“Oliver? Oliver, are you using the toilet or are you scrolling on your phone? Because you need to see this.”
There’s a beat of silence, then the bathroom door opens and Oliver looks out at me. “What?”
I point to the TV and turn the volume up. “Recognize them?”
“This man and this lady was driving by and they stopped to get my fancy lemonade, and they left me withfive hundred real dollars,” a little girl is telling the news reporter.
“We’re smart, so we called the sheriff to get it checked and make sure it’s not fake,” her older brother says.
“I got me the start of a college fund,” Tilda crows. “And I ain’t sharing. Because I did all of the work. I made the lemonade and I pulled the Oreos out of the cabinet and I even found my daddy’s special extra ingredient to fix up the lemonade all special all by myself.”
“Did you get a picture of the people who gave you all of that money?” the reporter asks, clearly holding back a smile.
“No, Sammy was being a fart-butt about letting me use his phone,” the little girl replies.
“They said they won the lottery,” her older brother adds. “They said this was their way of sharing. But I feel like it was a trick.”
“Trick or not, this little girl has the start of her college fund with five hundred real dollars from a stranger, checked over by the sheriff and everything. And there you have it, Ella-Mae,” the reporter onscreen says. “Today’s good news story, right here in Farnsworth.”
The scene switches back to the news studio, and I glance over at Oliver.
His eyes meet mine, half panicked, half something I can’t entirely read, and then he turns his back on me and disappears into the bathroom again.
“Did we go backwards?” he mutters to himself while he shuts the door.
I pull up my phone and check the map. “No, but we’re still in Mississippi. We’re probably on the very edge of the viewing area for this channel. We could leave and get a little farther down the road, but this is the kind of thing the internet and social media could pick up.”
He grunts in response.
It’s not so much an irritated grunt—not like I’d expect—as it is a simple acknowledgment.
I glance at the duffel bag that’s still packed with hundred-dollar bills that he brought up from the car. He left the other two in the car, like he did the first night.
Bags of money—it’s pennies to him, but I think he very much understands that several hundred dollars isn’t pennies to the people we’ve met so far along the way.
“Are you planning on giving all of this money away before you reach your final destination?” I call. “Like,allof it?”
A grumbled answer that I’m pretty sure is ayescomes from the bathroom.
“Do you have an actual plan besides leaving tips everywhere we go and paying for other people’s dinners when we stop at real restaurants?”
Silence.
I’m gonna assume silence meansno.
And that makes my heart hug itself.
Some parts of Oliver’s plan to escape seem so well laid out—or did, until today. Then the other parts…
He’s an irresistible mess.
“You want some ideas of how to give it all away without getting made and having your face plastered all over everywhere?” I ask.
The door cracks open.
Thuds open, really. I didn’t know doors could thud when they opened, but I think that’s the effect of the humidity. It’s nothothot in here, but the air conditioner clearly isn’t keeping up with the moisture in the air either.
Makes me glad I’m in a T-shirt and shorts. He has to be dying in jeans.
