Pretty Wanted (8 page)

“Ohshhhh—” I put down my fork, unable to even complete the curse.

Aidan and looked at each other, eyes widened in terror. It was just as I’d feared. The cops now knew we were in the area, our time was marked, and we’d barely scratched the surface in terms of doing what we came here to do.

We didn’t have to say anything else. What was there to say? We dropped a fistful of dollars on the table and walked out.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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SIX

“I COULD KILL
you right now,” I said to Aidan through my stress-wound jaw.

We were run-walking, hats lowered, sunglasses back on, not wanting to call more attention to ourselves by fully sprinting, yet trying to get away from Bubba’s as quickly as possible. Not like it really mattered much. At this point, I felt like I might as well have been wearing one of those house-arrest anklets, blaring an alarm for everyone to hear.

Aidan, to his credit, was working hard to keep my rising panic at bay. “So they saw us. Big deal. We’re not murderers. We’re hardly on the Most Wanted list.”

Not that I was letting him off the hook. “The big deal is that they know we’re in St. Louis. And that narrows down the field considerably. You were careless, Aidan, and selfish. You were showing off with those computer guys.”

“I wasn’t being selfish when I found your mom’s police report, was I? Or when I gave up my life to come with you on this trip. Besides you loved the attention from those guys. Or should I say
guy
. It was obvious he had a thing for you.”

That made me furious. “Are you kidding me? All I could think about was how weird the whole thing was. I did
not
want the attention, from him or anyone else, Aidan. You were the one encouraging them.”

“Well, without him we’d never have gotten into the police database. I thought it was only fair that we let them take one harmless photo. . . .” He threw out his hands. “Okay, maybe I made a mistake.”

“A mistake is leaving the house without your sunglasses. A mistake is texting the wrong person. This is way more than a mistake.”

“But we know how to hide. We’ll dye your hair again. I’ll dye mine, too. We can find new clothes.”

Yes, we could do those things. But that wasn’t the point. Didn’t he get it? We shouldn’t have been in this situation, and now that we were, time was of the essence. “We can’t waste any more time playing dress-up. I just want to find out about my mom so we can get out of here.”

“We will. Trust me. But you have to stop blaming me—”

“I want to know about Sheila,” I said quietly.

His eyes flickered so that he was looking everywhere at once. Everywhere but at me. Aidan Murphy, always too cool for school, was finally losing his calm. “Sheila? I don’t—”

I broke in. “It was her, wasn’t it? On your phone? Don’t tell me you’re protecting me, okay? I deserve to know.” He owed me that much, didn’t he?

He sighed, letting his eyes close. When he opened them again, he began talking. “Okay. You want to know? Fine. Here it is. She only came to Prep last year. I signed up for Latin because I’d heard it was a blowoff. I liked the class in the beginning. I thought she was really friendly and nice, and I actually liked all the conjugations and things.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, urging him to cut to the chase.

“Anyway, Sheila started inviting me to her classroom after school to do these”—and here he curled his fingers up in air quotes—“special projects.”

“What kind of special projects?” I asked cautiously.

“They were stupid at first, like watching
Clash of the Titans
. And there were a few of us showing up, like a Latin club. But then I noticed that I was the only one she was inviting. And she started sending me these emails and texts, flirting.”

“Flirting how?” I countered. “Did you flirt back?”

He looked down at his shoelaces, pressed his lips together. “I guess . . . I guess I thought it was sort of cool in the beginning that this teacher was paying all this attention to me.” He glanced up quickly, gauging my reaction. “I didn’t think she actually liked me in that way—just that she was extra friendly.”

Ew.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting but this story was creeping me out. Sure, I knew he was a player. Everyone had told me about him back when I started school. I’d imagined him messing around with some typical VP girls. But with an older woman? A teacher? It was the kind of thing you read about in tabloids. And here he was, my boyfriend. . . . Everything I thought I knew about me and Aidan floated above us in a little balloon, about to be punctured.

“So then?”

