Fragment. Herdrukt met toestemming. Alle rechten voorbehouden.
One
Phoebe
People say you choose your friends, but my friendship with Hailey Tinrock never felt like a choice. We clung to each other because we were told to, and then it became survival. And now-together-we're leaving our families behind.
At midnight, the motel room stinks of stale cigarettes and a microwaved burrito from its previous resident. Yellowed stains bleed into the cement walls and ceiling tiles. Five-star accommodations right here. Luxurious.
It's definitely not the Ritz-Carlton, and I've already become a roach murderer. I've counted four cockroaches so far, killed three with a rolled Forbes magazine that Hailey had been flipping through. She ripped off the cover with the roach juice to keep reading. I watch as the last one skitters into an air vent. It was smart to run away from us.
He knew what was coming.
As I plop down on the lumpy mattress, it lets out a warning screech but supports my weight enough. I appraise a box of poison-sorry, I mean hair dye. My scalp burns like I scrubbed it with sriracha and chile flakes.
"It says to wait thirty minutes," Hailey tells me, sitting cross-legged on the disgusting plaid chair in the corner. Her wet hair hides underneath a plastic cap, the color processing. She's wearing only an oversized black tee that says hexes on my exes, knee-high socks, and jet-black lipstick.
I'm not shocked she's painting her nails the same inky color.
Hailey dresses like she's someone who could stab you while she's sucking on a cigarette, but her favorite movie is about sisters working at a small-town pizza joint and falling in love so, so slowly. I can't sit through ten minutes of Mystic Pizza, and Hailey watches it every weekend like it's her bible.
She also has zero exes to hex. Just a laundry list of one-night stands and short-term flings. Our lifestyles aren't compatible with long-term relationships.
At least not real ones.
Hailey doesn't recheck the instructions on the hair dye box. I trust that she remembered the info on the first read through. Photographic memory and all.
I'd be envious if she weren't my best friend and didn't use her beautiful brain to bail me out of a million and one tragic scenarios.
"Are we sure they didn't make this stuff out of jalapeño paste?" I force myself not to itch, but yeah, I kinda scratch and wince. No self-control. "It feels like fire ants are exploding on my head. I've never even heard of this brand." I rotate the box to stare at the front. "Vivid Value Color. What's our plan B if our hair starts falling out again?"
"We shave our heads," Hailey says, like it's the obvious solution. She blows on her wet nails, and I try not to mourn my hair. Would I actually shave it?
Yes, I'm all-in with her.
Would I tear up?
One hundred percent.
Would she?
Probably not, considering she shaved her head when she was sixteen. Now that she's twenty-four, it's regularly chopped at her shoulders in an edgy cut.
At the moment, I'm restraining myself from doing a full-fingernailed scalp massage. Do not.
She can see my struggle. "We didn't have much to choose from at the gas station, Phebs."
"I know." I sigh, trying not to complain. We might be the same age and she might be the one figuratively behind the wheel, but I'm the one dead set on protecting us and keeping us from struggling.
When Hailey came up with this idea in Carlsbad, we had just trekked away from a multimillion-dollar beach house in the pouring rain. All façades dropped-we didn't call for our personal driver in his Bentley to take us "home."
We just slipped out. Without splendor or attention.
Almost like we never arrived.
It'd been a little past one a.m.-you don't forget things like time when it's one of those days that stay with you. Or in this case, one of those nights. After a long, barefoot trek with our heels in our hands, we sat at a bus stop, thinking we could escape the rain while we waited.
We didn't.
Carlsbad's bus stops have fancy white pergolas as roofs. So rain slipped through the slats of wood and wet our hair and our flowery Oscar de la Renta dresses we just purchased this summer. Her dress was embroidered with poisonous white oleanders. Mine was threaded with delicate pink tulips.
Hailey was silently crying. I could tell, even in the storm. She's an ugly crier when it's not faked. Her whole face was scrunched, and her reddened eyes looked touched by the salt of her emotion, not the sky.
Dark mascara streamed down her cheeks, and I clasped her hand tighter while my knees jostled. From the cold, I wanted to believe.
I was just cold from the rain.
