four
Somehow, I do manage to fall asleep. But when I wake up, I’m not in my cozy bed at home, ready to get up for a normal, boring day at school. I’m still in the backseat of the car with Jeremy and Rachel, both of whom appear to still be sleeping. I move the blanket so I can see out the car windows, and at first I think it’s morning because of how bright it is. Then I realize we’re in a parking lot with tons and tons of lights, and that it’s still pitch black outside beyond the lights.
I can see the shape of Mom in the seat in front of me. “Mom?” I ask. “Where are we?”
“We’re at Wal-Mart,” she tells me, and the idea of us being at Wal-Mart actually makes me giggle. Like, we’re on the run, our lives are in danger, we have to be super-uber-careful not to get caught—and in the middle of all that, we’re doing some shopping at Wal-Mart. Just because.
“Why are we at Wal-Mart?” I ask.
“Dad needed to run in and get some things,” Mom explains. “Actually… he’s coming back now.”
I poke my head out from under the blanket and watch as Mom leans over and unlocks the car door. Dad gets in, carrying a few bulging bags. “The safe location is about thirty minutes away,” he tells Mom. “If we hurry, we can get in and out while it’s still dark.” He notices me and frowns. “Krystie! You need to stay under the blanket! Thirty more minutes. Then you can have your head up all you want.”
I wonder what this “safe location” is that we’re going to. I wonder why Dad said “get in and out.” If it’s a safe location, shouldn’t we just stay there until the danger has passed? And if we’re not going to stay at the safe location, why will it be safe for me to keep my head above the blanket after we get there?
I don’t ask any questions. I just sit silently under the blanket as Dad turns the car back on and starts driving.
The drive feels longer than thirty minutes, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. Eventually, I feel the car start slowing down again. Jeremy stirs and mumbles, “Where are we? What’s going on?”
“I think we’re arriving at some ‘safe location,’” I tell him, because at least I know that much. “Dad said that was where we were going.”
“Ah, a safe location. Somewhere Dad’s imaginary pursuers can’t get to us.”
“Jeremy…” Something about the situation has me uneasy. This isn’t like all those other times Dad went berserk, when it only lasted for a little while and then everything was back to normal. “Jeremy… what if this is real?”
I can’t see Jeremy’s face, but I think he’s rolling his eyes. “Come on, Krystie. We’re normal people with normal lives. What Dad was saying sounded like something from a James Bond movie. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to normal people.”
I review my life in my mind. I wouldn’t go so far as to call our family normal. I’d say, “mostly normal,” or “relatively normal.” Completely normal families don’t move to a new house every year or two. Completely normal parents let their fifteen- and thirteen-year-olds go over to friends’ houses and invite friends over to their own houses. Completely normal kids don’t have to worry about what strange, embarrassing things their dad might do in public.
The car rolls to a stop. “You guys awake back there?” Dad asks.
“Two of us are,” I tell him.
“You can take the blanket off now.”
As one, Jeremy and I whip the blanket off ourselves and start breathing huge gulps of air. You don’t realize exactly how fresh air can feel until you’ve been deprived of it for several hours.
I look out the window and see that we’re at a gas station. A really run-down, closed-looking gas station. Is this the safe location Dad was talking about? It doesn’t look safe to me.
“Wake Rachel up,” Dad instructs us.
I shake Rachel gently by the shoulder. She moans a little and then opens her eyes. “Are we there yet?”
I laugh in spite of myself. “Yeah. We’re there. We’re… somewhere.”
“Listen carefully,” says Dad. “In just a moment, we’re going to head into the convenience store. Jeremy, you’re going to come into the men’s restroom with me; Krystie and Rachel, you’re going to go into the women’s restroom with Mom. There are some things we need to do, and then we’ll get back on the road.”
“I thought we were stopping,” I say. “I thought this was a safe location.”
“It is a safe location. But we’re not staying here permanently. Let’s go.”
Dad unlocks the back doors of the car and I open my door. The moment I step out onto the pavement, I’m struck by a crazy urge to start running. To run away, to not look back, to just get as far away as possible.
But that would be insane. This is my family I’m with. And no matter how paranoid Dad is, no matter whether there really are people after us or not, I know I can trust my parents to do whatever they have to to keep me safe.
I take Rachel’s hand. She’s still sleepy, so I help her out of the car. She stands next to me, rubbing her eyes. “Are we getting food here?” she asks.
“No, love,” Mom answers. “We’ll stop and get food later. In the morning.”
