over and shoves open the passenger door.
Is that what Odette did? Get in?
44
My decision, my choice, is pulsing.
Wyatt is pressing 85 miles an hour, trying to outrun the clouds. There are urgent tornado warnings on every radio station, which Wyatt flips through, then turns off. Two cops, lights flashing, zip around us.
On the highway, almost every car has its headlights on, a bad sign. We’re flying by fields with huddled cow orgies, another bad sign, a warning as clear as the crazy crows.
We’re on the highway because Wyatt announced that he wanted to show me the spot in the field where he found me. And I wanted to see it.
Full circle. That’s what he said this little trip down the highway was about. Now maybe we’re going to die for it. That’s a full circle.
A bale of hay gives in to the wind, barreling across the road in front of us. Wyatt screeches the car into a ditch and my body slams forward, stopping just short of the dash. I can feel my heart beating in my eye.
“We’re not going to make it,” he says grimly, pulling back on the highway as the first rock of hail hits the windshield. “But I know a place.”
I’m staring into a much bigger hole than the end of a shotgun. This is what happens to girls like me. Odette. Trumanell.
When girls disappear, their mothers are always on TV afterward, blaming themselves. They are trying to imagine the single moment that, if they were there to slap it away, would have turned things around. And this is it. This is the kitten I shouldn’t pat, the spiked drink I shouldn’t sip, the hand I shouldn’t take.
“Are you coming?” Wyatt, ahead of me, is reaching up, already on the steps disappearing down into the storm cellar. The rain is falling in sheets, streaking down his face, plastering his hair so I can’t see his eyes. There’s blood on the hand he is offering up, a scrape from tugging up a door that looked like it had been rusting shut for fifty years.
His T-shirt is clinging to every muscle and reminding me one more time what I’m up against if Odette was wrong about him.
I desperately memorize the blurry wet scene above the earth—a red farmhouse and a bunch of little outbuildings that Wyatt says belong to an old friend who is out of town. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think Wyatt has old friends.
I tell myself what I always tell myself. Pick the best of your bad choices. Survive this moment.
And this is a solid storm cellar, set away from the house, dug into the earth.
I had always dreamed of my aunt owning one.
I pet the kitten.
I chug the drink.
I take Wyatt’s hand.
Above me, I can hear Wyatt fighting the wind, trying to slam the door to the cellar. He got me settled first—even scanning the flashlight from his iPhone around the cinder-block walls, checking for anything crawling. I am grateful for this. I’ve seen people in Oklahoma with spider scars, untreated, that look like shark bites.
Before he leapt back up the stairs, he’d grabbed a Tupperware box from the corner that held matches and candle supplies. He watched my hands shake while I lit two candles and placed them in two brass holders hooked to the walls.
I take out one of the candles and run the flame along the slimy walls and dirt floor. No suspicious stains. No food. No water. Just two candles, two candle holders, a small box of kitchen matches, a pretty scrappy first-aid kit, a whistle, a Bible, and my backpack.
While Wyatt yelled at me, I had spent extra precious seconds to throw it on my back.
A final slam echoes down the stairs.
I don’t know which side of the door Wyatt is on.
I hold my breath until his phone is casting a little stream of light down the stairs. I hear the clump of his boots. I realize I want him on this side of the door. I count every clump so I know the exact number of stairs in case that becomes important.
As soon as he emerges at the bottom, he switches off his phone, so all that’s left is candlelight. Our shadows are bouncing off the walls like extra people. This is both comforting and scary at the same time. I wish I had my phone. I know exactly where it is—in the cup holder of his truck, forgotten.
“Saving the battery,” he explains about his