She was thirteen and a half years old the day she’d become certain there was no place on earth free of injustice. Neither in Cainland nor outside it. Wherever Lucy had escaped to, was it any better?
But a woman on a motorcycle didn’t have much in common with a police officer.
“I guess I’ll see you around, then,” said Ollie, and fastened her helmet on. She kicked her leg over the bike so she was straddling it.
Vern stuck her hands into the pockets she’d sewn onto her hemmed dress, rocked back and forth from right leg to left. “Where are you going anyway?”
Ollie leaned forward on the handlebars, squeezing her hands around the leather grips. “Anywhere I want.”
Vern raised an eyebrow at the nonanswer. “That’s the kind of thing an old friend of mine would’ve said.”
Lucy was always reminding people just how in charge she was of her own life even though it was obviously not true. It wasn’t true for anybody at the Blessed Acres. She’d been dragged there by her parents and had gotten to leave only when her mother could orchestrate her escape.
Vern had made her own way out. “If I get on the bike with you, you promise to take me back here when we’re all done?”
“Don’t know why you’d want me to. It’s redneck central. But all right,” Ollie said, tucking a strand of short, wavy red hair behind her ear. She looked like someone who’d never once cared about anything.
Vern shifted her gaze back toward the honky-tonk, then toward the woods, then finally back to the woman inviting her on a ride away from it all. “Are you going to hurt me?” Vern asked.
Ollie removed a half-smoked cigarette from a tin case in her side jeans pocket, then placed it between her lips, worrying but not lighting it. “I end up hurting most people,” she said, “despite my best efforts.”
Vern shivered. She was like a broken windup toy, titillated by the slightest provocation. Ollie need only exude an air of danger to pique Vern’s interest. “How old are you?” Vern asked.
“Too old for you,” said Ollie. “That a problem?”
Vern licked her bottom lip, took one last breath, then climbed onto the back of the bike. “Put that on,” said Ollie, handing Vern a helmet, “and hold on.”
“Hold on where?”
Ollie reached around and grabbed Vern’s hands, placed them onto her belly. “Tighter,” said Ollie.
Vern wiggled herself into the bike seat. Her cheeks warmed.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” said Vern.
Ollie turned on the engine and Vern yelped at the rumbling beneath her. She grabbed on more tightly, scooting herself up so their bodies were flush, Vern’s front to Ollie’s back.
They pulled out the parking lot and onto the pebbled road, Ollie ramping up the speed. Vern, taken over by the glee of it, warm wind and speed and heart racing, shouted and whooped.
They were in the darkness, Vern and Ollie both shooting stars flinging across the black.
On either side of them, trees hovered overhead. The woods had always seemed majestic from the inside. From the road, they seemed nothing but a murky shadow, a dream she’d been lost in for all this time.
Vern didn’t mind the smack of bugs against the helmet visor. Ollie had rock music turned up loud, just audible over the engine. Vern bopped her head to it. Even the gaseous odor of exhaust pleased her.
They’d been riding for twenty minutes when Ollie slowed the bike down and pulled it to the side of the road, the neon-signed wooden shack miles in their wake.
“You tell me you can go anywhere in the world, and this is where you choose?” asked Vern, but she followed Ollie off the bike and tore off her helmet. She was still high on music and people, on the rush of wind. What a strange thing, to have a conversation with a person old enough to talk back.
“Didn’t want to take you too far from the honky-tonk,” Ollie said. She grabbed Vern’s hand and pulled her off the roadside into the woods. Vern licked her lips as she tripped over stones and sticks, dragged by this stranger.
Finally, Ollie jolted to a stop and pressed Vern against the thick trunk of a tree. Vern hated the sound of her breaths, fragmented and weak with need. For months and months she’d been alone in the woods, but for her babes and the fiend.
“You want this?” asked Ollie, her forehead against Vern’s.
Vern nodded, teeth sunk into her bottom lip. “Sure,” she whispered, afraid that if she said so any more loudly, Sherman would hear and track her down. Standing next to the tree, he’d launch into a lecture about how the hormones, antibiotics, and altered genes in food off the compound could stimulate unnatural lesbian attractions.