Читать книгу Alice Isn’t Dead - Joseph Fink, Joseph Fink - Страница 14

Keisha’s first impression was frailty, and so she mistook the girl for maybe fourteen. But there was a hard and adult aspect about the girl’s face, and on reconsideration Keisha decided she was probably sixteen or even seventeen.

The girl considered back, giving Keisha a hard up and down, and then, apparently satisfied with what she saw, brushed by her and hopped up into the passenger seat.

“Excuse me?” said Keisha, unsure of what was happening. The girl was already tossing a backpack behind the seat and feeling around for controls to move it into a more comfortable position.

“What do you know?” the girl asked.

Keisha put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re a kid and you shouldn’t be on the side of the road like that, so I guess if we’re making a list we could start there.”

“You stopped and looked at one of those billboards. The new ones. You were looking at one of them and crying. Do you know who put them up?”

Keisha felt the weak and tired part of herself falter, but she wasn’t about to let the kid see it, so instead she hopped up into the truck, too, and pushed past the kid’s legs.

“Am I driving you somewhere?” Keisha said. The girl shut the truck door, which Keisha took as a yes and so she pulled back into traffic. Neither of them spoke. A few miles of silence. The girl smelled overpowering. Not like she needed a shower. Instead as though she had taken too many showers, over and over, until any natural human smell was replaced by perfumed soap. She smelled like a walk through a park condensed into a single, overpowering whiff. In small doses maybe the smell would have been pleasant, but Keisha found her stomach turning again and rolled open the window.

“Ok, maybe you don’t know anything,” the girl said. “Fine, I don’t know anything either.”

She kicked Keisha’s book pile out of the way to make room for her feet. Brat.

“What’s your name?”

“Sylvia. Sylvia Parker.”

Keisha glanced at her. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.”

“Common name, I guess.”

“Where are you going?” said Keisha.

“Swansea, South Carolina.”

“Bad luck. I’m on the way to Atlanta to exchange shipments and then I’m heading west. Where can I drop you off?”

Sylvia didn’t look at her, instead watched the blur of billboards. “Swansea,” she said again.

Keisha sighed. Fine. She was almost to Atlanta anyway. She’d get the girl to leave there, and until then maybe it was nice to have friendly, or at least nonhostile, company for the first time in months, even if the smell was a lot to handle. Sylvia’s face softened and she turned her body back to face Keisha.

“No offense, I have to know if I can trust you,” Sylvia said.

“I have no idea if you can,” Keisha said. Sylvia nodded as though that were the right answer.

“You’ve seen it too,” the girl said. “Visions out on the highway. The road takes weird turns for you, same as it does for me.”

“What have you seen?”

“What have you seen?” Sylvia said, and smiled.

That was a good question. A lot that was impossible and terrifying. Keisha couldn’t find the shape of the tongue needed to name them. She shrugged.

“Exactly,” said Sylvia. Another half hour of silence, and then, as they entered the traffic that marked Atlanta long before the skyline was visible, she spoke again.

“Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?”

“Yes,” said Keisha.

“Yeah. God, yeah, me too.”

When they got to the distribution center, Sylvia clicked off her belt and hid in the back. Keisha didn’t know if that was necessary, but also didn’t know how to explain to her supervisors why she had a runaway child in her truck and so decided that it was probably for the best. Pallets of cereal were unloaded from the truck and replaced with pallets of travel-sized deodorant. When packaged, the two looked much the same. Brown boxes covered in plastic wrap. Only the logos were different. As Keisha waited for them to finish loading, a hand came out of the curtained back with a book. Sylvia was holding up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume from that comic series, which Keisha had just finished reading.

“Is this any good?” she asked.

“Hell yeah, it is.”

“Ok,” she said, considering the cover for a moment before tossing it back by her feet.

Once the new cargo was in place and all the paperwork had been signed off, they were back on the highway and heading west. Sylvia had made no move to leave, and Keisha hadn’t found a way to ask her to. Sylvia hopped back up to the front.

“My mom and I, we used to travel a lot for work,” she said, as though it were part of a conversation they had been having for a while. “And on breaks from school I would come with her. Lot of time spent in cars. We started to see what other people were missing. Between the rest stops and the Taco Bells. There’s danger out there. There’s a crack somewhere, and a terrible force is seeping through.”

Keisha nodded slowly, not sure how to respond.

“Do you know what that terrible force is?” she asked.

“Mm,” Sylvia said. “I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina, and I can’t tell you why. Can you take me there?”

“South Carolina’s the complete opposite direction from where I’m going. I have to get to a supermarket in—”

“You’re the first person I’ve talked to, like really talked to, in, I don’t know, weeks? Months? I need you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with, you know.” Her hand spiraled out to indicate all the things neither of them was willing or able to specify.

Keisha snorted.

“Sylvia, I’m an adult. I’m an adult woman with a job. And that job says I have to deliver deodorant to a supermarket, not drive a teenager hundreds of miles to a town I’ve never heard of for reasons that kid won’t tell me. I’m a responsible goddamn adult.”