Banished (13 page)

It didn’t take long to get boring. That surprised me. I figured I’d never be able to relax, but when Prairie murmured that it was time to move on, I was relieved.

Next was the airport. That was a little more interesting, though Springfield’s airport was tiny and didn’t look anything like the ones in the movies. Still, there were people milling around, carrying bags, dragging suitcases—it made me wish I was flying somewhere. I’d never really thought I’d have a chance to, but now it seemed possible. Now that I was with Prairie. It wasn’t just that she had money and experience, either; she made me feel like I could do things I’d never considered doing.

After the airport, Prairie took us into Springfield’s downtown. There were enough tall buildings to make it seem like a real city. We circled for a while, sometimes barely moving in traffic, and by the time Prairie headed back out of town it was late in the afternoon.

The final place Prairie took us was a motel, an unremarkable place in a beaten-down neighborhood near the interstate.

“Okay,” she said as we pulled into the lot. “I have got to get some rest before we go any further. I’m going to get us a room—stay here, okay?”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to admit to Prairie that I had never been in a motel before. Gypsum had two—a Super 8 and a motor court called the SkyView. I’d walked past them hundreds of times, wondering what it would be like to have a room to myself, everything clean and neat.

Chub was napping, so I left him in the car and walked Rascal nearby. I watched Prairie go through the glass doors and into the lobby, where I could see her talking to a man behind a counter. After a short while she returned.

“I got us a room near the back,” she said as she drove the car around the corner of the motel to a space that was partly hidden behind a Dumpster. “I didn’t tell them about Rascal. We’ll have to sneak him in.”

“You’re worried about the cops looking for this car, aren’t you. And … the guys Bryce hired.”

She nodded. “I smeared mud on the plates this morning before we left, so the number’s hard to make out.”

I helped her get the bags out of the trunk. Chub held my hand and yawned as we followed Prairie to the last door on the first floor. Then I went back and carried Rascal in with my sweatshirt draped over him, not that anyone noticed us. Our room had a view of the end of the parking lot and a Denny’s next door. Beyond, on the other side of the fence, was the back of another restaurant, with more Dumpsters and delivery doors and trash blowing along the pavement. A man sat on an upturned bucket, smoking a cigarette.

I knew what motel rooms looked like from TV. This one had a smell, not bad but both chemical and musty. I set my backpack down on one of the beds and watched Prairie unpack the Walmart bags.

“I hope you’re up for a new look,” she said, and I could tell she was trying to sound cheerful despite her exhaustion. She laid out a box of L’Oréal Couleur Experte on the night-stand between the beds. Next came a plastic comb and a pair of scissors. She upended the two largest bags and a pile of tangled clothing fell onto the bed. The last bag contained a handful of little plastic makeup cases, plus an enormous pair of sunglasses with white frames.

“Is that all like … a disguise?” I asked.

“Yes. We need to do what we can to make ourselves invisible. So we can get back to Chicago. And then find somewhere we can be safe.”

Safe from things I never knew existed before today. From ancient magic and curses and dark secrets, things out of a twisted fairy tale. And at the other end of a spectrum, from a man who wanted to use me to experiment on.

A
scientist
.

I thought about the science class I’d never be attending again. Realized, to my surprise, that there were a few things I’d miss about my old life after all.

Chub was wandering around the room, touching things, exploring. He found the phone and pushed at the buttons. Prairie sank down on one of the beds, beside her purchases, and massaged her temples with her fingertips.

“Seriously, Hailey, we need to sleep, just for a couple of hours or so.” She took her cell phone out of her purse and pressed the keys. “I’m setting an alarm. I’ll get us up in plenty of time to do what we need to. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, sighing. It wasn’t worth fighting her over. And I knew she was probably right anyway. Even though I felt wired now, I was bound to crash soon enough.

“Come here,” I said to Chub. “Nap time.”

“Nap time,” he repeated, but instead of getting into the other bed he climbed up with Prairie. She must have been mostly asleep already, because she just made a sighing sound and looped an arm around Chub, who snuggled in close. Before even a minute passed I could tell by his breathing he was asleep.

I tried not to be jealous, to be glad that Chub was as comfortable around Prairie as I was. And mostly, I
was
glad. Except that now I was alone. And I didn’t want to be. The fears, the anxiety, were simmering inside me, and I was afraid that if I was left alone with my thoughts they’d bubble up and take over.

