The Awakening

Twenty-six

FOR MOST OF THAT day, both Derek and Tori steered clear of me, like I had a bug they didn’t want to catch. I didn’t see a lot of Simon either. He went off with Derek to the library, still trying to find their dad or his friend Andrew. Tori tagged along. I stayed put in a lovely dank alley Derek had chosen for me. Simon left me with a movie magazine, snacks, a hairbrush and soap, and promised they’d get me to a bathroom after dark.

It was mid-afternoon when I heard footsteps tromping down the alley and I scrambled up to meet Simon. Derek might be bigger, but it was Simon who made all the noise. Derek was only loud when…

Derek stomped around the corner, scowling.…when he was mad.

He had a newspaper rolled in his hand, bearing down on me like a puppy that had piddled on the carpet.

“Bad Chloe,” I muttered.

“What?”

I’d forgotten his bionic hearing. “Bad Chloe.” I gestured at the rolled-up paper and put out my hand. “Get it over with.”

“You think this is funny?”

“No, I think it’s tiresome.”

He slapped down the paper. In the bottom corner of the front page was the headline “Missing Girl Spotted” with a picture of me. I skimmed the short paragraph, then turned to the rest inside.

It had happened last night, when Derek had been yelling at me after my run-in with the street girls. The windows around us may have been dark, but a woman had been watching from an apartment over a shop, drawn by Derek’s voice. She’d seen “a girl with light hair and red streaks” being yelled at by “a large, dark-haired man.” So now police speculated that I might not be a runaway but a kidnap victim.

“Well?” Derek said.

I folded the paper carefully, my gaze down. “Guess you shouldn’t have yelled at me in public.”

“What?”

“That’s what caught her attention. You chewing me out.”

“No, what caught her attention was your hair. If you’d kept your hood up like I said—”

“Of course. Totally my fault. After nearly getting my face carved up, how dare I forget my attacker yanked down my hood. Bad Chloe.”

“So this is a joke?”

I looked up at him. “No, it’s not a joke. It’s a serious problem. The joke is this.” I waved from him to me. “You’ve been sulking all day, brooding—”

“Brooding?”

“Just itching for me to screw up so you can rip me a new one, your favorite pastime. You couldn’t just come back and calmly say we have a problem that we need to discuss. Where’s the fun in that?”

“You think I enjoy—”

“I have no idea what you enjoy, if anything. But I do know what you’d like. Me, gone.”

“What?”

“I’ve served my purpose. I got Simon out of Lyle House. Sure, you were willing to make a half-assed effort to find me, so it looks good for Simon—”

“Half-assed?”

“You showed up hours late. Left a hidden note. Came by once a day. Yes, half-assed.”

“No. Ask Simon. I was worried—”

“I’m sure you faked it well. But, unfortunately, I found you and, worse, I showed up with Tori in tow and a price on my head. So it’s time to activate the backup plan. Make me so miserable and unwelcome that I slink away.”

“I’d never—”

“No, you won’t.” I met his gaze. “Because I’m not going to slink away, Derek. If I’m too much of an inconvenience to keep around, then at least have the guts to tell me to get lost.”

I brushed past him and walked away.

I didn’t get far. I bumped into Simon and Tori, and Derek caught up with us. And then he got his way. Not about driving me off—he still had to work at that. But this new development gave him all the ammunition he needed to persuade Simon it was time to go to their father’s friend’s place. The bus left at four. First, though, the half-million-dollar runaway needed a disguise.

Derek took me to a restroom in the park I’d seen from the roof. The building was locked for the off-season, but he easily broke the locks and got me in. He made sure the water hadn’t been turned off, then slapped a box of hair color on the counter.

“Gotta get rid of that,” he said, pointing at my hair.

“I could just keep my hood—”

“Already tried.”

He walked out.

I strained to see by the bit of light coming through a row of tiny, filthy windows. It was hard to read the instructions, but it looked similar to the red dye I’d used, so I applied it the same way. I couldn’t tell what color Derek had chosen. It looked black, but the red dye had, too, so that didn’t mean much. I didn’t think too much about it until I washed out the dye, looked in the mirror, and…

My hair was black.

I hurried to the door and propped it open to get better light. Then I went back to the mirror.

Black. Not sleek glossy black like Tori’s hair, but dull, flat black.

