THE INSIDE OF the car smelled musty, like wool that had gotten wet, with an undersmell of Caleb’s peanut breath wafting up from the back. But it was clean enough—there wasn’t any junk I could see on the floor or around the gearshift—just her keys, with a little silver S attached to the ring.
“She’s nice,” Caleb said. I whipped my head around to tell him that if he told me the woman we didn’t know was nice one more time, I was going to lose my mind. But then I saw he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the woman. About me.
“She doesn’t always seem nice.” He cupped more peanuts beneath his chin, ready for delivery. “Especially at first. But she is. She’ll help you out.”
The woman nodded, though she’d scooted close to her door. I gave her a look to let her know that was probably a good idea. I’d taken off my mittens, and I had my backpack in my lap, my right hand inside the pocket with the pepper spray. She glanced down at my hidden hand, looking anxious. That was fine. Let her be anxious.
“You understood what he said?” I asked. “You understand English?”
She nodded again, pushing up her glasses. She’d put the Toasty Toes packet away, back in her coat pocket. I’d already refused it. I curled my toes inside my damp socks.
“Then you better start talking,” I said. I was acting tough, like I had a card to play. Which, of course, I did not. Caleb started to say something, but I held up my hand. “I want to hear it from her.”
She shifted in her seat. The nylon of her white coat made a sh-sh sound, but she didn’t say anything. She kept staring at me through her glasses. Even with her coat, I could see the rise and fall of her shoulders, and I knew she was breathing hard.
“Rápido,” I said. I couldn’t roll the r, but I snapped my fingers. She knew what I meant. “Come on. Start talking.”
“I just want to leave,” she whispered.
Or maybe she said, “I just want to live.” I couldn’t tell. What was clear was that she had some kind of accent, and it didn’t sound Mexican at all. Want had come out like vant, like the way a German in a movie would say it. But I didn’t think she was German. I looked at the bones of her face, the hollows of her cheeks, her scared eyes. My heart started to pound. I knew where I’d seen her. She looked different with the knit hat and more of her hair showing, and no lipstick now. But I knew.
I leaned away from her, a siren going off in my head. Caleb was right behind her seat. I pulled the pepper spray out and aimed it at her. She held up her gloved hands in surrender. I didn’t care.
“Caleb!” I kept my eyes on her hands. “Get out of the car! Get out now! She’s a criminal. They’re looking for her. I just saw her on TV.”
My whole arm was shaking. I grabbed my elbow with my left hand to try to keep it steady. But I was going to do it. I’d already popped the release. As soon as he got out, I would jump out too, and I’d give her a good spray, right in the face, before I slammed my door.
“Caleb?”
He didn’t answer. When I let myself glance into the backseat, he was just sitting there with his arms crossed.
The woman turned away and covered her face with her hands, leaning down against the steering wheel.
“Caleb. You listen to me.” I tried to keep my voice calm, but my finger stayed on the trigger. “This is serious. Even if you think she’s nice, understand she’s done something wrong. They were showing her on TV. I don’t know just what she did, but they’re telling people to watch for her. She’s maybe hurt people. And even if you don’t believe that, it’s for sure true that we would be in trouble with the police for sitting here with her like this.” I clenched my teeth. “Now get yourself out of this car right now.”
He shook his head. The sun had started to set, and the silvery light coming in through his window cast half his face in shadow. It was still him. Still Caleb, my little brother. But all at once—maybe it was the serious way he was looking at me—I could picture how he would look when he was grown, older than I was now.
“No way,” he said. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t hurt anyone. She just didn’t want to go to Nevada. That’s the only reason they’re looking for her.”
“You don’t know that,” I snapped. “You think that’s true because that’s what she told you?” I didn’t want to call him stupid again, but my God. I was trying not to breathe so hard. I didn’t want her to know I was scared.
“It is true,” the woman said. She sat up straight again, resting both hands on the wheel.
“You stay quiet,” I said. But I lowered the pepper spray to my lap. I couldn’t spray it with us both in the car with her. “Caleb. You don’t know if she’s telling the truth. But she probably isn’t. It’s only the bad ones that didn’t go when they were supposed to.” I eyed her from the side. “The ones who are still killing people.”
“I have killed no one.” She acted all offended, rolling her eyes, which, it seemed to me, is what any good actress would do. “And I won’t ever kill anyone. I just didn’t want to go to a”—she paused to make quote marks with her fingers—“detention center. I’m not going to participate in my own persecution.”