"Phoebe," Hailey choked out. "I-I don't think we should do this again." She tried to catch my gaze.
But I stared at my lap. My dress was riding up, and a trickle of blood on my thigh became exposed to the elements. The rain washed away the crimson streak in a blink.
Just a millisecond. That's all it took before it was gone.
"We're leaving California tomorrow," I reminded Hailey. "It'll be okay." I was ready to get the hell out of there. To start the next job.
It's always about the next job, bug, I heard my mom's voice in my head.
Hailey turned more to me. She squinted at me through rain and tears. "What if we don't?"
"Don't what?" I blinked through confusion.
"Don't go to Seattle."
To the next job, she meant.
My stomach tossed like it had earlier that night. I glanced back down at the inside of my thigh, expecting to see more blood, but it really was gone.
Now she squeezed my hand. The desperation in the strength of her fingers clung against my heart. "We could retire, Phebs."
"We're twenty-four. I don't think we're in a position to retire." I held my Hermès purse over Hailey's head as an umbrella, so the rain would stop pelting her face.
She looked simultaneously thankful and distraught.
We weren't trust fund children with loaded bank accounts, but growing up, we'd experienced wealth like we were daughters of neurosurgeons and tech moguls. A Bugatti for two weeks. Penthouse suite at a five-star luxury hotel for a month. Two-grand rib eye with shaved black truffle for dinner.
There were times the fantasy would pop, and we'd reconvene at a Holiday Inn like regular middle-class folk, but only for short moments. One night or two.
Our lives were always fantasies, and our parents taught us how to construct them and then rebuild when they started to crack.
Money would flow in heaps and go out just as fast. Be flashy enough to maintain appearances but not enough to cause attention. Wear the designer dress. Drive the car that'd elicit your neighbor's envy. Pick up the thousand-dollar tab once to show you can.
Insulate yourself in the "right" social circles.
When we became adults, things shifted a bit. Instead of playing with private school kids at some rich family's mansion for an afternoon, I could now attend an exclusive nightclub with VIP bottle service. Or the strip club that B-list celebrities frequented.
Only, I wasn't just partying the night away but seducing someone out of a few grand. Felt a lot different than batting my eight-year-old innocent eyes at the unsuspecting elite.
The marks tended to be affluent assholes, and as a kid I liked to believe we were Robin Hood-stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. But we weren't. We just gave to ourselves, and I was mostly a prop for my mom's long cons. There to give her backstory-sometimes as my doting mother, other times as my kind aunt or selfless guardian-more credibility.
By the time I was a teenager, I was no longer a shill. A prop. I had more responsibility and a bigger role to play. Long cons were always the bread and butter that kept us thriving. Short cons were like practice and a way to travel from A to B: conning someone out of a hundred bucks in sixty seconds, shortchanging a cashier.
Anyway, after all our families did to live this fabulous lifestyle, my savings didn't see much reward. It was never about saving money for some brighter future.
We were supposedly already living the "brighter" future. Our line of work is ethically and morally questionable and borderline corrupt, but it's not like we robbed banks. Most of the time, we just . . . tricked people. Into believing our fantasies.
Our lies.
But still, I listened closely to Hailey at that rainy bus stop like I understood what she was saying already. Even if the concept seemed far-fetched.
"Retiring is the wrong word," she whispered, but no one was around us. Barely any cars zoomed past our stretch of road. "More like . . . starting over. Like really starting over, from the beginning." Her mascara-smudged eyes were pleading with me. "Phebs." Her voice fractured. Despite her goth wardrobe and her unapproachable aura that radiated toward strangers, I'd seen Hailey cry plenty of times in our lives.
She cried over a turtle she ran over.
She cried when Romeo and Juliet died in the 1968 film.
She cried and cursed after breaking her pinky in a doorjamb.
And now she was crying from the fucked-up Carlsbad job.
I hated seeing her this distraught. Tears of my own threatened to rise, and I was trying-God, I was really trying to see what she saw. A way out? I'd never considered it.
I never wanted it.
"We can do the normal thing," she said. "The way that normal people do."
I couldn't see.
