-runaway Love - Alexis Love- Veronique Vega- Lindsey Meadows- Kis- Official

“Get back here or I’m calling the cops! You know you’re not allowed to leave the property!”

The bus doors closed with a pneumatic sigh. The engine growled to life.

Alexis felt a flutter of something that felt dangerously like hope. She’d learned not to trust hope. Hope was a shiny thing that Meadows would snatch away and sell for a bottle of cheap wine.

Veronique knew. She’d been there a year longer than Alexis. That’s why she had the plan. “Get back here or I’m calling the cops

The bus hissed to a stop. The three of them moved as one, a small, ragged army. They weren't friends, not in the beginning. They were just three girls who shared a bathroom with a moldy curtain and a terror of the dark hallway. But fear had forged them into something harder. Sisters of the road.

For the first hour, no one spoke. The bus was filled with the drone of the engine and the soft rustle of other runaways, other ghosts. Veronique leaned her head on Alexis’s shoulder and finally let out a shaky breath she’d been holding for two years.

The runaway was over. The living was about to begin. Alexis felt a flutter of something that felt

Lindsey Meadows stood at the edge of the parking lot, her pink bathrobe flapping in the wind, her dyed-blonde hair a wet mop on her head. She looked less like a predator and more like a furious, wet cat. Behind her, Dwayne’s truck’s headlights blazed.

The rain was a thin, cold curtain over the Greyhound station. Alexis Love clutched the strap of her duffel bag, her knuckles white. Beside her, Veronique Vega adjusted the brim of her stolen baseball cap, scanning the flickering neon signs of the all-night diner across the street.

Alexis dug into her duffel bag and pulled out a crumpled photograph. It was of a woman who looked like her, but older, sadder. Her mother, before the drugs, before the disappearances. Alexis kissed the photo and tucked it back. Veronique knew

She wasn’t being dramatic. The group home on Mulholland Drive had been a gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless. Alexis had aged out of the foster system six months ago, only to find herself shuffled into a “transitional living” facility run by a woman named Meadows. Lindsey Meadows had the smile of a televangelist and the cold, calculating eyes of a loan shark. She took their government checks, skimmed their meager paychecks from the warehouse jobs she forced them to take, and called it “life skills training.”

Alexis didn’t look back. She grabbed Veronique’s arm and pulled her up the steps.

“Alexis! Veronique! Don’t you dare!”