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When I had one hundred, I knew it was time.
A car horn blares in my ear. I jump, my heart pounding. “Watch where you’re going!”
I look down at my feet and back at the car as it screeches away. I’m standing on the side of the road, next to a solid curb.
I don’t care that they yelled at me or that they beeped their horn. My heart pounds against my rib cage in a frantic staccato because I don’t want to be seen and now everyone is staring at me.
“Hey! How about you watch where you’re fuckin’ going!” I jump and blink, my cheeks hot, at the irate voice of a woman next to me when she flips her middle finger at the retreating car.
We couldn’t look more different. Her hair is strangely short around the base as if she shaved it for the military or something, her eyelids painted a vibrant blue, and her lips as red as cherries. She’s chewing gum, snapping it like it did something to personally offend her. “Jesus,” she mutters. “People should watch what they’re going.” Turning to me, she gives me a sympathetic look. “You come here to sell somethin’ from the Amish store? Didn’t know we were that close to Pennsylvania but I’m shit at geography.”
“We-we’re not,” I stutter. I don’t usually stutter, but my teeth are chattering and a chill runs straight through me. When I left, I brought nothing but the clothes on my back and the small bag I’d packed but left everything else, including a sweater, behind. The chill breeze of a North Carolina sunrise did nothing to warm the air around me.
“So you came all the way up here to sell your Amish stuff?”
I blink. “Uh, no, I don’t have anything to sell.”
She blinks back. Grins. Then throws her head back and laughs as if I just told her the funniest thing she’s ever heard.
“Oh, honey, God am I such a bitch. You look beautiful, don’t listen to a word I said, though it’s too bad youweren’tselling Amish things, their bread’s the best I’ve ever head.”
I still wish I could somehow become invisible, but when she beckons me to come into the bus station with me, my heartbeat begins to slow.
I’ve left behind everything that I knew. I left behind a world of misery and fear, and now that I’m on my own, I have to face reality: There are many things I have no knowledge about, and I’m probably not going to be able to hide it.
“Where you heading?” she asks as we head into the station.
I want to change the subject. I don’t want to talk aboutmeany more than I want anyone looking at me.
“North,” I say vaguely, becauseas far away from here as my money will take mesounds a bit dramatic. “You?”
She grins. “Same. Out of this hell hole, that’s for sure. I’m Quinn. You?”
“Eden.”
“Eden. Well, that’s a new one.”
I watch as a line of people forms in front of me and I realize I have no idea how to buy a ticket. I have a wad of dollar bills and there’s a sign on the wall that has the names of cities I’ve never heard before. I’m assuming the higher the price of the ticket, the further it goes.
As the people begin, one by one, to purchase tickets, panic rises in my chest.
No one has money with them.
Everyone uses a credit card or their phone, but I have neither. Seth always said that mobile phones were the device of the devil and I was never allowed to have one. All credit cards, of course, are in his name. All I have is this wad of bills. It sayslegal tender,though. That counts for something, I’m guessing?
“Girl,” Quinn whispers, snorting under her breath. “Stack of bills like that, I’d think you got tips pole dancing at a strip club, but for some reason, you don’t strike me as the type.”
I’m starting to warm up to her. I feel my lips tip up again. “What gave that away? Was it the glasses or the full-length skirt?”
Quinn blinks, before she throws her head back and laughs out loud.
“Girl, am I dying to know your story, but I don’t pry.”
“You don’t pry,” I repeat, “Why do I have a hard time believing that?”
We’re only two people away from the ticket counter now.
“Ooh, so she not only doesn’t sell me Amish butter and scones, she likes to critique me, eh?” Quinn winks at me. “I don’t prymuch,but I am wondering what a girl like you is doing in a place like this and how you got that money. You flash your ankles to a bunch of hard-up church boys?”
