Authors: Elisa Ludwig
Pretty Sly
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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Contents
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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TO MY FAMILY-
who taught me what love and protection are all about.
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“JUST GO!” AIDAN
yelled.
There wasn’t time to sort it out. I had to jump. The man was right behind us now, yelling. Aidan was depending on me, and we were in this together. I inhaled big gulps of air like I was about to dive underwater. Counted
one, two, three . . .
As my feet left the wooden planks, cold air rushed around my face, so sharp it was almost a burning sensation. My arms flapped uselessly at my sides. I wasn’t flying. I was falling.
On the way down there was nothing but nothing. Air. A painful silence. For minutes, it seemed.
Then my feet jammed hard, and I landed in a heavy squat, snow crunching all around my sneakers, my bones thrumming from the impact.
Three seconds later, Aidan fell beside me, flinging bits of crystalline ice.
We looked at each other and then up.
The man had disappeared somewhere inside the house. He was coming down or calling the cops. He could report us. He probably would report us. My heart was in my throat, hard and whole as a jawbreaker.
Okay, so this break-in had been a bad idea. Aidan was right. We’d pushed our luck a little too far. If only—
Don’t think.
Aidan was on his feet. I got up, too. And we ran like hell.
On the other side of the building was our stolen car, but we both knew it was too risky to go that way. We didn’t need to say it out loud. In all the days we’d been on the road together we developed a silent language. We had to head for the trees, even though it was impossible to gauge how deep they were or what lay beyond them.
Aidan was like a lightning bolt, several paces ahead, the reflective strip on his bag catching the bright white around us. He turned around and urged me on. It frustrated me that he was naturally faster. I pushed as hard as I could to keep up with him. My ankle was sore from the fall and the pain rang out with every step, but I couldn’t pay attention to that now.
Our rhythm was steady for a few moments: the sound of our shoes swallowed up in the blue holes of the snow, punctuated by the bag flapping on my back and my own heavy breathing.
Keep going, Willa.
The cold air raged through my lungs. Gravity had us racing down the slope of a hill, legs rubber-banding our bodies onward into the thicket of pale-barked branches. The last bit of daylight was sputtering out in purple splashes on the sky but the world bleached out to a blur between my now-frozen eyelashes.
In the distance I heard the sound of a car starting. And was that a siren, too? Maybe I was imagining the siren part.
The déjà vu hit then, so powerful I almost lost my balance: I’d been here before, and not just in my head. The night I broke into Kellie’s house. Chased by cops. Busted.
I couldn’t do that again. I
wouldn’t.
Please,
I thought.
Just let us get out of here.
I closed my eyes as I wished and kept running, foolishly. I knew I could trip on the twigs scattered over the snowy ground or run into a tree, but I had to play by the wishing rules.
Never mind that I’d broken every other rule in the book. I probably didn’t deserve to get out of this.
“Willa!”
I opened my eyes and saw what Aidan was pointing to, lights and flashes of blue glass ahead.
Through the trees, a tall building loomed in front of us, its wings like open arms welcoming us back to civilization. Groups of tourists hovered on the sidewalk around it. Stateline, Nevada’s casinos and hotels. Surely
we could get lost in a crowd like this.
It was our light at the end of the tunnel. Our neon, blinking light. Maybe my wish was going to come true after all. Maybe I really was lucky.
We just. Had. To run. A little farther.
Soon, we’d be on blacktop again. I sped up, anticipating its hard support.
My legs were caked in snow. I could see us mirrored in the side of the enormous building, our bodies dark and distorted, emerging from the woods like figures from a nightmare. But this wasn’t a nightmare. This was our life. Our life on the lam.
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THE SAFE WAS
empty.
As in vacant. Cleaned out. Filled with nothing.
My fists opened and closed at my sides. Shock blotted out the rest of the room, the wreckage of my mom’s closet, even Aidan standing next to me.
“The money’s gone,” I said out loud finally, the words at once both obvious and foreign on my tongue. I was referring to my mom’s painting fortune, the money we were supposed to be living on, and though Aidan probably had no idea what I was talking about specifically, he could see that in the most general terms this was all very, very bad.
