Wandering Wild Read online

  “Tal.” Rona backs me into a shadowed spot between trailers.

  Wen keeps some distance and pretends to give us privacy. He’s looking at something. A brand-spanking-new RV I’ve never seen before is parked beside Boss’s. It must belong to Felix’s folks.

  “You are so smart you scare me sometimes,” says Rona. “I know you can spin this any way you want. This boy can be controlled if you play it right.”

  “Okay.” The word is so cold, I’m surprised she doesn’t shiver. I don’t want to control or be controlled. I want to be left alone.

  I follow her up the steps to Boss’s RV, Wen close behind me.

  “Finally,” says Lando, offering his arm to me as I stand in the doorway. “Our bride.”

  A boy gets to his feet. He’s broad and fair skinned, with slicked-back hair. Felix, I assume.

  “You must be Talia,” he says. “You’re prettier than they said.”

  I stare back, expecting Wen to laugh behind me, but all I hear is the generator running and the oscillating fan rustling an old magazine.

  “That was a compliment.” Felix winks. “I mean, I’m glad you’re pretty.”

  Rona digs her knuckle into my lower back. “Say thank you.”

  I say it, but my voice sounds distant and far away.

  They sit me down on the sofa. Felix sits so close he might as well be sitting on top of me.

  Boss is propped up in his wheelchair, wheezing into the clear tubes under his nostrils. My strength slips away, and I almost beg him to stop this. There was a time when he would’ve listened, a time when he adored me. A little bit of me loved him, too. All that changed when Lando got hold of the family bank.

  Felix knits his fingers together. “My parents are roving for a while. They sent me here with the last of the bride-price for Boss and to meet you, Talia.”

  “Tal,” I correct.

  He twiddles his thumbs in his lap. “But Talia’s a much prettier name. It’s more . . .”

  That’s when I zone out. He keeps talking with his hands, moving them in front of my face, widening his legs so his knee rubs against mine. I feel like I’ll never have any personal space again. I certainly won’t have my name.

  Everything becomes too much: Felix’s thigh hot against mine through his jeans. Wen blending in beside Lando. This is a con that’s spun out of my control.

  I stand and the room falls silent.

  The screen door creaks as I bust through it.

  Rona’s voice is distant as I run. “With the heat and all, she’s not feeling too great tonight. . . .”

  Everything whirls around me as I cut between the trees, all the dark leaves and bright spaces where the moonlight trickles between branches. The forest has to hide me and hide me well, at least until I can get my conning face back on.

  I slide my back down the rough bark of a tree and bury my face between my knees.

  Someone touches my shoulder. I jerk, but it’s only Wen.

  “I told the rest of them to stay. They listened.” He lowers into the leaves, his elbows balanced on his knees. “You can’t marry that jackass. He’s going to water down our genes.”

  Wen elbows me in the ribs, but I can’t smile.

  “We’ll leave,” he says.

  “Leave?” I laugh as I wipe away a runaway tear. “We don’t even have last names.”

  “We’ll get them. Me and you’ll pick one out and get all socially secured. Together.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy.”

  The road of the Wanderer is too wide, too dangerous for two to travel alone. The only way out is to settle somewhere. Thinking of my brother and me trapped in a small town like Cedar Falls makes me claustrophobic.

  “Tal, they won’t make you marry him until you turn eighteen.”

  But I’m not so sure. The fifteen months between now and my eighteenth birthday were my crutch, my time to get a plan together that would help keep all of me.

  “You’ll think of something,” Wen says. “You always do.”

  I don’t know about that. All I know is everything is going to change soon. That change isn’t going to be me marrying Felix.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lando finds me two days later while I’m transferring jugs of water from the bed of the truck into our tent trailer.

  “We need to have a little chat, Talia,” he says.

  Everything inside me twists on itself. “There’s nothing to say.”

  He grabs my wrist so hard I drop one of the plastic jugs. It cracks open, emptying water in loud glugs onto the pine-needled ground. “Sit.”