Now I rolled my eyes. That was a little much. First of all, they weren’t called detention centers. They were security zones. It was true that a lot of Muslims were living in those little trailers, and that they had to use public bathrooms that they all shared, but that’s only because the government was still trying to build housing, and hello, they were in the middle of a desert, so everything needed to be brought in by truck or train. But the trailers seemed fine for now. I mean, I’d been going to school in a glorified trailer every day.
And second of all, the government was sending them off to Nevada for their own good. We’d talked about it in social studies when I was at Hannibal High. Mr. Gordon said the security zones had fences and barbed wire and tower guards holding machine guns, but that was just as much to keep out people who wanted to kill Muslims as it was to keep the Muslims in. That’s how mad everybody was. It was all costing taxpayers a whole lot of money, and Mr. Gordon didn’t see how it could go on forever.
“Well. You should have gone,” I said. “Cause now you’re probably going to end up in a real detention center, and it won’t be the kind with quote marks around it.”
“No, she isn’t!” Caleb slapped the back of my seat hard enough so I felt it on the other side. “We’re going to help her, Sarah-Mary. You promised!”
I swallowed. It was true. I’d promised him. He knew what that meant for me, and that I wasn’t like our mom. But this was crazy, too much. He didn’t understand how serious this was. He was trying to be like Jesus, and judge not. He was going to welcome the stranger and love everyone the same. That was all very nice, usually, but not for this. Sometimes you had to judge, or you were going to get killed. Or arrested.
She looked at Caleb in the rearview. “Your sister is right. You should go with her. You would get in trouble, and it’s very serious.” She glanced at me. “I am sorry. I should not have told him to get in the car. But he looked cold and wet. I thought he was lost.” She pressed her hand to her ear and lowered her voice. “He was crying. I thought he was hurt.”
“She gave me dry socks,” Caleb said. “And now we’re going to help her back.”
The woman gestured at her face. “And he guessed right away. He knew.”
I nodded. I’d already figured out what to do. There was only one way I could think to keep my promise to him without doing something illegal.
“We’ll help her, Caleb.” I looked back at the woman. “We’ll help you turn yourself in. They won’t be as hard on you if you turn yourself in.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it seemed likely. It seemed fair. “And however bad you think it’s going to be in Nevada, it can’t be half as bad as sitting out here in your car.” I shook my head. “And they’re going to get you eventually.”
She looked at me, tilting her head. “How old are you?”
I raised my chin so I was looking down at her. I didn’t want her to think I was some kid she could talk down to. And I knew for a fact that when I put my mind to it, and with a certain fake driver’s license, I could pass for twenty-one, though I was more convincing when I had the chance to pile on the mascara. I would have lied and said I was older, but Caleb probably would tell her I was lying.
“I’ll be sixteen in March.”
She sighed, closing her eyes. “He told me you were nineteen.”
I turned around and gave Caleb a look. He stared back at me and shrugged.
“Where are your parents?” she asked. The look on her face made it seem like we were the ones with the weird situation.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said.
She still looked confused. “You live close to here? It is dark now. They must be expecting you home for dinner soon.”
Caleb started to say something, and I turned around to shush him. We didn’t need to start telling some Muslim woman anything about our parents. Or even Aunt Jenny. I looked back at her to let her know we weren’t giving out more information.
“Well,” she said. “Even at fifteen, you have studied history. You know why any group of people that is first registered, and then rounded up, should be very nervous.”
She was talking about the Holocaust. But that was totally different. The Nazis registered people and then killed them, even the little kids. America was just making Muslims go to the safety zones for their own protection, and for ours.
She sighed. “Not to mention the internment of Japanese Americans and German Americans during the same time period.”
She talked funny. It wasn’t just her accent, whatever it was. It was the words she chose, most of them bigger than they needed to be, and also the way she said them, like you were maybe a little bit stupid if you didn’t automatically agree with every single one.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Originally?”
I nodded. Duh.
“Iran.”
I shrank back. That just pretty much sounded scary, especially the weird way she said it, like EE-dan, not Eye-ran. I knew the capital of Iran was Tehran, which sounded even worse, like terror. It’s from a different language, okay, but if they ever wanted to make a better impression, they should probably change it.
“It’s just a country. A place.” She looked annoyed. “And for the last seven years, I’ve lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I taught at the university.”
