Hailey

Caleb's eyes flickered out fast, faster than the cop cars careening down the dirt driveway.

We had to move, to find the fire we first had back at Union Station. We used to be fast, fast enough to outdo the angels. But Caleb could barely move. He hardly had it in him to stand.

He’d lost more spirit than strength. Even when he cried his eyes were dull— like all that beautiful blue had melted into deadpan grey. Every time he faked a smile, pain lingered between the lines of his lips.

He stood there, listening to the shrinking distance between us and danger, and flashed the kind of grin I used to be good at—the kind that hid the fact that I was a big fat mess behind my expensively whitened teeth.

I grabbed his hand so he’d believe that we'd be okay—that I was okay, and that the echo of his Mom’s story wasn't rotting me from the inside out. He’d lost too much, too soon, and had come too close to losing himself last night.

I'd spent hours waiting, waiting to hear him cry out in the dark, or for Jack to come and tell me he was gone.

But I shouldn’t have been afraid of those things. Losing Caleb should've felt like losing a stranger. An enemy. But he didn't feel like one of the bad guys. Bad guys don’t save lives. Imposters do.

From the second stood between me and a bullet, he’d trapped me in feelings I didn't understand. And when he cried in front of me like he'd been holding in a hurricane, I sunk six feet further into him. Mistake or not, I didn’t have anyone else to follow. I didn’t have anyone else to trust.

        “You ready?” I asked.

He kept quiet, his right foot anxiously tap, tap, tapping a hole halfway to China through the worn wood floor. If he didn’t get moving we’d both die under his dad’s roof, under his dad’s thumb. The seven o’clock news would have a field day about the whole thing.

24-hour manhunt ends anticlimactically in teenage kidnapper’s childhood bedroom.

Both of us deserved better than cheap headlines, but Caleb was caving under the pressure. Earlier, he'd been ready to hit the road raw and reckless, only to end up waist deep in doubts.

He'd stopped paying attention. Stopped trying. I’d lived that way most of my life. I stopped trying when my parents did. In high school, I figured my problems were bigger and uglier than everyone else’s, so I was miserable, so much so that it got comfortable after a while.

Caleb pulled me out of that comfort, made things terrifying, exciting, and different. I needed something different, someone different, and the scrawny smooth-talker who stole me out of a train station, was it. We lost too much to die here without trying.

        “Get it together, Evans. We’ve got a tree house to scale,” I said.

He stuck his fingers knuckle deep into his sweaty, dark hair like it would take away the tension.

        “What if I can’t do this, Hailey?”

        “You can. You will. I’ll be right behind you.”

Caleb limped across the room; eyes married to the floor like he’d disappear into if he didn’t stay focused. I dug through the remaining pieces of the first aid kit for a solution to his pain. Two bandages later I found the medical motivation to keep him running.

The best thing about scrawny boys in blue jeans is, there’s only a belt between the world and their boxers. I waited by the door until he just about passed me and pulled his belt loose. His pants hit the floor, and before he could blush about it I jammed an Epi-pen into his thigh. Quick liquid energy.

Caleb jumped three feet into the hallway just to get away from me.

        “The hell is wrong with you?” He asked.

        “Everything. Let’s go.”

I stiffed armed Caleb further down the hall like I was strong enough to move mountains. Big mistake. He grabbed me by the wrist with one hand, pulled his pants up with the other, and dragged me towards the back of the house.

The front door of the house rattled open behind us right as we ducked into his Dad’s room. Caleb eased the door shut and pulled my body so tightly against his he held my breath hostage. His muscles stilled in the almost silence as he listened to the hollow thud of police boots against the wooden floor.

The low growl of hushed, hurried voices in the kitchen seeped through the cracks of the house. Caleb’s eyes darted across the room and fell on his Dad’s desk. He waved me over to the opposite end and we lifted its legs off the ground, holding our breath until we’d cleared the way to the window.

His eyes fluttered shut and he stumbled into the wall while his body responded to him pushing it too far. He sucked in stale air through his teeth to offset the pain. I crossed the small space between the both of us and snuck an arm around his back to keep him steady. His weight sunk into my shoulders as we shuffled towards the window.

The room smelled like pennies, but this time the copper bloodstains weren’t Rusty’s but Caleb’s. His dad’s sheets were soaked—all of it fresh, all of it my fault. I didn’t have the right to his time or his protection, but handed it to me without a word while I struggled to swallow his unreasonable humility.

I slipped my fingers under the windowpane, slid open the ragged wood and glass standing between him and a dying chance at freedom, and pointed him outside.

He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He stared down at me—eyes steely blue and solid in his decision to stay by my side. He balled his fist and punched out the screen.

        “After you,” he said.

He slipped his hands around my waist and lifted me outside like I wasn’t heavy, like it didn’t hurt, and my skin sparked to life in all places his fingers grazed. I didn’t speak, just waited for brushfire blush to put itself out before he caught onto my body betraying itself.

He lowered me out the window and squeezed his eyes shut, arms and hands shaking while he pushed through the pain. I squirmed out of his hands only to end up wedged stuck.

        “I wish I had a camera,” he said.

He almost laughed—but only almost. His eyes stayed dull and his lips straightened out about as quickly as he’d let them curl at the corners.

        “Just turn sideways, Hailey. You’ll be alright.”

He held my gaze a second too long, enough for the livewire tension between us to tear away at my composure. Caleb’s eyes turned darker than blue, closer to black, but still lighter than Evans’ family blood in his veins.

The shadowy rage I’d seen living and breathing in his brothers didn’t exist in him in that moment—just broken pieces of broken hope.