The convenience store is dark; the lights are all off. It gives me the creeps as we walk up to it. Are we seriously going in there? What if one of Dad’s pursuers is lurking inside, ready to attack us?
Dad pulls the door handle. It’s unlocked. That strikes me as creepy too. It’s an old abandoned convenience store at an old abandoned gas station. An ideal target for robbers and thieves. Why in the world would the door be unlocked?
“This way,” says Dad, turning to the right.
Rachel whimpers and moves closer to me. “This is scary.”
I agree. But I just wrap my arms around her and pick her up, even though she’s getting a little too heavy for me. “We’re safe,” I tell her, trying to make it sound like I believe what I’m saying.
“Over here!” Dad calls from a few yards away, and the rest of us stumble through the darkness—lit only by the dim fluorescent lights from the gas station outside—and over to a set of single restrooms. Dad opens the men’s restroom door and turns on the light inside. Mom does the same with the women’s.
“Girls, in with me,” says Mom.
“Come on, Jeremy,” says Dad.
Jeremy and I exchange a glance. This has reached the point of paranoia. So our “safe location” is nothing more than a pit stop in an old, abandoned gas station with hardly any lights, and to top it all off, we’re expected to go into the bathroom with our parents? Rachel’s young enough that she still goes into public restrooms with Mom. But Jeremy and I are teenagers. Are Mom and Dad really paranoid enough to think that someone’s going to snatch us away while they’re in the restroom?
Or do they think that we’ll try to run away?
“Why don’t we just take turns?” asks Jeremy. “Mom stays outside with us while you use the bathroom, and you stay outside with us while Mom uses the bathroom?”
“We’re not here for toilets,” says Dad brusquely. “Although if you need to use it, by all means do so. This will probably be our last stop for a while.”
If we’re not here for toilets, then what are we here for?
I don’t ask. I follow Mom and Rachel into the women’s room and Mom shuts and locks the door behind us.
“All right,” she says, setting the Wal-Mart bag she’s been carrying down on the floor. “I need both of you girls to turn around and face the wall.”
Rachel does what Mom says immediately, but all I can think of is the shows I’ve watched on TV where they make people turn around and face the wall so they can handcuff them or hold them at gunpoint.
That’s crazy, I tell myself. This is my mother!
Mom is always calm and reasonable, a rock of sanity when Dad’s acting like the world’s about to end. Mom doesn’t do crazy, impulsive, nonsensical things like Dad does. I can trust her. I am safe.
I turn around and face the wall.
A shaking hand seizes my hair and pulls it into what feels like a low ponytail just above my shoulders. Before I can really process what’s happening, I hear the sound of scissors cutting through hair, and feel the tugs that mean it’s my hair that’s being cut.
“Mom!” I exclaim, twisting away from her. “What are you doing? I was growing my hair out for Locks of Love!” It had been about a year since my last haircut, and my hair had been almost the right length to get ten inches cut off and still reach down past my chin. But now Mom has ruined that.
“Krystie, I’m sorry,” says Mom, and she truly looks it. “I’m so sorry. But it’s for your protection.”
She’s only cut half of my hair so far, and having half a head of hair that’s eight inches shorter than the rest looks horrible, so I grudgingly let her cut the rest off to match the new shorter portion. She evens it up a little, catching straggler pieces and making sure it’s not crooked, then moves on to Rachel. I watch in horror as she takes Rachel’s beautiful, waist-length blond hair and cuts it to shoulder-length.
“I don’t get how giving us shorter hair will make us any less recognizable,” I complain. “And plus, if the people who are chasing Dad want to steal us for ransom or something, they’ll know it’s us because we’ll be with Dad.”
Mom directs a pointed glance toward Rachel. Right. I guess I shouldn’t mention people chasing Dad or us getting kidnapped for ransom in front of my little sister.
“Dad and I are dyeing our hair,” Mom explains, handing me a small box of hair dye. “So we need you kids to dye your hair too, so your hair color matches ours.”
I look at the box. “You want us to dye our hair black?”
“Yes. Do yours and Rachel’s. It’s rub-in dye, so you just squirt it out into your hands and rub it into your hair like shampoo. Make sure you do it thoroughly. I’ll inspect when you’re done.”
“Why does it even matter if our hair color matches yours and Dad’s? Kids can have different hair than their parents.”
“Two parents with black hair having three kids with light hair?”
“You could pretend we were adopted.”
Mom shakes her head and sighs. “Krystie, just do it. We’re trying to be as low-profile as possible, and it’s the least suspicious if we all have the same color hair.”
