Page 19 of Sublimate
“How?” I asked him back. “I don’t have any money. He found the cash I was hiding—I always try to keep some back for an emergency, but he found it, and he took it.”
“What an asshat.”
Nolan looked furious, which put more color into his face. I wasn’t worried because this anger wasn’t directed at me andactually, it was nice that he was upset but in my favor. I was encouraged by that into saying more.
“He took my phone and broke it, so I had to get a new one that he doesn’t know about.” And just in case, I wasn’t putting anything incriminating on it, like searches for a new place to live or text conversations with anyone besides clients. Except, I had lost a lot of them when I’d disappeared for a while due to the other problems with Kolter.
“Why? Why did he do that your phone?”
“He saw that I had been looking into leaving and he thought that breaking it would stop me,” I answered. “He does things like that, like when he slashed up my old coat last fall. He had wanted to stop me from going out so often.”
Nolan just stared at me, like this was something totally foreign, like I was speaking French or something.
“Now I hide the new phone behind the panel of the oven door, because he’d never think to look there. I should have put my money there, too.” I sighed again. “I’m trying to get out of Michigan but it’s really hard. I’m barely making anything and then he takes most of it.”
“You could put your money in a bank,” he suggested. “He wouldn’t have access to that.”
I stared back and almost laughed. “Do you think he would let me have my own bank account? I could have tried to sneak it past him before, but he’s being much more careful now. He searches my car and the whole house when he comes over. Anyway, you need paperwork to do banking stuff. I don’t have it,” I said.
“I think it’s just your driver’s license,” Nolan countered and I nodded.
“I don’t have that. I never got one when I lived in Nevada, and I couldn’t get one here without the paperwork.”
“The paperwork,” he echoed. “Do you mean a birth certificate? A passport? Bills, to prove residency? What else would you need?”
“All of it,” I said. My voice had gotten quieter because I sounded so dumb. Why wouldn’t I have that stuff? A normal person would. “I’m not on a lease at Kolter’s house. I don’t get a paycheck because I work in cash. I probably had a Social Security card and a birth certificate but my mom never kept track of things like that. I’ve tried to get copies but you have to have one thing to get another.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one. I’m sure,” I said. “I definitely know my date of birth because my mom got a baby book from the hospital when I was born and she filled in the first page.” That book was long gone, but I remembered seeing it when I was a kid. “And she sometimes she gave me a cupcake or said happy birthday. How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven,” he responded briefly. “Have you been driving around with no license?”
“Yeah, for years,” I said. “I got my car from one of my mom’s boyfriends and as soon as I did, I was behind the wheel. That dent in the hood is because I was so bad at braking at first, but I got the hang of it.”
“This is wild,” he said. “I’ve never heard of anyone living like this.”
“I guess you wouldn’t. I read about your college and it said that there was a spa there and valet parking,” I answered, and he did the funny smile, the angry one.
“My grandparents were desperate for me to get a degree and that place accepted me, so I went to make them happy,” he said, but he wasn’t done with talking about my paperwork problem. “How did you end up in Michigan?”
“Well, it’s kind of funny. I had moved to Las Vegas and I had a boyfriend who said that he was going to kill me.”
“That’s not funny,” he immediately countered.
“No, the funny part was that I got in the car and started driving east-ish without knowing where I was going at all,” I explained. “I ended up on I-80 and then made a left just past Chicago, and I went north through Michigan until I stopped at the biggest lake I’d ever seen. And I stayed. He’s too lazy to follow me this far but I’ll still never register to vote. People can see your address that way.”
Nolan sat back and breathed in and out. “That’s an amazing story.”
“That was why last fall, it made sense to me that you were off in the woods by yourself,” I said. “I thought you might have been running away like I did. But then I saw your hair.”
“What?” He self-consciously put his hand on his head. “What about it?”
“You must have gotten it cut all the time. I went to cosmetology school very briefly, just until they figured out that I didn’t have all the paperwork, and I recognized that about you. I figured that you had enough money to run away properly. You didn’t have to walk off into the woods with no coat on, but there you were.”
“And you stopped and saved me,” he stated, and then he frowned at the french fries before looking back up. “School.” He pointed at me. “Somewhere, at some time, someone enrolled you. I don’t think you can do that without documentation.”
“You’re right! My mom must have had it back then,” I agreed. I had attended elementary school and middle school, too. I had attended at times.