  A group of women two trailers down are loading baskets of laundry into the back of their truck. They cut their eyes at us but never stop working.

  I take a seat on the tailgate beside him, not because he’s hurting me—which he is—or because I have to—which I don’t—but because it’s easier to comply than fight about something as petty as him forcing a conversation. I’ll save my fight for when I need it most.

  Wen swore he didn’t tell a soul about my hustle going south in Pike. He swore nobody in camp knew.

  There’s only one reason Lando’s come around.

  Last night, when Felix came to my door carrying a twenty-four-count box of chocolate bars lifted from a convenience store, I shook my head.

  “Thanks, but I’m allergic to chocolate,” I said, though I’m sure he’d seen me eating s’mores around the campfire hours before.

  He turned a deep shade of red and muttered something about not knowing people could be allergic to chocolate.

  Wen bent beside me and watched Felix disappear between the trailers. “What’d you do that for?”

  “I’d rather starve than eat his chocolate.”

  Wen sighed in a mopey way that no other grown boy could pull off. “But I could have eaten the chocolate.”

  “Then get your own suitor.”

  Felix spent the rest of the night in his fancy, air-conditioned RV, playing electronic games that beeped louder than the crickets.

  Two nights he’s been in our camp, and I know that won’t be his last attempt.

  “You’ve been hurting Felix’s feelings,” Lando says now.

  “Good.”

  “Talia! That boy is gonna be your husband. You will love and honor him, and he will do the same to you. Marriage needs respect. Mutual respect.”

  “What if I won’t marry him?”

  “Your marriage has been contracted for years. They gave good money for you.”

  They bought me the same way they’d buy a truck, a sandwich, or a dog. “Give it back, then.”

  “You were barely walking when that boy’s parents paid for you. By the next year, it was spent.”

  A thought occurs to me. Boss won’t let me go. He won’t lose his compass. I hate to do this, but it’s my one card to play, my ace in the hole in a game I’m sure to lose. “They paid for me before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before Boss realized what I am. Surely that makes a difference.”

  “Oh.” Lando rubs through the stubble on his jaw and chuckles. “Our compass. You think you’ve got everyone fooled, don’t you? Well, that little arrangement will die alongside my father.”

  I glare, but heat flares in my chest, and I break eye contact, giving myself away.

  “You want to end the arrangement, Talia, you’ll have to pay back the bride-price. And I sure don’t think you can raise all that money. Paying us back would mean a lot of Wen’s blood spilled in the dirt, a lot of concussions. I’m not sure he’d survive it.”

  “We’ll leave.”

  “You’d really want to leave this life?”

  Of course. Lando’s in love with our way of living. Being Boss’s son gives him advantages—money and, most importantly, choices.

  “You can leave,” he says slowly. “The camp isn’t a prison. Once you’ve paid the bride-price, you’re free to go wherever the road takes you. You don’t pay it, though, and we’ll find you, wherever you go. One way
or another, you and Wen’ll pay it back.”

  “Exactly how much is my freedom going to cost me?”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  Twenty grand is a fortune. It might not be much to some, but I don’t measure it in dollars. Twenty thousand means over a hundred pool-hall hustles. At least four hundred picked pockets. Two thousand shortchanged clerks. It’s more money than I could ever scheme into my hands.

  “You’re so damn ungrateful,” he says into his collar.

  “What’d you say to me?”

  “I said you’re ungrateful.” He leaps off the truck and plants his hands on both sides of my hips, trapping me. “You know what’d happen to you and your brother out in the real world? No daddy? A mama who’s run off?” He squeezes his eyes closed, and his voice goes almost sad. “Look, we’ve given you a family. We’ve given you the whole world. This is a good life. You don’t know how good you’ve got it. All I ask in return is a contribution every now and then, a little fighting for entertainment, and none of your smart mouth. You’d do fine to make things work with Felix.” He removes his hands and rubs them together to brush the dirt from his skin. “You understand me, Talia?”

  It takes an immeasurable amount of restraint, but I say, “I think I do.”

  “Good girl.”

