Chapter One
Then
“What are we doing?”
“Shh!” Lilah looked grim as she quickly crammed clothes into an old duffle bag she’d picked up somewhere. “No questions, Em. Pack.Now.”
I stared at a duffle bag, similar to the one she now packed, that she’d shoved into my hands. “Why are we leaving?” I whispered.
She glared at me, then at the bag in my hands, her message clear and brooking zero arguments.
I pulled open my dresser drawer and started packing.
We’d lived here nearly four months, two of five foster kids. We were the oldest, Lilah seventeen and me just turned sixteen. It beat the shelter we’d spent over a year in after losing our previous foster home.
It wasn’t like we had a lot. Even with all our clothes we both had room to spare in the duffle bags and in our school backpacks.
She’d already grabbed everything from our bathroom and stashed it in leak-proof zipper-top bags.
Our foster father was asleep in the back bedroom. He worked nights and his wife worked days. The other three kids, all boys unrelated to each other, ages eight, ten, and eleven, were still at school.
Lilah scoured our shared bedroom one last time and handed me another plastic baggy, a large one, this one filled with paperwork.
My eyes widened when I recognized it. “How’d you get this?”
She shrugged. “I learned how to pick a lock. Took them last night after he left for work whileshewas still at the grocery store.”
I hadn’t seen my paperwork since we first arrived and knew it’d been locked in a filing cabinet in the master bedroom. The only identification I had was my school ID.
“Let’s go.” She went first, slowly cracking the bedroom door and carefully listening before easing it all the way open and motioning for me to follow. I stayed in her footsteps, avoiding the creaky hall floorboards, and it wasn’t until we were a block away that I finally spoke again.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
I didn’t think she would answer me at first. “I overheard him on the phone the other night. You know that ‘summer camp’ he talked about sending us to after school lets out?”
A shiver rippled through me. “Yeah?”
“Well, turns out a couple of his ‘friends’ will be there. Oh, and it’s not a camp; it’s a private hunting lodge. And we’d be the only girls there.”
“Fuck. Me.”
“Exactly.” While Lilah and I weren’t sisters by blood, we’d been together for over five years now, sticking together, having each other’s backs.
I didn’t want to think about my time in the foster system before we met and she refused to talk about her experiences, although I could easily guess the basics.
Funny how when you start calling each other sisters the people who are supposed to take care of you don’t really check that shit out, which is how we’d managed not to be separated in all that time.
“So now what?” I asked.
“Now we do thingsourway. I’ll be eighteen in ten months, and then I’ll be your legal guardian until you turn eighteen. We already get free breakfast and lunch at school. Mia said she’d let us into the gym to shower for free and use a locker for extra storage. Before summer break we can shower at school in the mornings.”
“What about somewhere to sleep?” I asked.
“I already figured that out,” she said. “The public library across the street from school is open until 8pm on weeknights. We can study there. The 4H barn at school? There’s a thickly wooded patch out behind it. We’ll get a tent and sleep there. There aren’t cameras or alarms in the barn. If the weather’s nasty, we can sleep there. Besides, you’ll be in summer school to help with your extra credits for your GPA so we can explain our presence there.”
My stomach dropped. “You sure this is a better option?”
“If we go back to the shelter, they’ll separate us when I age out. And it’s our word against his. I’ll get a job after school lets out, and in a few weeks we should be able to afford a room at that old hotel just down from the gym.”
