Pretty Sly by Elisa Ludwig

supposed to be some kind of bandit. Sheesh.” He balled up his paper bag and stuffed it into his soda cup.
    “She’s probably sitting in there watching pay-perview,” I said. Though I was saying this more to myself than to Aidan. And in my heart of hearts, I sort of doubted it.
    She’d said she was in serious trouble. A fresh shot of panic thrust me upright. Where was my mom and who was she with? Time was ticking by as we sat here.
    “We should really get going,” I said, collecting all of our trash together and grabbing my bag.
    “As you wish.” He bowed and tipped an invisible chauffeur’s cap.
    We got back in the car and continued on. After a while we passed a sign for Coachella.
    “Have you ever been to the music fest?” he asked.
    “No, but I’ve always wanted to,” I said. “Have you?”
    He nodded. “It’s fun. Maybe we can go this year.” He didn’t look over.
    “Yeah,” I said, a tingling sensation spreading over me like static on a wire. He’s asking me out. Like, on a real date. “That would be cool.”
    Just then, the car flooded with blue and red lights, flashing and bouncing off the windshield. In the rearview mirror it was plain as day: a cop car speeding toward us.
    “Oh my God,” I said. “They found us. How fast are you going?”
    “I’m only doing sixty,” he said, glancing down at the speedometer.
    “It’s a fifty-five zone,” I said. “Slow down!”
    Aidan braked gently.
    Panic welled in my chest as I remembered the night I was taken to juvie. The cop advanced, shifting into the left lane, so that he was almost beside us. “Is he pullingus over? What should we do?”
    “I don’t know,” Aidan said, biting his lip. He glanced to his left and back again. “I don’t know if I could outrun him, not with this piece of junk.”
    The black-and-white car held steady with us, going window-to-window for a bit. I squeezed my eyes shut, preparing for Aidan to hit the gas or for the cop to push us to the shoulder. Something.
    But nothing happened. When I opened them again, the cop accelerated and zoomed forward, the lights pulsing out into the horizon.
    We both exhaled at the same time.
    “Holy crap,” Aidan said, wiping sweat from his hairline. “I thought we were toast.”
    I looked down and noticed that I’d been gripping the door handle so tightly the blood had drained from my hand.
    Aidan hit the gas and the car sped up again as we covered more ground that stood between us and whatever lay ahead.
    I pumped my fingers, trying to regain sensation in them. This whole situation was putting me on edge. My mom, the cops, the stolen car. Of course, being stuffed into a small metal box with Aidan Murphy was nerve-racking in its own way.
    “This is it, I think,” Aidan said, ducking his head to see through the windshield. “That says Hadley, right?”
    We’d been driving along the coast for some time, though in the dark we could barely see the ocean. Then Aidan turned off the highway onto a street with suburban homes. It was almost midnight as we reached the center of downtown Santa Barbara, and the Hadley Hotel was indeed straight ahead.
    With its bell towers and observatory, it looked like it had once been an old convent. Now it was the type of place that cost four hundred dollars a night to lounge around in a fluffy robe and order up shrimp cocktail, or whatever it was that people did in hotels. I personally never had the pleasure of staying in one. My mom, ever the free spirit, had always acted like she preferred cabins and campsites. Maybe that’s why she chose the Hadley, because it would be the last place anyone would expect to find her. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I might be the only person looking for her. We had no other family, and we’d moved so much she never really had any friends that I knew of.
    I watched as Aidan parked the car. My legs were thrumming against the faux-leather seats, and it was all I could do to not jump out of