  The wheels of my mind turn ninety to nothing as Lando saunters between trailers. Now there’s no way I’m simply walking away from Felix, not without paying back the bride-price. It’s going to take more money than I’ve ever seen in one place and a scam so big it’ll come close to cracking my world open.

  But even if I die trying, I will buy my soul back.

  An hour after the last light fades, Wen and I creep out of our beds. Camp’s always been early to bed, early to rise. When power’s a limited resource, there isn’t much reason to get out of sync with the sun’s rhythm.

  That markie party’s probably only now starting to roar.

  In the dark, I fumble to open the cabinets, searching between blankets. Finally, I hook the smooth plastic.

  “You think Rona’s asleep yet?” asks Wen.

  “She’s got to be.”

  Earning every bit of the bride-price isn’t going to be easy with Rona keeping her gaze glued to us.

  We slide down to the linoleum floor and click on a dim flashlight. Wen opens the Cool Whip container, and together we dig into the money we’ve been stockpiling since I was thirteen and Wen was twelve. A ten here, a one or a five there, and the occasional twenty. We iron the bills against our pant legs, piling them in neat stacks until the tub is empty.

  I count first, flipping the dollars like a blackjack dealer with a deck of cards. As the last green bill falls, I groan. “Seven thousand, four hundred, and eighty-two dollars.”

  It’s not enough money, not for all the years we’ve been saving.

  “Well, that can’t be right,” Wen whispers.

  He counts after me, coming up with the same number. A little over seven grand. That’s all we have to show for enough scams to bring a blush to the cheeks of the most seasoned markie criminals.

  “There’s still the party,” he says.

  “We’ll make five hundred at most.”

  “Not if I push it. One good night and I could clear a thousand.”

  Pushing it’s risky, though, and Wen can’t get caught. Not again. “I don’t know. Remember Augusta?”

  There’s no way either of us will forget our stay in Augusta, Georgia. The camp had decided to head to Memphis to scalp fake tickets at a music festival where there was bound to be a ton of toureys. But Wen wanted to see the Grand Canyon.

  We left on our own journey before the sun came up. For two days, we felt freer than ever before—until the truck broke down, Wen tried to hot-wire the wrong car, and he ended up behind bars.

  “I’ll be smart about it, Tal. You work the room. Give me a signal if it starts getting hot.”

  Even if we do pull a thousand, there are still so many thousands to go. A fortune to Lando—and a bargain in exchange for me. Not that I’m conceited. My value’s got nothing to do with long hair or curves or full lips; it’s the simple fact I have a talent for the cons.

  Tonight, I need that talent more than ever, and the money, too.

  The combination of those needs is the surest way for a con to go to hell.

  CHAPTER 10

  We step through the front door of Whitney’s home, under a high foyer ceiling full of nothing but unused space. The wastefulness unsettles me, but Wen finds the bookshelves lining the hallway, and his eyes are heartsick. He’s in love.

  He runs his fingers along the spines. “Look at all these.”

  I give Wen a little shove toward the pulsing music inside. “You’ve got a job to do.”

  The glass coffee table is a sea of bottles, ashtrays, and bongs. Vodka, peach schnapps, weed, or cough syrup—it’s a pick-your-poison kind of affair. Whitney’s curled up on an L-shaped couch in the middle of the room, surrounded by a couple of girls and a pack of boys.

  “You came!” she yells, clapping her hands together. She leaps over the back of the couch in a short lilac dress with silver beads sewn along the bodice in a diamond pattern. “I didn’t think you’d come!”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I say.

  Even though Whitney and I spoke only for minutes, she hugs me. She pulls away and collects my hands into hers.

  “You look so pretty,” she coos.

  With dark waves swinging low on my back, my hair is perpetually tangled. Tonight I’ve gathered some pieces from around my face and secured them with bobby pins. Whitney homes in on my bracelet, silver poured in the shape of leaves linking together into a circle, and spins it around my tanned wrist. Wen and I saw it in the window of an antiques shop before my fifteenth birthday. I’m certain he bought it for me, which annoyed me, but to this day he swears he stole it.