I looked at Rascal, who was sitting motionless next to the door. “C’mere, boy,” I said, and he got up and trotted over to me.

“Up,” I said, and he jumped up onto the bed.

I wrapped my arm around him and pulled him a little bit closer. He didn’t smell very good, a combination of wet dog and something else, something unfamiliar. But he was still better than nothing.

I was worried that he wasn’t back to normal yet, but now wasn’t the time to obsess over it. I switched off the lamp. With the heavy drapes pulled shut, the room was as dark as if it was midnight. There was a hum coming from the ceiling, a fan circulating the strange-smelling air. Prairie’s cell phone glowed on the bedside table.

I was sure I’d never get to sleep with everything I had to think about, but the next sound I heard was Prairie’s alarm.

C
HAPTER
15

R
ASCAL WAS CURLED UP
against me, oblivious to the cell phone’s beeping. My mouth felt dry as a desert as I slid out from under the covers. In the other bed, Prairie sat up and turned off her phone. She rubbed her eyes and yawned.

I went to the bathroom, drank two glasses of water and splashed cold water on my face. When I came out, Prairie had gotten up and lined up her purchases on her bed.

“Well, hello, sunshine,” she said cheerfully.

“What are you so happy about?”

“Nothing much … other than I think we managed to throw off Rattler. I mean, if he hasn’t showed up yet, I guess we’re doing okay.”

“You think that worked? All that driving around?”

“He’s not here, is he? So it seems to me he must have gotten sidetracked by one of our visits. For all we know he’s on a bus to Texas.” She gathered her supplies. “I know a shower would probably feel great right now, but how about if I color your hair first? You’ll need to rinse out the color after it sets, so you might as well wait to get in the tub.”

The sleep had done Prairie good; in the light of the lamps she’d switched on, I could see that the dark shadows had nearly disappeared from under her eyes.

I ran a hand through my hair. It was almost perfectly straight, rich brown with natural highlights. I knew people paid a lot of money for color like that.

“Uh, all right,” I finally said. My hair was the one thing about me that I always knew was special. But if it meant our safety, I’d get over it. “What color?”

“I thought we’d try to match Chub’s. Make it look like you’re brother and sister.”

I glanced at Chub, who was rolling over and sighing in a tangle of covers. His hair was so pale, it was almost white, with a wash of gold. I couldn’t imagine that color on me.

“I need to cut it too,” Prairie said, apologetically. “I wouldn’t ask, if it wasn’t so important.”

While she mixed up the dye, filling the room with an acidy smell, I stripped down to the tank top I was wearing under my flannel shirt.

“Let me cut some first,” Prairie said, after she spread a sheet from her bed on the floor in the center of the room, then put the desk chair on top of it. “Just get some of the length off. Then I’ll shape it when the color’s done, okay?”

I sat in the chair and she ran her hands through my hair. She gathered it into a ponytail and twisted it. I shut my eyes and tried to relax.

The first cut left my head feeling strangely light. I didn’t want to think about my hair falling to the floor, so I asked Prairie something I’d been wondering.

“How could you not know that Bryce wasn’t who you thought? I mean, you were … you know.”
Sleeping with him
, I thought but didn’t say.

Prairie paused. I could feel the heat from her skin, her hands inches from my face.

“I think deep down I knew something was wrong. But it’s amazing what you can convince yourself of when you’re in denial. Here, I’m going to start with the color, okay?”

She began to dab it onto my hair, starting at the roots and working out to the ends. It smelled terrible and stung my scalp.

“What did you like about him?” I asked. “I mean, at the beginning.”

A little bit of the dye dribbled toward my eyebrow. “Well, for one thing, I thought he was
hot.
”

I brushed the dye away. “In what way?”

“Kind of a, I don’t know, clean-cut look. He dresses well—really well. He likes expensive clothes. And he’s always worked out a lot. He’s a little compulsive about it, I guess you could say. He’s average height, but he’s got a naturally athletic build. Broad shoulders, strong arms …”

“Light hair or dark?”

“Brown … kind of a medium brown, I guess. And brown eyes.”

He didn’t sound bad, but he also didn’t sound all that special. “What else?”

“Well, he’s incredibly smart. I think that was the biggest thing, to tell you the truth. He has a doctorate, or at least he
says
he does, though now I don’t know how much of what he told me was true and how much was lies.”

