hills. Just about then, we stumbled into a hot zone for cell. The group texts started blowing up again.
I knew about pings and there was no way we were gonna respond. We stopped, though, and I read the texts aloud to Fee.
BROOK: R u guys reading these texts? Omg you guys? What have you done?
DELANEY: Runners? You guys?
ZARA: ppl gonna shoot you. Turn yourselves in.
BROOK: Turn yourselves in, Ror.
DEE: There is a million-dollar bounty on you.
BROOK: True. Reverend Jonze just put it on Twitter.
ZARA: Go to the police. God have mercy on your souls.
DEE: Can’t even believe this? Why would they do this?
ZARA: Ror has no God. Fee has no guap.
DEE: My dad SO MAD.
ZARA: OMG you guys. Just got trend alert. We’re everywhere.
Fee and I looked at each other in the moonlight, scratched and pale in our filthy, torn gowns. Wait. What?
BROOK: We’re on TMZ right now. Turn it on. We look amaze in our gowns. Frowny face that Ror and Fee ruined the Virtue Ball.
DEE: Turn yourselves in!
ZARA: My mom says Shelley has to be involved. Not surprised. Commies.
BROOK: Your parents are getting death threats. Turn yourselves in!
ZARA: Oh my God you guys. This is crazy!
FINALLY, JINNY HUTSALL: God’s will be done.
Fuck.
“We gotta get rid of our phones,” I said.
“No!” Fee said.
“Yes. They’ll be able to track us.”
I remembered there was another shallow creek up ahead. I snatched Fee’s phone from her hand and ran, planning to drown my phone and hers. Only there was no water at all in the once-raging creek. I smashed our phones against a rock and buried them in the mud. Fee just looked at me.
“Oh my God, Rory. This can’t be happening,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this. Why would they say that about us? Why would that guy put that baby in your car?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
All of this time I’ve been worried that the baby was real. After watching the footage, though, I’m sure that it was a prop—animatronic. You could tell by the jerky motions, and the face. I have no doubt someone’s gonna find that mechanical newborn somewhere online for sale to the movie industry, or to eccentric people who want to pretend to be mothers. It’s gruesome, but less gruesome than the thought that they used an actual baby for that stunt. What the fuck crime category would that fall under? Whatever happened, the “miracle baby” has not been found.
Fee and especially Paula have been watching the windows and doors while I’ve been blogging. The cops? Security company? Still no sign of either. But every time we hear a siren on the Pacific Coast Highway, which is every ten minutes, we flinch, and wonder if we should head back to the closet.
Social media and news outlets are now dissecting the security cam vid. At least some people are suggesting that thing in my backseat was a prop, like the fake fetuses Jinny brought to the courthouse in Pasadena. And the methy teen? Obviously an actor. A pretty good one. Some of the dads that were at the ball are still claiming they saw us grab that baby that was not a baby from the father and run with her into the hills. Others say the methy teen dad just sort of disappeared. No one has come forward with any information about the baby. Interesting that there is no crowdfunding to find either the methy teen or that child.
Holy war. In a war, there must be villains. And the villains have to die. But we didn’t.
One of the images I just saw was of Jinny’s brother, Garth, who maybe isn’t her brother at all, emerging from the girls’ bathroom much earlier in the day. Long before the event. But Garth and the other Chippendale dudes can’t be questioned because—guess what—they’re nowhere to be found. So Garth planted the bomb? Fuck you, Garth.
Paula just asked me to stop writing so we can go check on Fee. I hadn’t even realized she’d left the room.
* * *
—
Fee wasn’t anywhere on the main floor. We found her sitting on the marble floor of the dark master bathroom.
“You okay?”
She wouldn’t look up. “No.”
“Fee?”
“I had really bad cramps…not stomach cramps, but cramp cramps. I was hoping there’d be blood. I was hoping I was having a miscarriage…”
“Oh, Fee…”
“I didn’t.”
“Okay.”
“What am I gonna do, Ror?”
I really don’t know.
There was a noise outside. I checked out the bathroom window but couldn’t see anyone on the beach. No vagrants near