Page 15 of The Getaway List
“All good up there, Tarzan?” Tom calls, pulling his bike up to match pace with me.
I turn to him and say breathlessly, “I can’t believe we can just go wherever we want. Like this whole day! I don’t even know what to do with all this free will. It’s lawless. I fucking love it.”
That is, naturally, the precise moment the universe decides to humble me by way of the squirrel that darts into the bike path. I have enough of my wits about me not to barrel my bike into Tom’s, but apparently not enough to keep my balance, because the next thing I know I’m cutting across the pavement, jumping the curb, and toppling into the grass.
Tom’s brakes screech to a halt and I shut my eyes for a split second because I’m fine, save for my irritation that I can’t summon a hole in the ground to swallow me up and save me from what might be the most embarrassing public spectacle of my life.
“Riley? Shit, Riley, are you okay?”
“All good!” I say loudly, aware even from the ground that I have already amassed a small crowd of concerned onlookers. “Just mortally humiliated!”
Tom pulls the bike off me and hovers over me so close that I can’t get up without knocking his head into mine. His hands ghost over my head and my shoulders, his eyes moving so fast over me that I can practically feel the waves of his panic like they’re something solid in the air.
“You’re sure?” he says.
“Very sure. And also fuck that squirrel,” I say, hoping to make him laugh.
Tom’s frown only deepens. “Your knee is bleeding.”
“It’s okay,” I say, sitting up. “I’ve got another one.”
Tom’s already riffling through his backpack and I unsuccessfully stifle a laugh, because his Dora the Explorer–esque tendency to pack random things for adventures when we were kids has apparently evolved into full-blown mom-friend mode. He’s got Band-Aids and antiseptic pads out in five seconds flat.
“Dibs on having you on my team for the apocalypse,” I tell him.
Tom finally loosens up at that. “Like there’s anyone else I’d bother with at the end of the world.”
He uses one of the pads to clean out my knee and I manage not to hiss at the sting, but not quite hold in a wince. Tom gives me a sympathetic wince of his own and then says, “You were saying about free will?”
He asks the question lightly, but the look in his eyes is heavy. Expectant, even. Like he’s been waiting for me to talk about this since I showed up on his doorstep semi-unannounced.
“Oh. Yeah. You know how my mom’s been.”
I swallow hard at the reminder that she hasn’t texted me back. For some reason the skinned knee makes the pang of it feel deeper, like I’ve reverted into some little-kid-playground version of myself.
“Yeah. It seems like she was keeping you pretty busy,” says Tom. “Every time you tried to come up here something got in the way.”
I don’t want to mention the part where my mom was actively keeping us apart because then Tom will know she didn’t want me here in the first place, and that would mean opening a whole can of worms I don’t want to dissect right now.
“I guess I can’t blame her entirely. She got worse after the suspension,” I say instead.
Tom shakes his head. “It was ridiculous that you got suspended in the first place.”
Tom’s allowed to make this assessment because he’s one of the few people who knows the full details of said suspension. How at some point my mom had signed me up for so many things that it was abundantly clear that she was just trying to keep me out of trouble—or at least, her idea of it—so I devised a little scheme. Our after-school detentions took place in the hour between the end of school and the start of extracurriculars, an hour I usually spent in limbo just doing homework or reading books. One day Eddie was itching to get to rehearsal when he saw me sitting in the hallway with my aunt’s old Kindle and offered me twenty bucks to sit in for him in detention instead.
I believe my response was something along the lines of “hell fucking yes,” and why wouldn’t it be? It was the perfect crime. All I had to do was say “present” when our alarmingly disassociated gym teacher called roll, then spend the next hour sitting pretty, doing my homework, and scamming twenty bucks to boot.
It wasn’t long before word of my “services” got around, and I had more reasons to lean into it than not. I didn’t even bother charging if I knew it was a kid who couldn’t afford it. What did I have to lose? At least sitting in a detention chair was more comfortable than the hallway floor.
Of course, I did get found out in the end, and my whole detention empire came crumbling down. I was suspended for two days, which was put on my permanent record. I never had to give back any of the money, which my mom put into my bank account herself—“I’m very disappointed in you but you technically earned this from those idiots” were her approximate words—but that was the beginning and end of the perks. After that it was basically a life sentence of never having a free moment to myself again. I’d already proven I couldn’t be trusted with a single free hour each day; it only made sense to squash out as many free hours as could possibly be squashed.
Tom finishes carefully setting the bandage on my knee, and the tenderness of it makes me say more than I mean to: “My mom thinks it wrecked all my college prospects, but honestly I don’t even care if it did. I was kind of relieved not to get in anywhere.”
It’s the first time I’ve admitted it out loud. It’s not that I expect Tom to fully understand where I’m coming from, the way I know a lot of my friends would have—it’s just that of everyone in my life, Tom tries his best to understand. Not for his own sake, but for mine.
Sure enough, instead of trying to push me on it, he just says, “Yeah?”
I reach out and pinch his nose briefly between two of my fingers. “I’m not like you. I’ve got no idea what I want to do yet. And trying to keep up with all the stuff my mom pushed me into probably didn’t help.”
