How to Disappear Read Free

it. The pain just feels like motivation.
    The dogs snarl and jump at my sneakers with what look like werewolf fangs. Do these dogs get to tear trespassers to pieces until someone shows up to view the carcasses and bury what’s left?
    There are more pressing questions.
    Such as, what if they know where I am, and they’re on their way here?
    How much easier for them could I make it? Hanging off a rickety fence like a midnight dare at cheer camp, a slow-moving target as they reach for their guns.
    I know guns; people in Cotter’s Mill hunt.
    I know that the ones they were waving, silhouetted in the moonlight, are for going after people, not Canada geese.
    Steve was always dragging me off into the great outdoors to fish. Or, at least, cook the fish. The worst was hunting season, a buck tied to the hood of the SUV on the way home. But as sexist as he got with me, Steve made sure I knew my way around firearms.
    But I don’t see any stray rifles lying around. (As if I’d shoot a dog—I wouldn’t.) What I see is a flat, wide sky, a blue lid with fat clouds stuffed underneath, pressing down, closing me into a tight Texas box.
    A box I have no idea how to get out of.
    I could make it over this fence so fast, but there’s razor-edged tape up there that could separate your fingers from your hands if you grabbed it.
    Watch enough crime shows on TV, and you know this gruesome stuff.
    Wake up caked in blood a thousand miles from the scene of the crime, and . . . what? Pray that the pickups driving by aren’t them is what.
    I poke my sneakers into the fence’s unforgiving little holes and scramble toward the slim opening of the loosely chained gate. Pull it shut. Walk toward the row of trees that shields the lots behind them from the street.
    Trying not to be the out-of-place moving speck that draws the hunter’s eye.
    Trying to look as inconspicuous as if I were cutting fifth period back home, sneaking under the bleachers and over the fence behind Cotter’s Mill Unified High School with Jody Nimiroff and Olivia so we could get Big Macs for lunch and sneak back into school for sixth period.
    That’s what seemed like life-and-death two days before.
    Scarfing down fries in time to sprint back to school unnoticed.
    Avoiding Saturday detention.
    That life is over.
    If I don’t stop crying like a helpless baby, so am I.
    Over. Done with. Dead.
    I have to deal.
    I’m dealing.

6
Jack
    It takes everything I’ve got not to gun the car past the prison gates and fishtail out of there.
    Don’s envelope is pressing against my chest like a dead weight, like a rat corpse you pick up by the tail and chuck into the incinerator. It pokes me through my shirt. I’d reach down and scratch, but I won’t risk a move that could make the car jerk and give the Highway Patrol any excuse to stop me. Face it, when those guys see my name on my driver’s license, they’ve been known to come up with a bogus excuse to pat me down.
    I don’t know what’s in this envelope, but I know enough not to let a cop find it on me.
    I count the minutes, miles, and tenths of a mile to the first turn-off. I pull into a bar and grill that looks least likely to have electronicsurveillance, as if the security cam at the Jack in the Box could see into my car and call me out me for taking step one in Don’s deranged plan.
    Tearing open the envelope, I have the feeling I get when I’m crouched in the scull at the starting block, just before the starting pistol fires, waiting to pull back on the oars and launch across the water.
    Bang. There she is, staring out from under the envelope’s flap. A girl with long hair and doe eyes, all narrow shoulders and collarbone and small breasts.
    Hello, Nicolette.
    I’ve lost it. I’m seeing thought bubbles over her head that aren’t there: “Don’t.” “You aren’t going to, right?” “Guns don’t kill people; assholes kill people.”
    I think, At least she’s got a sense of humor . Then I think, Stop hallucinating