Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
“Girl, have you joined a cult or something?”
“What?” I laugh.
“What are you wearing?”
I don’t have a good explanation for this because I haven’t been in contact with anyone human in many weeks, so I didn’t even bother coming up with a lie. “Um.” I decide to just go for the truth. “Leftover Halloween costume?”
This makes Jacqueline giggle. “You’re so cute. Well, I love the new look.” And that’s when Pell comes up behind me. Jacqueline gives him the same scrutiny, but this time, her eyebrows shoot up to the top of her head.
When Pell leaves the sanctuary, he looks like some kind of rogue movie star currently filming a bad-boy action movie. Like Brad Pitt in Ocean’s Eleven. He’s wearing jeans, boots, an army-green bomber jacket, and a pair of mirrored shades. Add all this to his already tall, muscular body, blond beard, and too-long hair and he kinda morphs into Jax from Sons of Anarchy.
How is this fair? When I leave the sanctuary, I look like a hot slutty mess who just fell out of a frat house. When Pell leaves, he looks like he’s about to save the world and look good doing it.
“Well, who do we have here?” Jacqueline is enamored. As she should be, because Pell is enamoring.
Pell is not enamored back. He frowns, crosses his arms, and looks at me for an explanation.
“Pell… remember I told you about my friend in Toledo?”
He grunts.
“Well.” I wave my hand at Jacqueline to present her. “Here she is!”
He grunts again.
Jacqueline tsks her tongue and looks at me. “The handsome ones are always moody, aren’t they?”
I don’t answer that. Pell is totally that stereotype, but we have pressing matters at the moment. And this is when the situation finally hits me. She’s here, in my part of rural PA, on the side of the road, and a teenage boy is changing a tire on a pale-blue school bus. “What are you doing here? And what the hell is happening with this bus?”
The boy stands up. He’s tall, lean, and frowny. “It’s fixed.” His voice is kinda deep for a kid. He opens some compartment in the side of the bus and throws his tire iron in there with a clang.
I look back at Jacqueline.
Jacqueline looks at me.
There is a moment here. A moment when we have a silent conversation with our eyes, just like we used to back when we were kids. Jacqueline is saying, Just give me a moment to explain. And I’m saying, What the hell have you done now?
Because this is how Jacqueline Larue changes her life on a dime. She does something crazy and unexpected. “This,” she used to tell me, “is how one changes their fate in the world. You commit to opposite day and become someone else. And then, after a few weeks of this total-immersion therapy, you are someone else.”
Our internal convo suddenly plays out in real life.
“Just give me a moment to explain.”
“What have you done now?”
“I had to, Pie. They were gonna send them to awful places.”
“Them?” My eyes dart up to the windows of the bus and there I find several little faces peering out at me behind floral-patterned curtains.
“I couldn’t let them do that. I mean, that’s why I went to school in the first place, right? If one is going to be a social worker, then one must commit to being a… a… a force, if you will. A force for good in this evil world where children are just discarded like yesterday’s trash. I got a master’s and everything, Pie. I’m committed, ya know. Committed.” She stomps a combat boot.
I get a really bad feeling in my stomach. “When you said you had kids…”
“They are my kids. Aren’t you, Cecil?” She smiles and pulls the teenage boy close. He wriggles a little, but when Jacqueline Larue gets committed to you, no amount of wriggling will get you out of an embrace. He gives in, then smiles.
OK. I get this, obviously. We both grew up in foster care, so I understand. But… “What—” I wave my finger at this bus. “What is happening with the bus, Jacqueline?”
“Have you ever heard of van life?”
“Of course. You sell everything you own, buy a van, and live in it.”
“Well.” She pauses. This pause means she’s about to stretch the truth. “We’re doin’ bus life.”
I grab her by the leather jacket, pull her away from the kid, and Pell, and the bus, and drag her across the street. “Jacqueline. Who do these kids belong to?”
“Someone needs to explain what’s going on here.” Pell’s voice is loud and rumbly. Not the kind of rumbly that shakes down tombs inside the sanctuary, but it still has a presence on the outside too. It makes Jacqueline jump a little, which isn’t easy to do.
“Never mind him. What are you doing? Did you take these kids out of foster care and leave the fucking state?”