16

The visit from the police reinforced the decision Blue had made to leave Creekville.

Things were too hot around the trailer park. Cobra was closing in, old Billy Flynn was about to make good on his promise, and the law was snooping around.

And what about the comment that blond detective with the shoulders like grapefruits had made, asking about her Chinatown shirt? Did he know something about the camera?

At this point, she no longer cared about the answers to the mounting questions. She just needed to get the hell out of Dodge, as her daddy used to say.

For a moment, just a moment, she considered turning herself in, either to the gang or the police. The gang idea she discarded as the height of stupidity. Going to the police wasn’t much better. They wouldn’t protect her, and if Los Viburos ever figured out she had narced, she was deader than Myspace.

What if the murderer was never caught, she wondered? What if the gang never stopped believing she was a witness ?

She didn’t have an answer.

For now, she had to run.

She started to hide her camera but realized there was no safe place to put it. Once she disappeared, her mom would turn her room upside down, and there was no basement or attic to stash it in. Blue lived in a trailer. A shoe box with a microwave.

Just thinking of leaving the camera caused her stomach to clench and her palms to sweat. She realized she couldn’t do it. It was part of her now, a vital organ.

With Night Lives on hold, she decided to chronicle her sojourn into the underground instead. Maybe she could call it Carolina Blue: A Forgotten Journey. Yeah, she liked that. An artsy vignette of shorts documenting the underbelly of the Piedmont, from the trailer park to Southern urban decay. She could submit it around the circuit, Austin to Sundance, gathering acclaim while she worked on Night Lives.

She wondered how long it would take her mother to notice she was gone. She would probably appreciate the extra food stamps, especially after Blue made off with all her spare cash.

After packing her canvas satchel with clothes and toiletries, Blue dipped into her own secret stash. Every now and then, she stole a few dollars from an easy mark at school or one of her mom’s boyfriends. Blue had over five hundred dollars hidden in her mattress, which she was saving for a trip to LA when the time came to promote the film. It pained her to disturb the fund, but staying alive took precedence.

Terrified someone from Los Viburos would catch her leaving, she crept out of the trailer at 4 a.m. and scanned the deserted grounds. Armies of cockroaches scuttled underfoot. Inspired by her new idea, she kept to the shadows and filmed her exit on the sly, capturing the litter and the silent trailers strewn like junked cars in the darkness.

The slam of a screen door in the distance caused her to flatten against the side of a van. When no one came her way, she shuddered out a breath. Enough. She had captured the essence. After hurrying to the tree line, she stuffed her camera in her bag and hurried through the woods, forcing away her fears of the unknown. Waiting in town for the bus was too risky, so her plan was to hitchhike to Greensboro and arrive around dawn. Hitchhiking posed its own risks, but she would take her chances over running into Cobra.

Leaving town would cement her guilt in the eyes of the gang, however. She knew there was no turning back. Not unless the police caught the murderer.

The woods closed in around her, deep and dark and chittering. To distract her mind from her surroundings, she pondered her decision to go to Greensboro. Charlotte and DC, the closest large cities, were too big and dangerous. Most of the others were too small to disappear. Richmond or Asheville might work, but she had been to Greensboro once before, on one of her few trips outside Creekville, when her father had taken her to see the circus. It might have been the best day of her life.

Once she arrived, she planned to find the cheapest motel possible, one with a weekly rate and a cash discount. After that, surely she could find work somewhere. Everyone needed a dishwasher, didn’t they?

Relieved to leave the creeping darkness behind, she emerged from the woods and walked half a mile across town to the state highway. The lack of cars surprised her. After no one responded to her thumb, she ended up walking all the way to Highway 54, a busy road that led to Burlington, halfway to Greensboro. She could have walked the same distance in the other direction and tried the interstate, but that unnerved her. Visions of traveling serial killers and seedy truck drivers danced in her head.

Starving and exhausted, wondering if she would end up walking the entire fifty miles to Greensboro, someone finally pulled over as the pink light of dawn snuck through the pines. It was a red and white Ford Ranger, a low-slung relic with square headlights.

She eyed the driver as the vehicle came to rest: camo hat pulled low, gray sweatshirt with the logo torn off, worn jeans, grizzled beard covering a lined face and an unsmiling mouth.

That was okay. She trusted frowns more than smiles.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Greensboro.”

“I’m only going to Burlington.”

“I can take the bus from there.” She shrugged off her canvas bag and opened the passenger door before he could change his mind.

After she buckled in, he pulled onto the road and said, “Little young to be hitching, aren’t you? Don’t you have school today?”

“I graduated in May,” she said, with a rueful smile. “I came to Chapel Hill to party and ran out of money.”

“Huh,” he said, eying her clothes and the stuffed canvas bag. “Are you homeless, kid?”

“Um, no. You’re not a creep, are you?” she said. “Because my daddy’s a cop.”

The driver flinched. “What? No. Hey, if your dad’s a cop, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, as the truck slowed. “I won’t say anything, promise. He’d be super happy if he knew you were giving me a ride. I just don’t want him to know I left. He’s on a fishing trip and my mom’s at her sister’s. I don’t do this a lot, you know. I was supposed to ride home with a friend but she left with some guy and, like I said, I ran out of money.”

As he sped up again, Blue breathed a sigh of relief, amazed at how quickly the lies had flowed.

“What’s your name ?” she said, moving the conversation away from

her.

“Greg Peters. I’m a contractor in Durham.”

“You got work in Burlington today?”

“That’s right. Say, where’s your cell phone? I haven’t seen a kid these days who wasn’t buried in their phone.”

“Out of battery,” she said, with a sardonic grin.

The truth was that Blue was one of a handful of kids in the entire high school, maybe the only one, who didn’t have a phone. Her mom couldn’t afford the payments. It was very embarrassing.

She could tell he was growing increasingly suspicious, so she shut up and watched the road. Most of the scenery was woods or farmland, peppered by a few farmsteads and local businesses. Gas stations, a lumber yard, a garden shop or two.

Fifteen minutes later, they pulled into Burlington, a small town situated halfway between Durham and Greensboro.

“Where should I drop you?” he asked.

“A bus stop is fine. I have enough change to get home.”

“All right, then. Which stop ?”

“Anywhere downtown. They all go to Greensboro.”

He didn’t respond, and she could tell he was nervous and just wanted her gone.

After the highway crossed under the interstate and spilled into a tiny brick downtown, Greg let her off at a random bus station. “Watch yourself, okay kid?”

“Sure. Thanks for the lift.”

She felt like also thanking him for not being a creep, but she let him pull away, unused to adults showing her kindness. The bus stop was deserted, the shops still shuttered. A grimy slick of oil mirrored the gray sky above.

Blue had never taken a bus before. It took her a few minutes to figure out the schedule, and she was relieved to find that a bus did in fact go to Greensboro. It arrived in ninety minutes and would take an hour to get there. Inspired by the bucolic emptiness of downtown, she filmed her environs for a while, then lay on her back with her head resting on her canvas bag as she waited for the bus.