The truck bounced up into the brush with a terrible grinding sound, plowing through pitch-black, branches scraping the paint. The headlights washed over a rocky dirt road and the tires caught in the gravel, pulling them out of the hold of the trees.
"Cut the lights!" Tourmaline yelled just as Virginia killed them.
"Watch behind us!" Virginia leaned out the window, fighting the ruts in the road. "I can't see shit."
Tourmaline twisted. The truck bed kicked. But the only thing behind them was the night. "I think we're good."
The road stayed dim, but Virginia kept the truck moving.
A text from Allen lit on the phone Tourmaline had dumped in the center console when Virginia picked her up. Want to come over?
She picked up the phone. The truck bumped and dipped. Her knuckles brushed the wilted cotton of her dress and she closed her eyes, fingers frozen against the weight of her past. Allen was for the girl she could not be right now. Tourmaline dropped the phone and gathered her hair off her shoulders with sticky palms, scanning the woods around them.
"You sure that detective was following them?" Virginia asked, still half outside the window. "I mean. Since they're just law-abiding citizens and all."
Tourmaline ignored the sarcasm and snapped a rubber band over her ponytail. "Pull off up here. We'll cut through the woods to my dad."
Virginia parked, and Tourmaline led them into the woods, clinging tight to a deer path through the tangle of creeper vines and blackberry bushes.
"What else do you do for fun?" Virginia grumbled in a whisper as Tourmaline let another blackberry branch smack behind her.
"Hilarious," Tourmaline hissed.
"Still confused as to why you're wearing a dress."
"You picked me up from a date."
"A date?" Virginia snorted. "With who?"
"Allen Baker."
"A.B.? You had a date with A.B.?"
Tourmaline glared behind her. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Pretend like you're shocked. I'm not one of your little plebeians."
Virginia was silent. Sticks snapped. Then, "He does have a thing for blondes."
"It's not a thing. We're friends. He goes to my church."
Virginia snorted again.
"Sometimes," Tourmaline amended.
"Hey, while we're on the subject: Tim Flemming? True or ..."
Tourmaline groaned. Her yearlong relationship with Tim Flemming in eighth grade had ended the way all eighth-grade romances end—with a text. Except that Tim had alluded to a long conversation with her dad, and the rumor spread that Tim had literally pissed himself when her father threatened to end his life. The actual breakup and the subsequent rumor had left her gun-shy about the whole endeavor of dating, especially when it involved her dad. "Of course it's not true."
Virginia laughed. "Oh, poor Tim."
Tourmaline crouched and half crawled, half waddled as the path dipped under a thicket of mountain laurels. Fuck Tim Flemming. Tim wasn't the one with a dad suddenly faced with the panic of a teenage daughter and the concept of payback. "Well, thanks for your care. I've managed."
Behind her Virginia whisper-yelled, "You aren't helping your credibility, you know. You're full of shit. About your dad. About your life. You've worked really hard to make people think otherwise, but—" Virginia grunted; more sticks broke behind Tourmaline. "But it's just a hustle. Like in the bar back there, where you play all-innocent girl in a pretty dress in order to get by. I don't know what you are, Harris. But I know you're not innocent."
Tourmaline stopped and craned her neck against the thicket to stare at the dark mass that was Virginia. "Go piss up a rope," she whispered, furious that Virginia had the nerve to say it and suddenly terrified it might be true. "I know what the Wardens are. What I am. I don't need to prove it to you. Why can't you believe anything but lies?"
Virginia didn't move. Or answer.
Tourmaline bit her cheeks tight and turned back to crawling. They were almost back to the road. She'd have to be careful they didn't get turned around in the dark and come out right above Alvarez's old hiding spot.
Standing again on the path, she wiped the sweat and dirt off her forehead as Virginia crawled out. Too late, she remembered she needed Virginia's help to get things to her mom until she could go back and do it herself. That it had been the whole point of Virginia being there in the first place. "Sorry." For the truth.
"Nothing to apologize for," Virginia said, briskly brushing off her jeans. But her voice was tight.
The wind rushed high in the treetops—a dull roar hardly touching them under the deep tangle of vines and canopy as the hillside sloped steeper. After a few more minutes, the lights and the sounds of the clubhouse appeared and the hill fell out from underneath their feet.
Tourmaline paused to catch her breath, leaning against a thick oak.
The clubhouse stood in a clearing below, tucked along a rushing, spring-fed mountain brook. Under white pines stood hemlocks, and black cherry trees that bloomed thick and white in the spring. It was an old building, sided with rough-cut planks. A soft stream of bass and guitar slipped through the cracks and carried on the wind.
Tourmaline hadn't seen it like this in so long; she'd forgotten what it used to feel like. Safe. As if there would always be a place she belonged. When she was in middle school and things were falling apart with her mother, she imagined running away to live in its attic, where she had often stretched out on a rag rug and played Candy Land by herself while the rain pattered on the roof. Looking back, she realized she'd only been there when her mother couldn't care for her—first because of the pain, and then because of the drugs—and she was forced underfoot at her dad's, like a puppy in the way. But she hadn't known she was an intruder then. It'd felt like home.
She closed her eyes and listened to the water. To the whisper of the wind. To the music that was always in the background of her life. It was all coming back now. Her throat ached with longing for that home and that mother—even a mother who'd abandoned Tourmaline in places a girl wasn't supposed to be.
A stick snapped as Virginia stepped beside her.
Tourmaline put a hand out. "Careful, there's an edge. It's steep."
Virginia nodded, a mixture of moonlight and the security lights outside the clubhouse casting shadows on her face. "They party here?"