I thought about that. The smartest guy at Gypsum High was Mac Blair, but it would be a pretty huge stretch to call him hot. He wasn’t a geek, exactly—it was just that his mind was always on something else, usually some random fact he’d picked up online. “How did that make you like him?”

Prairie didn’t answer for a moment. Her hands on my hair were confident and efficient, distributing the dye evenly over my head.

“Part of it was, I guess, that I hadn’t known anyone like him before. Most of the guys I’d known—well, you know how it is in high school. It’s not like anyone was even all that curious about the world outside Gypsum. And I went to this little junior college and night school, anything I could do to get enough credits to graduate, and it wasn’t like I was around geniuses there, either. Even when I was working in the labs, a lot of the guys I met, they weren’t really all that happy to be there, they weren’t committed to the work. Not like Bryce.

“But it was also … I wanted so badly to do something with my gift. I wanted to
matter
. And Bryce seemed like he could make that happen. I guess it was a little bit of a power thing, you know?”

“You thought that if you were with Bryce, he could open doors for you? Get you a better job, more money, stuff like that?”

“No, not exactly. More like, with his background and resources, he made me think the things I dreamed about were actually possible. That they could happen in my lifetime. I mean, now I know I was only seeing what I wanted to see and believing what I wanted to believe. But it was just so easy to put my faith in Bryce, this incredibly successful guy, and I was blinded by the fact that he wanted
me
.”

“But what about other people? The people you worked with? Didn’t any of them get suspicious about him? If they were closer to the data, didn’t they wonder what he was researching?”

“Well, yes. About six months ago, Bryce started replacing a lot of the employees who’d been there a long time. He brought in people from all over the country, even a couple from other parts of the world. They were his inner circle, and when they weren’t meeting with Bryce, they kept to themselves. I think they knew exactly what was going on … I think they’re in on it. He can’t do this on his own, not without getting caught.”

“What about the people he fired? Weren’t they angry? Or suspicious about what he was doing?”

“Bryce gave them a lot of money, made them sign all kinds of nondisclosure documents. And most people knew about my relationship with Bryce and kept their distance, so I didn’t stay in touch with the ones who left. I did have this one friend.…” She smiled at the memory. “He was hilarious. His name was Paul, and he was our tech guy, just this brilliant, geeky guy who could make you laugh. He only left a few weeks ago. I think Bryce had trouble finding someone who could do what Paul could; he was a genius at security and computers and all that.”

“Weren’t you mad when Bryce fired him?”

Prairie’s smile faltered. “Yes … I guess I was. I mean, when I think about it now, I am, since he was the only person besides Bryce who’d have lunch with me or get coffee or whatever. And I don’t think he really trusted Bryce. He made me a backup of some of the security systems without telling Bryce, said it was in case anything happened to him.”

“Maybe he had a crush on you.”

Prairie laughed. “Maybe. He was always blushing when we talked. His only hobbies were paintball and computer games, but you know, he probably would have been a better boyfriend than Bryce. Guess I need to work on that, my taste in men.”

As she finished dabbing the dye around the crown of my head, I wondered if I’d ever have a boyfriend, and if so, whether I’d pick a good one. Maybe, being Banished, we didn’t have the common sense other people did. We were attracted to people like us, and as far as I could tell, most of the men weren’t great. Although Bryce wasn’t Banished … and Prairie had still made a mistake.

“Did you ever think about dating Paul?”

“He never asked. I don’t know … if he had, maybe things would have been different. I liked him a lot. He was shorter than me, not that it matters, and he had a ponytail, so if you like that … But it’s a good thing we were friends, because he made me keep a spare prox card when they rekeyed the lab.”

The familiar anxiety stirred in my gut. “Why is that a good thing?

Prairie didn’t say anything for a minute as she wound the dye-coated strands of hair on top of my head. “It will let me get back into the lab. This won’t be over until I destroy the data. I can’t let Bryce move forward with … what he’s doing.”

“How are you going to do that?” I tried to keep the hysteria out of my voice, but all I could picture was the killers in our kitchen. “You think he’ll let you just walk in there and—”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Prairie said gently. “We need to focus on the moment, on—”

“Is that why we’re going to Chicago? Can’t we go somewhere else? Somewhere he can’t find us?”

“We will. I promise. As soon as we do this last thing, we’ll go far away and start over. But Hailey, neither one of us is going to be safe as long as Bryce is still active.”