“So then, one day she actually kind of put the moves on me. She tried to give me a massage and then she tried to kiss me. It was so weird. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Jesus, Aidan. Did you kiss her back?” I asked, my heart dragging painfully in my chest. Was he really that stupid? Or that much of a horndog?

“No!” he exclaimed, practically yelling in my face. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. You’re freaking out. And you have no need to freak out. It’s not what it sounds like.”

“Then what is it?” My voice croaked. I felt like I could barely talk over the sob that was mounting. His telling me I was overreacting was only bringing it closer to the surface. How could this not be freak-out-worthy information?

“I actually pulled away and told her she was overstepping. And that’s when it got really strange. She grabbed my wrists and started to threaten me. She said if I didn’t kiss her she was going to tell the school officials that I’d forced myself on her. She got straight-up psycho.”

“Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Teachers were supposed to teach things. Set a good example. Remind you that the adult world was kind of boring. They were not supposed to act like slutty Cylons from
Battlestar Galactica
.

“Then she started to send me messages, asking for money. Like if I sent her fifty thousand bucks, she’d keep quiet.” He looked up, his mouth half open, eyes wounded. “I think that’s what she was after all along. Isn’t that effed up?”

“Um,
yeah.
” It was one of the most effed-up things I’d ever heard, and lately I’d been hitting the jackpot on effed-up things.

“I tried to go to the school administration and explain what was going on but she’d gotten there first and had already filed charges. Assault charges. She had a whole story worked out. They had a disciplinary hearing and they expelled me.”

“Is that why you got kicked out?” That was the other great mystery, the other big secret Aidan had been keeping from me. Well, now we were putting everything on the table.

“The crazy thing was that I had been trying to get expelled for so long—I’d done so many things that Mr. Page had overlooked because my dad was on the board of trustees—that this was kind of the last straw.”

I remembered that the very first day I’d met Aidan, in fact, he’d set off a fire alarm in the school and told me he was hoping they’d catch him. All along he was trying to prove some point, make his dad angry. Which, the more I thought about it, was lame. No matter how bad his relationship was with his parents, acting out in this way seemed completely juvenile and unproductive. I felt the family-envy rising up inside me again like a toxic gas. He didn’t even know how good he had it, did he?

“But no one would believe me. She had this way of making everything I said seem like a lie. I mean, it was brilliant in a totally twisted sort of way.”

“And you got arrested for that, too?” I asked. “For assault?”

“No,” he said. “There would never have been any evidence. Because it didn’t happen! But the arrest part was my fault. I was so mad after all this went down that I went to her house and spray-painted ‘Liar’ on it, and that’s when the actual cops got involved. That’s when I got stuck on probation. Anyway, my parents’ lawyers made me sign an agreement that I would never talk about it.”

I could only stare at him. “That’s an awful story.”

And yet I was relieved. As far as crimes went, spray-painting wasn’t too deep. He hadn’t been cheating on me and he hadn’t had an affair with a teacher, both of which would have been more serious, possibly unforgiveable offenses. And hearing what this lady did to him, I could hardly blame him for wanting revenge. I probably would have done the same thing.

“Even now she keeps taunting me, sending me these text messages, like the one you saw. It’s like she wants me to mess up again. Or maybe she still wants me to send her that money.”

“Can’t you get her arrested for harassment?”

“I’m not a minor. And who would believe a woman was harassing a guy? She has all the power in her favor. She’s the teacher and I’m the son of a rich guy. It’s always going to make me look bad, like a spoiled brat. No matter what, people are going to side with her.”

“What about blackmail? That’s a real offense.”

He sighed. “I just want to get away from her.”

“She sounds truly sick,” I said, softening. “I’m so sorry you had to go through all of that.”

“Yeah, well, I’d been wanting a reason to leave for a while. This gave me a way to get out from underneath my dad’s thumb. Ironic, huh? I finally ended up getting kicked out—but it was for something I didn’t even do.” He kicked at a flattened soda can on the street. “It’s really hard, you know, when no one will believe you and you’re telling the truth.”

