Full Ride (26 page)

And how many thousands of talented computer experts work for Excellerand?

“Even if they find us,” I say weakly. “What do you really think they'd do?”

Mom squares her shoulders, bracing her back against the wall. The expression on her face makes me think of a doctor preparing to tell a patient his illness is fatal.

“Some of the new information the prosecutors found,” she begins, “was about two men who worked for Excellerand, who got fed up and wanted to go to the authorities and tell them everything. One of those men died in a car crash. The other—his house burned to the ground. With his two-year-old son inside. Then he vanished. I guess . . . I guess he still had another son he wanted to protect.”

Mom lifts her face to me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. She gives a bitter laugh.

“The irony is, being in prison means your daddy's safe. Excellerand can't do anything to him directly,” she says. “We're the only ones they can use to get him to retract his story, to get him to refuse to testify.”

I see now why she's acted so terrified the past three years. Ever since the drive to Ohio, ever since the radio report about where we were supposedly going. Ever since we would have been exposed if Daddy's attorney hadn't planned ahead and switched the U-Haul trailers.

I don't want the burden of all that terror myself.

“Everything
might
come out within the next couple months,” Mom says. “And then Excellerand couldn't do anything to us. They'd have no reason to, because everything would be out in the open. We'd be safe again. We could tell anyone anything we felt like telling. You could apply to any college you wanted, try for all the financial aid and scholarships you need . . .”

I flash back to that stupid note Mom left the day I talked to Mrs. Congreves, when Mom said she'd work lots of overtime or take a second job to pay for my college. This is what was behind that note. Mom knows I can't afford college without help. She was just trapped: She didn't want to tell me about Excellerand, but she wanted me to keep believing college is possible.

Only, it actually isn't. Not right now.

“You don't think everything's going to work that way,” I say, because I know that's coming. I can hear it in her voice. “You don't think the charges against Excellerand will be revealed that fast. We'll have to wait—how much longer?”

Longer than it would take for what I told Mr. Court to find its way to Excellerand?

Mom shakes her head.

“It wouldn't be the end of the world if you had to wait an extra year before college, would it?” Mom asks. She's trying so hard. “After everything else you've been through, what's another year? Lots of kids
want
a gap year after high school. By next year surely everything will be taken care of and you'll be able to apply to college then.”

I can see by Mom's face how much she wants to believe this fantasy. How much she wants me to agree, “Oh, yes, Mommy, what a wonderful idea. Another year of limbo wouldn't matter at all. You're right—we can be sure everything will end after another year. Thank you for keeping me safe.”

But this scenario is just as much of an illusion as the past three years. I've
never
been safe. I just thought I was.

“Oh, right, so I don't have to wait until I'm twenty-four to start my life,” I say sarcastically. “Just until I'm nineteen. And then—who knows?—maybe things could stretch out another year and I'd ‘just' have to wait until I was twenty. Or twenty-one. Or twenty-two. And by then, who am I? Someone who's been buried alive for seven or eight years instead of three. I might as well be in prison
with
Daddy!”

“Becca, please . . . ,” Mom murmurs.

I jump up, too twitchy to keep sitting on the same bed with Mom. To have anything in common with someone who's so ineffectual and helpless and willing to sit around and wait. I tower over her now.

“It's too late for ‘please,' ” I hiss. ‘Because, guess what? I already ruined everything. I
already
applied for my first college scholarship. I had the interview today. And I blew it. You want to know why? Because I didn't know all your secrets. Because I thought I could save myself by admitting who I am!”

Mom stares at me. I can pinpoint the exact moment when she understands. She falls back against the wall. Her face seems to dissolve—who knows if it's because of her despair or the tears gathering in my own eyes? There is only one other time I've seen her so instantly gray skinned and dead eyed and desolate, and that time it was Daddy's fault, when he was arrested.

I am back to being unable to look at her.

I spin on my heel and run away.

There's nowhere to go.

I have been hiding in Deskins for three years now, and it's never occurred to me how open all my hiding places are. I hide at the school and the library and Riggoli's, and all those places are crawling with people. I'm out the front door of our apartment in a flash, but even as I jerk the door shut behind me, I can see kids in the school parking lot across the street. Marching band practice is ending, the sunshine glinting from a tuba here, the rim of a bass drum there. Any minute now someone I know will spot me and shout a greeting or a question—maybe Stuart asking how my Court scholarship interview went, maybe Clarice asking what I'm doing for my next AP lit essay . . .

I sprint around the side of the apartment building and run deeper into the complex.

There's a narrow swath of trees at the back of the property—two or three spindly pines, a few oaks and maples in their last gasp of autumn glory before cold, deadly winter.

Probably all the other trees were cut down to make Whispering
Pines Apartments,
I think, because, oh, am I ever cynical now; oh, am I ever certain there's nothing but deception and destruction and despair in the world.

Still, I'm grateful for what few trees there are, and I crash into their midst. My eyes are too blurred to see straight, and I slip in some mud—no, actually a tiny stream trickling through the dead leaves. Who knew this was back here?

I sniff, bringing a sickly sweet odor to my nose. I hold my breath for an instant and listen—yes, there are voices coming from a clump of trees just upstream from me.

Pot smokers' paradise,
I think.
I guess a lot of people know about this place.

I think I recognize some of the voices: Tyler Marco from lit class, maybe, and isn't that Ashley Stevens, who was so mean to me at the Court scholarship interviews?

That's just great, Ashley,
I think.
You go from telling the Courts how much you deserve a scholarship to crouching in mud a half hour later smoking pot? I should turn you in!

But I know I won't. I'm not my father. I don't believe I can make up for my own mistakes by busting anyone else.

