Free No Easy Way Out by Dayna Lorentz

partner for spying on the Senator. Darren would never have ruined everything by calling his dad and starting a riot outside the mall.
    Lexi finished brushing her teeth. The fantasy swirled down the drain with her spit. She was trapped in here with one friend who was kind of a bitch and another who was no friend at all.
Welcome to your life.
    Back at the cots, Maddie was flipping through a magazine.
    “They came by with books and stuff,” she said. “I got us a
Cosmo
and
Us Weekly
.” She waved two magazines. “Can I take
Us Weekly
?” It was the one she had in her hands. Lexi nodded.
    Maddie went back to reading. “It’s a week old,” she groaned. “I already knew about this breakup.”
    Lexi had never even flipped through a
Cosmo
before. There were lots of skinny white girls in clothes that looked less comfortable than the sweater from hell Lexi had spent the day trapped inside. These were not her people.
    “I’m going to walk around.”
    “Let me know if you find a copy of
Lucky
.”
    What in the name of jeebus was
Lucky
? “Roger that,” Lexi mumbled, and made for the stockroom.



L
I
G
H
T
S
OUT
    A t ten, the lights went black. All of them. The men around Marco grunted—“Hey!” “What the hell?”—and the shrieks of women could be heard from the JCPenney down the hall. The mall speakers bleeped and the not-quite-reassuring voice of the senator apologized and ordered that some lights be left on for safety’s sake. Within five minutes, a fluorescent light buzzed to life somewhere behind Marco’s head.
    Marco had preferred the black. He had covert ops to run. Light just made everything that much more difficult.
    After storing The Douche Corps in the parking garage, Marco had signed in to the Lord & Taylor, which was where all the unaccompanied men were supposed to live together peacefully. Whoever devised this plan had clearly never been to an all-boys camp. Some total dick had pissed all over the seat of the john Marco had gotten stuck with, and in the time he’d taken to do the round-trip tour through the facilities, some asshole had stolen his pillow. At least no one had crapped in his cot.
    Marco had gone to camp. Once. His parents had signed him up for a community day camp one week, at the end of which all the campers went on an overnight to Bear Mountain State Park. Marco was supposed to share a tent with one of the other kids, but some false claims were made about Marco’s sexual orientation, which prompted the boy to abandon Marco after lights-out to bunk with his friends in another tent. Marco’s solo enclosure was excreted upon at random intervals throughout the night. He listened to the sound of piss spattering on his tent and prayed that the walls truly were waterproof. After each golden shower, there was an explosion of laughter from the other tent signaling the piddler’s return to his partners in pee.
    He’d cried. Not like anyone was there to call him a pussy over it. In the morning he packed the tent in its bag, then washed his hands over and over, never really feeling clean. When the bus dropped him off, he informed his parents that he hated camp and didn’t ever want to go again. Money always being an issue anyway, the funds were never again wasted on summer programs.
    At least this time, it didn’t matter. He would not be at the mercy of these assholes. He had the key to the entire mall. And he was out of here the second that security guard cleared the area.
    • • •
    Shay was beginning to regret her plan. Here she was, in some back hallway behind the JCPenney, and there were no lights except the tiny LED on her key and the glowing red of a distant exit sign. Voices echoed down the hall, from where, Shay was not sure, but they scared her. She did not like being alone in this hallway, and definitely did not like the idea of
not
being alone in the hallway.
    Stumbling forward, Shay kept one hand on the wall, the other waving the small light back and forth across the