I waited until lunchtime. Then I walked right across the sports fields, past groups of kids who were talking on their cell phones, not paying attention to anything around them. Still, I kept expecting someone to call out or come after me. I didn't turn back to look at the windows of the school where some teacher might be watching, wondering where I was going.
And once I was out of sight, turning the corner and down the street, Audra was standing there, right where she said she'd be. She just looked up and waited, and then we walked along without saying anything, past the QFC supermarket, past Beverly Cleary Elementary, down toward the highway and the MAX train station. I looked back, once. No one was following.
We crossed a parking lot, then the bridge above the train tracks. We could already hear the train coming, so we ran down the stairs to the platform.
On the train we swung our backpacks around and set them on the floor. Audra smiled at me, reached out and touched my shoulder. There was ink all over her right hand, the words too smeared to read. She is left-handed.
"This girl knows a lot," Audra said. "She taught herself with books instead of going to school, grew her own food. She was hiding all the time, invisible—no one could find her."
"So we're going to the woods?"
"No," Audra said. "They caught her, finally, moved her to another place, said she had to go to school."
"You said no one could catch her."
"It was an accident, getting caught. It wasn't her fault. Still, there's a lot of things she can teach us."
The ring where Audra's nose had been pierced was gone. Her ears were covered by her hair swinging down, but her hair wasn't snagging on her earrings like it usually did.
"Like what?" I said.
"What?" Audra said.
"What's she going to teach us? How to be like her?"
"No," Audra said. "How to be like ourselves."
"Okay," I said, not sure what she meant. I felt the wheels clacking through the floor, through the soles of my sneakers. The train went around a curve, the middle part bending like an accordion.
"I mean, what do you think's going to happen to me?" Audra said. "I'm supposed to go to college, then meet some guy and probably marry him and then every day we both wake up and drive to work where we sit in cubicles and there probably aren't even any windows or anything?"
Her voice was loud enough that people were looking over at us. I unzipped my pack and touched my too-small sweatshirt, but then I looked at Audra and the feeling passed.
"That's pretending to be a different person than who you are," she said.
"What are you talking about?" I said.
"There's nothing worse than living that way," she said. "Like your life jacket, or that sweatshirt—do you think you'd need that, really, if you stopped taking those pills they make you swallow?"
"I don't know what I'd do," I said.
"But sometimes it still happens—like you still grab me, even when you've taken the pills, right? So maybe you don't need the pills at all."
"If I didn't take them," I said, "Mom and Dad would know. Mom counts them every night."
The train was starting over the river, across the bridge. Down below, there were only a couple of small boats. It wasn't raining, but it looked like it could start.
"Whatever," Audra said. "Just think about how you feel—just feel how it all is. It doesn't make sense the way it is, or the way it's been. I mean, Mom and Dad? Do we want to end up like them, all boring and sad? In front of a computer or a radio? Attached to a cell phone?"
The train slid into Pioneer Square, the center of Portland. Groups of kids stood out there, close together, kicking hacky-sacks, smoking. One got on the train, his short hair yellow, a dirty Band-Aid on his cheek. His black pants had straps and buckles all over them, and he'd brought his bicycle, a really tiny one, onto the train. He stood there as the doors slid closed and then Audra got up and walked over to him. They were talking, but I couldn't hear them. She asked him a question; he shook his head. She pointed at his bike; he pointed up in the air, down at the floor. He looked at her and smiled.
Audra turned and came back and sat next to me just as the train went into the tunnel. I could see us both in the black window, how our faces looked kind of the same. Audra's was sharper, the shadows darker in her eyes.
"You know that guy?" I said.
"Not really," she said.
"What were you talking about?"
"He said he's going to race that little bike all the way down the hills from the zoo, back to Pioneer Square. Some friend of his is timing him on a watch."
"Why aren't they in school?" I said, but Audra didn't answer.
The train slid to a stop at the underground station beneath the zoo. It was lit like a cave, and the boy got off. We could see him standing at the elevator, spinning the bike on its front wheel, holding the handlebars, and then he stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind him.
Out of the tunnel, in the day again, the train climbed farther away from the city.
"Where are we going?" I said. "Beaverton?"
"Next stop we get off," Audra said. "We transfer over to a bus."
We had to wait near a parking lot, near Best Buy and Walmart and Home Depot, before the bus came. We picked up our packs and climbed on.
"It's not too much farther, I think," Audra said. "It's just outside of town."
Reaching over, I put my hand in her hand, her fingers dry and rough.
"Are you afraid?" she said.
"No."
"It's all right to be afraid," she said. "You should be, actually."
"Does the girl know we're coming?" I said. "Won't she be in school?"
"We'll see," she said. "We'll wait for her. You know, she's closer to your age than mine, but she knows so much."
"I know things," I said.
Audra laughed, then looked away, out the window. An old lady was pushing a shopping cart. The wind blew her hat off her head and it was hard for her to bend down and pick it up.
"So now this girl lives in a house?" I said.
People were getting on and off the bus, pulling the cord to ring the bell, pushing their way down the aisle. I was thinking of all that Audra had said, how she'd been, lately. I tried to guess what she was going to do—it had something to do with this girl, and living in a way that wasn't our parents' way. Our parents had told Audra that once she graduated from high school she could live at home only if she got a job or registered at Portland State, for college. I didn't think she was going to take either of those choices.
Out the window, strips of pale blue showed between the clouds, sliding quickly through the sky. I tried to pull my hand back from Audra, but she held tight and I stopped pulling.
The closer we got to the girl, the less eager I was to arrive, to meet her. Was I jealous? Audra had changed so much, had moved so much further away from me since she met her. The books in Audra's room, I realized, they belonged to the girl. It was like Audra wanted another sister, a girl who knew all about the wilderness and how to live inside it. Those were things I did not know.
