“How…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence, I was so shocked. I’d never said his name to her. Not once.
Inside Ben’s trailer something crashed to the floor and I could hear Ben yelling, and I jumped, a small scream squeaking from my throat.
“Go inside,” Joan said, her voice calm and firm. Her eyes locked on mine. “And call Dylan. Tell him Max is here.”
“Max?”
“Go!” she said, and for emphasis pushed me back toward my trailer. I stepped inside the dark and relative silence of my trailer and felt as if the walls I recognized were being pulled down around me, revealing darker shadows I didn’t even realize existed.
I pressed call on the phone and lifted it with a shaking hand to my ear. It was three in the morning; there was no way—“Layla?” he said after the second ring. His sleep-roughened voice stroked over me and I could do nothing to stop my reaction. Not one thing. I shivered at the sound of his voice. Goose bumps rising on my arms. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. But Ben…there’s a guy here. Some guy on a motorcycle—”
“Oh fuck.”
“Joan…knew your name. She knew we were talking and she said I needed to tell you that Max is here—”
“Listen, Layla, listen carefully: I need you to stay in the trailer. Don’t go over there. Don’t…don’t even leave your trailer. Get down on the floor by your bed, the side farthest from Ben’s trailer.”
“Why? What the hell are you talking about?”
I could hear his breath shake as he exhaled and was suddenly a dozen times more scared. “Bullets go through trailers like cheese, Layla. I’m sending a car for you—”
“What?”
“I’m sending a car for you. He’ll be there in ten minutes. Tops. Don’t leave until you see a black sedan in front of your trailer.”
“I’m not going anywhere! I’m going to call the cops—”
“You call the cops and I guarantee someone is going to die.”
“This…you’re being ridiculous.”
“I wish I were. Stay inside. Stay safe. Someone is coming to get you.”
He disconnected and I stared down at the phone. In shock. Truly. If I called the cops someone would die? How did that happen?
The fight continued over in Ben’s trailer, but the intensity seemed to have dropped. Ben was yelling too, and now it was just a loud conversation.
In no time a black sedan purred to a stop in front of my window, in the shadows between my trailer and Joan’s. And I thought about that day in the laundry room when I’d scurried away while Tiffany and Phil fought. I’d been so scared—for myself.
Ben was my friend. He was. And I couldn’t leave him here to be bullied or scared or hurt.
I had to have changed that much. I had to have. I couldn’t have run this far to still be so damned scared.
I ran around my trailer to tell the driver he wasn’t needed. He was standing beside the car, a handsome guy older than me.
“You Layla?” he asked and popped open the back door of the sedan.
“Yeah.”
“Get in.”
“No. No, I’m not leaving.”
“Dylan told me to throw you in the backseat if I had to.” He stepped toward me and I stepped back, not about to be manhandled.
“Touch her and I’ll put a bullet in your hand,” Joan said from the shadows of her little deck. Her green robe caught the light and glimmered.
“Joan!” I yelled. “I’m not going to leave Ben—”
Suddenly from the front pocket of her robe she pulled out a badge. Some kind of government thing.
“What…what is that?” I asked. This whole thing was spinning so fast out of any kind of control.
“I’m undercover DEA,” she whispered. “Get in the car and get gone.”
“But—”
“Go!” she yelled. Truly yelled, as in no longer whisper-yelling, and I jerked into motion, stumbling toward the sedan. The driver yanked open the door, but before I got in I looked over at Joan.
“Come with me,” I said. “If it’s really dangerous—”
“If it’s really dangerous I do my job. Go.”
And then I was in the backseat of the car and it peeled out of the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground.
ANNIE
The car rolled through an endless night, parting the sea of shadowy kudzu and dotted by islands of neon rest stops. We got off the highway, onto increasingly smaller roads that switchbacked up hills and down again into gullies, until we were up in the mountains.
Panic and a thousand questions sat in that car with me. How could I have been so