“I thought you’d never show up. Don’t you know it’s rude to keep a girl waiting? The girl acting as your handler should have made you aware of this.” Lizzy put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot on the ground when I made my way inside.
“Glad to see you didn’t crotch yourself on the balance beam this morning.” I patted her on the shoulder and walked by, leaving her mouth hanging wide open. Lori didn’t do a lot to hold back the snort.
“Don’t. Be. Mean. To. Me!” Lizzy punctuated each word with a gentle punch to my back after she regained her composure. “You know what? This is going to be so TMI, but you deserve some TMI after you were mean to me. I bruised my tailbone and my lady parts, thank you very much. I had some very embarrassing conversations with my doctor because of them.”
“Really? You okay?” I sat down on the couch as quickly as possible to avoid getting punched below the belt by an overexcited dog a second time.
“Mhm, much better now. Nothing that can’t be resolved by the only thing that’s won my heart. Unlike you two, ibuprofen would never fail me.” Lizzy gingerly sat down on the balance beam. Like me, she was afraid of a repeat incident that would have her needing a lot more ibuprofen. “I’m disappointed you didn’t come by to ice my tailbone when it was at its worst.”
“You’re right, I’m so sorry for not coming by to ice your butt while you were recovering.” I clapped my hands together and bowed for her forgiveness and to return to her good graces. “Seriously, I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.”
“Hey, I think guys would die for the chance to put ice on it. Most of them wouldn’t be engaged to another gorgeous gal, I guess, but you get my point.” Lizzy flipped her hair. “I’ll just bring the girls over if I need my ass frozen.”
“This is a weird conversation. You two are weird people.” Lori shook her head. “As much as I’d love to stick around to hear Lizzy talk about her bruised backside and vulva, which is the weirdest thing I've said all year, I think you guys better hit the road soon. I have a few things I need to go work on too, so I think I’ll split.”
Lori pulled me into a big hug. For someone who said they needed to work out more, her embraces were remarkably strong. A girl that small had no right to hug as tightly as she did. She pulled back and put some of her hair behind her ear. “Call if you need anything, okay? I know I can’t help much from here...I’ll figure something out if you guys need something, I promise.”
Lizzy wrapped Lori in a hug, picked the smaller girl up, and sent her off through the front door with declarations of eternal friendship and gratitude. When she closed it, I felt a slight awkwardness come over me. I liked Lizzy just fine, but she could be just a bit high-energy for me at times. At least I’d gotten better about interacting with people. The version of me that first showed up to the Luna facility in New York would not have been able to handle so much time around Lizzy.
“Right!” Lizzy clapped her hands and smiled, plopping down on the couch next to me. She grimaced slightly and readjusted, carefully leaning back against a throw pillow. “Do you have any questions yet?”
“Yet? You didn’t go over anything.”
“There’s going to be a concert. It’s like, a punk concert, but apparently, the band itself completely sold out. They don’t mind singing about wealth inequality and systemic oppression while charging ninety big ones for a crappy T-shirt with their logo that cost a buck to make in a Chinese sweatshop. The cheapest tickets I could manage to find still ran a little over seven hundred dollars apiece.”
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “For a concert? Do you get one of those sweatshop shirts or anything with the purchase at least? That’s insane. At least a commemorative cup or something.”
“Exactly. Like the band, the concert is just about completely sold out, and all the tickets were expensive before everyone started reselling them for absurd amounts.” She stretched out her arms and cracked her neck. “Since the concert has been so expensive, that digging I mentioned before turned up this event. I think it’ll be a lot of rich kids who have some pent-up issues spending their parents’ money on this concert, souvenirs, booze, and drugs. Sadly, the inebriated and high don’t always make for targets that are able to protect themselves.”
“And you think the couple will be prowling the concert for the chance to get some easy money off people who won’t even know it’s gone.”
