Hallie
Saturday, June 5, 1:45 a.m.
I manage to wait barely thirty seconds from the time we leave the gas station to ask Jack, “So your brother—he’s a recovering drug addict?”
“Yeah.” I wonder if his brother looks like him—tall and slim with the same wavy, coffee-brown hair, square jaw, and stormy-gray eyes—or they’re complete genetic opposites in every way, like Dylan and me.
“That must be rough. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you have other siblings?”
He shakes his head. “Just the one brother. He overdosed on OxyContin. He’d stolen my dad’s prescription pad. If I hadn’t found him when I did, he probably would have died.”
“Wow.” I hug my knees toward my chest. “Well, obviously you saved his life, which is good. He’s still on the planet. I’m sure he’s grateful to you for that.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t spoken to him since it happened.”
“How long has it been?”
“Almost two years.”
I absently rotate my bracelet around my wrist. “Wow. I can’t imagine not talking to my brother for that long. Dylan’s a pain in the ass sometimes—he’s thirteen—but still. That’s rough.”
Jack nods. “My parents kicked him out. He’d pushed them too far and nearly messed up my dad’s career because you have to report stolen pads to the police. It’s not like Alex didn’t know what might happen. He wasn’t oblivious; in fact, just the opposite. He was smart enough to know it was exactly what it would take to get my parents’ attention.”
Dale swerves slightly, and the contents of the bag dig into my hip deeper. I shift slightly to lessen the pressure. This truck apparently has zero shock absorbers. No doubt we will both be black and blue by the time we get wherever we’re going.
“That’s awful,” I say.
“My family puts the fun in dysfunctional.”
A laugh escapes, and I quickly slap my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.”
“I think you can find the humor in anything after a certain point.”
We involuntarily bump against each other in the back of the truck for a while until Jack finally says, “So since I’ve completely overshared—because apparently you bring that out in me—it’s only fair that I get to ask you a totally personal question.”
“That seems reasonable. Shoot.”
“Why’d you leave school before the end of sophomore year? I mean, you didn’t move away, right? Did you transfer?”
I look at him with disbelief. “You really don’t know?”
He shakes his head. “Should I?”
Oh boy. I angle toward him to look him square in the eye. “If I answer your question, you have to promise you will not treat me any differently afterward or feel obliged to ask more questions because you’re worried about being impolite, because that’s usually what happens. And I’m so over that. Do you still want to know?”
“With a build up like that? Probably twice as much now as I did before. And I promise.” He cracks a half smile.
I lean my head back against the cab window. “So, the short version is…I had cancer.”
“Holy shit.”
I steal a glance at him, half expecting him to scoot over two inches like I might give him a virus.
“It turns out pregnancy, the flu, and cancer have a lot of the same symptoms: nausea, vomiting, fatigue, abdominal discomfort. So, when I spiked a fever and collapsed in the hallway one night, my mom rushed me to the hospital. I was expecting it to be one of the first two, which would have been crappy enough, but they ran all these tests and it turned out to be number three. I have this super-rare condition that only like a hundred and forty people have ever been diagnosed with called Carney’s triad. It mostly affects teenage girls, and it’s when three different types of tumors grow in three separate organs of the body, usually the stomach, lungs, or adrenal glands. Most people present with it in one organ if they’re lucky, but over their lifetimes, a small percentage get all three.”
His mouth is hanging open. “Jeez. Did you have all three?”
I shake my head. “The one I had was in my stomach. They call it a gastrointestinal stromal tumor, or a GST.”
“Did you have to do chemo or radiation?”
“The kind of cancer I have doesn’t respond well to either, so they do surgery. They removed part of my stomach along with the tumor, and I have to take this gross medicine with all these nasty side effects like muscle pain, headaches, and weird rashes to keep it from coming back. But it doesn’t always work the way it should. With Carney’s triad, you can have a tumor in one place and have it removed and then years later another will grow somewhere else.”
His eyes flit to my stomach reflexively, as if searching for evidence of what I’ve been through, and then back to meet mine. “But you’re cured, right? It’s gone.”
I shake my head. “There is no cure. There’s always a possibility it’ll come back. I have regular follow-up visits where they monitor what’s happening with radiography so they can see if new tumors are growing.”
