CHAPTER

2

THE ROAD TO town was lined with jagged pines. Jamie tucked her hair inside her skullcap, buttoned her jacket against the cold gray dawn, and walked with her head forward, hands deep in her pockets. Her phone buzzed from inside her backpack and she ignored it in exchange for a few minutes to think. The town of Blind River was a twenty-minute walk down a narrow two-lane. Weeds bent to the ground by morning frost sloped along the embankment to black ditches, thick with mud and smelling of the runoff from the fertilizer plant upstream. Ice-slicked grass crunched under her boots, and she was careful to keep at least one foot on the blacktop. The down jacket and backpack gave some bulk to her figure so that anyone coming around the curve could see her and swerve. Still, she kept close to the shoulder until the road flattened on a bend where the town’s only 7-Eleven had been built.

The low building, its windows plastered with neon beer signs and lottery posters, sat square in the middle of a gravel parking lot just off the road in a notched-out patch of woods. Between the ads, Jamie could see the vacant checkout counter, and she walked toward the smell of burning weed at the back of the store.

Myers had the door propped open with the mop bucket. He leaned against the jamb, staring at a folded newspaper—the crossword puzzle, she guessed, by the pencil behind his ear and the confusion on his face.

She had worked for him three months in the kind of dead-end job designed to keep people from ever improving their lives. After taxes she got a hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixty cents a week for opening the store and keeping the coffee pots full and the breakfast burritos hot, unless she got docked for forgetting to mop the floors after the early rush. Myers had always found a reason to dock her paycheck, and when she’d shown up late three shifts in a row, he’d fired her. The hardworking people of this town needed their daily packs of smokes and giant Styrofoam cups of coffee at six in the morning, not seven. Her uncle kept a more fluid schedule. On days like today, when he was too hungover to get out of the house, he paid her fifty bucks to collect money from a few of his gambling machines scattered around town.

At the sound of a car coming off the highway, Myers pinched the ember off the blunt, crushed it under his shoe, and went inside. Jamie slipped into the storage room through the back door and grabbed what she thought Angel might need—a box of tampons, some cheese, and a package of salami—and crammed it all into her backpack. In the front of the store the cash register slammed shut and the chimes over the door clanged. She had about five seconds before Myers would shuffle back to the storage room. She grabbed a quart of milk, headed out the back door, and kicked the mop bucket over. He threw the door open and yelled, “Goddamnit!” but she’d already made it up the path that cut through the woods. She crested the hill knowing he’d never leave the store long enough to chase her down, and chances were he hadn’t seen enough of her backside to make an official accusation. She stopped behind a tree to catch her breath. She heard the bucket bang against the wall and the back door slam shut. By the time she got to the other side of the woods, the sun was high and ghostly behind frigid white clouds.

The path ended at the alley between the computer store and the old strip mall turned satellite community college. She walked around to the front of the store and went to the help desk. A few students were ahead of her. She took a number and bought a Coke from the vending machine. A long-haired petite girl sat reading against the wall in a corner by the window.

College. She’d bombed her classes worse than anything in her life. Now just seeing a textbook made her stomach turn. Never able to keep up, she’d studied late every night, read the assigned chapters twice, gone to sleep at three in the morning feeling like a loser because the words didn’t make sense. Woken up feeling that same way. Her adviser hinted at a transfer to the tech program; maybe she’d be better at food service or welding. Then her grades came in. She’d flunked out in one semester. When Loyal had found out, he’d screamed at her until she agreed to sign up and try again in the winter. Like he gave a damn about college. It didn’t make sense. He’d never cared about her grades or what subjects she took. The college put her on probation and reinstated the grant that covered tuition and books for kids living below the poverty level, but it didn’t matter. After three weeks she was so far behind she stopped going to class. The only thing that made her feel better about that was not having to face midterms.

That had been two months ago. The only person who knew was her uncle’s business partner, Jack DelMar, the guy who ran the check-cashing store on Main Street. He’d said not to worry about college, that he’d done the same thing twenty years earlier and it hadn’t hurt him at all. He let her hang out in his back office and she’d kept it from Loyal since, left the house at the same time each morning and came home late each night. Wasn’t his business anyway.

