Free Paradise by Jill S. Alexander Page B

sheriff’s deputies would know we’d hightailed out the back way. Lacey and I would be in trouble twice as deep for running.
    I had no choice.
    I gutted it up, squeezed the steering wheel with both hands, floored the accelerator. The front end heaved as the Bronco shot out of the hole, straight toward the hog. I hung on, but I could feel the back tires losing traction on the wet, red clay trail. The hog bolted into the brush as the Bronco slid into a sideways drift. Like we’d hit ice. I turned the steering wheel into the slide, trying to counter the drift, trying to keep out of the trees. The tires spun. Clods of mud hailed down on us. Pummeling the roof. I fought the slide with everything I had. Staying off the brake. Holding the steering wheel steady. Wrecking was not an option.
    I held my breath and rode the drift until I felt the back end swing into line. I steered the Bronco into an opening flanked by two old oaks, their gnarled branches forming an archway.
    The trail had disappeared beneath the rutting and the hoof stamping of the wild hogs. I pushed in the clutch, eased on the brake, and collapsed onto the steering wheel. My forehead damp from sweat. My shoulders ached from fighting with the steering wheel. But I had to get out of the thicket.
    The Jessup County line couldn’t be that much farther ahead. If I was right, the highway would be just a rock’s throw from the woods’ edge. If I was wrong, I’d be tunneling deeper into the piney woods. Dad would have the sheriff and his dogs searching by church time Easter Sunday. I’d be legendary, but for all the wrong reasons.
    I shut off the headlights. Just sat there in the black night, clutching the steering wheel, my head resting on my hands. The hogs had scattered. Lacey was out. Not even a coyote howling. It was just me and a trembling fear I couldn’t shake.
    I sat upright and looked at my hands. My worst fear wasn’t of wild hogs, psycho movie murderers, or MIPs. It wasn’t even the getting caught. All that seemed to disappear into the woods with the hogs. There was only one thing. The real fear. The worst fear.
    I tilted the rearview mirror and stared at my sister’s reflection.
    There was nothing I feared in the woods that scared me more than not being able to drum in the band—to make something of myself—and I’d hang on to drumming and the band with my teeth if I had to.
    I wasn’t going to stay stuck in the woods. Nothing could keep me from making it.
    I turned the lights back on and stepped out of the Bronco.
    The trees looked different in the night with their bark bright-lighted to an ash gray. I searched around, three-sixty, until I was certain the way to the highway was between the arching oaks. I hopped back into the Bronco and set out.
    About a hundred yards farther into the thicket, the trees began to thin, the canopy opened up to a broad star-filled sky. The storm front had pushed through. The clear night behind it breathed a soft blue moonlight onto the pasture ahead. I sucked in a deep breath. The curving highway, slick from the rain and shining like black glass, waited at the end of the trail like a shiny-shoed escort extending the bend of his arm.
    I pulled onto the road and exhaled. I could make it now. Dodged a bullet. The dream was still alive.

 
     
    10
     
    HANGING ON AND HANGING IN
     
    I steered with one hand, reached over the seat, and patted her leg.
    “Lacey, wake up.”
    She grumbled and began to stir, wrapping Levi’s shirt around her shoulders.
    “Get up and get yourself together. We’re almost home.” I took a right off the highway onto the blacktop county road. “I’m switching cars at the bridge by L. V.’s.”
    At the bottom of the hill, just before L. V.’s house, I spotted Lacey’s yellow Volkswagen. Paradise leaned against the side; Cal sat on the edge of the roadside out from under the trees. He had a piece of paper pressed on his leg and looked like he was trying to write by the moonlight.
    I drove