Before now, I hadn’t been thrilled with my latest haircut. I’d had my long straight hair chopped shoulder length in a layered style that had turned out wispy and waiflike. Still, the worst I could have said was that it made me look “cute”—not what a fifteen-year-old girl wants to be called. In black though, it was not cute. It looked like I’d hacked my hair off with kitchen shears.

I never wore black because it drained any color from my pale skin. Now I saw there was something that washed out my face even worse than a black shirt.

I looked like a Goth. A sick Goth, white and hollow-eyed.

I looked dead.

I looked like a necromancer. Like those ghastly pictures of them on the Internet.

Tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back, grabbed some tissue, and started awkwardly trying to daub leftover dye onto my pale eyebrows, praying it would make a difference.

Through the mirror, I saw Tori walk in. She stopped.

“Oh. My. God.”

It would have been better if she’d laughed. Her look of horror, then something like sympathy, meant it was as bad as I thought.

“I told Derek to let me pick the color,” she said. “I told him.”

“Hey,” Simon called in. “Everyone decent?”

He pushed open the door, saw me and blinked.

“It’s Derek’s fault,” Tori said. “He—”

“Don’t, please,” I said. “No more fighting.”

Simon still shot a glare over his shoulder as Derek pushed open the door.

“What?” Derek said. He looked at me. “Huh.”

Tori hustled me out the door, brushing past the guys with a whispered “jerk” for Derek.

“At least now you know never to go dark again,” she said as we walked. “A couple years ago, I let a friend dye mine blond. It was almost as bad. My hair felt like straw and…”

And so, Tori and I bonded over hair horror stories. We put our differences aside and by the time we were on the bus, we were painting each other’s fingernails.

Or not.

Tori did try to cheer me up. For her, this situation seemed to warrant more sympathy than having a dead guy crawling over me. But the closer we got to the bus station, the lower her mood dropped, coinciding with a rising discussion of finances—how much did we have, how much would the tickets cost, should I try to use my bank card again…

I did use an ATM we passed. Derek figured that was okay—if they thought we were still in Buffalo, that was good, considering we were leaving. He didn’t expect my card would work though. It did. I suppose that made sense. The bank or police might have told my dad to lock it, but he wouldn’t cut off my only source of money, even if he thought it could make me come home.

That, of course, made me think about him and how much he must be worrying, and what he was going through. I wanted so badly to contact him, but I knew I couldn’t. So all I could do was think about him, and think about Aunt Lauren, and feel awful about everything.

To get my thoughts off my family, I concentrated on my companions. I knew not having money bugged Tori. So I tried to give her a couple hundred. It was a mistake. She lashed out at me, and by the time we reached the station, we weren’t talking again.

Simon and Tori bought the tickets. I wondered whether they’d catch any flak—unaccompanied teens buying one-way tickets to New York City—but no one commented. I guess we could just be traveling alone. We were old enough to do that.

Not that I’d ever traveled alone. Not even on a city bus. That got me thinking about who I normally traveled with—Aunt Lauren and Dad. When I tried to stop worrying about them I only thought about someone else I was leaving behind: Liz.

Liz said she could find me, but I was sure she’d meant “in Buffalo.” How long would she search for me? Could I summon her without her green hoodie…from hundreds of miles away? I’d need to try really hard, and that wasn’t safe.

Maybe she’d move on to the afterlife. That was probably a good thing. But at the thought of never seeing her again, my mood sunk lower than Tori’s until, by the time the bus arrived, it was as black as my new hair.

Simon had gone to grab sodas for the trip. Tori was already out the station door. When I struggled to get my backpack on, Derek grabbed it and threw it over his shoulder, which would have been nice if I knew he wasn’t just hurrying me along.

“Stop sulking,” he said as he walked beside me. “It’s just hair.”

“That’s not—” I shut up. Why bother?

Simon jogged up to join us in the passenger line. He handed me a Dr Pepper.

“You okay?”

“Just thinking about my dad and Liz. I wish I could have told them we’re leaving.”

Derek leaned down to my ear. “Smile, okay?” he whispered. “You look like you’re being kidnapped, and people are staring.”

I glanced around. No one was paying any attention to us. Simon shouldered past his brother, whispering, “Ease off.” He waved me to the first empty seat. “This okay?”

I nodded and turned in.

“There’s more at the back,” Derek said. “We can’t sit together up here.”

“No, we can’t.” Simon slid in beside me.