I could only stare into the flat silver void of the open metal box, as if by staring I might psychically fill it back up, the green bills in their neat little rubber-banded stacks, flying in reverse through the room and landing in soft thumps. As if I could go back in time to a moment
where the money, as far as I knew, was still in the safe.
And why stop there, really? While I was at it, I would’ve liked to unsee all of the chaos of my ransacked house. Fling my mom’s clothes onto their hangers, her scarves and underwear and socks swishing into place in closed-up drawers, send the sheets sailing to the ceiling so they could land on the bed, flat and even and unwrinkled. The downy snow of feathers on the carpet floating up and into the mattress slits, which would knit themselves back together seamlessly. The shattered bits of the ceramic lamp reassembling into wholeness.
Then my room: My books filing one by one in an airborne arc onto the shelves. The tangled heap of clothing and makeup and shoes on the floor unknotting and separating into the carefully organized arrangement I’d once maintained. The spilled nail polish whirring a pink stream into its little bottle.
Us too. Aidan and me scrambling backward, sucked down the hallway, the expressions of surprise at each new bit of destruction falling off our faces like discarded masks. Our cries of dismay garbling demonically into our throats. The breath refilling our lungs. The front door swinging open and pulling us back out into the Arizona dusk.
Aidan and me, kissing, just outside the house. That’s where I’d have to stop.
Our first kiss. His arms encircling me. The herbal smell of his soap. His fingers threading through my hair.
That one perfect meeting of our lips and breath and skin.
Sure, there were lots of moments leading up to the kiss that I would’ve liked to forget. Glimpsing the flannel-shirted intruder dashing out my back door. The two of us chasing him across town in Aidan’s car, to no avail. Me returning, dejected, to see what had become of my house, certain that this had been all my fault. My comeuppance for messing with the Glitterati. Hell, I’d erase the last three months if I could.
But not if it meant losing those crazy perfect few seconds of Aidan bounding up the driveway. Coming back for me. The sudden thrashing of my heart as he neared. The unexpected warmth of his mouth. No one ever forgot their first kiss, did they?
And he was still
here.
Only now he was looking at me with a furrowed brow.
“I don’t know, Willa,” Aidan said softly. “This doesn’t look like the work of the Glitterati.”
His voice, deep and buttery, broke through my thoughts, and I reluctantly tumbled back to the present moment. The one where nothing was making sense. The one where my house was wrecked, the money was gone, and my only theory about who was behind this was full of holes.
“No,” I said. “It really doesn’t.”
I paced around the shredded remains of my mom’s room as we tried to talk it through. This was Wednesday
evening of what was officially already the longest day of my life. The longest week, if you—
shudder
—counted back to my nights in juvie. It seemed impossible that only hours ago Aidan and I had met up at the animal shelter where we were both doing community service. We’d of course had no idea when Aidan dropped me off that we’d find the house like this, or go on a car chase, or any of the rest of it.
“I could imagine Nikki or Kellie hiring someone to come in and mess stuff up, mess with your head, but I don’t think they’d go this far,” Aidan said, still puzzling it out. “Why would they break into your mother’s safe?”
I had no good answer. He knew Nikki and Kellie and Cherise, aka the Glitterati, better than I. He’d been going to school with them forever. For a short time, when I first started Valley Prep in the fall, I’d been part of the clique. Before I’d started stealing from Nikki and Kellie. (Yes, it sounds bad, I know. But I was trying to help the girls they were bullying. Anyway, I’d gotten busted breaking into Kellie’s house, and that’s what landed me in juvie.)
“Nikki and Kellie don’t need the money, that’s for sure,” I said, gnawing on my thumb. And while they were willing to go illegal in all the usual teenage ways— drinking, smoking pot—I couldn’t imagine them risking their trust-fund futures to take money they didn’t need. Even if it meant getting back at me for what I’d done. But if it wasn’t them, then who?
Maybe I had other enemies. Cherise, my supposed best friend, had disowned me when she found out I’d been stealing from the others. The entire population of Paradise Valley knew about my thieving. It had been on TV, in the papers. (The whole serial-theft thing had really made a splash, which goes to show you that these rich towns are kind of lacking in the news department.) So it could have been anyone, really.