28

A few hours after Blue had heard the last of the footsteps crunching on gravel near her hiding place, cramped and numb from the cold, she had wriggled out of that god-awful hole inside the concrete platform and spent the rest of the night concealed inside the muddy thicket. She had kept her camera dry and had fifty dollars in her pocket, but she knew she dared not return to her hotel.

When the sun rose on Greensboro, she finally descended the embankment and emerged into the city, miserable and starving and exhausted to the bone. She had to get out of town and decided to risk a bus. No one would pick her up on the side of the road looking like she did.

During her overnight ordeal, she had had plenty of time to think through her options. No way could she go home yet, and she was almost out of money. Hungry. Desperate.

The way she saw it, she had three choices. The first two were hide out on the streets or find a homeless shelter to hole up in. She quickly discarded living on the streets. It was just too dangerous, and she would probably starve or freeze to death. No, that was the absolute last resort. A homeless shelter was a much better idea, except for the other creeps who would be living there, and a higher risk that Los Viburos would find her. Shelters were full of drug people, any of who would give up her location for a single hit.

Her third option was very different and, in some ways, frightened her even more than the other two.

After her father had left, once her mother had realized he wasn’t coming back and hurled his belongings into a dumpster, Blue had pawed through the trash and found a photo album from her father’s childhood. She even found a letter from a cousin addressed to her father at his old house.

She still knew the address. Her father had grown up in Old Fort, North Carolina, a speck on the map in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Asheville. Her father’s childhood home was a mythical town to which she had never been, her last place of refuge.

Blue had enough money to get there. She could take a bus to her father’s hometown and beg one of her relatives to take her in.

Yet what if they rejected her?

That was something Blue wasn’t sure she would survive.

After scurrying to the Greensboro central bus station, she checked the timetables and learned her father’s hometown was so small there wasn’t even a bus stop. The closest town was Black Mountain, a touristy spot about ten miles from Old Fort on the way to Asheville. The lack of bus service made her decision easier. She could go to Black Mountain to get away from Greensboro, then decide whether or not to visit her father’s family.

She bought a one-way ticket to Black Mountain and a cup of coffee, then hunkered down in the most secluded corner of the station she could find. During the wait, she didn’t spot any gang members. With any luck, they would bank on her returning to her hotel or running back to Creekville.

Though the wait had her biting her nails to the flesh, by the time she boarded her bus, just after noon, she was sure no one suspicious was watching her.

A few hours later, when Blue arrived in Black Mountain, she stood on the sidewalk and took a few minutes to inhale the fresh mountain air, eying the sweep of shaggy peaks that cradled the town. It was beautiful, an entirely different world from the Piedmont. As if the rise in elevation had also raised her station in life, or at least lifted her spirits. Yes, that was it. The change was internal. The mountains inspired her, transformed her into a more soulful being. She already felt closer to her father.

After spending a couple of bucks at Goodwill on a clean pair of jeans and a Montreat sweatshirt, she bought two hot dogs for a dollar at a gas station. There wasn’t much to the town that she could see, a few blocks of quaint shops and restaurants, but there was lots of activity. Tourists and hikers and parents walking their kids to school. It was a bucolic place, a place out of time, and she loved it at first sight.

After freshening up as best she could in a public restroom, she sat cross-legged in a public park full of gnarled old trees and debated what to do. She supposed she could walk the ten miles to Old Fort. How long would that take her? Half a day? It didn’t sound very enticing. She could also try to thumb a ride, or maybe she had enough money left for a taxi. No—she wasn’t spending the last of her funds on that. She would need those dollars. And hitchhiking was dangerous. She had pushed her luck once already.

Blue sat in the park for a very long time, knowing she was stalling, enjoying the crisp mountain air and the ancient wisdom of the trees. At the end of the day, she trudged toward a homeless shelter she had noticed on the ride in, nervous about spending the night in such a despondent place, but terrified even more by the thought of knocking on the door of the house where her father used to live.