Blood on My Hands

pleased with myself, although it does make me wonder where this talent for subterfuge comes from. When did I learn to be so devious?
    Just then a police car shoots past.
    When he wasn’t fighting with Sebastian, Dad tended to be quiet. He worked long hours and when he came home at night, he always had a couple of drinks and watched TV. On the weekends he worked around the house or watched sports. Mom and I got to be pretty good at tiptoeing around him.
    When I first started running on the cross-country team, I asked him to come to one of my meets, but he always had excuses to explain why he couldn’t. Mom would come to watch if she could.
    Once, in the car, going home, I asked her if Dad had played any sports in high school.
    “Tennis,” she said.
    “Seriously?” I said. I’d never heard him mention that, and I’d never seen a tennis racket or a tennis ball anywhere in our house. “So he stopped?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “How come?”
    “You’ll have to ask him,”
    Mom said. But I never did.
    The police car stops in front of the store where I bought the ice cream. As the officer gets out, the counterman I thought I so cleverly fooled comes out to the sidewalk and points in my direction.
    By the time the officer gets back into the police car and makes a U-turn, I’ve scooted out of the park and am crouching down behind a Big Brothers clothing bin in the parking lot next door. But I know I can’t stay here, or anywhere around town. I’ve been spotted and I have to believe that other officers are coming. There’s a rusty chain-link fence at the back of the parking lot with a hole just large enough for me to squeeze through, onto the property that’s part of the middle school.
    Moments later I’m cutting through the school parking lot, keeping low and weaving between the parked cars, feeling as if the Earth’s gravity has just doubled and is pressing heavily on me and making it more difficult to go forward. I’m weighed down by self-doubt. Where do I go? Where can I hide this time?
    The sudden descent from overconfidence to no confidence leaves me scared, anxious, all alone in the parking lot, and all alone in the world. I’m dirty, smelly, and tired, and I don’t want to hide again. I don’t want to be by myself anymore. I feel so insignificant and worthless that I might just curl up in a fetal position right here between the parked cars and wait to be discovered and arrested and sent to jail forever. Maybe they’ll put me in the Fishkill Correctional Facility, the same place as Sebastian. The notorious Carsons—brother-and-sister murder-and-mayhem team.
    No, I forgot. Prisons aren’t coed.
    I hear shouting from the field behind the school. It sounds like an after-school soccer game. I know it’s crazy, but right now I need those voices, ordinary people around me—otherwise I’m going to implode.
    Sure enough, there’s a soccer game in progress. The sidelines are filled with parents and families. The soccer field borders on a marshy area thick with tall reeds. I join the cheering crowd on the side nearest the reeds, in case I have to make a dash for freedom, and stand where I’m both part of the crowd and slightly apart from it. I just have to cling to the hope that no one is going to think that a girl on the run would be standing around watching a soccer game.
    At first I’m so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I’m only vaguely aware that it’s a girls’ soccer game. But gradually I realize that they’re not only girls but girls about the same size and age of Alyssa, Slade’s little sister.
    And there she is, racing around the field, her brown ponytail bouncing. I quickly glance down the sideline to see if Slade’s here. There’s no sign of him on this side of the field and I look across to the people lining the other side. Oh my God! He’s partway down the field, yelling encouragement. The pendulum of my emotions swings back toward elation, and the next thing I know, I’ve walked down the sideline until I’m directly across from him. Each time his eyes move in my direction, I raise my hand to shoulder height and softly wave.
    But he’s too involved in the game to notice. It’s driving me crazy. I want to run all the way around the field and into his arms, but I might just as well start shouting to everyone that the girl the police are looking for is here.
    I wave again and this time his eyes stay on me. His eyebrows dip, then shoot upward as if they’re going to rocket right