Never Could Stop Read online

  I hate that I feel this magnetic sort of attraction to the guy. I mean, obviously he's handsome, but I've met plenty of cute guys before—with way better attitudes. This dude, he's a total prick.

  The fact that he doesn't want me here only makes me even more determined to stay.

  “I don't have a problem with you,” he growls, putting his fingers on my arm. I jerk back before he gets the chance to grab me. Rubbing my palm against the soft wool of my sweater. “I don't have a problem with you,” he repeats, but before he gets the chance to say anything else, Keenan's standing beside us and pulling an unlit cigarette out from behind his ear.

  “You take that piss yet, Foster?” he asks and the blue-eyed boy grits his teeth, a muscle in his jaw ticking as he pulls away and disappears up the path toward the brick building and white columns that house the bathrooms. “He giving you trouble?” Keenan asks nonchalantly, lighting up and taking a few drags on his smoke as I dig in my backpack for some money.

  I'm not, like, completely stupid—my debit card and cash are tucked into my boots instead of my wallet. When Keenan glances over and sees me digging through it, I know the only thing he'll be able to see is a bunch of pennies and nickels.

  “Nah. Just making small talk,” I respond with a glib little wink and a smile. Once again, a look that's fake as hell. Inside, I'm fighting the shadow of my own constant self-doubt, still struggling to stop myself from thinking about the note I left my family, equating my need to run away with life and death. It was this or suicide, is exactly what I told them—even though I knew it would lash pain against their hearts like a hurricane.

  But desperation breeds desire.

  I needed them to understand how important it was for me to get away.

  Away from my broken family.

  Away from my dead mom.

  Away from the father whose attention I used to crave, the one I'm now terrified of.

  I pause next to the vending machines and grab myself a Coke, tucking the bottle in my bag before I slip into the bathroom and take a piss. Pausing in front of the mirrors on my way out, I touch up my makeup—red, red lipstick and shadow the color of a purple bruise. My liner is thick and black, the bottle of my tinted mascara promising to dye my pale orange lashes a darker color. With the chunky sweater hanging off one shoulder, the leggings, and the boots, I remind myself of my older sister, Never. We're barely a year apart. Hell, we could be twins.

  As I stare at my face, at the small pointed triangle of my nose, the almond curves of my hazel eyes, the expressive upturned shapes of my brows, I decide that even though my mom cheated on her husband and had the third of her first four daughters with a different man (yes, my mother was a total whore) that most people would be hard-pressed to tell.

  The longer I stand there, the more I decide that in my new life, the one I plan on starting in New Orleans, that I'll just tell everyone that Beth and Never's father was also my father. I definitely won't be telling anyone that my bio dad … murdered their bio dad. No way in hell.

  “I can be anyone I want to be,” I tell myself as I make a pouty face in the mirror and tug my sweater sleeve down my other shoulder, flashing the pale freckled flesh underneath. “Anyone.”

  Hauling my backpack up from the floor, I put my makeup away and head back out to the black truck. The guys are already inside, waiting for me, some country station playing on the radio.

  “How long until we get there?” I ask, knowing I could theoretically use the GPS on my phone and find out for myself. But I don't want to turn it on right now. I don't want to see the texts from my sisters that I know will be there, begging me to come back. Begging me for an explanation. I promised myself before I left that I'd wait at least a week before contacting them again.

  If I contact them at all.

  I curl up on the seat, boots propped on the cushion as I slip my Coke out of my bag and unscrew the top. When I was fifteen, my sister, Never, ran away without a word, disappeared and stayed disappeared for five whole years. No phone calls, no letters, and no social media contact at all. So I figure a week or two without a word from me is just fucking karma, right? She left me; I'm leaving her.

  Serves the bitch right.

  “About four hours,” Keenan says, still smiling as he pulls out of the rest stop and I do my best to resist glancing back at Foster. Something about his silent brooding draws my attention, and I find him leaning against the window on the opposite side of the truck, facing me. His slip-on sneakers are propped on the seat just like mine, knees bent in a similar position.