I couldn't see. "Hails-"
"We can. I know we can. We don't have to keep doing this. We don't. You and me-let's leave together."
My eyes stung, and I looked around for answers that I still couldn't see. Not like her.
"Inertia," she whispered a life-changing word into the rain, one that swung my head back to her.
My pulse raced. "What?" I breathed, thinking I heard her wrong.
"Inertia," she said more certainly, more forcefully. "I'm invoking inertia."
Inertia: an object will continue at its current motion until some force causes a change in its speed or direction.
She was unearthing a childhood pact that we buried like a time capsule. If someone invoked the word inertia, then whatever road we were taking, we'd have to change course together. To change course was to do the opposite of what our parents wanted for us, and that felt like the ultimate rebellion.
We never wanted to be alone when contesting them.
It felt isolating and devastating to stand against the indomitable forces that were our mothers. So the pact was born to ensure it'd always be the two of us against the world. It was an unbreakable pact. Stronger than a pinky promise. Stronger than a blood oath.
It's a pact reserved solely for us: two daughters of con artists and best friends for life.
It was only the second time the word was ever invoked. The second time the pact rose to the surface.
The first time, I'd been the one to say the word. We were fourteen.
Hailey had been viciously bullied at our prep school. She had hoped to "tough it out" even though every school day ended in tears. I had wanted to drop out of the prep school, though it'd go against our moms' wishes.
So I'd said, "Inertia." After that, we'd never gone back. We'd changed course together.
Hailey summoning this word at the bus stop in Carlsbad swept me into the power of our friendship and the indestructible pact we wielded like a trump card.
I had used it once and she followed through, despite being afraid of the repercussions. Now, it was my turn to do the same.
I had to do it. There was no other thought in my mind then. I had to, and I would.
She opened her black leather handbag and pulled out a brochure. "I found this."
She passed it to me. It started sogging between my fingers, but confusion began to fade as I gazed at the picturesque New England landscape.
Vacation in One of Connecticut's Oldest & Most Vibrant Towns!
It looked beautiful and quaint. The kind of place you'd start a family and grow old. A place you'd plant roots.
Normal.
And I realized, it was her Mystic Pizza. The small town with only romantic troubles and college dreams. No lies.
No scams.
And she wasn't asking me to take a weekend trip up the East Coast. I didn't know how long she had carried this brochure or how much she'd thought about leaving until then. But maybe that night had lit a match, and after what happened in the beach house, her idea had detonated into a plan.
Starting over.
A chill raced across my skin.
Doing the normal thing. Was that even possible?
The wet brochure was crumbling between my fingers. "Our moms will hate us moving to Connecticut." They'd been best friends since childhood.
Thick as thieves. Quite fucking literally. Only their lives were less than glamorous, unlike our cushy and glitzy upbringing-as they so often reminded us.
The rain began to let up when I glanced back at Hailey. "We're grifters, in case you've forgotten."
I like using that word because our moms hate it. They think "grifting" invokes a visual of tobacco-spitting hitchhikers. Though, we have hitchhiked before, and we try not to stay in one place for too long.
"Then we don't tell them we're going," Hailey said. "We could stop running. Stop conning. We could build something for ourselves that lasts. Can you picture that?" She looked up like it was a constellation in the stars. Spelling out our real bright future.
Pain blossomed in my chest from the strange, muddled yearning. The idea of not running sounded nice. Not conning . . . I wasn't so sure. While she stared up, I looked down at our sopping wet dresses, my discarded heels, and the dirt on the bottoms of our feet.
"It's hard to imagine," I whispered. "Sounds more like a dream." A strange fantasy.
But seeing the desperation in Hailey's eyes again-I really did want to give it to her.
"Then let's live that dream. Let's try." She clutched my hand again. "Please, Phoebe." Her round gray gaze pleaded. Begged. "I can't do it alone." A tremor shook her voice.
The pact surfaced in my heart again. "You won't be alone, Hails," I breathed.
When I was ten years old, Hailey told me to jump off a bridge into ice-cold water to save a drowning stray cat. She was too scared of heights, and I had rarely been scared of anything. I couldn't say no to her then.
