Page 7

She didn't have a destination. North was just…away, and away was all she needed.

The first week she slept in the backseat under every blanket she owned and ate gas station candy bars for dinner. She drew in her sketchbook by the light of her phone. Dark things. Girls with their mouths open and nothing coming out. Roses that looked like wrists that bled. Hands reaching from nowhere, grabbing at nothing. She filled twelve pages in seven days and they were the most honest work she'd ever done and she hated every one of them.

The second week the heater died somewhere in New Mexico — just gave up mid-rattle, a long mechanical sigh; silence, then cold. Real cold that got into the sleeping bag and settled into her bones. Cold that got into the dreams she couldn't stop having. She started wearing all her clothes at once. Stopped at truck stop bathrooms when she could. Watched as her money inevitably dwindled.

Forty-seven dollars became thirty and thirty became twelve.

She hadn't eaten a real meal in four days when she crossed into Wyoming with eight dollars and forty-two cents and a stomach that had stopped hurting and started feeling like nothing at all, which was somehow worse.

She saw the rest stop from the highway with fluorescent lights in the dark, a row of semis idling. She pulled in because the gas gauge was dipping toward E and she needed to think, needed to sit somewhere that wasn't moving while she figured out what to do next.

She sat in the Jeep for twenty minutes. Counted what she had. Counted what she needed. Arrived at the same answer she'd been avoiding for days.

There were truckers at the rest stop in tired, solitary, semis - engines idling in the dark. She'd seen them look at her before at previous stops. Understood what the looks meant. She'd understood that since she was twelve years old and her body had decided to become something that got looked at. Time had only made it worse. Her breasts were large and heavy, her hips flared out like she was some stupid Paleolithic fertility goddess, and her ass drew eyes she'd never asked for and couldn't escape.

She'd spent years hiding it under black hoodies with angry words. The goth armor that was supposed to make people afraid enough to keep their distance.

It hadn't always worked. It didn't work now.

She checked herself in the rearview mirror. Dark circles under eyes that were too blue for her face, too vivid, and full of pain.

The space buns she'd put her hair into three days ago were half-collapsed, lavender-gray streaks falling loose around her jaw. Her septum ring caught the parking lot light. The black eyeliner she'd applied yesterday or the day before — she'd lost track — had smudged under her eyes into something that looked almost intentional. Her lips were chapped under the last remnants of dark plum lipstick she'd bought at a gas station in Colorado, practically empty now, almost gone like everything else.

She looked exactly like what she was. A girl who'd been living in her car for four weeks. A girl who was out of options.

She pulled her oversized hoodie tighter across her chest — a useless gesture, it never actually hid anything — and got out of the Jeep.

The trucker was maybe fifty, heavyset, a face like a road that had been driven too hard for too long. He'd been watching her since she pulled in. When she walked toward him he didn't look surprised. Just shifted his weight against the side of his cab, let his eyes do what men's eyes did…the slow drag downward, taking inventory. She watched him register the sleeve of black roses climbing her left arm, the septum ring, the smudged liner, and dismiss it all as irrelevant. The armor never worked on men like this.

You hungry? he asked.

She wanted to punch him in his balls and spit at him. Instead she nodded.

He looked her over one more time — slower this time, deliberate, as if he was checking something he was considering buying. His eyes moved from her face down to her chest, where the hoodie pulled tight no matter how she wore it, and stayed there long enough to make the point.

“Pretty girl like you,” he said. “I'll buy you a hot meal and give you forty bucks cash.” He tilted his head toward the cab. “All you gotta do is get on your knees in there and finish me off. Deepthroat if you can manage it.” He said it the way someone orders coffee — bored, routine, no particular malice. Just a man who'd made this offer enough times that the words had gone smooth from use. “Shouldn't take long. You look like you know what you're doing.”

She stood in the cold and felt her brain do the math with the horrible efficiency she'd developed over four weeks of survival. Food. Forty dollars. That was nearly a full tank of gas. That was three more days.

She knew what she was considering. She knew exactly what it meant — not just what he'd do to her but what she'd be doing. Maybe more than anyone, she knew what it would cost.

Life had taken everything else. Her childhood. Her safety. Her mother — both of them, in different ways. But this, the choosing of it, the will of it — Rick had stolen everything around it and never quite gotten to the center.

She was about to hand it to a stranger for forty dollars and a plate of eggs.

“You coming?” he asked.

She followed him to the passenger side. He opened the door.

She put her foot on the running board. Reached up and gripped the door frame. The cab interior was dark and smelled like fast food and stale air, the seat worn shiny, a pair of cheap sunglasses on the dash.

And Rick was on the other side of the window.

Not real. She knew immediately — knew it was her own exhausted mind, her brain making its last argument in the only language she'd ever understood, which was terror. But there he was anyway, rendered in perfect detail because she'd spent six years memorizing every line of him, leaning back against the passenger seat with that specific loose-limbed ease he had when he'd already decided how the night was going to go. That smile. Those eyes.

Family takes care of each other.

Then she let go of the door frame and stepped back off the running board onto the asphalt. The trucker said, “hey” and then, “hey, come on” and she was already walking, then running, across the parking lot with her heart in her throat and her boots loud on the pavement and her hands shaking so badly she dropped the keys twice before she got the Jeep open. She got in. Locked it. Pressed her forehead to the steering wheel.