I slipped out the window and Caleb followed, his breaths labored and shallow as he lowered himself onto the gravel under our feet. A lonely row of trash bins stood between us and the edge of a steep hill tapering off into the kind of woods city girls stayed away from.

Caleb leaned back against the off-white paneling of the house and edged along the side so quietly the stones hardly breathed. He titled his head around the corner and held up four shaky fingers.

Four cop cars. Eight cops. Eight guns. One way to run.

I waved him back towards me and whispered his name, hardly suppressing the frantic desperation in my voice. He disappeared around the house, his sneakers dragging across the ground as he walked closer to danger. I tiptoed after him, hoping that a hawk-eyed officer wouldn’t stick their head out the window and shoot Caleb on sight.

My dad had done his job—sent an army to deal with his little girl so he wouldn’t have to. Caleb turned back towards me, his face drained of as much color as it was expression. He mouthed the number “five”—five reasons to start running. There were one too many police cars on the property, and Caleb was one to many steps away from me.

Thick, accented voices seeped through the outside walls of hallway leading towards Jack’s room. I sidled along the house, cold sweat sliding down all the places where my skin was exposed.

I stopped just outside Jack’s room and pressed against the space below his windowpane until the side of my face was flush against it. I listened for anything, for everything, for Jack to notice something out of place and give the two of us away.

Jack had everything to hide, but whether he chose to do so was up to the whisky and his willingness to carry out his threats. I waited for his words, for him to give us away like a dirty secret, but he didn’t speak.

His quiet panic was tangible even on my side of the wall. He scrambled around the room, either un-cluttering our clutter or exaggerating our escape route.

The door creaked open a rusty hinge at a time, and somebody else’s footsteps shuffled in. A husky sounding officer cleared his throat loud enough for the whole house to hear and spoke to Jack, low and somber.

        “Mr. Evans, I’m truly sorry about your loss. We appreciate you letting us come here and look around. We’ll be on our way once the dogs check out the place.”

Dogs? I whipped around the corner of the house and signaled Caleb to come back as fast as I could flap my fingers. Two steps into his trek he lost his footing, slammed shoulder first into the steel rain gutter, and vomited all over his shoes.

The shutter from the downspout set the police dogs on full alert and sent the gaggle of officers inside the house running back to the porch. I sprinted to him, hoping the dog’s barks would drown out my footsteps, and helped carry him back towards the trash bins.

The second I secured my arms around him, he pushed me away.

        “Get outta here, Hailey!”

I heard his words, loud and clear, but I ignored his intentions. Sending me off on my own wouldn’t make him a hero—it would make him a corpse. I steadied him against the wall, and snuck over to the trash bins, and pulled a wet bag of garbage out from one of the cans.

        “Get in!” I whispered, and then kicked over the five-foot, round, Rubbermaid bin and pointed him inside.

The red in his cheeks drained away again, but this time the Epi-pen wasn’t to blame. The stink steaming from the sticky wetness lining the trashcan walls was thicker than soup. The sweet stench of old rotting food in Virginia heat was strong enough to kill, but we climbed in, holding our breath as long as our lungs could take it.

The water pooled in the bottom of the bin seeped through the backs of our shirts, into our hair, and burned our nostrils. I smiled through it like a champion while Caleb contorted his face. Somebody had to stay positive.

Caleb shifted towards me, until the between us space got so tight our bodies touched. I slid my knees between his, he snaked his arms around my back, and our faces got so close we could feel the heat from our shallow breathing.

        “Push if you can, Caleb. I’ll move with you.”

        “You’re gonna kill me, you know that?” He said.

        “We'll be alright. Just push.”

Caleb shifted his weight and slammed his body into the side of the bin. We hit the ground hard, too hard, enough to send the dogs inside the house into a frenzy. My heart hammered away so hard the vibrations rippled through my veins. 

There wasn’t enough air to breathe, there wasn’t enough space to move, there wasn’t enough time to do anything but think on our toes. Caleb pushed against the rubber walls again, and again, until the gravel beneath us turned to grass through the rubber casing and the sky blurred as we barreled down the back hill.

We shut our eyes tighter than our nostrils while the ground thumbed and thudded against the bin, beating bruises into our backs, arms, and legs as we rolled. Every idea feels like a good idea before you do it.

This one felt like a mistake. Every rock, root, and ditch we could’ve hit we hit, our bodies rolling faster and faster towards oblivion. I waited for the pain, the black out, the end, but it never came. The bin launched into the air and crashed to hard stop against the dirt.

The impact wracked my bones so violently I stopped breathing. Inhale—nothing. Exhale—pain. It started at the center of my back, and exploded through my chest. I choked on panic, writhing and fighting to take in enough air to fill the emptiness in my chest. Nothing helped. Nothing healed.

Caleb dragged himself out of the bin, pulled me out by my arms, and cradled my body against his dirty white t-shirt.

        “You’re alright, Hailey. I got you, crazy girl.”

And in the middle of his whole world going wrong, he laughed quietly to himself like a well kept secret. He held my head against his chest, and I felt him everywhere. Even the low gravelly rumble of his voice buzzed through my cheekbones.

Inhale. Exhale. My first breath came quivering in through my lips only to rush back out as a full-fledged, hysterical, girly cry. He bunched up his t-shirt and wiped the waterworks out from under my nose and off my cheeks.

I snorted the remaining emotional sludge back into my nostrils like a high-speed vacuum. Caleb looked like he’d never heard a girl make those kinds of noises before. I got teary again when I realized how ugly the whole ordeal must’ve looked.

        “You planning on drowning half of Manassas, Hailey? C’mon, we’ve got a tree house to get to.”

Normally, I would’ve held it together. Normally, Caleb wouldn’t have silenced me with one of his troublemaker smiles, but sometimes silence says the things you can't, and our silence was electric.