"Are you afraid?" Dot smiles like the thought exhilarates her.
"Yes, Dot, we're very afraid," I tell her.
She jumps on my answer. "But are you glad? Is it worth it?"
Her urgency makes me pause. Something doesn't seem right. "I don't know yet if--"
"Yes," Kara says firmly. "It's worth it. Every second. Every mile. Every risk. Being trapped is the same as no life at all. We were prisoners." Kara turns to look at me. "We've been prisoners for too long."
Dot nods and accelerates the car, seemingly pleased with this information. "Where to, Escapees?"
I look out at the countryside and then at Kara. This was not a well-thought-out plan. Where can we go?
"Boston," Kara says flatly. She stares straight ahead, ignoring me.
Her family, my family--they're not in Boston anymore. We both know that. What is there to go back to? It's the first time I have thought about descendants. Did my brother or sister have children? Neither was the type to settle down and have a family, but children may have happened anyway. Could I possibly have someone I am related to? A distant niece or nephew? Even a distant cousin? Someone who might help us?
And then I remember. There is someone in Boston. Someone we both know.
Jenna.
I look at the elegant line of Kara's jaw. She finally has what she wants--freedom from Gatsbro--but I think she still wants so much more, and the more is what frightens me. Her eyes are fixed on the road, and for once I wish I could see into her mind again, that I could control my wanderings there. What would I see now?
I want to go to Boston too, but I'm certain it's for different reasons. I want to see something familiar. Something from then. My street. My house. Even the market at the corner where my mother worked. And Jenna too. Even if she didn't help us before, maybe she would now. I think about her every day. The idea of seeing her again--
Jenna. Jenna. Jenna.
It's an unexpected angry beat in my head, and I'm not sure if it's coming from my own thoughts or somewhere else. Kara turns to look at me. Her eyebrows rise and her hand slides across the seat to lace with mine. She squeezes my fingers, a simple act, but it releases an explosion of feeling. When you have spent so many years without fingers, the smallest touch is something you can get lost in. I am easily lost in Kara again, returning her squeeze.
"Yes, Dot. Boston," I say.
Francis Street in Boston.
Chapter 13
Our house on Francis Street was a big move up for us. Before that we had lived in a cramped apartment in a bad neighborhood. I had shared a bedroom with my brother. Every memory of him is filled with slamming doors and yelling. He was wild and ran with a wild crowd. In that neighborhood that was all there was to run with. But when my sister was spotted running with a gang and the police showed up on our doorstep, that was when we moved. My brother moved in with friends and refused to come, and since he was almost eighteen, my parents didn't force him. For nearly two years we lived with my grandparents while my parents saved every penny for the house on Francis Street. It was a dump, but in a good area, and my uncles helped my dad gut it and make it livable. They made my sister help too, and she hated every minute of it. She wanted to be back with her friends in the old neighborhood.
I was spared from the scraping and hauling because I was "their student." They always said it just that way, their student, like I was the genius of their loins. I was the only one who excelled in school, and my parents held me up as proof that they had done right by at least one of their children. I was going to be a doctor, a senator, a scientist who found the cure for cancer--maybe all three. It didn't matter what, just something big. I could do anything, they said, I just needed to stay focused. I knew what that meant--not wild like my brother or sister. So I did stay focused, for them. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life anyway. It seemed wrong not to have a goal, so I let their goal be mine. And for a time, I even thrived on it.
But then one day, something changed. Something inside me. I needed more. Something of my own that was for me and no one else, but I had no idea what that something was. I just knew I needed something more than being redemption for my parents. The grades and praise weren't enough anymore, but I couldn't tell them. I couldn't tell anyone.
Then I met Kara and Jenna. We may have gone to the same school, but our neighborhoods were barely in the same universe. Kara and Jenna both came from wealthy families. Like me, they excelled in school, and they had the pressure to perform but for entirely differe
nt reasons. Jenna was an only child and apparently a miracle child as well. The sun rose and set with her as far as her parents were concerned. Kara's parents were both brilliant high achievers: her dad a CEO of an investment banking firm, and her mother, a managing partner in a law firm. Her brother was at Harvard studying law. For Kara's parents, greatness was an assumption, and anything less than the stars was shamefully unacceptable.
We had all been on the fast track to mind-numbing, soul-smothering academic brilliance--feeding on it even--but somewhere else inside we were starving. That's when we put the brakes on, but we couldn't do it by ourselves. We needed one another.
I spent a lot of time at their houses. They never came to mine. I didn't invite them. It's not that I was ashamed of our shabby furniture or the cramped rooms or even the cheap plastic chairs on the porch and half-dead poinsettias left over from Christmas. I wasn't. I just didn't want to share Kara and Jenna. I didn't want my parents to say a single word about them, good, bad, or otherwise. I wanted everything about them to be mine. I think I was secretly afraid that someone else might break the spell, because I was sure that's what it had to be for these two girls to spend time with me, call me, and most important, voice my thoughts. Girls, I had always assumed, were better at articulating feelings, but Kara and Jenna articulated my feelings, and they taught me to voice them too. I became a different person. They both loved poetry, so I memorized lines of poems to impress them, but soon I found I liked it too. We took turns spouting lines of poetry that spoke to us and the moment.
I all alone beweep my outcast state.
I tramp a perpetual journey.
I saw and heard and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past ...
Everything we talked about seemed deep and real, and the truest words that had ever been spoken on the planet. Words that would heal the world. Words that would heal us. We finished one another's sentences. I was in love with both of them. And there was a time I thought Jenna--