Walk Me Home by Catherine Ryan Hyde Read Free Book Online

get off this highway and go this way again.”
    The pay phone rings. They both turn and look at it. But neither girl moves. It’s unsettling to Carly. As if the phone knows she’s here. But she forces her attention back to the map.
    “But those roads…they’re so…”
    They’re small and confusing. They’re such fine lines on the map. They’re probably just little residential dirt roads. Reservation roads. For locals. And not a one goes straight through. Or even straight. It’s a maze.
    “So…what?”
    “I feel like we’ll get lost.”
    The phone is still ringing. It’s on what may be its twelfth ring. But Carly hasn’t been counting.
    “We’ll just keep going west,” Jen says. “We’ll watch the sun.”
    “Why is that phone ringing?”
    “I dunno. Answer it.”
    “Come on. Let’s just go.”
    But as they’re walking out of the gas station lot, it hits her that maybe Ralph or Jud is calling her back. Maybe they know more after all. Maybe they found out, right after she called, that somebody else knew more.
    “I’m gonna get that,” she says.
    She grabs it up but doesn’t say hello. It feels too volatile to say hello.
    “Are you there?” she hears. “Is somebody there?”
    It’s not Ralph. It’s the operator. Her belly ices over with panic.
    “Yeah…”
    “Did you get the help you needed, honey, or should I call somebody for you?”
    “No!” she shouts. Way too loud and defensive. Badly played. She just gave away a lot. “No, we’re fine now. He’s gonna come pick us up.”
    But just as she says it, it hits her that maybe the operator stayed on the line the whole time she was talking to Ralph.
    “Honey, do you and your sister have someplace safe to go right now?”
    Carly slams the phone down.
    “Come on,” she tells Jen. “We’re going. Fast.”
    “Why? What?”
    “The operator’s going to call somebody to come help us. We’re going to do just what you said. First road goes off to the left, we’ll take it. Get as far away from the highway as we can.”
    “Maybe—” Jen begins.
    Carly doesn’t let her finish. She can’t afford to. She can feel where this is headed. She grabs Jen by the sleeve, and they set off down the road double-time.
    “We didn’t come all this way to get picked up by child services,” Carly says as they nearly jog. “If we’re gonna get put in different foster homes or something, we could’ve just sat where we were and waited for them to come and get us. We wouldn’t have had to go through all this. We didn’t go through all this for nothing.”
    Jen never answers.
    A road appears to their left. They have no idea what road it is or where it goes.
    They take it.
    By sundown they could be anywhere. They’re headed for the setting sun, but then the road keeps curving. They could be going around in a circle for all they know.
    They’re in a different sort of neighborhood now. Reservation residential. A fence made of old discarded tires. Squat stone houses with three or four pickup trucks out front, stone mesas towering behind. Tiny wood or stone shacks with old motor homes or trailers parked nearby, often more than one, like inexpensive housing compounds. And though they don’t see a soul close-up—just plumes of dirt rising from tires on the next road over, or people sitting outside too far away for Carly to confirm her theory in their eyes—she’s nursing the distinct impression that they don’t belong here. They are outsiders in this place. She can feel it.
    “Maybe just cut straight through,” Jen says.
    They try that. But it’s brushy. Hard going. And Carly keeps getting a bad feeling they’re on private property. “Maybe we could sleep there,” Jen says, pointing.
    There’s an old yellow school bus, sitting mostly down in a gulley. No tires. No windshield. No grill.
    It’s cold. And they want someplace sheltered to sleep. They haven’t said so out loud. They haven’t needed to. It’s just a thing that’s