Nobody but Us by Kristin Halbrook Read Free Book Online Page A

There’s a glint in the rearview mirror.
    I gotta take another look ’cause I ain’t sure what I saw. She gives me another cookie, but I can’t remember finishing the first one. I bite. The sprinkles pop under my teeth. I look again.
    There’s something glinting on the roof of that SUV behind us. I can’t tell what. Not yet. It might be rectangular. Too far, but I ain’t slowing down to let them catch up. I ease the accelerator down, pick up speed, build space between us. I check the side mirror and hope that car ain’t really closer than it appears.
    “Slow down, Will. You’re going to get pulled over.”
    “Everyone drives fast out here,” I tell her. Like the SUV. Where the hell are they going so fast?
    I get a good look. The car’s white. White and something across the top. Shit. I floor it. The engine revs. We’re flying and Zoe’s scared. She’s got one hand clutching her door and the other one on the dash.
    “Will!”
    But we gotta move or we’re screwed. I check the stretch of highway. Check the mirror. Why ain’t he got his lights on? The gap’s opening. I’m pulling away. I hold the wheel so tight sweat forms on my palms. Fields rush by, and if I lose control we ain’t stopping for a long time.
    There’s a town coming up, the kind of place where I gotta slow down, go twenty-five. I push one last time, gain more road in between us. Another look back. The SUV’s a square, hard to even see the lights. It slows, turns off on some back road. I take my foot off the gas.
    Hunting lights. That’s all it is across the top.
    I relax my muscles. Push my head back. Zoe gives me a look.
    “Just testing her out. See how fast this baby can run.”
    Zoe lets her hand fall off the dash. “Boys.” She laughs.
    I ain’t sure she believes me. I should tell her about the money. No, not yet. Not till we get to Vegas and she realizes we need it. Any sooner and she’s just gonna think I’m a thief.
    My heart slows down as the car slows down, and I figure we’re okay, I figure I shouldn’t overreact like that. But reacting quick’s just the way life made me be. Ain’t never felt safe much.
    Zoe leans on my shoulder. She watches the fields and nothingness pass us by.
    I check the mirrors.

ZOE
    THERE’S NOTHING, REALLY NOTHING, OUT HERE. Acres and acres of graze land and wheat land and who-knows-what-else land. At this time of year, though, the land isn’t being used for much. Just sitting, waiting, resting. Brown and going on forever.
    We slow when we pass through towns. I brush my finger distractedly across the bottom of my chimes when we’re tired of the radio but need more noise than the ever-present rush of tires on road. Sometimes the glittery sound makes me think she’s here, escaping with me.
    We look curiously around those small towns, as though trying to see if this was the kind of place we could see ourselves living someday. But the towns are all small and we’re sick of small towns. We can’t ever go back to places where everything is everyone else’s business. Everybody’s business, unless it’s something really important. Then everyone has the right to ignore it.
    In first grade, Mrs. Hilliard spent two days a week running the school library. She saw things, asked a lot of questions, until the day my dad walked into the principal’s office wearing an American flag T-shirt and his “I’m a vet” face, shouting at the principal to mind his own business. Mrs. Hilliard kept her lips zipped from then on, but she never stopped watching me, an ever-present shadow hanging over me as I browsed the shelves or curled up in a corner with Little Women .
    She retired at the end of the year and volunteered at the public library. Whenever I went there, she’d ask how things were at home, would sit with me for a few minutes, telling me about my mom, about how she was a student when Mrs. Hilliard first started at the school library. She said I looked like my mom. The same eyes, the same mannerisms.