Mom turns toward the mirror, holding the scissors up to her own hair. I open the box of hair dye and stare at the package inside. I’ve never dyed my hair before. Some of my friends at school did, just to change things up or because they liked the new color better than their own. I never had an interest in changing my hair color. I like my strawberry-blond hair that everyone says looks pretty with my blue eyes.
“Why do we all have to color our hair?” Rachel asks.
“We’re… playing dress-up,” I tell her. “Actually, we’re sort of playing hide-and-seek. We’re trying to make everyone think we’re not us. It’s like a game.”
Mom gives me an approving nod, and I keep going. “It’s a secret spy game. If we trick everyone we meet into thinking we’re different people, we win. If anyone figures out that it’s really us, we lose.”
Rachel nods. She understands winning and losing. Back at home, she cries whenever I beat her at Chutes and Ladders.
I squeeze the hair dye out onto my hand. It looks like tar. The thought of putting tar in my hair is almost enough to make me puke. “Is this going to dye my hand black too?” I ask Mom, stalling for time.
“Don’t worry about getting it on your hands. It washes off skin. Don’t worry about getting it on your pajamas either. Dad bought new clothes for us to change into.”
She brings up a good point that we’re all still wearing our pajamas. I’m glad Dad got new clothes for us.
I hope he remembered a bra for me. I haven’t been wearing one for very long, but I’ve gotten used to the way it looks and feels and I’d feel uncomfortable being in public without one.
Not like we’re going to be “in public” very much.
I swirl the hair dye around on my hand. “Couldn’t we just wear wigs or something?”
“Krystie! I’m not asking you to do anything difficult. Just rub it into your hair like shampoo. Pretend you’re washing your hair.”
I’ve never washed my hair while standing in a convenience store bathroom in my pajamas, surrounded by my mom and sister, but I close my eyes and think, Okay, I’m just taking a shower. Just washing my hair. That’s it. I bring the tar to my hair and smear it in. I rub it around a little. It feels wrong to be “shampooing” my dry hair.
I squeeze out an infinitesimal amount of the dye onto my hand to use for the other side of my hair. “Krystie, that’s not nearly enough. Don’t be afraid to use the whole package. We have plenty,” says Mom.
I scowl and squirt out more, rubbing it into my hair. Rachel’s staring at me, looking unsure. “We’re all getting black hair?”
“Yes,” I tell her, trying to sound happy about the fact. “Isn’t that cool? Short black hair like Snow White.”
Rachel processes that for a moment, then her face breaks into a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Just like Snow White.”
I can see the shape of Mom in the seat in front of me. “Mom?” I ask. “Where are we?”
“We’re at Wal-Mart,” she tells me, and the idea of us being at Wal-Mart actually makes me giggle. Like, we’re on the run, our lives are in danger, we have to be super-uber-careful not to get caught—and in the middle of all that, we’re doing some shopping at Wal-Mart. Just because.
“Why are we at Wal-Mart?” I ask.
“Dad needed to run in and get some things,” Mom explains. “Actually… he’s coming back now.”
I poke my head out from under the blanket and watch as Mom leans over and unlocks the car door. Dad gets in, carrying a few bulging bags. “The safe location is about thirty minutes away,” he tells Mom. “If we hurry, we can get in and out while it’s still dark.” He notices me and frowns. “Krystie! You need to stay under the blanket! Thirty more minutes. Then you can have your head up all you want.”
I wonder what this “safe location” is that we’re going to. I wonder why Dad said “get in and out.” If it’s a safe location, shouldn’t we just stay there until the danger has passed? And if we’re not going to stay at the safe location, why will it be safe for me to keep my head above the blanket after we get there?
I don’t ask any questions. I just sit silently under the blanket as Dad turns the car back on and starts driving.
The drive feels longer than thirty minutes, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. Eventually, I feel the car start slowing down again. Jeremy stirs and mumbles, “Where are we? What’s going on?”
“I think we’re arriving at some ‘safe location,’” I tell him, because at least I know that much. “Dad said that was where we were going.”
“Ah, a safe location. Somewhere Dad’s imaginary pursuers can’t get to us.”
“Jeremy…” Something about the situation has me uneasy. This isn’t like all those other times Dad went berserk, when it only lasted for a little while and then everything was back to normal. “Jeremy… what if this is real?”
I can’t see Jeremy’s face, but I think he’s rolling his eyes. “Come on, Krystie. We’re normal people with normal lives. What Dad was saying sounded like something from a James Bond movie. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to normal people.”
