An Honest Lie(9)

“Okay.” It was the best peace offering she could make.

“It’s you and me now, kiddo.”

“And, like, all the people we’re going to live with.”

Her mother’s laugh filled up the whole car and Summer felt happy again. Sometimes the things she said made her mother upset, and other times she’d laugh harder than Summer had ever heard. She tried not to say the wrong things, but it was hard to know what exactly it was that made adults upset—they were like seesaws.

An hour later, a row of small, stucco homes appeared on their right: they looked like toenails painted pink and green and yellow.

“Is that it?” Summer asked, scanning the desert for more homes and seeing only scrub bushes.

“The town is called Friendship, isn’t that cute?” Lorraine said, ignoring her. She pointed to the sign as they sped by and Summer caught a glimpse of the name with the words Established 1913 beneath it.

“Why is there a town way out here?”

“It was a mining town, part of the boom at the turn of the century, I’m guessing. When the minerals run out, the people do, too.”

They passed a row of buildings and she craned her neck around to see what they were: a diner, a place called Red’s and a two-pump gas station next to what looked like a motel...then more nothing. That was it. She slouched back in her seat, disappointed. When her mama had told her they were going to Nevada, she’d been excited about the bright, flashing lights of Las Vegas. But Vegas was at least an hour from where they were going. Friendship was just a boring town in the middle of the desert.

“There’s some kind of famous cactus back there. People drive from all over to see it!” Lorraine was using her overly cheerful voice, something she did when she was nervous.

Summer hated when adults tried to make boring things sound fun; who did they think they were fooling, anyway?

“Cool.” She traced the stitching on the back of the seat, not bothering to look.

Her mother, who usually called her out when she was rude, was leaning all the way forward in her seat, oblivious as she studied the road ahead of her.

“It should be coming up...”

Summer rolled her eyes but scanned the desert for it, anyway.

“Does it look like a prison?” She’d seen them on the Lifetime movies her mother watched: gray places with bars over the windows and people dressed in orange.

“Don’t think of it like a prison,” her mother said. “He’s renovated the inside with the money his adoptive mother left him.” She was checking her reflection in the rearview mirror. “It’s more like living in an apartment building. They have a vegetable garden, an apricot orchard and goats and chickens. There’s a cafeteria where everyone has their meals together.”

“He”: her mother’s friend—the help-promiser. “Are the goats and chickens in prison, or to be eaten by the prisoners?” She’d meant for it to be funny, but by the look on Mama’s face, she’d said the wrong thing again—the thing her dad would have said. Summer could taste the dust from outside coating her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said quickly, not wanting to ruin the mood. “Can I have a sip of that water?”

The plastic water bottle crackled when Summer took it from her mother’s hand. She was lifting the bottle to her lips when an odd shape rose out of the desert, on her right.

“Look, is that it?” She pointed out the window at the pale building that rose out of the dirt like a squat sandcastle. A single road led down to the building. To reach it, they would have to pass through a gate. The gate was an ugly, solid, metal thing; Summer resented that she couldn’t see through it, but now someone was stepping out of the little shack to their left and she switched her attention to the thickset woman wearing a guard’s uniform.

Her mama said a bad word, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel like she did when she was nervous. “Summer, sit back,” she said.

The woman was around her mom’s age, and she had crunchy-looking blond hair that zigzagged out from her head like electrified noodles.

Noodles took a step toward the car, scanning the road behind them like she was waiting for an ambush or something.

“Name?” This one word, spoken through her teeth, with no smile to accompany it.

“Lorraine,” her mama said to the woman. She said it in the nice voice she reserved for Summer’s teachers. The woman didn’t react to the name or her mama’s friendly tone. She didn’t check a list or smile; she stared straight at Mama—stuck her jaw out at her, even. And then, in a less friendly voice, she heard her mama add, “Taured is expecting us.”

Bending at the waist, like she hadn’t heard, Noodles scanned the interior of the car for...what? Summer scanned along with her, looking for a problem. There was none. They both seemed to come to this conclusion at the same time. “Pop the trunk.” The woman’s voice was deep and impatient.

It came as an order, not a request. Summer felt rather than saw her mama tense. Sometimes she thought she could hear her mother when no one else could, feel her feelings, and she couldn’t really explain that to anyone, because it was weird. The trunk unlatched and she heard things being moved around. A few seconds later, the woman reemerged next to the driver’s-side window. She nodded to Summer in the back seat and stepped into the shed, picking up a walkie-talkie. She turned her back to them when she made the call, and Summer watched her walk back into the little shed, nod and press a button to open the gate. The two solid metal doors opened to reveal a long stretch of road.