Mr. Guillory is only too happy to gift us with as much sugar as we want. We follow him into his kitchen—or, rather, I follow him. Mom disappears somewhere after the entryway. Before I can wonder if I’m still supposed to keep silent, she reappears. Mr. Guillory straightens up after retrieving a nearly full bag of sugar from one of his lower cabinets.
“Perfect.” Mom snatches the bag from him a little too quickly. “We’ll bring the cookies over tomorrow.”
As soon as Mr. Guillory sees us to the door and closes it behind us, Mom retrieves our bags, grabs my arm, and hurries me onto the dimly lit street. She dumps the sugar in a trash barrel on the way and pulls a set of keys from her back pocket. Not her keys. These have a small pocketknife and a Dallas Cowboys star dangling from them.
Mom has the driver’s door of Mr. Guillory’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercury Comet, open in seconds. She reaches across the bench seat and pushes open the passenger door forme.
“You took his keys? Why would you do that?”
The streetlight overhead catches the sharp lines in her face. “Katelyn, get in the car. We don’t have time for this.”
I know Mom is the way she is because she loves me and wants something for me that she never had as a kid: safety. That’s why I’ve never refused to follow her rules; I’ve just bent them. And, yeah, I still have to deal with her paranoia, but I can tell she tries really hard to keep that from me as much as possible. So I’ve gone along with her social media ban and her need to vet every new friend I make.
All in all, I think I’m pretty easygoing, but stealing our neighbor’s car? It’s so just plain wrong that it overrides the numb confusion that was keeping me silent.
“We can’t just take Mr. Guillory’s car. Why can’t we take our car? Or better yet, why do we have to leave at all?”
“We’ll make sure he gets it back, but—”
An alarm blares behind me. From our house.
Mom’s eyes bulge as she stares over my shoulder, and for the first time in my entire life, I hear my mother swear. Then she says, “We’re too late.”
We’re too late.
I have no idea what that means.
All I know is that Mom looks like we’re in the direct path of a tornado. I glance back toward our house and see someone moving past the bedroom windows upstairs.
I get in the car.
“Please,” I say in a voice that has gone suddenly hoarse. “Whatis going on?”
Mom peels out of the driveway instead of answering, looking more at the mirrors than the windshield in front of her. I crane my neck around and see a shadowed figure leap out from Mr. Guillory’s backyard. It starts running after us.
We sideswipe a parked car and then careen onto the sidewalk as Mom makes a sharp turn, wrestling with the older car’s lack of power steering. “Put your seat belt on.”
My hands are shaking so badly that it takes two tries before I can fasten it. I don’t see the other car before it slams into us, sending my head smacking into the window hard enough to cause spots behind my eyes. I blink at the shocking pain and the shower of glass that rains down on me. The other car separates from ours—Mr. Guillory’s—and the scene comes back into focus with a crunch of metal.
“You all right? Katelyn, answer me!” The car spins as she brakes suddenly and shifts into drive.
“I’m okay.” But of course I’m not. I’ve never been less okay in my life. Even once she loses the other car after several terrifying minutes, Mom continues to check all her mirrors in a pattern of rapid glances that make my head throb viciously trying to follow. I don’t say anything else, even some twenty minutes later when she pulls into a Walgreens parking lot.
“I’ll be back in eight minutes. Do not move.”
And she leaves me there. I watch her walk past half a dozen cars before she stumbles, catches herself on the hood of a white minivan, and throws up. Then she straightens and walks into the store.
Dazed, and bleeding from dozens of tiny cuts along my arms, I feel something warm and wet trickling down the side of my head. I touch it, then look at my fingers and barely have enough time to fling my door open before I’m sick.
I give up trying to get the crumpled door shut afterward, instead staring into space, in total disbelief. I’ve only just resolved to try again when I see Mom emerging from the store, laden with bulging plastic bags. She walks not to her door but to mine, opening it fully without difficulty. She slides a hand around my back and helps me out, carefully avoiding my vomit. My head spins, but at least I’m not sick again.
She holds up a set of keys with the hand that’s not supporting me, and the double beep of a car unarming sounds. Mom leads me to the passenger seat of this new vehicle—something silver—and buckles me in. She hesitates for a second before shutting my door, clearly looking at the blood that has dripped onto my shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” she says, jerking her chin firmly, but I can hear the bags shaking as she loads them into the backseat.
I feel so far from fine, especially when I see the massive supply of protein bars and water bottles, and enough first-aid supplies to open a hospital. Mom slides into the driver’s seat.
“We’re stealing another car,” I say. I must be in shock. No way I could have spoken so calmly otherwise. “Some customer we don’t even know.”
“No.” She adjusts the mirrors and pulls out of the parking lot. “Not a customer, an employee.” Before I can ask what difference that makes, she goes on. “A customer would finish shopping a lot sooner than an employee would finish their shift. Hopefully. I need at least two hours before this vehicle is reported stolen.”