Also, if Ashley and Tyler are smoking pot together, then they're not alone, like I am. And I don't want anyone to see how I have nobody left. I've lost or left behind my father, my mother, my friends in Georgia, my friends here . . .

I follow the little trickle of water downstream, and I'm hoping for thicker and thicker woods, more trees to hide in. Somehow I end up in downtown Deskins instead. I creep under a bridge I've never noticed before on Main Street; I press my back flat against mossy, crumbling stones.

Rundown old Deskins,
I think.
Hiding under glitzy new Deskins.

What if everything that's shiny and gleaming and beautiful
has something nasty and disgusting and evil at its core?

Like Daddy's wealth, like Excellerand's success, like Stuart said—cheating is the only way to win?

That's not exactly what Stuart said, but I'm not thinking clearly enough to dissect it.

Sometimes things start out great and then turn rotten,
I think.
Like how Whitney Court's life went, like how mine used to be so happy . . .

If Daddy was a lying crook before I was even born, what was my happiness ever worth? Was there ever any truth in it?

It's too awful to think these thoughts alone. I want somebody to talk to, Rosa or Oscar or Jala or Clarice, but they're all such good people, and I would be the rot that contaminates them. Even Stuart . . . Stuart talks tough, but compared to the evil I'm facing—people wanting to kill me—Stuart is a Sunday school choirboy.

None of this is my fault, either,
I tell myself.
I'm just the innocent victim. Like how Whitney Court didn't do anything wrong. It's not her fault she went crazy. It just happened.

There's something wrong with this comparison, but I can't figure it out. Not when my back is pressed against filthy, mossy stone. Not when the bridge above me rattles every time a car drives over it, which is approximately every other second, because this is rush hour and everyone in glitzy new Deskins is going home to their safe, happy homes.

Not me,
I think.

At least nobody could find me under this bridge. Not my mother, not my friends, not any Excellerand-hired assassins. I'm not like Mom—
I
wouldn't sit cowering indecisively in the apartment until somebody showed up to kill me.

But Mom actually might.

This thought sears me. It makes me jump so violently, I scrape my back on the stone.

This is the difference between me and Whitney Court,
I think.
She's limited, but she still seems to be trying to do the best she can with what she has.
She
wanted to help me. But I left my own mother behind in danger . . . danger that I made worse. . . .

I jump up and start scrambling back along the stream, back toward Whispering Pines. It's not like I think Excellerand would already have found out what I told Mr. Court and instantly dispatched assassins who were conveniently located right outside Deskins. But I run as though I believe that.

I crash through the streambed, throwing up clumps of mud with every step. When I get the first whiff of sickly sweet pot, I veer to the right and stumble into the Whispering Pines parking lot. I zigzag around the buildings and am paranoid enough to press my back against the wall of my own apartment building before turning the last corner. I peek around toward my own door: The sidewalk out front is deserted. Mine is just one vacant, blank door in a row of many. I listen: There are no screams or dying gasps.

But I do hear a car engine in the parking lot, speeding out toward the street. I turn my head and peek out farther. I catch a glimpse of gray metal in the dying sunlight.

It's my mother's car, driving away.

Is she running away and leaving me behind?
I wonder.
Or going out to search for me?

I flip back and forth between these two possibilities a dozen times in an instant. My feet make their own decision: I dash after the car.

“Mom!” I scream. “Mom! I'm sorry!”

Even if I could run well, I'd be no match for a speeding car. I run and run and run, and still the car disappears into the distance.

I guess for once Mom isn't glancing at her rearview mirror. She isn't looking behind her.

Or she is, and doesn't care.

Those thoughts—and the possibility of assassins—make it impossible for me to go back to our apartment to wait for her to come back (if she's coming back). Somehow I can't even bear to go see if she's packed up and taken her things from the apartment.

I keep running. There's nowhere to go, but I keep running anyway.

Is this how Daddy felt all those years ago?
I wonder.
He fought with his family, he ran away, he just wanted to be somebody else? With a different life?

I pace my thoughts to the pounding of my feet against the sidewalk. And for a moment I can imagine doing this myself: disappearing, going somewhere new, taking on a new identity . . .

It wouldn't be that different from what I've done in Deskins, except that I would be completely alone this time.

Like Daddy was.

But it'd be harder for me than it was for Daddy twenty-five, thirty years ago,
I think.
Back then everything wasn't online, they didn't have safeguards to keep people from using fake identities to get jobs . . . look how much trouble Mom and I have had, even with the attorney helping us, even keeping our own names.

And everybody knows what happens to teenage girls who run away. Everybody knows what is left for them when they can't support themselves legally.

I haven't been paying attention, but somehow I've ended up in another part of Deskins I didn't know existed: a dark alley. A door opens and raucous laughter spills out—it's some ratty bar with a bunch of motorcycles parked out front.

So here's the kind of irony my English teachers would love,
I think.
I'm running away from assassins I think want to kill me specifically because of who I am. And so I've run to a place where I might get killed just randomly, because I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I'm being melodramatic. The same sociology teacher who told us about free lunch percentages at Deskins High also talked about how the murder rate in Deskins is practically nil, just one homicide every fifteen or twenty years.

“You live in one of the safest places on earth,” he told us.

Crime in Deskins is pretty much limited to stupid high school
kids smoking pot behind Whispering Pines, and probably people doing the same kind of white-collar offenses that Daddy did, except not so audaciously as to get caught, and not very often. It's people thinking that lying and cheating and taking a little more money than they deserve isn't actually
crime
—there's not really a victim when you're just shifting a column of numbers from one place to another.