After a week of pretending to be at school and poking around on the Internet, she’d found an online poker site. Right away she saw she was better than most players. And it was all legit. No sleight of hand, no marked cards. Every time she cashed, it was due to knowing the odds, playing her position on the board, and calculating the perfect timing of a bluff. She was good even without cheating and the rising balance on her account proved it. A one-dollar tournament could pay a hundred bucks if enough players signed up. After one month she was winning a little money nearly every day, putting her average at about five percent. She knew from the chat rooms that the best players averaged ten percent. This is the future, she thought, and I’m in on the ground floor. Every day her brain expanded. She could see a hand developing and knew immediately how much to bet or when to fold. If she’d had a faster laptop, she’d have been able to play four or five tournaments at once and really rake it in. She was getting close. Last week she’d won her first twenty-dollar tournament and it had paid big. Almost six thousand dollars. If her transfer had come through since last night, she’d be able to buy the new laptop today.

She sipped the Coke and tried to power up her laptop. She got nothing but a blank screen.

The girl reading by the window closed her book and stretched her arms over her head with swanlike grace. Jamie figured the girl had understood every single word of that book and instantly hated everything about her—the highlights in her hair, the pink fingernail polish, the clearly above-average reading comprehension.

When the tech desk called her number, the news was as she’d expected. The battery was ruined and that wasn’t all. Her computer was so outdated the batteries had been discontinued. She’d hoped to give it to Toby, but he’d been such a tool lately and he’d probably just use it to watch porn anyway.

The model she needed was twenty-six hundred dollars. It was a lot, but she needed it if she was going to get serious. She’d heard of players tucked up in their parents’ attic playing three or four days in a row, making tens of thousands. It would pay for itself in a week, probably less, and then she’d work on saving enough to get to Florida. She’d never waited more than five days for a transfer, so it would definitely come through today. It probably already had. She gave the techie guy a thumbs-up and he unboxed the new laptop.

It took him an hour to get everything off her old hard drive and load it onto the new laptop. While she waited, she bought another Coke and practiced with a deck of cards. When she flipped over a queen, she remembered what her mother had used to say whenever the queen of spades appeared: “The Luck of the Odds.” She’d said it so often that Jamie had begun to imagine a little family with round sad faces like queens and jacks. The Odds family. A lucky family. A boy and girl that she would draw in the margins of her homework because homework was hard but drawing this family pulled her into a quiet space inside her head. She drew them until she got in trouble and her teacher started subtracting points from her grade. But that didn’t stop her. She drew them in study hall, and later in detention, and only stopped when a guidance counselor insisted that the reason she drew the little people was because there were problems at home she needed to talk about.

Sitting in the café now, she tried to stick an ace from the bottom of the deck, but her concentration was off and her fingers were clumsy. The cards didn’t distract her from what she’d have to do if the transfer hadn’t come through. She touched the jacket pocket holding her uncle’s envelope, guessing at the amount of cash the south route usually brought in. Five or six thousand at least.

The techie guy brought the laptop to the checkout line, where a tall good-looking dude ran the cash register. The bill was over twenty-nine hundred dollars with tax, so she waived the extra fee for a service contract. She’d use her debit card and hope the balance would get covered by the little credit attached to the account. If that didn’t work, she’d have to go with the backup plan.

She swiped her card.

It failed.

“That happens,” the good-looking dude said.

“Huh,” she said. She tapped her card on the counter and thought it through one more time, even though she’d already decided. There was a window here, probably a good forty-eight hours before Loyal would know something was off with the deposit. Besides, Loyal hadn’t gotten where he was today without taking chances, skirting the rules, floating money from one account to another. If she never took a chance, she’d never get out of Blind River. What were her choices anyway? Every day she wasn’t playing online she was losing money. According to what she’d learned in the poker chat room, transfers could take up to ten days, though she’d never had to wait that long. Chances were it would come through this afternoon and she’d skate through unnoticed. She pulled out the envelope, shook her head at what she was about to do, and slit the tape with her fingernail.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I have cash.”