“Grab our backpacks,” I tell Agnes. “Don’t bother with your cane. I’ll guide you in.”
She tosses her white cane, folded up into a bundle of sticks, onto the floorboard. Me and Utah walk around the car and wait until Agnes’s got one backpack slung over her shoulders and the other hanging from her right hand. I stare at the purple bag for a second, the one she brought with her.
“You didn’t bring your phone, did you?”
“Of course not. Just clothes and money—like you said.”
“All right. Just making sure.”
She holds out her left arm, and I step forward, letting her grip just above my elbow, the way she’d taught me.
We don’t say a word as we head across the parking lot, toward the automatic sliding doors of the hotel.
“Good evening,” says the man behind the desk, even though it’s several hours past evening, if you ask me. “How can I help y’all?”
“We need a room,” I say.
His eyes fall on Utah, and he stumbles backward, even though there’s a tall counter between us. Like he’s scared my dog, who’s wagging her tail so hard she could clear a coffee table, might maul him. I oughta not be so hard on him, though. German shepherds do have real sharp teeth. And he don’t know Utah would never use them.
He clears his throat. “Ah. Well, do you have a reservation?”
“No.”
“I see … How old are you two?”
“Seventeen. Why?”
“I’m sorry, girls.” But he don’t look too sorry to me. “We can’t let you rent a room from us.”
“Why the hell not?” I demand.
He narrows his eyes at me. “Well, for one thing, we don’t allow pets. But even if we did, all our guests are required to be at least twenty-one.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I’m afraid I’m not,” he says, and he sounds awful annoyed. Probably ain’t used to being cussed at by teenagers in the middle of the night. “And you’ll find that’s the case with most hotels in Kentucky. Now, if you have somewhere else to keep the dog and a parent or guardian who can—”
Me and Agnes are out the door before he can even finish that sentence.
“What do we do now?” Agnes asks when we’re back in the car. “We can’t rent a hotel room—I think the twenty-one thing might actually be the law.”
“Then we’ll find a place that’ll break the law.” I know there must be places that’ll rent to just about anybody. Too many girls get pregnant on prom night, and I know they ain’t doing it at their parents’ house. There’s gotta be somewhere that’ll let teenagers in.
We ain’t driven five minutes when I see a place. Big red lights above the door read MOT L—the E is burned out. The place looks run-down and dirty, even on the outside. The sorta place I’m sure a lot of drug deals have gone down in—many of them probably involving people in my family. If any place is gonna let two teenage girls rent a room, it’s this one.
Beggars can’t be choosers. Ain’t that what they say? And me and Agnes aren’t exactly on vacation. A shitty motel won’t be the worst thing that’s happened to us.
Well, not to me.
“Does this seem like a good place to try?” Agnes asks.
I’m glad she can’t see the graffitied brick walls or the trash-covered parking lot.
“Good ain’t the word,” I say. “But this is where we’re staying. Come on.”
Like I suspect, the man at the front desk don’t give a damn about our age. Just as long as we pay in cash. Agnes takes some money out of her backpack, and we get a key to a room at the far end of the parking lot. He don’t even ask about the dog. But when I unlock the door, I can see why. Utah can’t make this place any worse than it already is.
The carpet ain’t been vacuumed in years, and there are some mysterious stains on the wall I don’t even wanna know about.
Agnes can’t see none of it. She might be able to make everything out a little better if one of the lamps—the one on the desk—wasn’t broken. I try to see the place through her eyes. Just a bed and a TV, with all the dirty details smoothed over.
“We should sleep,” she says. “My parents will be up at seven thirty to get ready for church. I wanna be long gone before they come looking for me.”
“Or the police do.”
“They won’t call the police. I left a note. They’ll know it was me who took the car. They’ll know it’s not stolen. But they will come looking.”
I set the alarm for seven. Just three short hours away. Somehow, the thought of waking up that soon makes me feel even more tired than I already am.
“I need to use the bathroom first.” She starts heading toward the bathroom, her arms outstretched, looking for the wall.
I don’t help her. I know she can do it herself. But I do give her some advice. “Hey, Agnes? Don’t sit on the toilet, okay?”
“What?”
“Squat when you pee. Don’t sit down.”
The look on her face makes me wonder if she’s ever had to squat over a toilet in her life. Probably not.
But she don’t argue.
While she’s in the bathroom, I pull back the blanket. The sheets look all right, even though I’m sure nobody’s washed them in days. Or weeks. I don’t bother opening my backpack. I just slip off my cutoffs and climb into bed, wearing my T-shirt as pajamas. Utah jumps on the bed and walks in a circle until she’s made herself comfortable—right on top of my feet.
I grab the remote from the nightstand and switch on the TV. Most of the channels are just white fuzz, but eventually I find an infomercial on. Some old model advertising antiaging face cream. That’s as good as it gets this late at night. It’s better than sleeping in the quiet.
Agnes comes out a second later. “I squatted,” she says, like she’s proud of herself.
“Good job.”
The queen-size bed is pushed up against the wall, so she’s gotta climb over me to get to her side. “You’re gonna let the dog sleep in the bed?”