“But couldn’t we wait a while? Let things die down? You could get your friend Paul to help you, and when it was safe, you guys could, I don’t know, sneak back in or something.”

“I’m afraid it would be even more dangerous to wait,” Prairie said. “I don’t know how far Bryce has gotten. They were close to some key breakthroughs. But Hailey, you really need to try not to worry about that right now. Just relax while the color sets.”

While Prairie cleaned up, I watched
SpongeBob
with Chub until it was time for me to rinse. On the sheet she had spread out, my hair lay in glossy piles, but I tried not to think about it.

I undressed in the bathroom and stepped into the shower, making the water as hot as I could stand it. I spent a long time lathering and even longer rinsing, standing under the shower with my head tipped back.

When I was finally done in the shower, I felt both worse and better. Worse because now I understood what was driving Bryce, and we were headed right back into it. Better because I was finally starting to believe that Prairie wouldn’t abandon me. I dried off and wrapped the bath towel around my body. Then I took a washcloth and wiped away the steam on the mirror.

I was shocked. My hair was a pale, pale shade of gold. Nearly all the color was gone—and it hung in a heavy, straight line below my ears.

I felt my eyes fill with tears, and swallowed hard. It was ridiculous—my appearance was the least of my problems. But I still looked away from the mirror as I got dressed.

When I came out of the bathroom, Prairie pointed to the Walmart bags. “There’s a new shirt in there. Go ahead and keep your shoes—I didn’t know your size, and people won’t be looking at those. Or your jeans. So really, it’s just the top.”

I unfolded the shirt. It was black with gray sleeves, and printed on the front was a silver skull with a leering grin, flames shooting out of its sides.

“I know, you hate it,” Prairie said. “Sorry. I thought we’d do kind of a rocker look for you.”

“It’s … not so bad,” I lied.

“I have these.…” She rooted around in the bag and came up with a pair of earrings that looked like pieces of bicycle chain. She also had a black leather cuff with snaps and rivets, and a silver ring with a skull on it. “If it’s any comfort, I picked this because I thought it was the opposite of your look. I mean, you’re so pretty, like your mom.…”

Her voice faltered and I turned away, partly to let her have her privacy and partly because I was kind of shy about changing in front of her. I found underwear and socks in another bag and slipped them on, then pulled my jeans back on and put on the new top. It smelled like the Walmart, clean and chemical-y, and it was tight enough that I had to tug on the sleeves to get them to sit right on my arms. I yanked off the tags and dropped them in the wastebasket.

“Very nice,” Prairie said, with a smile that looked genuine.

“Hay-ee?” Chub, who had been tucking his giraffe into a pillowcase, seemed to have just noticed me. “Hair … What happen?”

I touched my newly short hair. “It’s all right, Chub, it’s just a different color. It’s nice.”

Chub liked his new clothes, the nubby sweatshirt and corduroy pants. As he went back to playing with his giraffe, Prairie got to work on me.

There was a lot of snipping, but it went fast, bits of hair flying to the floor as Prairie worked. Finally she stepped back and checked out the results. She snipped a little more and then got the motel hair dryer out of the bathroom.

“I wish I had a little product,” she said. She ran the dryer for a few minutes, pushing my hair this way and that.

“Oh …,” she said when she was done. “I really like it, Hailey—I think it suits you. I mean, you can always grow it back but, well, I hope you like it too.”

I went in the bathroom and stared in the mirror. Dry, my hair was a shiny platinum blond. It was cut so the front curved just a little past my chin, and then it got shorter in the back, with choppy layers I could feel with my fingers. A few chunky bangs were smoothed across my forehead.

It was amazing. It was better than anything you could get in Gypsum—I knew that instantly. For a second I wished I could go back to school just long enough for everyone to see. I looked like—I caught the thought and held it for a second—like someone in a band, like someone everyone else wanted to be.

“Happy with your new look?” Prairie asked, smiling, when I came out of the bathroom.

Before I could answer her, Chub jumped up from the floor where he’d been playing with his giraffe. “Bad mans,” he mumbled, and pointed at the door. Then he pressed his face into my jeans and hugged my legs hard.

Prairie crouched down next to him. “Where are the bad men, Chub?” she whispered. “Are they close by?”

Chub nodded, his lower lip stuck out in a pout. “Outside.”

She gave him a little hug and stood up, grabbing her purse off the bed and pulling out a little black canister.