Page 14 of Finding Noah

Dad with his gun.

The boy, shaking in a corner.

“Are you okay, Noah?” Jason's mom asked.

I looked up at her again and forced myself to nod. “Yeah, I'm okay.”

“Are you sure?”

Dad sighed, and I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to tell her not to make Dad mad. I wanted to tell her how mean he was when he was mad. I wanted to tell her all the terrible things he had done to Mom—the things I had seen and the things I hadn't—and that if she made him mad, he might do those things to her too.

But I didn't do any of that.

Instead, I smiled and nodded. “Yep.”

I looked at Jason and said, “Thanks for the Doritos. I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see ya,” Jason replied, but he wasn't looking at me when he said it.

He was looking at Dad.

He was looking at him as if he'd never seen a big, mean man before in his life, and you know what? That was probably true.

Because some kids … kids like Jason …

They had been born lucky.

But Jason and I were different in so, so many ways, and that had all started when I was born to the bogeyman.

***

“Where's Mom?” I asked the moment we drove away from the school.

Dad said nothing as he drove his truck through the happy, sunshiny streets of River Canyon.

I loved this town. I loved the people here. They were friendly, and they remembered my name. They made Mom and me feel like we had a place here, like we'd always belonged. But now, I saw them on the sidewalks, glaring angrily at Dad's noisy truck.

He wasn't welcome, and he didn't fit.

We hadn’t run far enough.

Dad turned a corner onto the highway just on the outskirts of town, then made another right into the trailer park we lived in—or community, as the people in town called it. He sped through the narrow, winding rows of little houses, until he came to Daffodil Lane.

The truck lurched as he slammed on the brakes in front of 1109, the house Mom and I lived in.

He barely missed crashing into her car.

She's home.

My brow crumpled as I worried my bottom lip between my teeth.

She forgot about me?

Dad climbed out of the truck, rounded the hood, and threw my door open. “Out.”

“What did you do to Mom?”

He reached inside, grabbed my backpack from my lap, and threw it onto the walkway to the porch. “I said,” he grumbled through gritted teeth, “get out.”