“Why didn’t you come back to school after that?”
“By the time I was able to, I’d missed half of sophomore year. I ended up doing homeschooling. It was much easier than having to go back to school and have everyone talking about me, or worse, not talking to me because they don’t know what to say. People are weird about stuff like that. Even the people you’d never expect to behave that way. So, I did classes online and had to check in with an advisor once a week, which was actually great because I got to work at my own pace, and I was able to take the GED and graduate months before I would have normally.”
He bobs his head, expressionless. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. But then his brow furrows, and he says emphatically, “That’s ridiculous. That people act that way, I mean—not what you chose to do. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I probably would have chosen not to go back either.”
“Sometimes perspective comes in ugly wrapping paper.” I arch my back slightly, eyeing him. “You’re not going to look at me differently now, right? Because you promised.”
“Nope.”
I smile. “Okay, good.”
“But you’re fine now, right?” he presses.
Oscar hastily slides open the rear cab window, and we’re snapped back into the moment.
“The battery died and as luck would have it, Dale is the last human on Earth with a flip phone. Seriously—you should consider donating that back to 1995,” he says offhand to Dale, then turns back to us and adds, “At the last check, it appears like they’re just up ahead off the highway on this service road. They haven’t moved since we started tracking them, which can’t be good because it means they either ditched the phone or they’re dissecting my car like a frog.”
Jack and I got so caught up in each other’s stories that I nearly forgot why we’re here. And of course, none of us thought to check if they sold chargers at the gas station. Dale picks up speed as he exits the highway. My parents would freak out if they could see me right now. Yes, this is ill-advised and reckless, but it’s also a total rush.
Oscar passes Jack’s phone back to him and says, “Oh, and by the way, right before it died, you got a text from someone named Natasha.”
“I did? What did she say?” he asks a little too eagerly.
“I didn’t read it,” Oscar tells him, which makes sense because he was slightly preoccupied with trying to track his stolen car. “We should probably come up with some sort of plan for if the guys are still there when we find the car.”
“A plan would be good,” I agree.
Jack shoves his phone in his rear pocket. “It’s about the element of surprise, and in the worst-case scenario, being prepared to offer them something they want in order to get what you want.”
“I have that Target gift card you gave me,” Oscar says.
“Probably not gonna be enough. Do you have a watch or anything?”
“Do people even wear watches anymore?” I ask.
“I have a watch. It’s a digital Casio waterproof to a hundred meters.” Oscar proudly holds up his wrist to show us.
“The thing is: we’re not all that intimidating, but we need to give off the impression that we are,” Jack says, reeling him back in.
“All that. Yes. But how the hell are we gonna pull that off?” Oscar asks.
We drive down a dark, narrow road that runs parallel to the highway. The truck hits another pothole, and one of the green bags awkwardly topples onto my leg, dislodging the tie and falling open. What looks like a human head peeks out of the bag. Jack and I simultaneously cry out and recoil.
The truck hits yet another bump, and the head fully emerges, along with naked shoulders.
“Holy shit!” Jack yelps and instinctively puts his arm across me protectively, as if that might do anything.
You know that moment they say happens when you face the prospect of imminent death and your entire life flashes before you? Yeah, that doesn’t actually happen.
Instead, I immediately start visualizing the grisly way in which I am potentially about to meet my end. A guy that looks like Santa is going to chop us all to bits and bury us in a shallow grave behind some scrub brush on the side of the 101. I haven’t even done anything worth doing with my life yet.
And then the body slumps sideways, revealing the face. The eyes are painted on and the hair is fake.
It’s a mannequin. Jack and I start laughing. I lean forward and peel the rest of the bag away to reveal that it is more specifically a mannequin head and torso. No legs.
“That’s creepy,” I say. “What do you think he does with them?”
“Maybe he’s building an army for the zombie apocalypse,” Jack offers.
He loosens the tie on another bag and pulls it down, revealing yet another mannequin. There must be at least ten bags back here, and they all seem to have the same dimensions. A smile spreads across his face, and he lets out a laugh.
“I have an idea,” Jack says.