Tunnel Vision Read Free Page A

you’d be so willing to act like a person you’re not.”
    “I’m not hungry,” said Betty, and then she stood and walked calmly to her room. Tears were running down her face as she hit the stairs, but making it from the dining room without crying in front of them was victory enough.
    Betty wanted to yell at them, to shout that Jake had been the one who took the bikini picture in the first place, and that sending it to him had been a joke. It wasn’t a joke now, though, at least not a funny one.
    God. Jake Norton.
    Jake had just been something to break up the monotony a little bit, just a minor stop in the quest to find The One. Betty knew who that was—some distant boy in some faraway town who had as many dreams as she did about disappearing into a life of glory on the road. He’d love her poems, call them lyrics, and play a wicked lead guitar. Betty smiled despite the tears. Yeah, and sleeve tattoos wouldn’t hurt, either.
    When Ophy brought her food up twenty minutes later, Betty was cheerful enough to hug her mother and take the plate without so much as a cross word.

THREE
    The late-morning trip from the bus station to home only takes a few minutes on my bicycle, but my bike isn’t here, it’s locked up in the garage back at the house. Instead of walking I call Lou, my longtime cabbie friend, and like usual, he’s at the train station in minutes.
    “Home,” I say, and Lou knows to drive me to the gas station by my house. If he’s curious about where I’ve been for the last two months he doesn’t say anything. Lou just drives, his eyes locked to the road like always.
    I’m practically shaking when Lou parks, both from the pain in my side and my desire to be home, as well as the growing fear that something will have happened to the house while I was gone.
    I pay Lou with money I took from Fillmore’s office, knowing as I do so that I’m lower in cash than I’ve been in years, but also knowing that Lou needs to be paid in full every single time. For all I know Lou would be OK with getting paid in installments, but I’m not going to find out. Lou is a certainty right now, and I’m a lot lower on certainties than I am on cash.
    “Pick me up in an hour?”
    Lou nods from the front seat. Doesn’t say a word, but I know he’ll be back, and I know he wouldn’t tell a soul about where he picks me up or drops me off.
    The walk to the house goes quickly, though I do have a growing fear in my belly that the house will be inaccessible when I get there. The stuff inside is all that I have in the world and none of it was easy to come by.
    My plain little house is still standing, at least. I wonder if my neighbors have noticed that no one has been coming or going for a couple of months. I live in the new suburbs—closed doors and windows, neighbors that don’t know each other—but my absence has to have been noticed by someone. And when they did see me, would it finally be the tipping point to make someone call the law about the boy with no parents?
    I rub the wound in my side and the pain rushes in, forcing the bad thoughts into the well in the pit of my stomach. Lately it’s been even more crowded than usual in there.
    I walk up the driveway as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, but my mind is insisting that FBI boogeymen will come flying from the bushes, looking for answers about the blood I left in the snow. No one comes, though—not the FBI, not Gary, and not a neighbor wondering where I’ve been. I walk around the house to the backyard and hop the fence, take the spare key from the biometric lockbox I keep on the patio, and then unlock the back door to the attached garage.
    I sigh. All of my stuff is still where I left it. Even my bike is sitting unmolested. There are a lot of things that I’m going to need to do in the next few months, both for myself and for other people, and for the first time I feel like I might be able to actually do them.
    I could cry, but I don’t. My last tears