  We look at each other for a long, long time before I flip him off and he glances away with a scowl. Whether he likes it or not, I'm getting out of Mississippi and I'm never coming back.

  3

  I'm too excited to sleep, so I stay up and watch the occasional sweep of headlights cut across the dark interior of the truck. My red painted fingernails pick at a small hole in my leggings, teasing loose threads out to tickle my skin. Keenan makes a few more attempts at small talk, but Foster stays silent. Not that I care. Like I'd even want to talk to the guy. I can't even believe he offered me cash to get the fuck out of his truck, as if I'm really all that much trouble anyway.

  “Hey, do one of you have a phone I could use?” I ask, and surprisingly, it's Foster that's popping up and handing his smartphone over the back of the seat. I notice that Keenan's hands tighten around the wheel again, the skin over his knuckles getting tight. I decide that maybe he's just got a crush on me and doesn't want Foster butting in.

  Could be wishful thinking but sometimes, wishes are all a person's got.

  “Who are you calling?” he asks me at the same time he leans back, disappearing into the shadows of the cab. A few seconds later, the brights of an oncoming car cut through the darkness and flash across his face. I see that the deeply carved shape of his frown has lessened slightly, the fullness of his mouth catching my attention before it disappears again, bathed in blackness.

  “Nobody,” I say as I type in an online search for hostels New Orleans and come up with a few promising locations for around twenty bucks a night. I've been saving for a while now, using money from my part-time job at the coffee shop to build a little nest egg. Six hundred bucks doesn't seem like a lot, but that'll buy me quite a few nights at a hostel. Looking through the listings, I see that most have a ten night maximum, but that's okay. I'll hop between a few if I need to. Hopefully though, I'll have a job by the end of my first week and then I can start looking for a place to live. “I just need to find a place to stay while I'm in town.”

  “Since we'll be getting in so late tonight, you're welcome to hang at our place until morning,” Keenan offers as I flick my fingers across the screen and start to make a booking for tomorrow. There's no point in setting something up for tonight; it'd just be a waste. I want to make the most of my time at the hostel, from the earliest possible check-in until the latest possible check-out. If I have to, I can always wander around the city and take in the sights while I'm waiting.

  My eyes lift up and find Keenan slouched comfortably in the driver's seat. I don't feel any sort of alarm going off in my head when I stare at him or Foster—despite the latter man's nasty attitude. If anything, he seems overly keen to get rid of me. At worst, I think Keenan's just trying to get into my pants.

  “Maybe,” I say as I start to make tomorrow's booking and hesitate at the thought of fishing my debit card out in front of the guys. I mean, they've been nothing but nice so far, but money makes people do crazy things.

  I swing my feet onto the floor and bend over, pretending to dig in a pocket on my bag, slipping my debit card out of my leather boot and glancing at the numbers, typing them in as quick as I can with my thumb before I push it back into place and come up with a cigarette.

  Foster offers me another light, leaning forward again and holding up a silver Zippo to bath the end of my cherry in bright orange flame.

  “Thanks,” I say, leaning back and finishing my reservation. I
make sure to clear the screen before I hand the phone back. See, I can fucking handle myself out in the world. If a person doesn't act like a complete idiot, it's not so hard. “So are you guys roomies or something?”

  “For now,” Keenan says as we continue down the highway, approaching a bright blue sign that's briefly lit by our own headlights. Welcome to Louisiana; Bienvenue en Louisiane. In the center is a yellow and black fleur-de-lis.

  I'm so excited, I briefly forget I'm wearing makeup and bite my lower lip, scraping red lipstick across the whiteness of my teeth. When I get out a mirrored compact to fix it, I look like a vampire who's just taken fresh blood from her victim. I bare my teeth and make a little face before I rub it off with my fingertips.

  No way would I actually want to be one of the undead. Supposedly, they live forever and to me, there could be no worse hell than being stuck in this world for eternity.