  “Everyone, this is Rachel.” Whitney points around the party, calling off names I immediately forget, before she weaves her fingers with mine and guides me away from the couch. For nothing more than an instant, I’m a normal girl. “Drinks and snacks are in the kitchen. Bathroom’s down the hall. Oh, and poker’s in the den. If you play.”

  Oh, do I ever. But, no. I can’t let myself get distracted.

  “Now,” she says, “introduce me to that gorgeous brother of yours.”

  “This is my brother, Elliot.” I tilt my head, and Wen comes to my side. “Elliot, this is Whitney.”

  Wen leads Whitney away, like we’d planned, leaving me to work the room alone. This is Wen’s scam. I’m only along for support.

  There used to be three or four of us scamming a group of markies, sometimes Sonia, and sometimes Emil, too. Now that they’re married, Emil would prefer to have her mop his floor than run his cons.

  I miss her at my side.

  How with one glance across a crowded room, Sonia’d see in my eyes that the plan had to change. How she never strayed far from Wen if things got hot. Most of all, I miss her wild laughter as we pulled away from the scene of the crime.

  “For you.” A boy wearing a white visor with a little green alligator appears at my side with an open bottle of beer hanging limply from his hand. “I’m Craig.”

  “Rachel. I’ll get my own beer if it’s all the same to you.” Last thing I need is for Wen to put the brakes on the scam so he can cart my roofied ass back to camp.

  Over the hum of the music, he says, “Um, sure thing. Kitchen’s this way.”

  It’s my job to insert myself into the group, to become one of them, or make them think I’m just like them for a few hours. Craig is my ticket to the inner ranks.

  I collect a beer from the ice chest and head to the living room, where Wen already has Whitney and a few other girls crowded around him. With my back against the living room wall, I watch the scam unfold.

  Wen’s got that forbidden-fruit look in his eyes as he reaches inside his pocket. I read his lips: “You girls want to party?”

  �
�Isn’t that what we’re doing?” someone asks.

  “No, party-party.” It isn’t long before he utters the magic words: “You want some ecstasy? I’ll give you my special price.”

  This is how the ecstasy scam always goes down. Devious and delectable.

  Of course it’s not real ecstasy Wen’s pushing. If we were pushing drugs, we’d be dealers. Not that my delicate scruples would be offended. But if they were real drugs, there would be no scam, and if there’s no scam, there’s no rush. Plus, real ecstasy is expensive to buy and tricky as hell to make. And that would seriously cut into our time and bottom line.

  Wen passes the little baggies to the girls first. The green transfers from their sleek, manicured fingers into Wen’s shirt pocket. Others find their way to the couch to score—at least sixty people by my count. And, once again, we’re invincible.

  I run numbers in my head. If he sells it all, we’re one giant step closer to buying my life back. My body aches to walk over and count the money, make sure he’s not getting stiffed, but I can’t be a part of these transactions. It would be too suspicious.

  One of the girls presses her hand to his cheek. Wen isn’t exactly smooth when it comes to girls, but he gives her a small smile, a cute one. He’s coming up in the world, putting the con in confidence tonight. Most people don’t know that the con in con man comes from the term confidence man. It’s not that Wen is—confident, I mean—but he’s quite the actor when he needs to be.

  Craig reappears at my side. “Your brother’s the life of the party.”

  I smile and rest my fingertips on his bicep. “He should be careful. We hardly know you people.”

  “We’re cool. We’re cool,” says Craig. “So y’all cook it up yourselves?”

  “Of course not. What do I look like?” I take a sip of my beer. “A chemist?”

  With Craig close behind me, I walk out onto the deck.

  It’s crowded with people: flashes of skin, blurs of letterman jackets, stiff fabrics with labels reading, DRY CLEAN ONLY.

  I set my beer on the railing and lean over the edge. My stomach leaps into my throat as I look down. The house is built on the side of the hill, making the front one story and the back, two. The deck wraps around the upper level, stopping halfway up the trees here, and it’s far, far down to the ground.