The same impulse is still driving me: escape. But no one is chasing us, and Malcolm needs to stop. We’re in a neighborhood now, and not running exactly, because neither of us wants to draw attention from anyone who might be looking out his or her window, but still moving quickly. I come alongside him and offer him my shoulder to lean on. We pass a detached garage with one of those swing-open doors, the kind that look like they belong on a barn, a simple lift latch at the base is all that’s keeping it shut. I know it’s technically illegal when I steer us toward it and we go inside, but we just ran from a cop, so it hardly seems to matter, especially since Malcolm is leaning more and more of his weight on me with each step.
No car. Hopefully, that means the owner is out driving it and not inside the house, calling 911 because he or she just saw two people breaking into their garage.
I tow Malcolm toward the back, past neatly stacked boxes and carefully stored furniture. It’s the tidiest garage I’ve ever seen, and a pang of guilt hits me that we’ve broken into a place the owner takes such obvious pride in. I move a few boxes so we can sit, and when Malcolm drops onto one, I linger in front of him. “You okay?”
“I took a bunch of painkillers in the car, and they’re starting to kick in. I just need to sit for a minute.”
He sits for longer than a minute, eyes fixed on a box markedPAUL’S ROOMin thick black marker, the kind that squeaks when you use it. I love that kind.
“We should have taken turns in the bathroom,” I say. “That way one of us would have noticed the clerk growing twitchy.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” he says.
“We lost the car.”
It goes without saying that neither of us is going to suggest heading back toward the cop to get it. By now, he’s searched our bags, found our bloody clothes, and drawn whatever conclusions about them that he’s going to. Will he call out a search for us? I have no idea, and I don’t want to voice the question in case Malcolm does. Besides, he silently answers my unspoken question by growing visibly more agitated with every passing second. He starts darting his eyes all over the place and bouncing his knee incessantly.
“This is a bad idea,” he says, and then looks at me. “We could both get caught. You get that, right?”
The box dips as I take a seat next to him. “That’s true whether we go to my grandfather or not.” More so after our run-in with the cop. The latest in my list of crimes. I’m supposed to be helping my mom and prove she’s innocent, yet I was with her when we stole two cars and now I’m fleeing the police and breaking and entering, all while preparing to sneak past security in a retirement home.
“Yeah,” Malcolm says, “but this is parking on the tracks and running toward the oncoming train when we should be sprinting like hell to get away from it.”
Brushing the dark strands from my forehead, I prod the skin around the cut, and red smears my fingers. Unlike the time I saw my own blood in the Walgreens parking lot with Mom, my stomach doesn’t violently empty itself on the spot. I don’t know if I should consider that progress or proof that I’ll never find my way back to the me I was before all this started.
I see a few towels folded on a shelf and take one. I’m now officially a thief, but I can’t risk using my clean-if-slightly-sweaty shirt on the cut, and I definitely can’t risk blood trickling down my face when we try and slip into the retirement home unnoticed. Malcolm doesn’t have any open wounds, but I pass him the towel anyway and he uses it to mop the sweat off his face. “That’s actually wrong,” I say. “Statistically, your survival odds are better if you run toward the train, next to the tracks. When the train hits, it’ll explode all the wreckage forward, likely impaling anything in front of it.”
Malcolm wearily hands me back the towel, now stained with our sweat and blood. “Yeah, well, this is on the tracks.”
“So you’d rather run blind? Forever?” Just saying those words makes my muscles cramp. I can’t imagine living the rest of my life with these unanswered questions. Malcolm has much less at stake than I do, but hiding from the truth and being afraid like this every day until I die isn’t a life I want to live, no matter what the risk.
“I’d rather not end up in another trunk.”
“Me neither. And this is how we do that. Get information, track down my mom, and find out what really happened so we can run in the right direction. Now come on. What’s the plan to get me in without getting caught?”
“Silver Living—that’s the retirement facility where your grandfather lives—is about a mile from here. We can walk.”
He’d said we were close when we stopped at the gas station, but I hadn’t realized we werethatclose. Something like excitement tingles inside me. Other than my mom, I’ve never met another member of my family before. “Okay. That’s good,” I say. Because I had no idea how we’d get another car if we were still miles and miles away. Although even as the thought passes through my mind, the answer chases right after it: I’d get a car any way I had to.
“And then what?”
I’d worried that Malcolm was lying about needing only a few minutes to rest, but the color is already coming back to his cheeks and his breathing is steadying.
“There are security cameras in every hallway, and we need a passcode and a key to enter each floor.” He says this all dispassionately, but I feel my stomach clenching with every obstacle he lists.
“But you’re a hacker. Can’t you, you know, bypass all that?”
The look he gives me makes me feel utterly and completely stupid.
“I need access to a computer. There’s probably an empty office somewhere inside, but it’ll be locked.”
I nod and nod again, like I’m calmly following along and not trying to keep the bile from crawling up my throat. “So we’ll have to get someone’s keys.”
“Yeah,” Malcolm says, but not like I came up with a solution, like I just exchanged one problem for another.
Keys. Mom got two sets of keys the night we ran. One by conning our neighbor, and the second by means unknown. I’m feverishly wishing now that she’d explained exactly what she did inside the store that led to her leaving it with a stranger’s keys in her hand.
“I need to be the one to get the keys,” I say.
