Hailey

      "That's some nephew you've got there, Georgia," Dale said, sizing me up like he hadn't been able to yesterday morning. Caleb pulled me right out of his sight line.

            "Do you look at all girls like that, or just ones you’re looking to throw in the back of your cop car?"

Caleb shot his mouth off like he’d walked in ready for a gunfight. Georgia flagged him down before he started more trouble than we could afford.

            "Caleb, Shut your mouth and sit down. Dale, this is the favor I called about last night.”

The cracks in Georgia’s voice gave away her desperation. She’d jumped into our problems and waded into the deep end even further than I understood at this point. Caleb and I had plans to leave on our own, without her help. She’d been generous but this was going too far, and she’d gone further than we could handle.

           “You didn’t say anything about fugitives, Georgia! Do you know who you’re dealing with here?” He said.

Dale practically spit across the table at Georgia’s gusto. He sounded about as round as he looked, sort of like a uniformed man made of tooth-picked together marshmallows. His eyelids turned down at the corners, which made him come across more helpless than a cop ever should.

            “They’re children, Dale. That’s who we’re dealing with. And as far as help’s concerned, you owe me a few favors. You know I wouldn't ask anythin' of you if I didn't need it. Now everybody calm down and eat, I didn’t cook the food for nothin’."

Georgia pulled out chairs for us at the table. My legs were so weak from the anxiety that sitting felt preferable to possibly passing out. Caleb sunk into his hard, wooden seat like he’d been forced into an interrogation. I held my breath just waiting for Georgia to explain something—anything would’ve been fine as long as it filled the suffocating quiet.

            "How’re the grits, Dale?”

            “Fine.”

            “The bacon?”

            “Fine.”

            “How’d you feel about taking these two to Charlottesville?”

Dale nearly choked on his breakfast.

            “You’re outta your mind, Georgia!”

          “C’mon Dale, they’re too beat up to walk it, and your car’ll get ‘em down there without any questions. You up for it or not?"

            "Up for it? Georgia, there's a federal warrant out for the both of em', and I'm on strict orders to arrest these two on sight. The state’s breathing down the captain’s neck, the captain’s breathing down my neck, so I gotta take em' in. When you asked me to come by to help you out this morning', I didn't think you'd be askin' me to lose my job!" 

Dale ran his fingers over the top of his head like there was still hair to stroke. Whenever he grimaced at something Georgia said his face turned tomato and crinkled in weird places. Every now and again, he’d look back and forth between Caleb and I, like he expected to see a more menacing Bonny and Clyde.

Whatever it was he'd believed about us from the police briefings died away the longer he stared, especially at Caleb. Even I still couldn’t figure out how a guy that skinny managed to walk from Manassas to somewhere near Midland in the shape he was in.

            "Your job, Dale? Who helped you get that job? Who put in a good word with the captain when the department didn't want the son of a drunk driver in the force? Dean did something for you, your daddy wouldn't even do."

Georgia and Dean were two pieces of the same puzzle after all. The two of them took in people the same way they took in Huck, selflessly and without judgment.           

            "I know, Georgia, I know. You and Dean did a lot for me, but I just can't do this. You know I've got a family, I can't risk everything I have for two kids in trouble."

            "Would you do it for your little girl, Dale? What if your daughter was out here like this? Wouldn't you be praying every night that somebody, somewhere had the decency to bring her back home to you safe?"

Dale dropped his spoon into his eggs, and stared at me like he wasn't seeing me but someone else. As much as he grumbled about trying to do his job, he still seemed human at the end of the day. His eyes changed when Georgia mentioned his daughter, like he loved her more than anything in the world, and, for a split second, I think he saw me and her as one in the same.

Not me as the girl worth however many grand, or a fast track to a front-page column story, but somebody else’s daughter. He had a soul left somewhere underneath that protect and serve star on his chest, he just needed to do a little searching for it.

