Free The Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura van den Berg

spent hours sitting on the floor of Pinky and Dana’s room, tracing the lines out to California and Oregon and Florida.
    “Here.” Cora lay on her side and pointed at San Luis. She had been eating sugar cubes from a cardboard box and her fingertip glistened. “That’s where we should go.”
    Jackie was interested in traveling south, to New Orleans or Fort Lauderdale, but Cora said those places were too hot. Dana was intrigued by the small patchwork of northern states. They had studied geography during homeschooling, but now they were looking at the map in an entirely new light, as being full of places they might one day go.
    “Too cold,” Cora said when Dana touched the hook of land extending out of Massachusetts.
    “Do you promise to take me with you?” Pinky asked. He didn’t look his age, thirteen. He could have passed for ten or eleven. He reminded Dana of a rabbit; he had the same nervous nature and quick-beating heart. He never requested any particular place. He just wanted to make sure he wasn’t left behind.
    “We’ll see.” Cora ran her finger along the edge of California.
    “Of course we’ll take you,” Dana said. He wasn’t cut out for life in Elijah. It was too rugged, with the target practice and the long winters and the dead animals. She didn’t yet know that he would be even more ill-prepared for the life she and her cousins would choose.
    One night, in the early spring, they packed a single suitcase, hitched a ride to West Plains, and kept going. That was six months ago. Their parents never came looking for them, or if they did, they must not have looked very hard. Maybe they thought their children had fallen in with the government or the devil and were beyond hope. Or maybe they just didn’t know how to search.
    At first Dana thought leaving Elijah meant getting away from how things were on the farm, but now she thinks the past is like the hand of God, or what she imagines the hand of God would be like if God were real: it can turn you in directions you don’t want to be turned in. They are still in a battle with the laws of the land. The laws that say they shouldn’t steal or point guns at people. And she feels the same resistance to these laws that her father must have felt toward paying taxes. Why not do these things? she found herself thinking. Who is going to stop us?
    Their first robbery was at a feed-and-grain store. They wanted money to buy a used car. It was so simple. They had stolen a shotgun from the bed of a truck they’d hitched in. All they had to do was walk inside. Dana told the teenage boy behind the counter to empty his register because that was a line she’d heard in one of those R-rated movies. She called him a cocksucker, too, since criminals seemed to say that all the time and she wanted him to know that she was to be taken seriously.
    The boy gave them everything he had. Feed-and-grain stores aren’t used to being robbed.

    3.
    The night before they hit the bank, Pinky tests his robot in the parking lot. Dana is the only one interested enough to watch. The floodlights are on; tiny bugs hover around the glow. The robot is covered in a pillowcase. It stands on the black asphalt like a ghost. Dana is smoking one of Jackie’s cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke much anymore, but it’s the night before a job and that always makes her nervous. Once the thing is started, there’s no sense in worrying because it’s done, it’s over. You can’t rewind. But being on the edge, that’s the hardest part. It’s like standing in front of a burning building and knowing that it won’t be long before you have to walk inside.
    She sits on the ground and watches her brother peel away the pillowcase. The robot looks like a kid’s science project. It has a round silver head and black buttons for eyes, an economy-size tomato soup can for a body, and large plastic suction cups for feet. It doesn’t have any arms. Dana realizes that, for some reason, whenever she thinks of a