Page 7 of Dotted Lines (Runaway 5)

“I can’t believe it.” He shook his head again, then his gaze shifted to August. “Hi there.”

August clutched me tighter and murmured, “Hi.”

“Is it really you?”

“It’s me.”

“It’s really you.” A slow smile spread across his face, wider and wider.

It hadn’t changed. There, on the face of a man, was the smile from the boy I’d loved.

The boy I’d loved before his life had gone one direction and mine had gone the other.

And between us streaked those dotted lines.

Chapter Two

Clara

Twelve years earlier . . .

“Here.” Aria tossed me the dry-erase marker.

I caught it and rubbed my fist on the van’s wall, erasing yesterday’s number. Then, popping the cap, I wrote today’s number in blue. The sharp scent of the marker had become the smell of hope.

Sixty-one.

We had sixty-one days until our eighteenth birthday. Sixty-one days until we could leave the junkyard as legal adults and get on with our lives. After three years of living in this van without electricity or heat or air conditioning, our time here was coming to a close.

I’d thought as the days had ticked away, I’d be more excited to say goodbye to this shitty old van. I guess leaving any home was hard, even a dirty one. Even my uncle’s. Though any shithole was better than living under that bastard’s roof.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to Montana?” Aria asked from her bedroll where she was bent, tying her shoes.

The laces had been white at one point, just like the laces on mine. But after nearly three years, they were permanently a brownish red—the color of the dirt outside that we did our best to keep from tracking in.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “That’s where Londyn, Gemma and Katherine went.”

“Exactly my point.”

“Don’t you think we should, like, find our own place?”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “I guess so. Then where?”

“LA?”

“Hell to the no.” She stood up and plucked her favorite black hoodie from the backpack that was her closet. “I want out of California. Forever.”

“I just want out of this freaking town.” I took one long look at the number on the metal wall, then recapped the marker and tossed it into my wooden crate.

Sixty-one.

The excitement would come. Eventually. Right?

“Will you water my plants for me today?” Aria asked.

“Sure.” I had nothing else to do.

On the days when I wasn’t working, life in the junkyard was boring. The day would stretch without TV or a phone or . . . anything. So I’d water her plants. I’d sweep out the van with the handheld broom I’d gotten from the dollar store a couple years ago. Both chores would take an hour total. Then I’d have to find something else to do.