“Bingo!” Lizzy shot a finger gun with a perfectly manicured pink nail at me. “And this concert was the biggest thing I could find happening this weekend. Every sports team in Vegas is either on the road, not worth talking about, or just isn’t playing. The concert will be held indoors, so it’ll be comfortable in that desert heat. There are always the casinos, but I just have a feeling this will be a prime place to get some cash. Man, I think I could grab a wallet or a few bucks out of a purse there.”
That all made perfect sense to me. The only thing that might have been a hang-up for me was going after a concert instead of a casino. If their Anomalies were truly so great for stealing money, wouldn’t casinos be the easiest banks in the world to steal from? On the other hand, casinos were so synonymous with Las Vegas that maybe going after them was a stupid idea. Disrupting the flow of income for casinos in Vegas sounded like a great way to get on the wrong radars belonging to the wrong people.
“Good job, I like the idea. Where do we fit in?” I was having trouble envisioning the concert, partially because the outrageous cost seemed to put it on a different plane of existence from the entertainment I was used to. I’d never been to one, so I couldn’t help but imagine it being a bunch of people in black, banging their heads like they wanted to snap their necks.
“I know how you feel about larger groups of people being tightly packed together, so I thought you might want to help me watch the entrance. Everything I’ve found out about our happily married duo shows them wearing formal clothing. A nice suit and hat for the sir, and a sparkling halter dress for the lady. It’s possible they’ll change it up since this is not a formal event, but I think they like to have their stolen money visible on their bodies, so they should stick out like sore thumbs.”
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She spent the next few minutes showing me the concert venue and gave me some info on the band, The Hedgetrimmers. When I had to stop her to ask if the band name was real, she solemnly nodded. I thought that was an...interesting name for a punk band. Not that I knew much of anything about naming a band or marketing, and they were the ones making enough money to have their concert tickets sell for over seven hundred dollars. They were doing something right.
Lizzy held up a few black devices with a small hook looping around them. “We’ll use these to communicate. Nothing fancy, except they’re phenomenal at noise-canceling, and they filter out background noise so damn nicely. They’ll be perfect for a concert and for me annoying you all evening.”
“What’s Julio going to do?” I asked, looking over some more images of the concert venue. “We’re not old enough to buy drinks, but we can still get inside most places. I don’t think he’ll be able to do that.”
“First off, when you look like me, there is no drinking age restriction if you don’t want there to be one.” Lizzy smirked and I sighed. “Okay, fine, you’re right. All of our ages could pose a problem for some things. You do not tell Julio this, but I have us some fake IDs if we need them. In fact, I have a fake marriage certificate for the two of us dated for the day we arrive in town. Yes, our IDs match too. Anyway, right now, the plan is to have him walk the areas around the locations where the Andersons committed their crimes. I don’t expect him to find much, but who knows? He might get something. It gives him something to do as well. I want this to be a learning experience for him with some training wheels on for the kid. He’s some decent muscle too.”
“No arguments from me.” I gave her a thumbs-up. “You’re the boss, I’ll follow. Speaking of Julio, where is he?”
“We’re going to pick him up at his place. I’ve gone over all this with him already, so I figured I’d let him sleep in some. We’ll pick him up and I’ll drive straight through.” Lizzy got up and grabbed a suitcase and a backpack, bringing them both to the door. “Got everything I need here! We’re set to stay a week, so you’ll be a bit tired for your school speech. Oh yeah, since the concert cost a small fortune, we’re all staying in one hotel room. I don’t want us to sleep separated if something happens, so you two will have to tough it out for a little while.”
“Works for me. Should we go ahead and hit the road?” I stood next to Lizzy’s luggage while she pulled out a sheet of paper.
“Yep, just a sec. Let me check over the list. Shirts, shorts, underwear, concert outfit, toothbrush, toothpaste, hair dryer, extra socks, pajamas, shampoo, conditioner, bandages, shoes, a brush, and some snacks.” She tapped the paper with each item she said.
“That order seems random,” I said. “Wouldn’t you want to check your packing to make sure that everything you listed is actually in there?”
“I packed everything with the list, so I should be good. I was just double-checking to make sure it all looked right. I don’t want to unpack everything in there either.”