I review my life in my mind. I wouldn’t go so far as to call our family normal. I’d say, “mostly normal,” or “relatively normal.” Completely normal families don’t move to a new house every year or two. Completely normal parents let their fifteen- and thirteen-year-olds go over to friends’ houses and invite friends over to their own houses. Completely normal kids don’t have to worry about what strange, embarrassing things their dad might do in public.
The car rolls to a stop. “You guys awake back there?” Dad asks.
“Two of us are,” I tell him.
“You can take the blanket off now.”
As one, Jeremy and I whip the blanket off ourselves and start breathing huge gulps of air. You don’t realize exactly how fresh air can feel until you’ve been deprived of it for several hours.
I look out the window and see that we’re at a gas station. A really run-down, closed-looking gas station. Is this the safe location Dad was talking about? It doesn’t look safe to me.
“Wake Rachel up,” Dad instructs us.
I shake Rachel gently by the shoulder. She moans a little and then opens her eyes. “Are we there yet?”
I laugh in spite of myself. “Yeah. We’re there. We’re… somewhere.”
“Listen carefully,” says Dad. “In just a moment, we’re going to head into the convenience store. Jeremy, you’re going to come into the men’s restroom with me; Krystie and Rachel, you’re going to go into the women’s restroom with Mom. There are some things we need to do, and then we’ll get back on the road.”
“I thought we were stopping,” I say. “I thought this was a safe location.”
“It is a safe location. But we’re not staying here permanently. Let’s go.”
Dad unlocks the back doors of the car and I open my door. The moment I step out onto the pavement, I’m struck by a crazy urge to start running. To run away, to not look back, to just get as far away as possible.
But that would be insane. This is my family I’m with. And no matter how paranoid Dad is, no matter whether there really are people after us or not, I know I can trust my parents to do whatever they have to to keep me safe.
I take Rachel’s hand. She’s still sleepy, so I help her out of the car. She stands next to me, rubbing her eyes. “Are we getting food here?” she asks.
“No, love,” Mom answers. “We’ll stop and get food later. In the morning.”
The convenience store is dark; the lights are all off. It gives me the creeps as we walk up to it. Are we seriously going in there? What if one of Dad’s pursuers is lurking inside, ready to attack us?
Dad pulls the door handle. It’s unlocked. That strikes me as creepy too. It’s an old abandoned convenience store at an old abandoned gas station. An ideal target for robbers and thieves. Why in the world would the door be unlocked?
“This way,” says Dad, turning to the right.
Rachel whimpers and moves closer to me. “This is scary.”
I agree. But I just wrap my arms around her and pick her up, even though she’s getting a little too heavy for me. “We’re safe,” I tell her, trying to make it sound like I believe what I’m saying.
“Over here!” Dad calls from a few yards away, and the rest of us stumble through the darkness—lit only by the dim fluorescent lights from the gas station outside—and over to a set of single restrooms. Dad opens the men’s restroom door and turns on the light inside. Mom does the same with the women’s.
“Girls, in with me,” says Mom.
“Come on, Jeremy,” says Dad.
Jeremy and I exchange a glance. This has reached the point of paranoia. So our “safe location” is nothing more than a pit stop in an old, abandoned gas station with hardly any lights, and to top it all off, we’re expected to go into the bathroom with our parents? Rachel’s young enough that she still goes into public restrooms with Mom. But Jeremy and I are teenagers. Are Mom and Dad really paranoid enough to think that someone’s going to snatch us away while they’re in the restroom?
Or do they think that we’ll try to run away?
“Why don’t we just take turns?” asks Jeremy. “Mom stays outside with us while you use the bathroom, and you stay outside with us while Mom uses the bathroom?”
“We’re not here for toilets,” says Dad brusquely. “Although if you need to use it, by all means do so. This will probably be our last stop for a while.”
If we’re not here for toilets, then what are we here for?
I don’t ask. I follow Mom and Rachel into the women’s room and Mom shuts and locks the door behind us.
“All right,” she says, setting the Wal-Mart bag she’s been carrying down on the floor. “I need both of you girls to turn around and face the wall.”
Rachel does what Mom says immediately, but all I can think of is the shows I’ve watched on TV where they make people turn around and face the wall so they can handcuff them or hold them at gunpoint.
That’s crazy, I tell myself. This is my mother!
Mom is always calm and reasonable, a rock of sanity when Dad’s acting like the world’s about to end. Mom doesn’t do crazy, impulsive, nonsensical things like Dad does. I can trust her. I am safe.
I turn around and face the wall.
