Don't Tell, Don't Tell, Don't Tell by Liane Shaw

Author:Liane Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2016-03-03T22:47:32+00:00

fourteen

Thirteen buses have passed by here. Seven buses have stopped and let people off or picked them up. Twenty buses altogether.

I don’t think I’ve seen that many buses in one place in my whole life, except for this morning at the bus station. Big day.

I’ve been timing them, and they don’t seem to have a very organized pattern. Sometimes there will be twenty minutes between buses and at other times thirty or thirty-six. They don’t arrive at clean time intervals, like fives or tens. I like things to be in clean intervals. Multiples of five and ten are clean. Fours and sixes are not.

I haven’t seen Angel or anyone who looks like she might be a Celina walk into the house across the street. I might have the wrong house.

If it is the wrong house, what am I going to do? I can’t sit outside three houses at the same time. I can’t sit here for three days looking for Angel. I was really hoping to make it home before school tomorrow morning, or my mother will get a phone call from the attendance robot and then there will be real trouble.

Somehow, I thought I’d be on my way home by now with Angel beside me, or at least some information about Angel inside me. That I’d sneak into my house and crawl into my own bed and everything would be normal again.

I thought this would all happen a whole lot faster than it seems to be happening. I don’t know why I thought that. I’m pretty sure it isn’t logical to think that. I have a very logical mind about most things. But I have no experience with this sort of thing. Is this a sort of thing? Is there a precedent for someone taking a bus to a strange city to find someone who seems to be missing even though she had a foolproof plan?

If I don’t get back in time for school tomorrow, my mother will find out what I’m doing, and she will be angry with me.

I don’t like anger. I try not to feel it because it’s an uncomfortable and out of control feeling, as if my insides are turning red and molten with heat that burns my common sense until it melts and drips out of my mouth with words that I shouldn’t say. When people are angry they say hurtful things. My mother’s angry words always burn me, and it takes a long time for the scars to go away. I don’t like to make her angry.

Finding out that I used money that she didn’t know I have to take a bus to find Angel because I actually do have some idea of where she is even though I said I didn’t, which is another big lie, will make her angry.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that I haven’t really thought all of this through. I think my brain is melting. All of my life people have seemed so worried about me because I have never had many friends.

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