I shrugged and grabbed her bags. “Just checking. I’ll help load these in the car. Is there anything you’re forgetting? It’s a long way back from Vegas.”
“Nope, let’s get this show on the road. I’ll need to get a lot of energy drinks after I get Julio.”
Loading the bags into her car, I started to get butterflies in my stomach. The last two road trips I’d been on yielded some mixed results. The first one led me to essentially adopting the sweetest little girl ever into my family. I also got to meet the love of my life in a weird time bubble cave, and that was something I was putting in the Win Column of my life. During the first one, I got to feel like I’d been brave and in control of something for the first time in my life, even if it was a lot of Lori and Alex babysitting me. The second road trip gave me a house nicer than anything my brain could have processed me living in ever since Mom and Dad were killed.
Then whatever the opposite of butterflies was filled my stomach. On my first road trip, I saw the destroyed, ashy remnants of what had been a large city and its citizens. I ended up killing someone I hadn’t meant to due to the lack of control I had over my Anomaly. Physically, I got hurt worse than I ever had before in my life. While I felt like I had control over something major for the first time in my life, I quickly realized I had been seriously out of my depth when it came to what happened to us. If it had been just a hunt for an object without being ambushed—something partially caused by our own lack of awareness—that would have been more along my speed at the time.
Then the second road trip happened because we’d been forced out of our home when McLeod took it from us. I had scars, some mental, mostly physical, from that horrible event. Again, I got to feel like I was in control when I made the decision to stay to defend our home and my sense of stability. That decision left me with a hole in my arm that I was lucky could get healed up. It left me with an inability to do something like grill food over an open fire.
They weren’t all winners.
A sudden wave of tiredness hit me as I slammed the trunk of Lizzy’s car closed. While I couldn’t deny I felt like I’d gone on proper adventures that, even with all the tragedy and grief, had largely been cool experiences that helped me grow and see the world for what it could be under someone like McLeod. I’d gained some life experience I never would have on those two road trips. I’d gained family on those road trips. I’d also gone into a state barely better than catatonic due to what happened on of those road trips.
I was tired of learning. I was tired of life experience. I was tired of hurting. The classmates I would have graduated with were barely in their first semesters of college. I was standing in someone’s driveway at the crack of dawn with scars that ached just imagining being in the Las Vegas heat. They were enjoying getting hammered and high and going to parties with their first real taste of independence. I would have loved my mom to be around to make just one more decision for me.
I leaned my head against the cool glass of the rear window in front of me. It felt like I was suddenly exhausted. I knew it wasn’t sudden. The exhaustion and fatigue from what my life had become in less than a year had been there for a long time. My brain just picked the most annoying time ever to tell me I needed to take a nice, long nap both before and after a month-long vacation where I wouldn’t have to lift a finger or worry about doing anything that might get more holes burned right through me.
“Hey, you okay?” I was too tired to even get startled and jump from Lizzy’s question, asked with a gentle tenderness that had been gone from her sarcasm previously.
I pulled in a lungful of air through my nose, letting it wake me up a little. “I will be. Tired, so if it’s okay with you, I might nap for a stretch on the road.”
Lizzy pondered me, her eyes piercing right through why I was tired, quickly figuring out it wasn’t something a simple nap on a road trip was going to fix. She didn’t need Lori’s ability to read emotions to know when someone wasn’t feeling their best. The girl had plenty of social deduction skills hidden under an odd charisma and a jovial personality front. Unless someone spent time around her to see how she was a good leader, I bet nearly anyone who ran into Lizzy would underestimate the girl.
“Sleep as much as you can on the trip.” Lizzy’s smile was tight and forced. It was a little comforting that this bothering me was bothering her. No one would have been able to convince me that a girl like Lizzy would have talked to a guy like me in January. Then she became one of my best friends. More like extended family.
“I’ll get some sleep in.” I nodded toward the car’s front door. “Let’s go get Julio, let’s go do some gambling, and let’s go to some strip clubs.”
“Your sister will rip my head off and stick it on a pike outside your house.” Lizzy huffed and laughed. “I’m so in, let’s go.”