The Girl Who Would Be King(28)

Trying to sleep in the car, I can’t help but fantasize about meeting Jasper for the first time again. My mind races. He’s 24. Will I recognize him as I recognized his voice? Will he recognize me? Does he still blame me for the accident? Did he ever? Will he forgive me?



•

I can’t read Adrian’s face. It’s a bunch of percentages of things like surprise, fear, love, and hate, but it doesn’t add up to a hundred percent and no one emotion seems to be winning.

“Lola?” he says, holding his arm and staring at me. I can’t believe he can’t smell the blood. It’s all I can smell.

“Adrian,” I say, dropping my head, resigned but unhappy about it. I realize now I’ve been playing mental roulette in my head ‘if he doesn’t show up, I let him go. If he shows he’s gotta die,’ that kinda thing. He still doesn’t appear to see the carnage around him, and there’s still no romantic reunion   to celebrate the fact that I’m not dead. What the hell does a girl have to do to get a movie style happy-ish ending?

I’m not prepared to die a third time for it.

Adrian sees the gun in my hand and finally notices the chaos of the room. You wouldn’t think it would take long to process four dead bodies in a room, but I like to think his happiness to see me makes him a little extra slow, heaven knows he wasn’t that quick to begin with.

“What…what have you done?”

“What have I done? What have I done?! You’ve got to be kidding me. You people left me for dead once and then killed me again before dumping me in the desert and stealing all my shit, I’m pretty sure I’m on the high moral ground here. This is practically self-defense at this point, and if it’s not then it’s at least like, justifiable homicide.” I watch him taking stock of the room, and his relief is obvious when he doesn’t see Felice’s body among the carnage. “Don’t get your hopes up Adrian – I did her first,” I say, my voice hard and flat. His face falls.

“Lola, are you going to kill me too?” His eyes have that puppy dog look that I’d first fallen for, but I raise the gun and point it at him anyway.

“I’ll make it fast, okay?” I offer softly. He starts to cry a little bit, which actually annoys me, but I can’t deny that my hand is shaking, which has never happened before, not since getting my powers, and really not even when I killed Delia. He closes his eyes.

“Okay,” he says, his voice trying to hide a tremble, his cheeks wet. That kinda kills me, that he says that. It’s much better than trying to appeal to me with a last ditch ‘I love you, Lola’ (though that would have been nice to hear, truth be told). I can’t help but admire the fact that he isn’t begging, isn’t stooping, isn’t trying to play me. At the last second, I turn the gun and shoot him in the meaty bit of his thigh, instead of between the eyes. I’m out the skylight with my bag of loot before he’s had a chance to scream.

If anyone were to ask me if I cried into my helmet as I was leaving Vegas I would have said no, but I did. Adrian broke my heart and I’m surprised that it had been so easy for him to do. Just because I am the way I am, and I am as strong as I am, I guess doesn’t mean I’m totally invulnerable. I like to think it also means that maybe I’m not as bad as I always think I am inside. If I can care about Adrian, enough to make his betrayal something worth crying over, then maybe I’m not as broken as I thought. I don’t know how I feel about that.

So I just ride the motorcycle faster and try to leave all of it in my dust. I’ll be in Los Angeles in a few hours and all of this nonsense will be behind me. Perhaps that’s the only way to get rid of these feelings, to ride away from them, to leave them with the carnage – I certainly don’t know what to do with them if I hold onto them.

I don’t make it to L.A., not even close actually. I stop 90 miles outside of Vegas, in this shitty little town called Baker, which is famous for this giant kind of run-down-looking thermometer. Apparently, it’s the largest in the world, or the U.S., or something. It’s super-unimpressive and I blow right past it and into the nearest convenience store. My hands had been shaking on the road and I’m telling myself it’s from hunger. Anything so long as it’s not me feeling bad about the slaughter I left in my wake back in Vegas. I’m trying to not let it get to me, but it’s really the first time that I’ve just bathed in blood. And my hands are shaking.

So what.

After using the surprisingly clean bathroom at a 76 station I grab a diet coke and stalk the aisles for junk food. I barely look at what I’m grabbing, just picking up handfuls of the most brightly-colored packages until my arms are nearly full. At the register I drop the armload on the counter, save for one package of cupcakes, which I rip open with my teeth while still balancing the diet coke in my other hand. The cashier has her back partly to me and her feet up on a stool, a cell phone glued to her ear. She’s snapping her gum and talking at the same time, which should be impossible, but apparently isn’t. I’m not really in a hurry and my eyes are still hungry so I run my hands across more shiny packages of sugar and eavesdrop.