  “If you're old enough to drink, maybe we could stop at a bar on Bourbon Street? Give you a proper introduction to the city.”

  My heart hammers as I look up and try not to act like having a drink on the infamous Bourbon Street would be the literal highlight of my life.

  “Yeah, totally,” I say, purposely leaving out my actual age. I don't need these guys to know that I'm just barely over the twenty-one marker. I want them to think I'm sophisticated, worldly, in my late twenties maybe. I mean, this is my new life. I get to decide who and what I'm going to be, like a writer penning a novel. My main character is going to be vivacious, outgoing, knowledgable. I wonder if I should give her a college degree, something obscure but interesting, something that an employer probably wouldn't even bother to check up on. Like, liberal arts or whatever. I mean, what does a person even do with a liberal arts degree? Nothing, right? But it would totally add to the depth of my new persona. “After being trapped in a car all day, I could really use a drink.”

  “Is your family going to be worried about you?” Foster asks, putting a dark splotch on the shiny exterior of my new spirit. I give him a look over the back of the seat, trying to pretend like I can really see his eyes through the shadows in the cab. Some strange part of me vehemently wishes that I could.

  “Why would they be? I travel all the time,” I lie, using my practiced smile to make the words seem more real. “Whenever the mood strikes me, I just take off and do whatever. It's kind of my thing.”

  “Seriously?” Keenan asks, sounding intrigued as he tosses a brown-eyed glance my direction. “That must be some life you lead.”

  “Oh, you know,” I say, waving my hand around like I've seen my sister do. Never has this hyper cool, take no shit attitude going that I've always envied. After her surprise return home last year, it's gotten even more unbearable to be around. I don't want to have to put up with that kind of attitude; I want to have that kind of attitude. And now I can. “It's just, like, I can't fucking stand being trapped in one place for too long. My spirit's too big for a single city.”

  “Where do you get the money to travel?” Foster asks in that rough, dark voice of his. It reminds me of freshly ground coffee, like maybe the grinder needs to run for a few more seconds to smooth out all the sharp little shards of glossy brown beans.

  “Trust fund,” I say, making things up as I go. I've spent hours trying to decide who it is that I want to be in this world, but there are so many possibilities, I've never actually made a decision. I decide to try one of my more favorite personas out on these men. “My dad passed away when I was six”—which is partially true: my sisters' father, the man I used to think was mine too, was murdered by my biological dad when I was six—“and he left me and my sisters a lot of money.”

  “Sorry to hear about your dad,” Foster grumbles, but he doesn't sound sorry. No, he just sort of sounds pissed. What a serious weirdo. “How about your mom?”

  Mom.

  Pain lashes my heart like a whip, craving curved scars against the aching beat of red flesh.

  “She's a professional belly dancer,” I say, elaborating a little on the truth. My mom was a dancer although she never really made it past the county fair. “She travels the world, too, putting on performances and teaching classes. Believe it or not, a ton of pop singers actually use belly dancing in their videos.” I try to decide if that's too fantastical of a lie, but somebody must've taught Shakira and Beyonce to dance, right? I mean, there is a real person out there that does that kind of thing. Why can't it have been my mother? “She's in California currently, living in Santa Cruz.”

  I decide to pepper my new story with as much truth as possible, so it's easier to remember. My sister, Never, was living in the Santa Cruz area and going to school just before she came back and blew my entire family's collective mind with her mysterious return. When she showed up on the driveway of our old farmhouse after five years away, I almost collapsed. Seeing her again … it was like a dream. But slowly, that dream has morphed into a nightmare. I can't look at her without remembering everything else: her dad, my dad, the murder, the reason she ran away in the first place.

  “So who is it that lives in Mississippi then?” Foster continues, almost like he wants there to be someone back there missing me.

  I smile—a real smile this time—because there's one thing about my real life that's actually interesting.

