Then
Emma sits on the bed in Gabriel’s room. Her bag is packed on the floor next to her, but she hasn’t touched it. Eventually, the front door opens; his footsteps approach down the hall, and he looks in on her.
“Emma,” he says.
“Don’t,” she says, stopping him, though she doesn’t know what he might have said. She doesn’t want to know.
He sits near her but not too near. He bows his head, and for a moment they sit like that, without saying anything, and Emma knows it’s because the moment they do, something will fracture. So she doesn’t ask where he went. He doesn’t ask where she has been. He lets out a long breath, as if he is in pain.
Then he straightens up. The light from the street catches his eyes, makes them gleam.
“You can’t stay here,” he says softly.
“I know.”
“If my grandmother were here, that would be different, but I can’t—”
“I know,” she says sharply, shutting him up. Because it can’t just be that she needed somewhere to go and he was there for her, a friend. It’s dangerous for both of them, her being here. People will talk. They already talk. If things get back to her parents, they’ll both suffer for it.
“Is there anywhere you could go?” he asks.
“I was going to leave,” she says.
“Leave?”
“I could take a bus somewhere.” Where, she doesn’t know.
“You’re not eighteen. You can’t just leave,” he says.
“I have money.”
“Do you have a way to rent an apartment? Get a job? Go to school? Do you know what happens to runaways?” he asks.
“I can figure it out,” she says, but she’s smart enough to know he’s right. She blinks away tears, furiously staring at the carpet.
“Hey,” he says. “You’ve got what, one year of high school left? Ten, eleven months. After that, you’re eighteen, you’ve got a diploma, things get easier.”
“They won’t let me go,” Emma says. “They’ll never let me go.”
“They can’t stop you,” Gabriel said. “Once you’re eighteen, the only control they have is what you decide to give them.”
“You don’t know my parents.”
“I’m more and more happy about that every day,” Gabriel says, and she laughs ruefully. He touches her, carefully—a hand on her shoulder, as innocent a touch as he can engineer. “You don’t have to do this alone. A few more months. You can make it.”
She thinks again of the bus. Of a road leading out of Arden Hills, headlights cutting through the darkness. She can picture herself on it; she can picture it vanishing in the night, in the distant gloom. But there is nothing at the end of that road. She can imagine leaving, but she can’t imagine arriving anywhere. She realizes with a slow seeping defeat that she never did want to go anywhere. She only wanted to be gone. In her fantasy, she disappeared into that night, and there was no other ending but that.
Gabriel is wrong. She cannot survive another few months. She doesn’t see how she possibly could. But the only place she can go is home.
“I’m going to get some water,” she says. Gabriel starts to offer to get it for her, but she waves him off and walks into the kitchen. She gets down a glass and fills it but doesn’t drink. Instead she reaches up above the fridge, carefully taking down the old cookie tin in which Lorelei keeps her “emergency fund.” In the last six months Emma has seen her get it down many times, and when she eases open the lid there are only a few bills loose inside. Emma takes the thick roll from her pocket and nestles it in quietly, replacing the tin back where it was.
Gabriel is still on the bed when she comes back out. “I’m going home,” she says. She sees in his eyes that he wishes he could save her. She knows the cost of trying would be too great, but she still wishes he would.
“I can give you a ride,” he says. She nods, because she knows it will let him feel like he did something, at least. “You don’t have to leave yet. Stay a little while, at least. Rest.”
“Okay,” she whispers. She stays, and curls on top of the covers, and without meaning to drops into a dreamless sleep, deeper than any sleep she’s had in a very long time.