Untamed (36 page)

I put on a jacket, wait for her in the corridor, and she emerges wearing a black hoodie and dark jeans. She’s got her hood up, the cords pulled tight so that it wrinkles in a circle around her face.

“Why are you laughing?” she asks, as if she’s accusing me of making fun of her.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Tell me,” she says. “Or I won’t go with you.”

I see the flicker of a smile on her face, and say, “You just look like you’re about to rob a store or something.”

She fingers the rippled edge of her hood, grins. “Is there a dress code for that?”

I shrug. “You tell me.”

We share a small silence, and I put my hand out. She looks at it for a moment, and there’s this… stoppage of time, as if someone has pressed the pause button on our lives.

We look at each other for what feels like an eternity. When she takes my hand, holds it, it fills me with some crazy kind of feeling, like I’ve got bubbles inside of me, floating me up.

I’ve never felt this before.

“You ready?”

She nods. “Sure.”

We creep down the hallway together, even though we have no real need to. Frank is long gone, the staff has left, and Glass must be in a deep and drunken sleep.

We slink to the garage, adjacent and unconnected to the house, and open a door with squeaky hinges. I spot the silver key box on the wall, open it and look through the sets of dangling car keys.

“Which car is your favorite?” I ask, looking out at the cars parked. There’s a Ferrari, a BMW coupe, a Camaro, a boxy SUV I don’t recognize, a… it dawns on me that outside of the SUV, there isn’t really a
family
car in here. Just two-door sports cars.

“I always liked this one,” she says, pointing to a small, old-ish hatchback hiding behind the SUV. It looks like it hasn’t been driven in a while.

I look for the corresponding key, take it, and open the driver’s side.

“Wait, I thought I was driving,” she says. “Do you even have a license?”

I blink. “Yeah, actually. We got driving lessons at the home. They even had somebody come down every day, and if we were old enough we’d take turns. Glass had me do a bunch of hours in Thailand at the best school they have there, then had my license converted for here.”

“Oh,” she says. It’s this bizarre moment, like we’ve just come face-to-face with the fact of how little we actually know each other.

As we get into the car, I’m suddenly pulled back into an old memory, one that makes me grin at the stupidity of it, but also makes me cringe at the stupidity of it.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just remembering something.”

“What? Tell me.”

“Before I went to Thailand, sometimes the boys at the home and I… we’d, well, we’d go for joyrides. We could boost a car in fifteen seconds.”

“You stole cars?”

“Borrowed them.”

“What do you mean?”

“We usually left them somewhere nearby where we took them. We just did it to drive around at night.”

“You never got caught?”

“Sure we did,” I say. “Squad car rolls up, all flashing red and blue, and we split in different directions. They never get us. Half the time they weren’t even up for a proper chase even in their cars, let alone on foot.”

“I had no idea it was that easy to steal a car.”

“Sure it is,” I say. “How many cars are stolen per year? I’d bet fucking loads. You think every car thief is a genius?”