  “I have seven sisters,” I tell them with a slight shrug. “My parents were sort of new age and into, like, occult stuff or whatever. Some fortune teller told them once that eight was their lucky number as a couple, so they had eight kids.” Complete and total lie. In reality, my mother just sort of didn't think about things as simple as birth control and got pregnant willy-nilly. Between the eight of us, we have six different dads.

  But that's my old life. This is my new one. And my sisters and I all look enough alike that if I were to show people pictures, nobody would ever guess.

  “You're lucky,” Foster whispers, his husky voice warming slightly, “having a big family like that.” He scoots forward, putting his feet on the floor and looking over the back seat at me. Once again, the force of his eyes on mine is almost overwhelming, like a brick to the face. It creeps me out how much I like it, so I change my focus back to Keenan. He has an okay face, but his nose is crooked like he's been in too many fights and the cleft in his chin has a few thick scraggly hairs sticking out of it that kind of gross me out. Since I'm not attracted to him, it makes it a lot easier to stare. “I have a little sister, too.”

  Something in Foster's voice compels me to look back at him, just in time to catch this pleading look in his eyes. It's fucking … oh my God, it's hypnotizing. His sapphire eyes are no longer stone, liquefying into these deep, dark pools like a decade's worth of tears have crystallized on this man's face. At the same moment I'm drawn into them, I'm also repelled. I've seen that look before, too many times to count—on my family's faces … and on my own.

  As I'm fighting to break eye contact with Foster, he tears away first, scoffing under his breath and mumbling something I can't quite hear.

  “What on earth are you goin' on about back there?” Keenan asks, drawing my attention. He's so … boring and normal, it's easy to look at him. I focus on those wiry hairs in his face and dig my fingers into my thighs; the physical pain helps ground me, pull me back to reality.

  Wow, seriously, fuck this guy.

  I left home to escape that sort of searing pain, not run into more of it. I promise myself I'll have a drink or two on Bourbon Street with these guys, excuse myself to the bathroom, and then ditch them. There's no way I'm spending the night with Foster anywhere near me.

  “Nothing,” Foster snaps, leaning back and putting one of his shoes up against the front seat. “Not a goddamn fucking thing.”

  Tempted by the damn devil, that's how I feel when my gaze is drawn inexplicably back to Foster's. The shadows inside the truck's cab make it difficult to tell for sure, but somehow, I imagine that I see him scrub a rough hand over a single tear on his cheek.

  But then that creepy, morbid
skeleton hand of his drops back into his lap and there's nothing but anger and frustration in his gaze. Somehow it feels like every single ounce of it is focused directly on me.

  4

  As soon as I enter New Orleans, I can feel it, like the city itself has a spirit, one that's so big and outrageous that it sweeps over and consumes me as soon as we cross some metaphysical border separating the Big Easy from the rest of the world.

  Keenan drives around for a bit until he finds a parking space, and then together, the three of us walk the vibrant, bustling streets of the city until we get to a historic white building with green shutters and wrought iron railing decorating the porch of the second story.

  I take my backpack which garners me a funny look from Keenan, but I don't bother to explain myself. Even if he suspects that I'm going to ditch them, so what? I already offered Keenan some money for gas, pretending like the twenty I offered him was the last bit of cash I had on me. He told me to go ahead and keep it, so … I wasn't about to argue. That twenty is just one more night I can spend in a hostel.

  The bar itself has four doorways, all of which have their big green double doors opened, people spilling out into the street. It's cold enough out that my skin is pebbled with goose bumps, but inside, the room is warm with the body heat of a large crowd, and a few outdoor heaters dot the sidewalk near the entrances.

  Inside, there's a seriously ancient octagonal wooden bar completely surrounded by people three or four deep, all of whom are laughing and yelling and chatting. The energy is so infectious that I find myself giggling uncontrollably.

  Foster gives me a weird look, but Keenan just grins nice and wide.

  “I'll grab the first round,” he says, and I just nod, completely enraptured by the rusty old chandelier hanging above the bar, the walls plastered with business cards from all around the country—all around the world—and the antique football helmets dangling from the ceiling.