That made sense, that she was a teacher. She totally had that way about her, like she knew everything you didn’t.
“What did you teach?” Caleb asked. He’d moved to the middle of the backseat, one hand resting on each headrest. Still, I guessed if I tried to grab him and pull him out, he’d go all rigid. He’d hook his feet under one of the seats.
She rubbed her eyes. “Electrical engineering.”
“Wow,” Caleb said. “You must be smart.”
Or she was lying, I thought. But it was a pretty smart lie. I didn’t know anything about electrical engineering. It wasn’t like I could quiz her and trip her up. And even if it was the truth, it seemed kind of suspect. Somebody who knew about electrical engineering probably knew how to make a bomb.
“She’s got to get to Canada,” Caleb said. “You promised you’d help her, Sarah-Mary.”
I turned around and gave him a look to let him know how crazy he sounded. “Uh, how am I going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But you’ll think of something.” He turned to the woman. “She’s really sneaky,” he said. “She makes up the best lies.”
The woman did not look especially relieved. But I have to say, I knew Caleb had meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. If I were a foreigner trying to sneak out of the country, I’d for sure come up with a better plan than sitting out here in my car.
“You should turn yourself in,” I said. I knew I’d already made that clear, but I wanted to say it again, and hear myself saying it, just for my conscience. My brain was already starting to think of what else she could do, what I would do if I were her. Even that, just thinking about it, seemed morally wrong.
“That’s not an option.” She looked at me like I’d said something stupid. “Do you think your parents would help me?”
I rolled my eyes. She was really stuck on this parent thing. She was acting like I was nine or something. I’d be a whole lot more help to her than any adult I knew. Unless they had a car.
“We live with our aunt,” Caleb said. “And she’d turn you in.”
He was right. Any adult we knew would turn her in.
She nodded, looking through the windshield up at the sky. “Then there is nothing you can do.” She turned back to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to get you into trouble. Please go with your sister. She is right. And I’m glad you found her.”
“No,” Caleb said. “Sarah-Mary promised. She’s going to help. She’ll think of something. You’ve just got to give her time.”
I shook my head. It would be better if I could just tell him, in all honesty, that there was nothing I could possibly think up. But my wheels were already turning. I couldn’t help it. It was like somebody put jigsaw pieces in front of me and said, Okay now, don’t try to put this together.
“Why don’t you just keep driving?” I asked. “Why you parked out here?”
She waved in the direction of the highway. “They are showing my face and my car on television. I saw it when I was getting gas just now—my picture up on the screen. That wasn’t happening when I was still in Arkansas, when my car was parked in my friend’s garage. One of the toll cameras must have scanned my plates when I drove through yesterday. That’s how they know I’m driving. I ran out of the gas station and drove here to hide, and here’s where I’ve been sitting. If the police have my license number, I’ll never make it. This car is no good to me now.”
She was right. If she was out on the highway, they’d get her in no time. Even I’d noticed her Arkansas plates.
“You could take a bus.” I couldn’t believe I was giving her ideas. But Greyhound stopped in Hannibal. Anyway, I didn’t know how she would get from here to there. It wasn’t like Aunt Jenny was going to come out here and give her a ride.
She shook her head. “You need identification to buy a ticket.” She looked down. “Same with a train, or a flight, of course. I have a license, and an American passport. But given my name, I’m sure I would be pulled aside.”
That was true. I didn’t even want to know her name. The less I knew, the better.
“She’ll think of something,” Caleb assured her.
But I couldn’t think of anything. We were a long, long way from Canada, and they were looking for her car. But I like to think that every problem has a solution, or at least most of them do. You just have to figure it out. I tried to think what Tess would do.
“Can you talk normal?” I asked. I tried to say it in a nice way.
She looked confused.
“Like without an accent?” I pointed at my mouth. “Can you talk like me?”
Now she looked like I’d said something funny. I didn’t know what. It seemed to me she better listen up.
“Let me hear you try it,” I said. “Say, ‘Hi. I’m from Arkansas and my name is . . . Lindsey. I’m trying to get up to . . . Minnesota.’”
She tried it. She saw I was serious, so she was too. But no matter how many times I corrected her, she didn’t sound normal. She sounded like she had a hook tugging hard on one side of her mouth.
“No,” I said. “Try to sound like me.”
“This does sound like you,” she said, like she still had the hook.