            "Georgia, I—"

            "Just say you can, Dale. You owe it to Dean and you owe it to me. I'll ride with you and the kids, if you want. I'd take them in the truck myself, but we couldn’t make it past Culpepper with the kind of check points those state boys set up."

Dale shoveled spoonful after spoonful of grits into his mouth just to stall on answering. Georgia planted two plates down in front of Caleb and I, but the smell made me sick. The whole situation made me sick to the point where I couldn’t even stand to stomach her five star cooking.

Dale finished the last of his food, swallowed down a mouthful of coffee, and stood up and straightened his belt without saying a word. Georgia, Caleb, and I watched him walk halfway across the house, and open the front door before he stopped to drop the verdict.

            “I get off my shift at six, I’ll be back here ‘round then if we’re gonna go. Ya’ll comin’?”

I’d never seen so few words weigh down a man as much as those did Dale, but I was grateful to hear them. Terrified—but grateful. Georgia hurried us out of our chairs, and shooed us outside to thank him without stopping to clear the table.

            “If I lose my job for this, Georgia, you better be ready to help find me a new one."

            “If you lose your job, Dale, I’ll give you and your family the house and I’ll move out to the barn. Spit-on it?”

            “Deal.”

In D.C. nobody spits on anything, except the occasional politician. Georgia and Dale spit in their hands and shook on a crazy promise like it was a contract. For a second they felt a little bit like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, standing on the edge of risks bigger than they were, on the verge of discovering something. Whether that something was great or terrible was up to the road.

                                                                                ***

In what would’ve taken us nearly two days on foot, Dale drove in an hour and a half. We cruised through the last leg of winding pines, and there it was, Charlottesville. The city felt newly strange to me, still further away than my fingertips, like I was almost there but not quite.

The home I’d escaped to for so many summers, my college town heaven, suddenly felt ugly, final, like the last breath of possibility escaped into it’s mountain peaked skyline. We pulled off the twenty-nine south, and I felt like sprinting, like kicking open the cop car door, and running back into the middle of nowhere, back into my new sense of familiar.

But the door stayed shut, and the car stayed silent, and Caleb stayed stiller than I’d ever seen him, just staring at the window contemplating a future he couldn’t have.

 Dale pulled up Main Street, parked the car outside Mel’s Cafe, and kept the engine running.

            “Ten minutes, Georgia. I gotta get back, and unless you plan on walking home, keep it quick. Stay out of trouble kids, or less trouble, anyway.”

Georgia walked the two of us into the restaurant without saying a word to Dale and sat down across from us at a window booth. No one said anything for a while, ‘cause a strange kind of heartache stole the spark out of what was supposed to be an easy goodbye.

A curly-haired blonde with wet-paint-heavy make-up, moseyed over to our table. Her squeaky voice cut right through the melancholy.

            “Can I get ya’ll anything?”

            “Earplugs,” Caleb said, deadly serious. Georgia slapped him from across the table.

            “The Sugar Supreme waffle for these two will be fine. Nothing for me.”

Georgia did her best to smile off the sting of Caleb’s comment, but Squeaky couldn’t seem to recover her spunk after that. She waddled off in her cherry-red heels, click-clacking all the way back to the kitchen.

Caleb looked pissed, Georgia seemed vindicated, and everything almost seemed normal—but only almost.

            “If I don’t get goin’, Dale’s wife’ll never forgive me, so listen up kids.”

Georgia did her best to look teeth-and-nails-tough, even though every single one of us felt anything but.

            “Be careful, ya’ll. Caleb, don’t do anything stupid just ‘cause I’m not around to pop you, and Hailey, get yourself home, alright? Don’t talk to anymore police, don’t run anywhere else, or fall outta any bathtubs.”

Caleb turned red in the face. Guess I missed the punch line.

            “Just stay safe, you two. I’ll be prayin’.”

