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EVANGELINE
I wake up to the sound of rain still drumming against the windshield, but the car is no longer in motion. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I glance over to see the woman leaning against the driver’s side door, facing me and eating a protein bar.
She tosses me one without a word and gets out of the car once more. Guess my disco nap is done. My body protests any movement as I crawl over the center console with a yawn.
I keep looking for anything recognizable—a city or town or landmark. Hell, I don't even know what state I'm in. My quiet companion tells me where to turn and when, keeping us on the backroads. She's not looking at a map or her phone, and I can't even begin to guess how the hell she knows where we're going.
The rain has subsided, leaving a dewy mist hovering in the air as I drive us back onto the road. I open the protein bar with my teeth, wincing a little bit when I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror. My mother would be horrified by it. Even in this, she’d expect me to maintain a certain level of decorum, as she liked to say.
I look at the woman next to me, trying to piece together who she might be. What her story is. And maybe where the hell we’re going.
Locks of unruly red waves of hair frame her face, freed from the loose braid tossed over her shoulder. Dark lashes and darker eyes, high cheekbones and full lips pursed into a scowl. I can see it though, the softness that used to be there. She wasn’t always the knife-wielding type, I’d bet my house on it.
"What?" she snaps without looking at me.
"Nothing," I murmur, looking at her and then at the road one more time. "You're just not how I imagined you'd be."
"You're not the only pretty girl around here," she drawls.
My brows furrow. “Why do you keep calling me that? Pretty girl or Hollywood.”
She tips her head back against the headrest. “That’s our worth, isn’t it? Our value lies in our ability to decorate. Arms, events. Families.”
My mind turns over on itself, spooling together like a ball of yarn and trying to piece together the things she's not saying. "Is that who you're running from?"
Her fingernail taps an unsteady rhythm against the barrel of the gun. I honestly don’t know how she’s maintained her vigilance. Though I guess she didn’t crash a car into a ditch or escape through a hidden tunnel or get tossed into a literal gunfight. For all I know, she could’ve just woken up before I saw her at the gas station. Somehow, I doubt it. There’s exhaustion carved into every line of her posture, weighing her down.
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, pretty girl. A wall of degrees couldn’t help me, so it’s not really worth your time,” she says.
I clear my throat. "Evangeline."
"What?" she asks, but it's a slow drawl of the word. Like she's unwilling to further this conversation.
"My name is Evangeline."
She laughs then, this low, raspy bark of humorless laughter. "Of fucking course it is."
"Are you going to tell me yours?" I hedge.
“Not a chance in hell. This isn’t a sleepover and we’re not braiding each other’s hair. This is a one-way ticket away from your panty-snatcher. That’s it.”
I shift a little in my seat, my jean shorts stiff and stuck to my skin like damp papier-mâché. The seat warmer has been great for warmth but not for drying clothes. Either my skin feels irritated from sitting in wet clothes for hours or the bush I squatted over when I peed an hour ago was really poison ivy.
I nod a few times. “You ever had poison ivy before?”
She gives me a long look. “Do I look like the outdoorsy type to you?”
I lift a shoulder. “I don’t really know you, so it’s hard to say.”
“No one does,” she murmurs. “Slow down a little. Your stop is almost here.”
Hope leaps into my throat, quick and heavy as it lands on my tongue. I lean forward in my seat as I peer out of the windshield. "Are we close to Rosewood?"
“I wouldn’t know. But this is your stop,” she says, gesturing toward a green sign on the side of the road for a rest stop in five miles.
I flex my fingers on the steering wheel, my hands clammy with nerves. My gaze bounces from her to the rearview mirror to the windshield to her to the side mirror and back to the windshield. “Can I please use your phone? What if that guy followed us from the gas station?”
“Nah, we would’ve seen his headlights during the night,” she says, her red hair swishing when she shakes her head.