I shook my head. It wouldn’t work. As soon as she said anything, people would know. “How’ve you been getting around up till now?”
“I have been hiding at a friend’s house.” She touched her ear again. “In a basement. But the neighbor was getting suspicious. He’d seen my car in the garage.”
“Your friend you stayed with’s a Muslim?”
“Of course not.” One of her thin brows moved high. “All of my Muslim friends are gone.”
I knew she might be lying. But the story about the friend hiding her seemed true—I couldn’t think of any other way that she wouldn’t have been caught already with her accent, not if she had a Muslim-sounding name on her passport giving her away. The fact that somebody else, somebody in Arkansas, somebody who wasn’t a Muslim, had already helped her made me helping her, if I really had to, not seem so bad. I was still holding the pepper spray, but I switched the safety cap back on.
“Are you thinking of something, Sarah-Mary?” Caleb asked. “You look like you’re thinking of something.”
I didn’t answer him. But an idea had already come to me—it was exactly what Tess would do, if she were sitting in this car in the cold rain with a Muslim fugitive, and not in Puerto Rico, probably wearing a bathing suit and walking along a beach, or smiling pleasantly at a painting in a museum. It was exactly what she would try. And if I tried it, whatever happened, at least I wouldn’t be headed back to Aunt Jenny’s. Or Berean Baptist. Not right away. It would certainly be an adventure, maybe free of charge.
“She’s coming up with something.” Caleb slapped twice on the back of my seat. “I knew you would, Sarah-Mary! You’re the best! You’re the best person in the world!”
I shook my head. Now there was some irony for you. I looked over at the woman’s face, at the faint wrinkles that branched out from her eyes, and the thin wire frames of her glasses. She didn’t look particularly dangerous or crazy. Then again, she was dressed normal, wearing a blue knit hat and not the headscarf she’d been wearing in the picture. I tried to think of what I should ask her, something that might put me more at ease: Are you sure you haven’t hurt anyone? Are you sure you don’t plan to? You absolutely promise you’re not going to blow anyone up? Or help anyone who’s planning to?
It wouldn’t matter if I asked or not. If she was lying, she’d just keep doing it.
“Do you have money?” I asked.
She nodded.
“How much?”
Now she looked all nervous about me. I could see it in the way she pulled her head back a little, her eyes going small behind her glasses. Good for her. I should have been that smart.
“I’m not going to steal it,” I said. “But I know someone in St. Louis who makes fake IDs. He charges three hundred dollars, and he’s really good. I can get you to him. Maybe tonight. And you’ll need to buy me a bus ticket home.”
She nodded. “I have that. But . . . he’ll make one for me? A license?”
I didn’t know for sure. “Yeah.” I’d figure out how to get him to do it. “You have cash?”
She nodded again. But she still looked unsure. “I don’t understand. Won’t your aunt be upset if you are out so late? What are you going to tell her?”
I waved her off. “You got a phone?”
She shook her head. “No. They can use it for tracking.”
“Then I’ll need some cash now.” I wriggled my toes in my boots. “Sorry. I just got robbed myself. Ten dollars should do it. Maybe fifteen.”
“What’s your plan?” Caleb asked. I waved him off as she turned away from me, fidgeting in one of her coat pockets. When she turned back, she held out a folded twenty-dollar bill.
“Okay,” I said, taking the twenty. “Here’s what we’ll do. Up by the highway, there’s a McDonald’s. Right next to that is a truck stop. It’s big. You can’t miss it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was just there.”
“Okay. I’m going to walk Caleb back to the McDonald’s.” I zippered the pepper spray in my backpack. “I’ll meet you at the truck stop in an hour. Just leave your car here and walk over. Take what you can carry. If you stay bundled up, I don’t think anyone will recognize you.”
“Why can’t I go to the truck stop?” Caleb asked. He usually wasn’t whiny. But he was whining now. “I want to go! Sarah- Mary! I want to help!”
I turned around, but before I said anything, I took a breath and made my voice soft. “It won’t work, Caleb. If you want to help her, you need to listen to me. You’ve got to go back to Aunt Jenny’s. Okay? That’s the only way this is going to work.”
He nodded, looking miserable. He zipped his coat and put his hand on the door release. Before he pulled it, he gave me a long look. “But you promise? You promise you’ll help her?”
