The Perfect Escape (The Perfect Escape #1) - Suzanne Park Page 0,28
no one else would notice if I wore them, but that didn’t matter. It’d been so long since I had even made any effort to get dressed up (other than zombie wear), that even wearing them was a baby step.
As I closed the jewelry box, a flash of shiny redness smack in the middle of the necklace mangle caught my eye. My garnet pendant, trapped inside the chaos. It would take hours to untangle that mess.
My home phone rang. “Incoming call! Rohit Mishra.”
“Hey, Raina, you here already?” I glanced at my watch. Exactly twenty minutes had passed.
“Yeah, I’m in your driveway. You have one of those scary haunted mansion gates now. Can you give me the key code so I can get you?”
“I’ll just come out. The security system is confusing. Sorry.” I grabbed my cross-body bag and navy North Face fleece. “Jeeves,” I said loudly, “tell Dad I’m going out with Raina.”
“Mishra, Raina. 132 Northeast Sixty-Sixth Street. Information logged and sent.”
“Don’t stay up too late, Jeeves,” I quipped as I headed down the hall.
“I’m scheduled for a firmware update at twelve a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Kate.” Right. Jeeves wasn’t programmed for sarcasm. “Your father has sent you the following message. ‘Okay! Sounds good!’”
So he’d woken up, then. This cheery message from Dad was a prepopulated canned reply, the first option in the drop-down menu. After two weeks on the road, he hadn’t even bothered to leave his bedroom to say hello or goodbye to me. Didn’t I deserve at least a custom reply if he wasn’t going to come out?
I grabbed my things and slammed the front door.
Chapter Nine
Nate
“Why does it smell like Fritos in here?” My eyes scanned Jaxon’s blue vinyl seats like a helicopter searchlight sweeping for a murder suspect. Where was that god-awful smell coming from? When I dropped off Kate a few hours ago, my car didn’t stink like this, so I knew it wasn’t me.
Jaxon cracked open his window. “I don’t smell it. And I don’t eat Fritos in my car.”
“Zach, do you smell it?” I asked.
Zach nodded.
“Oh, wait. I know. It’s my gym clothes.” With only his left hand on the steering wheel, Jaxon leaned down next to my feet and pulled up his mesh black gym bag from the floorboard. Jostling around the contents made the car reek more.
I rolled my window all the way down, even though it was pouring rain outside. “Oh God, I might vomit,” I spat out, dry heaving.
Jaxon tossed the bag in the back seat next to Zach, who immediately tossed it back to the front.
An unfriendly game of stank potato. Back and forth it went, till finally Jaxon yanked the steering wheel to the right and pulled over to the side of the road.
Jaxon got out and opened Zach’s door. “Hand it to me,” he commanded, holding out his palm.
Into the trunk it went. Bye-bye, car anti-freshener.
He got back in and slammed the door. “This is the last time I let you guys ride in my car, you ingrates,” he huffed, wiping the rain from his face with a towel in the center console. After pulling his seat belt across his chest, he got back on the road.
A few seconds of silence passed. “Why is this party at a roller-skating rink?” I asked.
Jaxon blew out his cheeks. “A friend of mine heard about this friend’s party from another guy. I don’t know all the details. He said something about the rent being too high so they’re shutting it down at the end of the year.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So why would some high school kid have a party there?” I got that the roller-skating-rink industry wasn’t exactly booming and the business was failing. But I didn’t get why Jaxon had dragged Zach and me to a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s party.
Confession: I’d never been to a roller-skating rink before and was slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing. Okay, terrified was more like it. Frightened of the smelly rental skates. Of falling on my face. Peeing in the bathroom while on wheels. I mean, what