We walked in silence for a while, watching our shadows elongate on the pavement. The Arch came into view up ahead, the uppermost part of it peeking behind the tallest buildings. So far it had been a good-luck charm, and when I saw it I took comfort in knowing it was out there, watching over us.

I guess I was relieved to know the full story, finally. It was creepy, but it explained everything.

Even so, I was still uncomfortable with his whole family situation and the way he was just throwing it all away, like it was no big deal. As if the people who raised you were disposable or replaceable. That was something about Aidan I would never understand, one way we’d never be connected.

In the meantime, though, we had enough problems. Bigger ones. Like cops.

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” I asked.

“I guess we can’t go back to the library,” he said. I’d thought the same thing, even though we were only a few blocks away from there. It was tempting.

I nodded agreement. “I don’t think, under the circumstances, we should be squatting in a private home, either. That’s what they’re expecting us to do.”

It was now four o’clock, according to the time on our phone. I searched through the files of my mind for possibilities. We certainly didn’t have enough money for a hotel room. Sleep out on the street? That seemed like a bad idea. We could look for a hostel or a Y, or something, but we wouldn’t have any privacy. We kept walking, passing a postal center and some other office buildings. We turned down Washington Avenue and up 16th Street where red ribbons were tied onto each light post. Even if I wanted to forget about Christmas it was impossible with them jamming holiday cheer down your throat at every turn.

“Cool,” Aidan said, pointing to two serpent sculptures meeting fang to fang at the edge of a parking lot. “And look up there.”

On the roof of the building behind the lot was a Ferris wheel. Next to that was a school bus and a gigantic praying mantis, and an airplane hull. We looked down to the ground level, where there was a large complex of monkey bars from which several kids were swinging delightedly. Every time I was ready to hate St. Louis, it went and gave me a beautiful landmark or a plate of delicious ribs or some crazy-looking joint like this.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“The City Museum and World Aquarium,” he said, reading the sign on the side of what looked like an old factory building. “So what about this?”

“This what? Sleep here?”

“Why not? If we pay admission now and stay with the crowds we can hide until after it closes. It’ll be like the library. You said yourself we can’t break into a house.”

He had a point. The library had worked out well for us. And this place looked just huge and busy enough that we could purposely get lost in it.

“All right,” I said, after weighing the nonexistent options. “But no screwing around.”

He saluted me. “Aye, matey.”

“I think you’re mixing pirate and military metaphors,” I said.

“Always a stickler, Colorado.” Our eyes met, his crinkling. That was our tentative attempt at a peace treaty.

We entered, waited in line, and paid our admission like normal people, though my heart was pounding the entire time. One person. All it would take was one person to recognize us, call us out. Crowds were equal parts danger and safety.

But we made it through, clipping the little square aluminum museum tags onto our collars, and here we were on the other side of the atrium.

“Amazing,” I said, looking around and taking it all in.

The floor was covered in a mosaic of bugs and other creatures. Discarded industrial parts had been fashioned into stairways and slides, with cement supports in the shape of dinosaurs. The walls of the lobby were lined with metallic tile like zippers. Above us, people scampered around, yelping with delight. We crossed into another room where the ceiling was hung with crystalline icicles. Kids explored the inside of a beached white cement whale. Columns glittered with imagery of waving squid and dancing octopi. It was like a Dr. Seuss book come to life.

I’d never seen anything like it.

Inside, Aidan and I slipped into bathrooms to change our clothes. Then we tried as best as we could to disappear. We started on the upper floors. On the fourth floor there was a humongous thrift store. I didn’t even know they had thrift stores in museums.

Through the window, I spotted a red 1980s dress with a sweetheart neckline and a flouncy skirt. It would have been perfect—you know, had I not been on the run and stuff.

Aidan was behind me. “Do you want it? I’ll buy it for you.”

“You can’t buy it for me,” I said. “We can’t spend the money right now.”