A shaking hand seizes my hair and pulls it into what feels like a low ponytail just above my shoulders. Before I can really process what’s happening, I hear the sound of scissors cutting through hair, and feel the tugs that mean it’s my hair that’s being cut.
“Mom!” I exclaim, twisting away from her. “What are you doing? I was growing my hair out for Locks of Love!” It had been about a year since my last haircut, and my hair had been almost the right length to get ten inches cut off and still reach down past my chin. But now Mom has ruined that.
“Krystie, I’m sorry,” says Mom, and she truly looks it. “I’m so sorry. But it’s for your protection.”
She’s only cut half of my hair so far, and having half a head of hair that’s eight inches shorter than the rest looks horrible, so I grudgingly let her cut the rest off to match the new shorter portion. She evens it up a little, catching straggler pieces and making sure it’s not crooked, then moves on to Rachel. I watch in horror as she takes Rachel’s beautiful, waist-length blond hair and cuts it to shoulder-length.
“I don’t get how giving us shorter hair will make us any less recognizable,” I complain. “And plus, if the people who are chasing Dad want to steal us for ransom or something, they’ll know it’s us because we’ll be with Dad.”
Mom directs a pointed glance toward Rachel. Right. I guess I shouldn’t mention people chasing Dad or us getting kidnapped for ransom in front of my little sister.
“Dad and I are dyeing our hair,” Mom explains, handing me a small box of hair dye. “So we need you kids to dye your hair too, so your hair color matches ours.”
I look at the box. “You want us to dye our hair black?”
“Yes. Do yours and Rachel’s. It’s rub-in dye, so you just squirt it out into your hands and rub it into your hair like shampoo. Make sure you do it thoroughly. I’ll inspect when you’re done.”
“Why does it even matter if our hair color matches yours and Dad’s? Kids can have different hair than their parents.”
“Two parents with black hair having three kids with light hair?”
“You could pretend we were adopted.”
Mom shakes her head and sighs. “Krystie, just do it. We’re trying to be as low-profile as possible, and it’s the least suspicious if we all have the same color hair.”
Mom turns toward the mirror, holding the scissors up to her own hair. I open the box of hair dye and stare at the package inside. I’ve never dyed my hair before. Some of my friends at school did, just to change things up or because they liked the new color better than their own. I never had an interest in changing my hair color. I like my strawberry-blond hair that everyone says looks pretty with my blue eyes.
“Why do we all have to color our hair?” Rachel asks.
“We’re… playing dress-up,” I tell her. “Actually, we’re sort of playing hide-and-seek. We’re trying to make everyone think we’re not us. It’s like a game.”
Mom gives me an approving nod, and I keep going. “It’s a secret spy game. If we trick everyone we meet into thinking we’re different people, we win. If anyone figures out that it’s really us, we lose.”
Rachel nods. She understands winning and losing. Back at home, she cries whenever I beat her at Chutes and Ladders.
I squeeze the hair dye out onto my hand. It looks like tar. The thought of putting tar in my hair is almost enough to make me puke. “Is this going to dye my hand black too?” I ask Mom, stalling for time.
“Don’t worry about getting it on your hands. It washes off skin. Don’t worry about getting it on your pajamas either. Dad bought new clothes for us to change into.”
She brings up a good point that we’re all still wearing our pajamas. I’m glad Dad got new clothes for us.
I hope he remembered a bra for me. I haven’t been wearing one for very long, but I’ve gotten used to the way it looks and feels and I’d feel uncomfortable being in public without one.
Not like we’re going to be “in public” very much.
I swirl the hair dye around on my hand. “Couldn’t we just wear wigs or something?”
“Krystie! I’m not asking you to do anything difficult. Just rub it into your hair like shampoo. Pretend you’re washing your hair.”
I’ve never washed my hair while standing in a convenience store bathroom in my pajamas, surrounded by my mom and sister, but I close my eyes and think, Okay, I’m just taking a shower. Just washing my hair. That’s it. I bring the tar to my hair and smear it in. I rub it around a little. It feels wrong to be “shampooing” my dry hair.
I squeeze out an infinitesimal amount of the dye onto my hand to use for the other side of my hair. “Krystie, that’s not nearly enough. Don’t be afraid to use the whole package. We have plenty,” says Mom.
I scowl and squirt out more, rubbing it into my hair. Rachel’s staring at me, looking unsure. “We’re all getting black hair?”
“Yes,” I tell her, trying to sound happy about the fact. “Isn’t that cool? Short black hair like Snow White.”
Rachel processes that for a moment, then her face breaks into a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Just like Snow White.”
