“Okay—one, I’ve seen you get yourself out of trouble, and two, this is much lower risk,” I point out, even though I’m not sure it’s true. “Josie only volunteered to be my decoy white lady, not help me steal a motel sign.”
Technically, what Josie said wasI’ll come with you, and if the cops ask what we’re doing, I’ll hold a map upside down, act super confused, and giggle a lot, and then her boyfriend, Wells, saidDon’t forget to also twirl your hair, and anyway, no one stopped to see what we were doing, so it was all moot.
“If it’s even here,” Wyatt sighs as we stop behind a building, the pool of shadow around us even deeper than the dark. “Who’s to say every motel-sign connoisseur in the Blue Ridge hasn’t already broken in and whisked it away right under our noses?”
“I’m being optimistic,” I tell him, strapping on a headlamp. When he found out what we were doing, another friend, Gideon, rolled his eyes, sighed, and told us this was a dumb, risky thing to do. Then he gave us headlamps with red filters on the lights so our eyes wouldn’t have to adjust and we’d be less likely to be seen.
Gideon wasn’t wrong. This is dumb, risky, and technically, I think it’s burglary. Or larceny, maybe. Silas told me the difference once, and I promptly forgot it. Anyway, it’s illegal for sure because all this still belongs to someone and that someone isn’t me, even if it’s hard to feel bad about this crime because the whole motel is getting razed in two days.Literallyno one is going to miss this sign.
“Ready for your weird quest?” Wyatt asks.
I hand him a pair of thick gardening gloves because there’s probably broken glass everywhere. “One man’s trash, blah blah blah,” I say. “Thanks for coming with me, by the way. I probably couldn’t swing this alone.”
“Breaking into an abandoned motel in the middle of nowhere at midnight? How could I say no?”
“You love it.”
“I also have an uncle who’s a judge, so if we get caught, he probably knows people.”
“I knew I invited you for a reason. Which side do you want?”
“You think we should split up?”
“It’s a search-and-recovery mission, not a horror movie,” I point out. “And if you start screaming, I’ll be, like, a hundred feet away.”
“Better not be a horror movie,” Wyatt mutters, glancing around the corner. “If I see even one creepy doll, I’mout.”
“Why would there be a creepy doll here?”
“That’s what would make it creepy.”
“So, any doll.”
“Here? Yes.” He adjusts the straps on his pack, tightening the one over his chest like he’s about to run through enemy fire or something.
“If you see a doll, we can leave,” I promise.
“Or the desiccated corpse of the owner’s mother in a rocking chair.”
I don’t bother answering that one.
“Or one of those weird stick figures that they kept finding inThe Blair Witch Project.”
“Itoldyou not to watch that,” I say, adjusting the strap on my headlamp. I should’ve done this before I put the gloves on. “Or any of the other shit Lainey’s been talking you into lately.”
“She’s nottalking me intoit—I like horror movies,” declares Wyatt, who I have personally seen scream and knock over a chair while watchingThe Conjuring. “We’re going through all the classics for a month. It’s fun.”
Because I’m a nice person, and because I have other shit to do right now, I don’t say anything about why Wyatt would be so willing to sit on a couch in the dark and watch something he doesn’t like with hisvery good friendLainey.
“Right. Headlamps indoors only, and try to stay out of the parking lot where the floodlights are.”
“Should I make a lot of noise?” he asks, because now he’s being a dick.
I ignore that. “I’ve got Silas’s night vision goggles in my bag, but they’re probably more trouble than they’re worth. If anything happens, I don’t know—hide. Unless it’s an animal, and then either run away or punch it if it corners you.”
“Punch the raccoons,” he says. “Got it.”
I turn the corner and look out over the cracked, grayed asphalt of the parking lot one more time. At the single-story buildings that have stripes where the fake logs used to go, at the boarded-over windows and room doors that open onto the parking lot. I take a deep breath and crack a knuckle and let the thrill of rule breaking settle into the pit of my stomach. It shouldn’t be as much of a rush as it is.