            “We’ll do our best, Georgia. Thank you for being you,” I said, hoping to blink the salty blur out of my eyes before it got the best of me.

            “Thank me later. Then I’ll know ya’ll made it out okay.”

Georgia slid towards the end of the booth, and slapped a twenty on the table. She gathered her things and stared at Caleb, who was staring at the menu.

            “Ain’t you got something to say, boy?”

            She hovered over his side of the table with her hand at the ready.

            “See you, I guess.”

            “That’s it?”

            “Yep.”

            “Not even a thank you?"

            “Thank you.”

Georgia hit the back of his head so hard a couple people at the bar turned around to see where the slap came from. She tipped her trucker hat, straightened out her glasses, and disappeared out of our lives as quickly as she’d come into it.

            “Squeaky Red Heels”, whose name turned out to be a completely accurate “Louisa-May”, served us our lukewarm waffle plate with a sour smile. Caleb ate without saying anything, just held on to the tips of my fingers under the table like he hoped the gesture was enough.

The quiet was stifling, the waffles sucked, but I tore through them anyway, hoping the over-sweetness of processed sugar was enough to fill more than an empty stomach.

After five minutes and fours sips of water, I was three-and-a-half bites away from having to go home. Three and a half bites away from walking the two-and-a- half miles through the almost woods and into my backyard.

Three and a half bites away from a goodbye I couldn't swallow, from Caleb making himself disappear into the back of a cop car, from the end of an unwanted day. The news worthy, whole-world-can-sleep-easy-resolution of my life as a kidnapping victim, waved at me from the other side of cinnamon syrup soaked waffles.

The idea of finishing made me sick, blow-Sugar-Supreme-chunks-kind-of-sick.

Sick because I couldn't get my head around the inevitable "the end", the emptiness of knowing there wouldn't be a Caleb with me tomorrow morning, and every morning for forever after that. Sick because of the terrible aching awkwardness of sleeping with him yesterday and never being able to again, but that was “justice.”

The happy ending for newscasters and a blind America, ‘cause to them, we were a mistake, a disease, a syndrome, a result of each other’s sadness, just fading headlines. We were fugitives, freaks, rebels, and examples of a crazed youth.

            Not two real people.

             Just stories.

Never mind the real me, never mind the real Caleb. We'd only be us for a few more hours. Time had become the great divider between us still being us, and us becoming CNN’s newest broadcast, some doctor's new basket case, and some prison's new jailbird.  

Three bites between us and the inevitable, us and our inevitable misconception. Well, fuck the inevitable. Fuck everything and everyone and every news station in America, and my Dad, and the cops, and the whole world.

 I threw my fork across the table so hard it left four little almost holes in the red fabric seat where Georgia wasn’t anymore. Caleb looked at me, his eyes over-the-top-full of what he couldn’t say, his hand warm and constant in mine, and smiled the most unforgivably gorgeous smile in the world.

He knew.

He understood my tableside sadness, my quiet rage, my fork across the table fuck you to the world, and our un-swallowable circumstances, and he kissed me.

Sugary Supreme all over his lips, syrup on his fingers, chocolate chips still on his tongue, and tears stashed away somewhere behind those beautiful grey-blues. We crashed against the waffle house window, feet and hands flying as far as the booth would let them.

Our whole table shook, the plates and glasses rattled, people turned around, the waitress shouted at us to stop, but we wouldn't stop.

Not even with the whole of Charlottesville watching, because this was us. This was everything. This was the story we wanted someone to remember. Even if it was only squeaky Louisa-May, server of the month with a voice like a fire alarm, at least she'd have a story to tell her kids tonight.

I hoped she’d rant to them about the two rowdy runaways who made out in the front booth of her restaurant, who she shouted herself hoarse just trying to stop. But they didn't, because they loved each other so desperately that they couldn't.

And that would be the only story, out of the thousands the papers would print after tomorrow that would still be true.

            Fingers crossed.