“Maybe he meant you needed to live. Maybe he’s telling you Dr. X will cure you and everything will be okay. Dude, I’ll bet that’s it!”
Gonzo’s face lights up now that he thinks he’s solved the puzzle, but I just feel like some kind of jerk who’s having a cosmic prank played on him. I wanted something concrete—turn left at the Auto Mart. Dr. X’s office is on the corner of Fifth and Main and you have an appointment at eleven o’clock next Tuesday.
Just as they’re making the announcement for our bus, a couple of cops enter the station. At the sight of them, we automatically go low-profile, hiding at the back of a pack of people heading for the buses. They’ve got a flyer they show to people in the station.
“Keep your head down,” I whisper to Gonzo. The cop stops to ask a lady with three small kids if she’s ever seen these two guys, and I get a look over his shoulder. The flyer shows two very bad school photos of Gonzo and me under the word MISSING. I hate that picture of me. I look like a complete putz. But at least I’m not sporting the ridiculous upper-lip peach fuzz Gonzo’s got in his.
“Gonzo,” I say. “Be cool. Those cops are looking for us. Blend in.”
“Blend in? Easy for you to say!”
The line presses forward toward the bus. The driver opens up the metal jaw on the side and passengers hand over their suitcases for storage. Why do people have to travel with so much stuff? The cops are out here now, scouring the buses for two teens—one a dwarf—who escaped from a hospital in Texas. I position Gonz in front of me so I can block his body with mine. Trouble is, he’s wider than I am, and it makes it look like we’re one of those Indian goddesses with lots of limbs. After what seems like forever, the driver opens the doors, and Gonzo and I nearly kill each other in our rush to reach the back of the bus, where we pile into our seats and slink down.
“Cover your face with your jacket. Pretend you’re asleep,” I say.
We bury ourselves under Windbreakers and backpacks so that only the tops of our heads show. People lumber on now, looking for seats. I peek over the top of my jacket to see the cop stepping into the aisle. He cranes his neck, looking for us, but there are too many people moving around to really see.
The driver climbs on. “Excuse me, Officer. If you’re done, I got a schedule to get to.”
The cop gives a last hard look, and I duck under the safety of my jacket. After a few seconds, I hear him thank the driver. The doors close with a hiss, sealing us in. The bus rolls out of the station, but my heartbeat doesn’t get back to normal till we’re far from the city limits of New Orleans.
When he’s ready to take a nap, the guy next to us lets us borrow his deck of cards. We eat RealFruit Lassos and play Texas Hold ’Em and Jacks Are Wild. The bus bumps along the coast. Oil refineries send up plumes of toxic smoke. The smell, like rotten eggs mixed with cleaning fluid, makes me want to gag. A couple of shrimp boats bob on the water, the fishermen pulling up the soul of the sea in their heavy nets. I like watching the country roll by my window. I wish we’d taken more vacations. I try to remember why we stopped. Dad got busy with work and Mom got busy looking busy and Jen and I started hating each other and next thing you know, we’re a bunch of strangers totally uncomfortable being around each other. And who wants to go on vacation with a bunch of strangers?
Gonzo deals out a new hand. The sky’s getting darker. The lights in the bus kick on. Little cones of yellow-white shine down on our cards, making our hands look bleached out.
“You get a phone number from that German girl back in the graveyard?” I ask. “I think she was hot for you.”
Gonzo shakes his head. “Not my type.”
“What? German? Tourist? Girl?”
Gonzo flashes me a Don’t Go There look.
“So what is your type?”
He thinks for a minute. “Sweet, but dangerous-looking. I like Southern accents. And tattoos.”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Tattoos? Whoa! Who’da thunk it? The Gonzman likes ’em a little tough.”
He grins. “You don’t know everything about me, pendejo. I’m a pretty complicated dude.”
“You’re, like, a totally open book, Gonz,” I say, laughing. “I’ve never met anybody more transparent in my life.”
“You don’t know me, dude,” he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. “People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel f**ked up and sad for no reason at all.”