Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 27

"Stephani," I gasped with alarm, rushing toward her to prevent her from making a scene. It didn't even really cross my mind to pretend I hadn't heard her or insist that I was someone other than myself; we'd gone to pre-school together. "Hi. What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here? I think the bigger question is what are you doing here?" Stephani asked with a smile. She seemed curiously happy to see me, which was at least an initial relief while I formulated a game plan for how to proceed. What I wanted more than anything was to prevent her from asking more questions—and most of all, keep her from saying my name again in the crowded restaurant, since it was safe to assume that everyone in the state of Michigan . I slid into the booth next to Stephani in an attempt to keep her from raising her voice.

"The truth is," I began, defining which version of the truth I'd tell as the words took shape in my mouth, "It's me and Trey. We're going to Canada. Toronto, actually." Romance seemed like the surest way to get a girl my own age to keep quiet. A girl like Stephani, who loved gossip and was eager to please authority, could probably be relied on to not go blabbing to the teachers chaperoning the ski trip, or call the police the second I turned my back, if she had reason to believe that she'd be bringing an end to an epic romance. She was, after all, apparently breaking the rules by being off of the property of Fitzgerald's Lodge with a grown man. And we'd never been close friends—unlike Olivia Richmond, Stephani had always teetered on the fringe of popularity, hanging around with the girls who frequently got into trouble for ditching class. She had no good reason not to turn me in unless I gave her one.

Excitement bubbled in Stephani's eyes as they darted from me over to her lunch date. "I knew it!" She elbowed the guy in the ski sweater and bobbed her head in my direction. "You know that girl everyone's talking about on the news, the one who broke out of her military school and is presumed to be armed and dangerous? This is her!"

The guy in the ski sweater looked appropriately uncomfortable. His smile was amused as his gaze met mine, but his eyes held fear. "She's kidding, right?" he asked me.

Behind them, I saw Trey leave the men's room, and look at me with curiosity. Remaining expressionless, with a flick of my eyes, I motioned for him to get back into the car in the lot. If I was going to get caught because we'd gotten hungry and had the misfortune of walking into the only restaurant in Traverse City where someone likely to recognize from childhood was eating lunch, then I was going to need Trey and Henry to finish the job of dealing with Violet for me. Catching my drift, Trey slipped out of the restaurant unseen.

"Uh, she's not kidding," I said quietly, trying to look shy and remorseful. "I needed to get out of that school. There's some bad stuff going on there. Really, Stephani..." Her eyes were enormous as she surely imagined all kinds of awful abuse, none of which I was going to specify. I already felt bad about lying to imply that I'd been abused at Dearborn, because nothing of the sort by the staff there had happened. "I wasn't sure I was going to make it until the end of the year."

"Oh, my god, McKenna," Stephani said, her voice shaking. She reached across the table to set her hands on top of mine. Realizing that she hadn't bothered introducing her gentleman friend, she sat up a little straighter and said, "I'm being so rude. This is RJ. RJ? This is," she paused, making me feel a little bit safer about this entire inconvenient situation, and whispered, "McKenna Brady."

RJ nodded and without smiling, his eyes never leaving my face, said, "Nice to meet you." He'd probably never seen a real fugitive before, and in that moment under his stare, I realized that's what I actually was. A fugitive. On the run from the law. I couldn't guess how much older RJ was than Stephani, but assuming he really was a ski instructor at Fitzgerald's Lodge, it was reasonable to assume that he was as old as twenty-four, twenty-five. I would have bet that it was occurring to him at that very instant in time that he was realizing how much older he was than Stephani, and that if the police were to find out that the two of them had spotted me at Burger King and hadn't alerted anyone, he could land himself in a whole bunch of trouble.