“Yeah. Why? She sleeps in my bed every night at home.”
“I don’t know … Won’t she get the blankets dirty?”
“No dirtier than they already are.”
I don’t think she knows what to say to that.
“Bo,” she says after a minute. “What are we doing?”
For a second, I’m scared, thinking she’s changed her mind, thinking she might not wanna do this no more. Part of me wants that—wants to take her home, wants to keep her out of my mess—but another part of me, a bigger part, can’t do this without her. I need her.
“I mean, what’s our plan? Where are we going in the morning?”
I hold back a sigh of relief. Swallow it down a throat that’s suddenly way too dry.
“Well … I thought … Maybe we could find my dad.”
“Your dad? How come?”
I sit up and switch off the lamp, so now neither of us can see. “Money,” I say. “He owes a shit ton of child support. Maybe I can get him to give me some money.”
“I guess that’s not a bad idea. We’ll need money if we’re gonna make this work … This sure isn’t how I imagined us getting out of Mursey.”
“Me neither.”
“We’ll come up with a plan, though. Maybe … Maybe after we find your dad, we can try and get an apartment or something? Some place we can stay for a while. Until we turn eighteen, I guess. We’ll have to figure out jobs and …” She yawns. “I don’t know. But once we’re eighteen, we can go anywhere. We won’t have anything to worry about. Right? Just you and me.”
Even in the pitch-black, I can’t face her. “Yeah … Right.”
“Do you know where your dad is?”
“No. But I’ll find him,” I say. “I got to.”
I’ll never forget the day Miss Bixley, the guidance counselor, walked Bo Dickinson into my English class.
“Mrs. Hartman,” she said, tapping on the open door. I knew it was her before she opened her
mouth. Miss Bixley had the biggest hair I’d ever seen. It almost touched the top of the doorframe. Even I couldn’t miss it. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have a new student for you.”
“Oh?”
“Bo Dickinson,” Miss Bixley explained, ushering Bo into the room. “I’ve decided to switch her into your class. I think this will be a better fit for her.”
By “this” she meant the advanced class. Our school wasn’t real big. Every high schooler in the county was bused into Mursey, and we still had less than four hundred students. But we did have some honors and remedial classes. Maybe it was wrong of me, but I’d assumed Bo Dickinson would be in the latter. I’d just never thought of her as being advanced at anything school related.
And I clearly wasn’t the only one. There was a sudden rush of whispers. They started quiet and got louder and louder, like a swarm of bees closing in.
“What?” Christy growled into my ear. “There’s got to be a mistake.”
Finally, Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat and everybody went silent again.
“Glad to have you, Bo,” she said. “There’s an extra textbook on the shelf in the back. You can take whatever seat you find.”
“Thanks.”
As Bo headed to the back of the room, Miss Bixley called after her. “Good luck, Bo. Thank you, Mrs. Hartman.”
The classroom door shut, and Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat again. She was a constant throat-clearer. She did it before almost every sentence. Sometimes loud, to get our attention. Sometimes not. But I always heard her.
“We’re reading Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ today,” she explained to Bo. “Page three thirteen. While Bo catches up with that, why don’t the rest of you take another look, too, so you’re ready to discuss in a few minutes.”
I didn’t have a book—the print was too small for me to read, and using a magnifier was slow and a little exhausting. Instead, I just had a couple of pages Mrs. Hartman had enlarged with the copy machine in the main office. A poem that took up less than a page in the book took up three sheets of paper for me. But at least I could follow along. Every once in a while Mrs. Hartman would just read out loud whatever it was we’d be discussing, but I liked this better. I could underline or circle things I liked. Not that I ever understood any of it. I liked fiction, but poetry usually went right over my head.
Which is why I didn’t raise my hand when Mrs. Hartman cleared her throat and asked, “So, what is this poem about?”
Christy raised her hand, though. She always raised her hand. Her arm brushed past mine as it shot into the air.
“Go ahead, Christy.”
“It’s about being an individual.” Christy had on her sweetest voice. The one she reserved for teachers and Brother Thomas. “It’s about doing the thing no one else has done and how that can change your future. ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ It’s a really lovely poem.”
“Nice job, Christy.”
“But that ain’t what it’s about.”
Everybody except me turned. This time, I recognized the voice. It was Bo.
“Yes, it is,” Christy snapped.
“Now, wait a second, Christy,” Mrs. Hartman said. “Let’s hear Bo out. That’s what this class is for, after all.”
I could tell by the crack in Christy’s voice that she might be close to tears. She didn’t handle correction real well. “Sorry, Mrs. Hartman.”
“Go on, Bo. What do you think it means?”
“It ain’t about individuality or any of that. The road wasn’t less traveled. He says it right there in the poem. ‘Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.’ They’d both been traveled just as much.”
I looked down at my own copy of the poem. She was right. It said it right there, in the second stanza.
“Then how do you interpret the last line?” Mrs. Hartman asked.
“You can’t just look at the last line. It’s that whole section there. He’s talking about how he’s gonna tell the story later—with a sigh and all that. When he tells it years from now, he’s gonna tell how the road he took was less traveled. It ain’t about being different—it’s about how we change our own histories.”
