AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Your best friends are siblings?”
I nodded. Occasionally, people had commented on this over the years. Was it strange/Was I closer to one of them than the other/Did I ever feel left out? And I never knew how to explain that it had always just worked, from the very first seventh-grade lunch period. And knowing Didi and Katy as I now did, I could see how it worked for them, too. That they were so close that someone who was only friends with one of them would have fractured them in some fundamental way. “They’re twins. Identical.”
“That must be fun.”
“It really is.” He gave me a smile and I drew in a breath, like I was preparing for all the questions I wanted to ask him. Because I wanted to know it all. Where he was from, and what his middle name was, and what his go-to pizza topping was, and what he’d wanted to be when he was five, and what he wanted to be now. I wanted to know everything. I got a sudden flash of a huge undiscovered country in the distance, just waiting to be explored, beckoning me.
Russell lifted the tent bag and crossed to the first bench, then slid it underneath. “What do you think? Feel safe enough?”
I nodded, and pushed my duffel underneath as well. After all, there were only three people here, and I couldn’t imagine any of them stealing my stuff. And even if they did—they had no place to go with it. That was what had landed us all here in the first place. I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder—practically empty except for my Nighthawks sweatshirt, my sunglasses, half a granola bar, and my tiny toiletry bag.
“Do you want to put your stuff here too?” I asked. I looked around, but the only thing where he’d been sitting was a small black backpack
“I’m okay,” Russell said as he crossed over to it and slung it on his back. As he did, his black T-shirt rose up a little, giving me a flash of his stomach, making my mouth go suddenly dry.
“That’s really all you have?” I was trying to make the backpack make sense. I’d packed as lightly as I could—despite Romy bugging me about what I was packing in the run-up to the festival, texting me constantly about what I was bringing—but I still hadn’t been able to do anything smaller than my duffel bag.
“Yeah. I… um…” He dropped his eyes to the tile floor and took a breath. “I had a fight with the guy I came to Silverspun with. I didn’t want to head back with him, so I just took my bag and got on the bus.”
“I had a similar thing! Romy, the girl I was at the festival with, headed off to Palm Springs with some people she’d met to ‘keep the party going.’ ” Russell made a face at that, which reflected pretty much the way I’d felt when I heard Romy say it, and I laughed. It was kind of crazy that we had both washed up here in similar circumstances. It felt like it was more than a coincidence. Was it a sign?
It’s totally a sign! Katy enthused.
A sign of what? Didi asked skeptically. Maybe Sunburn Head was also ditched by his friends. Want to go hang out with him?
Ignore her, Katy said. It means something. It totally does.
“Sorry about your friend.”
Russell took a breath, like he was going to say something, but then let it out and just smiled at me. “It’s okay,” he said, his eyes finding mine and holding them. “In fact, right now I’m kind of grateful to him.”
Heat crept into my cheeks, but I made myself keep looking right at him. “Me too,” I said, then realized that didn’t make any sense. “I mean, I’m grateful to my person. At the festival… who left…” My voice trailed off. “Anyway. Ready to go?”
He nodded and crossed to the door of the bus station and held it open for me. “After you.”
I tried not to swoon at that—Didi was always talking about how straight girls were far too impressed by things that should just be baseline manners—but I also couldn’t help noticing how nice his arms were, his biceps and forearms and large hands holding the door open. I glanced back for just a second at the bus station—my stuff stashed under the bench, the bald guy still snoring, the couple and their movie. The girl gave me a look that clearly said Go for it! and I smiled at her.
I tried to freeze the moment for just a second, pause it for posterity. Because I was pretty sure this was when everything started happening. This was Jesse and Céline getting off the train together, Tony and Maria ducking under the bleachers, Jack and Rose taking a turn around the deck. The moment that everything started to change.
I took a breath. And then I stepped forward, out of the bus station, into the Nevada afternoon—ready for our story to begin.
CHAPTER 3 Sunday
5:05 P.M.
It was still warm outside, but not too hot. It was August in Nevada, but we were north enough that we weren’t getting true desert heat—it had been warm during the days at the festival, but it had gotten really cold at night. The second the sun had gone down, the temperature had dropped, so much so that I’d been grateful for Romy’s insulated sleeping bags and ended up sleeping in a long-sleeved T-shirt both nights.
“Well,” Russell said, turning in a circle. “Huh.”
I followed suit, looking around. I could see now—in a way I hadn’t been able to tell from the highway—that Jesse must be in some kind of basin or valley. Because we were surrounded on three sides by mountains. They were dotted with green trees—and just looking at them, you could imagine, not too long from now, when they would be white-capped and covered with snow. We’d been able to see some mountains in the distance at the festival—but it was nothing like this.
But despite how gorgeous the scenery was, this didn’t translate to the area outside the bus station. We were at the end of a paved road—I could see the highway just over some fencing, cars zipping by on it. The station had a parking lot with a few scraggly trees planted in the medians between the rows of painted lines. Across from us was a Mobil, and I was momentarily hopeful that we might be able to find a charger there before I realized that there were weeds growing around the pumps, and that the little mini-mart was boarded up. This clearly hadn’t been a functioning gas station in a while.
“What do you think?”
I looked and saw that Russell had walked over to a brown sign that read VISIT JESSE, NEVADA! And then in smaller letters under it, PROSPECTING MUSEUM! HISTORIC DOWNTOWN!
“I think whoever made this sign really likes their exclamation points.”
