Nobody But Us
Kristin Halbrook
Language: English
Pages: 140
ISBN: B01FKUBDQE
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Will
Maybe I'm too late. Maybe Zoe's dad stole all her fifteen years and taught her to be scared. I'll undo it. Help her learn to be strong again, and brave. Not that I'm any kind of example, but we can learn together.
When the whole world is after you, sometimes it seems like you can't run fast enough.
Zoe
Maybe it'll take Will years to come to terms with being abandoned. Maybe it'll take forever. I'll stay with him no matter how long it takes to prove that people don't always leave, don't always give up on you.
of them and, yeah, there’s the car with lights across the roof out the window, at the corner of the parking lot. The waitress ain’t got to them yet. They’re still standing in the entryway. “You almost done?” She looks guilty. “Sorry. I’ll hurry.” I sink down in the booth. “No, it’s cool. Didn’t mean to be mad.” She looks where I look and drops her spoon. The cops shift their stances like they’re impatient. Or looking for something. My stomach clenches. “Don’t look at them,” I tell Zoe. “Do
only one time, because my dad told him to get lost—during lunch, after school. Sometimes he snuck me away in the middle of the night under a secret-keeping moon. In a handful of weeks he’s become my new belief. This night is the black kind of dark when there is no moon and it’s hard to see the houses we pass only every ten minutes or so. But I can see the stars if I lean forward and look out the top of the windshield. The stars don’t seem to move, even though we’re flying down the highway.
of me to let her do this, to get her involved at all. But I can’t see no other way. We pass through Vegas, all those lights and casinos and the fake Statue of Liberty and the fake Eiffel Tower. The things that were supposed to be our future, our home. But now we have to find signs to California. There are so many millions of people in California that I figure, sure, we can get lost there. And if nobody knows we’re headed farther west, we’ll be better off. “I’m gonna make this up to you.”
twice, checking on the road in between glances. Something’s going on in her head. I hate not knowing what. There’s cars behind us, red and blue. A little sports car, a pickup truck. No shiny black sedan, no white car with flashing lights. There’re cars in front of us, too, putting on their brake lights, and I wonder if there’s an animal in the road or something. What could be big enough to stop traffic out here? “Are you sure you want to keep going?” She’s sitting up straight, eyeing the road.
clutch?” “On the left.” “What’s a clutch?” “It’s the—” He stops when he sees the look on my face. “Okay, know-it-all. You do it. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the ride.” He doesn’t sit back at all. It doesn’t seem possible, but his back gets stiffer. And it takes an act of supreme willpower to steady my hand enough to insert the key in the ignition. I press my foot against the clutch, a little surprised at how much effort it takes to get it to the floor. Then I turn the key. The car growls to