Shark of Spades

Alone In a Big World

With everything going on...my brother, Jack...I needed to get away. But where could I go that neither one of them would find me?

You can always leave town, I immediately thought, before sinking more heavily into my shoes as I trudged on. Yeah, but you left your precious briefcase in the motel with your brother. Can we all just punch me now?

As stupid as I was, I blamed Evan for half of it. If I hadn't left the briefcase behind, the scene would've gone like this:

I  got out of my chair and walked with long strides around the bed and  grabbed my briefcase, adjusting my sunglasses as I headed over to the door, but then Evan's voice stopped me.

"Wait, Misa."

"What?"

"You can't just run away from me."

"I'm not running away from you," I denied without feeling, just wanting to be gone.

"Then leave your briefcase behind as insurance. I need to know that you're going to come back."

And then I would've given in and left the briefcase behind anyway.

I  sighed and sat down on a nearby bench, setting my elbows on my knees  and holding my face in my hands as rain streamed down my face, coating my eyes with a layer of water behind my sunglasses and making my hair plaster down against my head and thing black polo.

It wasn't long before a little kid, maybe five or six, came dashing down the street, splashing in all of the biggest puddles and ignoring his mom's frantic  calls.

I wasn't even really paying attention to him until he stopped right in front of me and stared at me for a good ten seconds.

Feeling the weight of his stare, I finally sighed and lifted up my head, meeting his bright blue eyes.

"Nice glasses," he said, giggling, and before I could stop him, he took them off my face. Or maybe I didn't want to stop him, because my reflexes  were much faster than his, and yet...I just let him...

I heard his  mom approaching quickly, so I gently grabbed the glasses back (he'd put them on his face for his own amusement) and put them back on me just as she grabbed his hand.

"Look, Mommy. I met a nice woman," he said giddily, pointing at me, and my heart froze for a second. This kid, how did he figure it out so quickly? Sure, the sunglasses are meant to help conceal my femininity, but...

"Honey, that's a man, not a woman. Now hurry up," she said, dragging the boy away and sending a backwards glance at me more than once. As she sped away, I heard her admonishing her son and warning him about "bad guys."

I sighed, laying down on the bench and crossing my arms behind my head. For a second, my mind flashed back to when I'd been on the train with Jack  and people had mistaken us for a gay couple. My mind tried to  rationalize the instance from every angle; fact: with females locked up in the government-sponsored communities, the average rates of both lesbians and gays went up; fact: Jack and I were nearly telepathic, so  it must have been obvious that we shared some kind of relationship; fact: Jack had kissed me...

I'm not sure why I was thinking of that. When normal girls get kissed and think about it later, they blush and stare at the ground as their heart warms their blood temperature, but...I don't think I'm capable of doing any of those things.

So did I even care about what Jack had done? I wasn't sure.

All of this thinking was giving me a headache, so I decided to just close my eyes and let the rain keep pounding down. If someone found me and  reported me, so be it. I was never meant to live a natural life anyway.

With that apathy breaking down my walls, I went to sleep under the cover of rain, not as Card, but as Misa.

***

You would think, Who the hell manages to sleep when it's raining? And I'd probably agree with you, but something must have been out of whack in my system, because mission accomplished.

The problem was that someone else did have that thought, actually. In fact, they had that same exact thought and felt the need to voice it.

"Who the hell manages to sleep when it's raining?" Evan asked, bending over me to do that weird you're-sleeping-so-let-me-inspect-our-face-for-a-minute thing before he picked me up, rousing me from my sleep.

"What are you doing?" I murmured, eyes still closed, and man was I freezing. "And why are you carrying me like a princess?"

"Why are you sleeping in the middle of a storm? Do you want to catch hypothermia?"

Reaching a standstill, we both remained silent, neither one of us wanting to shatter whatever grudge we'd managed to grasp for even a few seconds. It  reminded me of the time I'd been hiding in his room, when we'd get mad at each other and then be laughing a minute later, unable to stay as square pegs in round holes and simply transforming to fix the problem.  Now, though, we had a few years of separation between us. I had to wonder if we'd ever fit back into our old, easy groove.

"Misa-"

"Call me Card."

"Fine, but only in public."

"Well, we're in public now, so it looks like a great time to start."

He  sighed angrily before continuing on his Path to Divine Admonishment.  "Look, Card. You can't just sleep in the streets like this. Anyone could  have just kidnapped you or found out about you."

"Then I would have shot them."

"But you left your gun in the motel."

"Then I would have shot them mentally with invisible bullets, or prayed for a  car to accidentally clip every single bone in their body."

"Card, stop trying to be funny. I'm serious. You're too laid back. You didn't even resist when I picked you up."

"Because I knew it was you."

"But what if it wasn't me?"

I despise it when people ask you to imagine hypothetical situations altered by one degree from reality. "Evan, it was you. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have let you carry me."

He just grunted, probably upset with my indifference. "But Card, let's pretend for a moment that I'm not Evan, and let's say I picked you up."

I elbowed him hard enough in the gut to make him cough and struggle to regain his breath. "That's what I'd do."

His  breathing was a little ragged, but he continued the story. "What if I'd given you an injection that numbs your body's responses?"

"Then so what? I was sleeping anyway."

Evan  shut up, clearly done with trying to protect his little sister, and didn't say another word until we reached the motel, where he put me in the passenger seat of the car. "Woah, woah. Slow down. Where's my stuff?  Where are we going?"

"Your briefcase and gun are in the back seat, and it doesn't matter where we're going," he answered briskly as he buckled me in.

"Can you at least tell me why we're leaving?"

He shut my door and went around to start the engine. "Jack's in town."

"I know. So?"

"So we're leaving before he tries to kill us."

I shrugged. "He didn't try to kill me earlier today." Evan gaped at me, sputtering for a minute, but I was still tired so I laid my head against  the window and ignored him.

When he realized that I wasn't going to  give him an answer, he eventually frowned and reversed out of the parking lot before hitting the highway.

I closed my eyes and slept, this time as Card.