I nodded. I’d already promised. I was a little insulted that he’d made me promise again. But the woman just sat there looking at me, sort of peering at me through her glasses, like she was trying to see in through my eyes to my brain, to better guess how it was really working. That was fine. If she didn’t trust me, there wasn’t much I could do. If she thought she had a better option, she was free to take it. The best thing for me would be for her not to show up at the truck stop. I could tell Caleb I’d done my best, and it would be the truth.
I looked at Tess’s watch. It was almost twenty till six.
“I’ll wait until seven,” I told her. “You got that?”
Caleb leaned up between the seats. “You’ve got to do it,” he told her. “You can’t just sit out here in your car. They’ll get you if you do. And Sarah-Mary will help you. She will.”
The woman nodded. I couldn’t tell if she was nodding like she agreed or nodding like, yeah, whatever, but after I’d opened the door and started to pull my hood up, she touched the sleeve of my coat. “Take the umbrella.” She gestured to where I’d thrown it down earlier, its green so bright I could see it in the dark. “Just take it,” she said, like it was totally normal for her to tell me what to do. “Stay dry. Keep your brother dry.”
The dark actually made it easier to find our way back to the McDonald’s, as we could see the glow of the lights from the signs and the highway reflected off the clouds. Not long after we started walking, the rain eased up enough that I closed the umbrella and put it in my backpack. At one point, I stopped to ask Caleb why he was walking funny. He pulled up one leg of his jeans to show me one of the pink socks the woman had given him to wear.
“They’re thick,” he said. “They make my shoes tight.”
But other than that, we didn’t talk. It wasn’t until we got out of the trees, walking side by side through the field, that I started to tell him the plan.
“Listen,” I said. “If you want me to do this, you’ve got to do everything just like I say.”
He nodded. I’d been thinking maybe he would chicken out and say I didn’t have to go help her. But he just kept walking, waiting for me to say more.
“Okay.” I nodded up at the McDonald’s. “You’re going to go in there, find a manager, or anybody who works there, and ask to use their phone. You call Aunt Jenny and tell her that Mom left you there. Only tell her I went with Mom.”
When I got to that last part, he slowed his walking and shook his head. “She won’t believe that, Sarah-Mary. She won’t believe you left me.”
I thought on that. He was probably right. And it was nice to hear that even Aunt Jenny knew me that well. There was no way I would have left him at a freaking McDonald’s by himself. If I would have been in the car with my mom, I would have made her turn around, no matter what. I would have jumped out of the car. That was a difference between me and her. One of many.
“You’ve got to make her believe,” I said. “That’s your job, okay? Go ahead and tell her that you were so upset you ran out into the woods, but just say you sat out there by yourself for a while. Don’t say anything about the woman in the car.”
He made a face. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not.” I stopped walking and looked down at him, so he could see that I meant it. I’d already said I was sorry, so it didn’t seem like I should have to keep saying it. But I was still feeling it. So I said it again.
“Okay.” He held up his palm like he got it, and he’d had enough of it too. But the hurt was still in there, lodged in his brain. I’d put it in, and I couldn’t take it out.
“But you’re going to have to have one story and stick to it, no matter what.” I started walking again. “Even if you have to say it to the police.”
Here was where I really thought he would get scared and have second thoughts. His eyes did widen for a second, like he was trying to imagine having to lie to a police officer with a notebook. But then he just nodded and waited for me to say more.
“Tell everybody the exact same story. Tell them you and I went out to the picnic table together, in case anybody saw us out there. Say we were waiting while she got gas, but we’d already told you we couldn’t take you with us.” I could hear how false it all sounded. “Say you tried to argue, whatever, but I just kept saying I’d call in a few days, and that it would be okay, and when Mom came back, we both gave you a hug and told you we loved you, but only I went with her. Say it over and over, the same way each time. Picture it in your head like it really happened, and then it’ll seem like a real memory. Nobody’ll be able to trip you up.”
I felt like I was giving him a gift, telling him my best strategy. At Hannibal High, I’d told a couple of girls that my dad died when he pushed a little boy out of the way of a tow truck. I told them I saw it happen, and I remembered how his body had flown higher than the roof of the truck before landing on the curb, and how I knew he was dead as soon as my mom and I ran up because I could see his wide-open eyes staring up at the sky. I’d told them the tow truck had HERE COMES HELP painted on the door, and that the driver kept yelling that it wasn’t his fault, like the only thing he cared about was not getting a ticket. I told them about how the little boy’s mom had come to my dad’s funeral, and how she’d been crying when she hugged me and my mom, and how my mom could barely hug her back because she was so pregnant with Caleb.
