breasts, but Steven and Dillon were nowhere in sight. People were already evacuating when Mia darted into her office to grab her laptop, where she found an unwelcome surprise.
The smoke came from
'Shit,' she said again, stumbling blind backward. With a gasp, she remembered her new plant. Panicked, she whirled around. It looked a little wilted but okay, and she gratefully hugged the pot close as she sank to a chair.
Margot was the first to show up, with half the building behind her. 'The fire department is on its way- Ohmigod, Mia! Are you hurt?'
'No.' Mia swiped her sweating forehead with her forearm, which came away black with soot. Ugh.
Tess shoved her way in, yelling, 'Clear the way, let me through, damn it!' Then she skidded to a stop. 'Oh, my God-'
'I'm okay,' Mia said quickly.
'But honey, your eyebrow!'
Gone, Mia discovered. Just like her trash can.
But she still had the plant.
'You'd better work on that rejection policy of yours,' Tess said in the employee bathroom a few hours later, after Mia refused to let the paramedics fuss over her, after everyone had been allowed back in the building and been thoroughly lectured by the fire marshal.
He'd deemed the incident 'suspicious in nature,' and an investigation was under way.
Mia instantly thought of Ted, but he'd been gone from the building. Which meant she had someone else after her, a fact that Tess pointed out with great worry.
'Who now?' she fretted. 'Who else have you succeeded past, made look bad, or walked all over?'
She would have protested, but the truth was she hadn't made a lot of friends over the years. She stared in the mirror at her singed eyebrow. 'I guess could make a few social changes.'
Tess let out a sound that said, 'Ya think?'
Mia just sighed again. Maybe she could try to adopt a new kinder, gentler manner.
Oh, and a new eyebrow.
Chapter 4
Sixteen-year-old Hope Appleby was going somewhere if it killed her.
And given that she'd never felt more alone, hungry, or desperately afraid she'd never get out of her car and into a real bed again, it just might.
She chewed on a fingernail and hummed as she drove, trying to fool herself into a lull of comfort. But she'd been driving so long now, and for so many days, the scenery blurred into itself. Tennessee to Los Angeles… a lot farther than it had seemed. Still, she'd always dreamed of seeing the country, and finally, at sixteen years, two months, and three days old, she was seeing it plenty.
Just not quite in the style she'd imagined.
State after state passed as she headed west, Arkansas into Oklahoma into Texas into New Mexico. She'd been sleeping in her car to save money, trying to keep one eye open as she did because, as everyone knew, bad guys preyed on people sleeping alone in their cars.
Especially female people.
She had a flashlight, but she'd dropped it at a rest stop about five hundred miles back and couldn't get it to work after that. She'd been singing to the radio just to hear a real voice, but now she couldn't get any stations that weren't farm weather reports. Now she had nothing but herself for company, and she'd never been much good at small talk.
Not that she wanted company from strangers. No, thank you. They all looked at her funny, as though they'd never seen anyone dress goth before.
It was just black.
And a few chains.
No big deal. She'd started dressing like this only to look as different on the outside as she felt on the inside.
She'd lifted a steak knife from Denny's the day before, which was dull as a plastic butter knife but flashed fairly impressively in the light. It would be good for show, if need be, and hopefully that was all she'd need to do-even the thought of blood made her want to hurl.
She was eating as cheaply as she could and bathing in
But she was in the home stretch now, nearly to her aunt Apple's in Los Angeles, and she patted the dashboard of her beat-up 1989 Dodge Diplomat. “Not much farther,' she promised.
The car coughed.
Or so she hoped. The problem was Apple didn't know she was coming, and Momma didn't know she'd gone.
Which left Hope in her usual spot-a big mess.
Unable to read the map and drive at the same time, she pulled off the freeway, not daring to turn off the engine for fear it would never start again. Only she didn't have much gas left…
'Please find it,' she whispered to herself, running her finger over the foldout she'd pilfered from a 76 station somewhere in Arizona. She'd felt a stab of guilt until the grimy two-hundred-fifty-pound guy behind the counter looked her over, making her skin crawl like that time she'd gotten ants in her bed after her momma had left out a box of Twinkies.
When Hope had asked the guy for the key to the restroom, he smiled (missing a front tooth!) and offered to take her himself.
So she said no thanks, left with the map, and then cursed him the whole time she was peeing in the woods.
Now she unraveled the small scrap of paper that had Apple's address on it. The ink had gotten smeared. Was that 11732 High Waters Drive or 11735? Five, she decided and hoped she was right. She searched the map for High Waters, feeling a little frantic. 'Please find it, please…'
She wasn't too far now. Probably she could get there by nightfall, which was good because she was in the last of her clean clothes. She thought of how surprised and shocked her aunt Apple was going to be, and swallowed the niggling doubts that she should have called ahead.