“Okay … How do you mean?”
“Sometimes we tell ourselves stuff we know ain’t true,” Bo said. “Just to make us seem better or to give meaning to stupid things, I dunno. He says he took the road less traveled even though he knows he didn’t. Just like some people tell everyone they’re good little Christian girls, even though they’re really gossiping, lying bitches.”
“Mrs. Hartman, are you going to let her talk to me like that?” Christy demanded.
“She wasn’t talking to you, Christy,” said Andrew, who was sitting on the other side of her.
“No. But I was talking about her,” Bo assured him.
The whole room began buzzing again, and I felt Christy start to stand up, but something yanked her back into her seat. Andrew, I figured. Although maybe I should’ve grabbed her, too.
“Enough,” Mrs. Hartman hollered. “Bo, that language will not be tolerated. Principal’s office. Now.”
A chair scraped against the tile, and a second later Bo trudged past our desks, toward the door.
“Can you believe her?” Christy asked, her mouth close and hot next to my ear. “Kicked out of class five minutes after she got here. Just what you’d expect from a Dickinson. And that was a stupid interpretation of the poem anyway.”
But the more I read the poem—and I read it several times that day and even again that afternoon when I got home—the more I thought she might be right. Maybe it was about the ways we rewrite our histories. And if that were true, how would I rewrite mine?
I wake up with a cold, wet nose in my face and two big paws on either side of my head.
It’s the same way I wake up every morning, and for a minute I forget where I’m at. I’m in my little twin bed back in Mursey. It’s Sunday, and I ain’t got nowhere to be.
“Not now, Utah.”
The words ain’t even left my mouth when I remember. The voices on the police scanner, running through the woods, Agnes, the stolen car—
The goddamn alarm clock that was supposed to go off at seven.
I bolt upright and Utah scurries backward, then jumps off the bed, tail wagging and ears perked up.
“Agnes.” She’s still fast asleep, her black hair fanned out over the pillow. She looks so peaceful that I almost hate to wake her. But we gotta go. Now. I grab her shoulder and give it a shake. “Agnes, get up.”
“Mmmm.”
“Come on. The alarm didn’t go off. It’s … shit, it’s after ten. Get up.”
Her eyes blink open and she stares at me. “You’re still here,” she mumbles.
I act like I didn’t hear her. “Come on. Get up. We gotta go.”
“Ugh. Okay, okay.”
I jump out of bed and pull on my shorts. Utah whines and nuzzles at my legs, wanting breakfast.
“Fine,” I mumble, grabbing my backpack off the floor and rushing to the bathroom. Hurry or not, I ain’t gonna let my dog starve.
Last night, I’d packed some of her food into a ziplock bag, but I forgot to bring a bowl. I toss a couple handfuls of the kibble onto the bathroom floor. She starts chowing down before all the pieces even hit the ground.
“Good girl.”
I hear Agnes moving around in the other room, getting her clothes on. I get my toothbrush out of my bag and try to clean myself up as fast as I can. I look like shit. But I guess that don’t matter right now.
“Bo,” Agnes says, and I can hear the shake in her voice. “Bo, come back in here.”
“What?”
I step out of the bathroom and look at her. She’s half-dressed, wearing just her jeans and a plain white bra. But she ain’t moving. She’s real still, her shirt loose in her hand.
“What?” I ask again.
She don’t say nothing. Just points to the TV, s
till on from last night.
“… Atwood’s parents contacted police this morning. It’s believed the teenager may have run away with another girl, Bo Dickinson. Authorities say the vehicle is a silver Chevy with the license plate …”
Mine and Agnes’s most recent school pictures stare back at us from the screen while the news anchor talks, fast and monotone, like she don’t give a damn what she’s saying.
But I give a damn. I give many damns.
My heart starts beating so fast it hurts.
Agnes turns to look at me. Then she says what we’re both thinking.
“Fuck.”
I’d hoped to go to Lexington with my parents when they drove Gracie up to college. It’d mean two and a half hours in the car—one way—but I’d never been to a city that big. We could go to a real mall and eat at a nice restaurant. But my sister put an end to all those hopes when she packed two giant suitcases and a handful of boxes full of her stuff.
“How will you fit all of this in that tiny dorm room?” Mama asked as she lifted one of the cardboard boxes into the backseat, in the spot where I’d normally sit. There was just too much stuff and not enough room for four of us. Which meant I’d be the one left behind.
“I’ll make it work.”
“Really? Because I’m not even sure we can fit everything in the car,” Daddy said, slamming the Toyota’s trunk shut.
“Well, if you’d let me drive the Chevy and follow y’all up to campus …”
“Nice try,” Daddy said. “You’re not taking the car.”
“But it’s my car,” Gracie whined.
“And yet, we’re the ones paying for the gas. You don’t need a car on campus. Not as a freshman. End of story.”
Gracie huffed and stomped her foot, but the way I saw it, she had nothing to complain about. She’d just gotten a huge scholarship to the University of Kentucky. She was getting the hell out of Mursey—something hardly anybody did. Around here, you grew up, got married, and stayed put. Going to college, especially a good state school like UK, was a big deal. Even in my family.