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Monday
Mia was lying in a strange bed, her face pressed into a soft pillow. Her head throbbed, and her mouth felt like mice had made a nest near her tonsils. She pushed herself to a sitting position, and ran her dry tongue around her mouth, nausea swimming through her gut. A quilt slid off her shoulders and pooled around her feet. No, not a bed, really, just two mattresses stacked up.
The room she was in was small, enclosed by rough wooden walls. The door was closed. What time was it? Where was she? Inside a shed, or maybe a barn? The light was dim in here. A bulb on the ceiling was enclosed in a metal cage contraption, but the light wasn’t on. Sunlight leaked in through a slender crack in the gray-brown wall, and one knothole near the ceiling streamed a shaft of brightness, a miniature spotlight that illuminated the far corner.
So it was daytime. Crap, they’d missed the concerts last night?
This was beyond embarrassing. Was she such a baby that a couple of beers knocked her out? Had they affected Darcy like that? They had to get on the road. It was almost a four-hour drive back to Bellingham.
Where was everyone, anyway? She studied herself, running her hands over her jeans and T-shirt. Her jacket was laid across the foot of the mattress. Her socks were still on, but her shoes rested neatly, side-by-side, next to the bed.
She slid her feet to the floor, which was, surprisingly, only packed dirt. Where the hell was she? This was a weird guest room—there was only the frameless bed, made up with pink sheets and a flowered comforter, and a small wooden table next to it. A granola bar and a bottle of water lay on top of the nightstand, if that was what it was intended to be, along with a single pink rose in a beer bottle.
Across the room was a big plastic paint bucket, upended, with a roll of toilet paper on top. She hoped that didn’t indicate the use planned for that bucket. The public toilets at the campground had been gross enough.
Mia stood up and padded to the door, her hands held out in front of her in the dim light, fighting dizziness that threatened to make the walls undulate around her. She flipped the light switch near the door. Nothing happened. Next, she tried the doorknob. Locked. She searched for a button to release the lock. There was none. Using both hands, she twisted the knob with all her strength, rattled the door again.
The door was locked from the outside. A stab of alarm tweaked her gut. It was a metal door, the kind her dad called a security door.
She searched the walls. There was no other light switch in the room. Just the one that didn’t work.
Had Darcy left her here, locked in, in the dark?
Was that a footstep she heard outside? “Hey!” she yelled. “I’m awake. Come let me out!”
There was no answer. She clenched her hand into a fist, pounded three times. “Hey! I really have to pee! Open the door!”
Holding her breath, she listened for a moment. What was that creaking noise? It might have been only the wind, because a puff of air whistled in through the knothole at the same time. “Darcy?”
She remembered now that Darcy had begged to go back to the Gorge. That had been irritating. Why cut short the first real adventure Mia had ever been on? The wind in her hair, her arms around the cute guy, racing down the highway on a motorcycle like a scene out of that old hippie movie, Easy Rider.
Born to be wild . . .
What was her guy’s name? Rusty? No, Dusty, that was it. Dusty and—what was the name of Darcy’s guy?—something weird like Commie, no, Comet—had invited them on a picnic. A bike ride, food, beer. The guys were both clearly older than high school, but that was okay; everyone knew that girls matured faster than boys, and she wanted a man, not one of the pimply boys her parents were always trying to warn her away from. Dusty was a handsome dude in a clean-cut-farm-boy sort of way. He looked like a guy she could lose her cherry to and not pick up some disease. And best of all, nobody at school knew him. It was so mortifying to still be a virgin at seventeen. She was pretty sure she was the last virgin in Stanton Academy.
Mia had instantly been ready to hop on the back of Dusty’s motorcycle, but Darcy hadn’t been sure it was a good idea. Probably thinking of Sean, the neighbor boy she was hooking up with. He was still a kid. Mia was pretty sure Sean had never done anything interesting. And probably never would.
But there’d been no point in worrying about Sean. Sean wasn’t at Sasquatch. And those two boys who bought them snacks had taken off, too. There were just these two smiling motorcycle riders standing in front of them, promising a good time.
“We’ll be gentlemen,” Comet had promised, holding up his arms in an “I’m unarmed” gesture.
That clinched the deal. Most boys they hung out with probably didn’t even know the word gentlemen.
The ridge where the bikers had taken them was sweet, overlooking the valley and the hills beyond that rolled out as far as you could see, with fields of gold and green and brown like a patchwork quilt. So different from Bellingham, where basically all you saw was trees and mountains and once in a while, water and the San Juan Islands out to the west.
They’d watched the sun go down as they ate cold fried chicken out of a box and sipped those beers. Hers hadn’t tasted as good she expected, sort of sour and bitter at the same time, but it was her first and everyone said beer was an acquired taste. Plus, there were hundreds of kinds of beer, and you had to try a lot to find the kind you liked. Bellingham was like the brewpub capital of the United States.
Then Darcy had wanted to go back to the festival, telling Comet, “We want to hear the last concert, and we have to get up early in the morning and drive back home.”
Mia wasn’t really ready to go, but Darcy had the car keys, and she probably wouldn’t think twice about leaving Mia at the Gorge. “Yeah,” she had agreed, “We’ll get busted if we’re not back by dinnertime tomorrow.”
“Sure thing. It’s not like we planned to keep you prisoner or anything.” Dusty had smiled at them and then shot a look at the other guy. “You’ll see how sweet it is to ride under the stars out here in the country; you’ll love it.”
“It’s like flying,” Comet added.
Mia flashed back on her brother Jared riding his motorcycle. That was exactly what he had said: “At night, it’s just like flying.”
At five years old, she’d had a vision of Superman flying through the sky under star-spangled heavens, but of course Jared had meant riding his bike at night. Probably speeding way too fast down some lonely highway. She liked to imagine Jared that way, riding free and happy.
It wasn’t really a memory, because she’d never actually seen her oldest brother take his bike out after dark, but that mental picture of him was so much better than the real memory that was seared into her brain. When she thought of her sister Julie, she liked to imagine her riding a palomino horse bareback through a field of flowers, the blond mane of the horse and her sister’s dark hair floating in the breeze. Justin was a bit harder to envision, but she imagined him sailing on a yacht somewhere. He’d always been quiet, but he loved the water.
After the beer and the chicken were gone and the sun had set behind the Cascades, Mia and Darcy—Sunshine and Blackbird—had mounted up again behind Dusty and Comet. On the way back to the Gorge Amphitheatre, Mia had started to feel so sick that she was afraid she’d spew down the collar of Dusty’s leather jacket, which would be absolutely mortifying. The world was spinning. So she’d shut her eyes, held on tight, and put her cheek against Dusty’s shoulder. She didn’t remember seeing the stars.
Actually, now that she examined her memory, she didn’t remember anything after closing her eyes on the back of that bike.
“Darcy?” she yelled again. “Dusty? Comet?”
As she pounded again on the door with her fist, dust shimmered down from the ceiling above. “This is so not funny!”