Only Tess knew the real story: when Caleb was just a baby, our dad had been walking home from a bar by himself in the middle of the night, maybe too drunk to be careful, and he’d been hit by a car.
We got to the edge of the field, just out of reach of the McDonald’s security lights. It was cold enough that I could see my breath, but Caleb kept standing there, looking up at me, and I realized he was trying not to cry.
“Hey,” I said, poking his shoulder. “This is your idea, remember? Do you want me to help her or not?”
He nodded, but he turned away from me, rubbing the back of his neck. “How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at the sky. There were no stars. There was no moon, even. “I’ll probably get back tomorrow. But if I don’t, you still can’t tell anyone. Just sit tight and wait. You gotta promise me, Caleb. I could get in a lot of trouble for this. And not just with Aunt Jenny.”
“I won’t tell,” he said. “I promise.”
We nodded at each other, and I wasn’t worried anymore. I leaned down to kiss him on the top of his head, and then I backed away, watching him walk out into the light.
The Muslim woman wasn’t at the truck stop when I got there, but it was only six thirty. After I used the bathroom and did what I could to dry my hair with the hand dryer, I waited by the counter, looking at maps in a spinning rack until there wasn’t a line. The clerk behind the counter had little dreamcatcher earrings and called every customer “honey”—male or female, young or old. Okay, honey, thank you. Mm-hmm. You have a nice day now. Her voice sounded friendly, even a little musical, but everything she said came out with the same tune, so it sounded more like the fake voice you can use when you have to get through a long shift of saying the same thing over and over, and you know very well somebody could be rude to you any second and you can’t say anything back if you want to keep your job. I know. I’ve used that voice at Dairy Queen. When I came up to the counter, the clerk smiled and used the singsongy voice on me.
“Honey, you look like a drowned rat. Did you get stuck out in the rain?”
“I’m all right.” I smiled back. “But is there a phone I could use?” I got out the twenty. “I could pay.”
She turned her head and looked at me from the side, so I was looking at the wing of her eyeliner. It was like all of a sudden she didn’t have to be so friendly just because I didn’t have a phone.
“We got a booth.” She nodded toward the back of the store. The music in her voice was gone.
“A booth?” I stood on my toes, but I couldn’t see anything over the shelves. “Like a phone booth?”
“With a lock.” She lowered her voice. “Some of our customers prefer not to use their own phones for certain numbers, and they still want the video component that the disposables don’t have.” She gave me a knowing look. “And they usually want privacy.”
I wrinkled my nose. She was talking about sex calls.
“I’m just trying to make a regular call,” I said. “I’m calling an arcade in St. Louis. I don’t need any privacy.”
She held up her hands. “Not my business. You buy the card up here and tell me how much you want to put on it. First minute is a dollar. After that, every minute is fifty cents.”
“Can I get change back if I don’t use it all up?”
“Nope.”
I got a card with five dollars on it and headed back. The booth was at the end of a long hallway that went past the bathrooms and the changing rooms for the showers. I kept my head down as I moved past people, like I was so worried some truck driver I was never going to see again would think I was headed to make a sex call.
The door to the phone booth had a slide thing for the card I’d just bought and a dial that read VACANT over the knob. After I slid my card, I heard a timer start ticking, and I peeked my head in. The booth was a little bigger than my closet at Aunt Jenny’s, and there was a touch screen and a plastic seat to sit on. Everything looked clean, and I smelled something lemony that I hoped was disinfectant. But after I closed and locked the door, I didn’t sit.
It was easy enough to ask the screen for the number, though I typed in Bobo’s Good Times instead of saying it, as I didn’t want anyone to overhear and think I was making a sex call after all. Tess and I had laughed about the name of the arcade when we’d called last September.
Before I touched the Call button, I turned off the video.
“Bobo’s.”
I kept my eyes on the speaker by the dark screen. “Hey. Is Matt P. working?”
“Hold on.”
I took a breath. This was the part I was most worried about. I doubted Matt P. worked every night. I might be out of luck. But I got ready in my head, just in case. I’d been thinking about whether or not I wanted to try out an accent, to sort of get a read on how he would feel about making an ID for somebody foreign. But I wasn’t sure I could do any kind of accent right. I didn’t want him to think I was playing a joke.
