Escaping Perfect Read Free Page B

me, scanning the stores for Daria’s place. I hoped it was still here. Please, please let it still be here.
    Daria had a salon on Main with an apartment above where she and Jasper lived. It had been the home base for the best two days of my life. Gigi and Daria had taken the two of us kids to a park nearby, where we’d been allowed to climb trees and jump from monkey bars and eat peanut butter sandwiches without first making use of the hazmat kit my mom always kept in her bag.
    I had never felt so free.
    The bus screeched to a stop at a small bus shelter—a pretty white structure with a green shingled roof—and I held my breath until the noise died down. Then, shouldering my battered backpack, I shakily made my way down the aisle and out into the sunshine, into my new life.
    I froze.
    Up until this very moment, my goal had been to get to Sweetbriar and find a job and a place to stay. But now that I was here, staring at Main Street, the panicked questions I’d been trying to ignore crashed to the front of my mind, demanding to be heard.
    What if I couldn’t find a job that didn’t require me to share a social security number or a valid ID? The ones I had belonged to the daughter of the senator from the great state of Massachusetts. The second somebody typed my digits into a computer, I was toast. How long would my two thousand dollars last me? Truth be told, I had no clue what rent or food or anything else cost. Would it last me a month, a week, a day? My palms started to sweat in the awful way they did back at school every time someone had knocked on my dorm-room door. How could I have ever thought this was going to work?
    â€œHiya!”
    I flinched and turned around, instinctively tugging my hood forward to hide more of my face. I was greeted by thewide, toothy smile of a bottle-ginger grandma in a floral dress and cowboy boots, pushing a stroller as she walked by.
    â€œWelcome to Sweetbriar, hon!” she said with a nod.
    In my entire life no stranger had ever said hello to me out of nowhere, possibly because I had never been allowed to encounter actual strangers. Even though I didn’t answer, she kept right on smiling and walking, her stride wide and purposeful. I glanced into the stroller and found a little pink pig in a bow tie staring up at me. I swear it scoffed when it caught my eye.
    A door across the street opened, releasing a burst of piano music as two girls my age spilled out in full-on cotillion dresses, looking back over their shoulders like they were being chased. They ducked into Hadley’s Drugs next door, giggling, just as a pack of guys chugged by in an old red pickup, two of them hanging in the back, singing at the top of their lungs to the country music that blared from inside.
    Clearly, the people-watching in this town was going to be distraction enough.
    I took a deep breath and let it out.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I told myself, trying as hard as I could to believe it. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
    Slowly I let the hood fall off my hair, looked both ways, then crossed the street. Daria’s was somewhere on the farside of Main, facing the park. I wasn’t sure whether I’d even go in. If Daria recognized me, the jig would be up before it even started. But I wanted to know it was there—that she was there. As a safety net, I guess. I needed to know that if I screwed it all up, I’d have somewhere to turn.
    â€œMorning!”
    A middle-aged man with a black beard to his navel tipped his cowboy hat at me. I managed a small smile back. His eyes flicked over my outfit, and I self-consciously tugged up the zipper on my hoodie, hoping he hadn’t noticed the swipe of blood on the white shirt underneath. After I’d used that rock to weigh down the gas pedal and put the car in drive, it had moved a lot faster than I’d thought it would, and I’d scraped my stomach pretty badly trying to get out before it submerged