exactly like a picture of Janelle. No aunt or uncle in sight, so I guess she got sent alone to pick me up at the airport.
Why was I even talking to her, you ask? Yeah, I know I said I’d disappear once I got to Albany, but I changed my mind. So sue me.
“Sorry I’m late,” she prattled on, “but the traffic was awful. Don’t we need to go to the baggage claim to get your luggage?” she asked, tagging along like a little duckling as I rode down the escalator. I shook my head and held up my carry-on bag. “You mean that little thing is all you’ve got? Well, I’m glad you’re not one of those girls who needs to travel with a whole shopping mall full of clothing changes and makeup. Still, I don’t think I could move across the country for a whole two years with only one little carry-on. If you want, we can go shopping before school starts. I already got my fall wardrobe, but if you need to get some things, I’ll be happy to do it over again with you.”
I opened my mouth to respond but was forestalled.
“I’m crazy about airports, aren’t you?” my newfound cousin asked, gazing around, wide-eyed, as she chattered. “There’re always good-looking boys at the airport. And I love watching the people, especially families who’ve been separated. Military families, you know? The mom or the dad has been overseas in danger—they could have died, or come home missing a leg or something—and the spouse and the kids are so excited and so relieved to see them alive and okay. They’re really happy to see each other. It makes you feel better about humanity, I always think. Oh, look at that little girl—how sweet! Isn’t she darling?”
I looked where she was pointing, at a particularly foul specimen of beribboned and beruffled toddlerhood, who seemed to be having a meltdown in the lounge area.
“Mmm,” I said, and followed the Babbling Brooke out into the August heat.
“Right this way. This is the parking garage. Well, of course.” She giggled. “What else would it be? An ugly hotel, I guess. This airport is pretty small, probably, after what you’re used to. I always park kind of far back because I’m afraid my car will get scratched. Aggressive drivers tend to park up front, that’s what they say.” She sucked in some oxygen to fuel the next gush of words as we approached a little green convertible.
“It’s a Miata roadster. My car, I mean. I’ve wanted one my whole life ever since I saw one as, like, a baby. I saved up my money for years and years, but of course my father paid for most of it. It was used, but it’s in perfect condition. I wash and wax it every Saturday. Or Sunday, if it’s raining or something on Saturday. There’s a car wash just outside our neighborhood so it’s easy even in bad weather. But if it’s nice out, I like to do it in the driveway. Do you have your driver’s license yet? No, you probably don’t. You’re six months younger than me, and lots of people take a couple of tries to pass.”
I managed to insert four words into the stream of verbiage: “I have my permit.” Of course, I didn’t actually have my permit, but I had Janelle’s, so what’s the difference?
“Oh great, but probably you won’t be able to drive my car because it’s a stick shift. It’s not like I wouldn’t let you if you could drive stick shift, but you can’t, can you?” Here she actually paused for my response.
“No,” I admitted.
“Oh good. Well, not ‘good,’ of course. But I admit I was a little teeny bit worried. Because I love my car so much. I’m sure you understand.”
“I’m an exceptionally good driver,” I said. This was not quite true. My parents flatly refused to let me touch the steering wheel of their little tin-can car until I had a permit (and they kept the keys under close supervision), so I had zero driving
experience. But I figured that possession of Janelle’s permit entitled me to claim her experience. Why shouldn’t she be a good driver? “I could learn to drive stick shift,” I added, regarding the little car with interest. “I’ll bet this baby can go really fast.”
“Oh! Well . . . we’ll see. Maybe you could try driving the SUV first. Actually, I drive slower in the Miata than I do in the SUV. It’s so low to the ground, it makes you feel like you’re going a lot faster.”
“Seems like kind of a waste of a sports car, doesn’t it? If it were mine, I’d want to push it to the limit, so I knew how much power it had.”
Brooke fell silent for the first time in our twenty-minute acquaintance, no doubt seeing visions of crushed and mangled roadster before her eyes. I settled into the passenger seat as she lifted my carry-on into the trunk.
She didn’t speak again until we were on the highway, zipping along with the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces. Oh yeah, I could get used to this form of transport. The most notable thing about the scenery whizzing past was that it was green: yellow green, moss green, blue green—more greens than in an L.L.Bean catalog. At home things are brown and olive, mostly. And the air felt different; kind of moist and balmy.
“Um, so, Janelle—”
“Morgan,” I corrected absentmindedly, watching how she moved her feet on the pedals, trying to fathom the mysteries of driving stick.
“What?”
“Oh,” I said, resurfacing. “Um, I mean, I’ve decided that I hate that name. It’s so stupid-sounding.” Which is nothing but the truth. Janelle? Give me a break. “I always wanted to be called ‘Morgan,’ so I figured this would be the right time to make the change, moving to a new place and all.” My parents did give me one thing I liked: my name.
“Oh wow, really? ‘Morgan’? It almost sounds like a guy’s name.”
“Sometimes it is,” I said. “It’s unisex.” I like that about it. It sounds strong, a little tough. Like me.
“Well, okay . . . Morgan. Anyway, I hear your mom and dad are trying to break up your romance,” she said. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but if you do, I can sympathize. What happened?”
Don't You Trust Me? Page 2