The line rustled. “This is Matt.”
“Matt P.?”
“’Sup.”
“Uh, hi.” I’d already started in my normal voice. It was too late to go back. “I remember you once helped me and a friend out with some identification issues?”
There was a long pause. I could hear beeps and whirls in the background, and then some kind of lion or dragon roar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He seemed to mean it. I bit my lip. It was possible that I had the wrong Matt P. But it sounded like him, as well as I could remember. He had the same low voice, and a lazy way of barely using consonants, like he had chew in his mouth when he didn’t. Tess had done a great impersonation of him after we’d left with our new IDs.
“We went to your apartment? I remember it was across the street from a pancake house. And you had a dog. I forget its name.”
“Well,” he said. “I’m from the Show-Me State. How come I can’t see you?”
“I’m calling from a booth at a truck stop, and their screen isn’t working right.”
He was quiet again.
“Boogie.” It came to me, just like that. I jumped a little in the booth. “Your dog’s name is Boogie!”
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Um, to get your services? I lost the first one. And I remember how much it cost last time. I can do that again. You going to be around tonight?”
He was quiet. The timer on the booth was still ticking.
“Hello?” I said. “Are you there?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What do you look like? I need to know if I can find a good picture.”
That was a lie. When Tess and I were at his apartment, he’d bragged that he had access to some database of something like two million ID photos, all of them electronically sorted by height and weight and hair and eye color. He was just a skeeve. When we went to his apartment in September, he was looking us both up and down, even though he must have been at least twenty-five, and he knew for a fact we were minors. Tess took me aside and told me not to drink anything he offered, even just water. She said it wouldn’t matter if there were two of us if we were both passed out.
Still, I needed to bait the hook.
“Um, let’s see. I’m about five foot eight.” I’d always wanted to be taller. “A hundred and twenty-five pounds. Dark hair, dark eyes.” I waited. “And if it matters, they’re unusually big.”
He laughed. “Excuse me?”
“My eyes,” I said, and laughed back at him, exactly the way my mom would have. “My God. You’re terrible!”
That did it. He told me he got off work at eleven, and he’d be home by quarter past, and that he’d be available until midnight.
“I’ll turn on the light over my door when I get home. Don’t knock until you see it turn on. If I’ve turned it off again, then you’ll know you’re too late.”
That didn’t give us a lot of time. But he wasn’t so suspicious anymore. I got him to remind me of the number for the highway exit he was by, and then, with just a little more pushing, he gave me the number of his apartment. But that’s as close as he would come to giving me an address. He said if I’d really been there before, I should be able to remember the name of the complex, or at least how to find it.
“I’m sure I’ll remember,” I said. I kept my voice steady, but unseen to him, I pumped my fist in victory. It had all worked just how I thought it would. I was a freaking mastermind.
Then I caught sight of my reflected smile in the dark screen, and just like that, my conscience rose up and made me put my fist down, embarrassed. I didn’t recognize the person who was looking back at me, the person who was breaking the law and not even stopping to feel bad. Just now I’d been caught up in the game of it, in seeing how much of a solution I could put together. I hadn’t even been thinking about how what I was doing was wrong. But it was wrong. There was a reason she was on the run, a reason the government or whoever put up the money for the reward was looking for her. Maybe a better reason than I knew. Either way, I was betraying my country.
I wished more than anything I could talk with Tess. She would help me think this through.
“We’re all set, then?” Matt asked.
“Yeah,” I said, quieter now. “Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”
We weren’t all set, of course. Just because he was okay with making fake IDs for girls to get into bars didn’t mean he’d help a Muslim get out of the country, whatever she was willing to pay. I guess she’d find out when she got to his apartment. Even if she didn’t say a word, he’d know as soon as he looked at her she wasn’t under twenty-one. But it wasn’t like I could go in and get it for her—she’d need the license to say she was older for it to be believable, and if I asked him to do that, he’d still guess what was really going on, only I’d be the one standing there if he felt patriotic and called the police. I didn’t think Caleb meant for me to promise to be stupid and put myself at that much risk.
Still, after I hung up and walked out of the booth I started to feel worried for her, which was crazy. I was doing all I could. More than most people would. I’d get her to St. Louis, and right up to the door of Matt’s apartment. The rest was out of my hands.