Tourmaline nodded back. The lights swam, liquid and soft. The way you wanted romance to be—a little dark, a little mysterious, enticing you into some kind of lush, hidden world with a bottom rhythm of music and a sky as high as the stars. Unbidden, the conscript appeared in her thoughts. She shook her head to rid herself of the enchantment and lifted her chin. "They're my dad's friends. Do you want to hang out with your dad's friends?"
"My old man is dead."
Tourmaline bit her lips. Shit. She'd forgotten. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." The night and shadows and moonlight mixed in Virginia's hair, seeming to pour out of her body as if she were emitting the night itself.
"Let's find a way down and get my dad." Tourmaline hitched her skirt higher on her thighs and started picking her way along the edge of the ridge. Hayes's warning echoed in her head again. Like an alarm, it kept going off. You have to start paying attention to what's around you. You can't claim you didn't know and expect to get by.
She knew. She was paying attention. Wayne was looking for her. Alvarez was back. But she found herself scanning the hillside with the wind biting the back of her neck in warning. You have to start paying attention.
What wasn't she seeing?
They clung to the ridge, high above the washed-out cut, and deep in what Tourmaline was certain would prove to be poison ivy. When a wash with a slope gentle enough to slide down opened up, she paused.
Virginia stopped at her side, breathing heavily. "What's your dad going to do about a state detective, anyway? Politely ask him to leave?"
"He'll ..." But Tourmaline couldn't finish. What would he do?
"Mm-hm." Virginia seemed smug.
"It's not that," Tourmaline bit out in a whisper. "Everyone wants to fight the bikers. Even the cops. So it doesn't matter what he does, the story will always be he started a fight. He needs to know."
"Right this second?"
"I mean ..."
"Why not wait until the morning, and then he has time to plan instead of just react?"
Tourmaline clenched her jaw and turned from the wash. They'd lost Wayne. Alvarez didn't know she'd seen him. There was no telling what kind of state her dad was in right that second. Virginia had a point. "Ugh, fine. I'll deal with it."
"I didn't mean that," Virginia said.
"Go back to the truck. I'll figure a way out." Tourmaline pushed onward, scanning the edges for a car. It was a little spot Alvarez liked to hide in—a hollowed-out place in the hill where he could scan license plates and note bikes or run radar. If that car was there again, it was Alvarez. If the spot sat empty, it might have just been the same model, but not his car.
"I think this is also an ill-conceived idea," Virginia muttered, trampling in the brush behind her.
Tourmaline nearly smiled. Who would have thought the ever notorious beauty queen Virginia Campbell was the kind to stick it out? The idea made a tiny knot in her chest, like she had been feeling lonely and hadn't noticed until someone showed up.
A little farther ahead, the ridge pulled away, and there, overlooking the hollowed-out spot where the base of the ridge met the road, a dark car sat in the shadows.
Tourmaline crouched and chewed her lip, stomach sinking. This didn't need to be pretty. Pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her dress, she turned on the screen. "Find some big rocks."
Virginia dug in her back pocket for her phone, matching Tourmaline's whisper. "We're low-tech tonight, I see."
Tourmaline flipped her off and picked through the dark by the light of their phones, amassing a pile of heavy sticks and rocks at the edge of the ridge. "Head back to the truck," she whispered, tucking the phone away. "It should be straight up that way."
"You have twenty minutes to get rid of him; then I'm picking you up down here," Virginia said. Her footsteps faded quickly, sucked into the summer-growth forest.
Tourmaline crept close to the edge of the ridge. The car sat neatly parked between two tall, shady spruces. Picking up a heavy rock, she tightened her jaw, eyed a spot on the roof, and threw.
The rock landed just where she'd hoped: dead center in the roof, with a terrific crunch.
Rushing, she picked up a stick and heaved it over. A second rock. Pelting the car with debris. Her last rock bounced off the trunk and she dashed behind a tree, watching. Waiting.
A floodlight hit the trees just to the right of her shoulder. As if he'd been waiting for her, not anyone on the road.
The tree she stood behind was not wide enough to cover her if the spotlight moved. Tourmaline bolted. The spotlight followed.
The ridgeline dipped toward the road and she fought to clutch at the deepest threads of night. Her boots slipped in the leaves. A pain stabbed into her bottom ribs. Fuck her life, and fuck Virginia, too—she should have just gone straight to Dad the way she'd planned. Or even asked Virginia if she had a better plan. Surely anyone had a better plan than this.
Tourmaline ducked behind a large shadow, discovering it was a lichen-covered boulder as it slapped into her back. Her heartbeat throbbed in her eyes—the moon and the dark sweep of the ridge mixing strangely. She pinched her lips shut tight to keep from panting.
The car passed slowly on the road. Gravel crunching under the tires. Spotlight sweeping the ridge above her.
Then it all fell dark again.
Something tickled her knee and she closed her eyes and forced herself to keep still. Sweat trickled into her eyes. The dress she'd picked out that night, imagining its cool, soft layers brushing against Allen's warm skin, felt dingy and wilted and just as ruined as she did. It was hard to remember she'd even been in that life—at youth group, worrying her top was too low, watching Allen under the lights, ordering teaberry ice cream and talking about college.
The night stayed silent. The tree frogs outpaced her breathing. Her phone buzzed.
Tourmaline stood and watched the road carefully, but Alvarez was gone.
Her phone buzzed again. Yanking up her boots, she walked out to the road, keeping to the edge as she waited for Virginia to pick her up.
Wisps of hair stuck to her forehead, but she didn't bother brushing them back anymore. The adrenaline ebbed. Her phone slapped her thigh as she walked. She was going to go home, shower, and, after a good night's sleep, tell Dad everything that had happened. He would know what to do, and they would do it. End of story. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Yes, that was it.
A noise sounded in the distance and Tourmaline turned. A low thrumming. The wind? A growling. No. She closed her eyes.
The roar of a Harley.
