Torn Away by Jennifer Brown Page A

as wrinkled and tan as a tree trunk stepped inside.
    “She ready?” she said, talking about me rather than to me, as if I weren’t sitting right there. Ronnie nodded and she turned toward me. “You got things?”
    “Only a few,” Ronnie interjected. “We lost everything in the storm.”
    “Yes, you told me on the phone,” she said, no softness, no tenderness in her voice. As much as I’d gotten tired of hearing everyone tell me how sorry they were, this was worse. It was like she didn’t care at all. Like she was here to pick up an unwanted couch. All business. “Harold’s in the car,” she said, raising her voice. “You eaten? He’d like to hit the diner on the way out.”
    “I’m not hungry,” I muttered, forcing myself to stand up. I searched Ronnie with my eyes as I walked past him, hoping he would change his mind. I would forgive him if he let me stay. It would hurt, but I’d pretend he’d never called them. I’d try to understand. But he simply looked down at his feet and let me pass.
    I followed Grandmother Billie, who didn’t so much walk with me as walk determinedly ahead of me, her step as steady as a warden’s. And I realized that was what this felt like—being led to a jail cell, my freedom stolen. Actually, this felt worse than prison. At least in prison, my friends could visit me. I’d already lost Mom and Marin—now I was losing Dani, Kolby, Jane, everyone I knew, everything that was familiar to me. What else could possibly be taken from me?
    We approached an old, mostly rust and maroon car idling at the curb, Grandfather Harold sitting behind the wheel, squinting in the sun. He pushed a button on the dash with a fat finger, and the trunk popped open.
    “You want to put your bags in?” Grandmother Billie asked, lifting the trunk lid all the way.
    I shook my head, squeezing Marin’s purse closer to my side. The thought of lowering the pocketbook she loved into the motor oil–scented trunk on top of a tangled snake of jumper cables felt too much like ripping out my lungs and jumping up and down on them. I opened the back door and slid inside the car, which also smelled like oil, mixed with something more organic. Grass? Skin? I couldn’t tell.
    Grandfather Harold lifted his chin once to acknowledge me, and my stomach clenched with fear as he put the car into drive, Grandmother Billie slamming the trunk and easing herself into the passenger seat in front of me. I didn’t want to go.
Please, Ronnie
, I begged inside my head,
come out and get me. Make it like the movies, where at the last minute the girl is loved after all, and gets saved by the hero. Be the hero, Ronnie.
But our motel room door had slowly swung shut, closing the space between me and the last familiar thing in my life. He didn’t even wave good-bye.
    “She ain’t hungry,” my grandmother said, her blunt fingers working to find the seat belt as my grandfather pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
    “Well, I don’t s’pose she has to eat,” he mumbled.
    “She’s just gonna sit there?”
    “If that’s what she wants to do. As long as she knows we ain’t stopping halfway down to Joplin for anything. She don’t eat, she don’t eat.”
    “Well, we can’t let her starve to death.”
    I chewed my lip and listened to them argue about me, as if I were invisible.
    We navigated way too slowly toward the highway. If Grandfather Harold was going to insist on driving like this, we would never get to Caster City. Which would be fine with me.
    I stared out the window and thought about the time Mom had taken Marin and me to Branson for an all-girls weekend. I’d watched the fields roll by, thinking that southern Missouri was so many worlds away from Elizabeth. As we passed Caster City and the landscape changed, the Ozark Mountains bursting around us, looking untouched and untamed, I had felt so far away from home.
    I remembered that there had been a dead, flattened scorpion behind the curtains in our cabin and