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After she sees the ghost, she packs up and leaves.
Her father is twelve kinds of furious, all rage and worry mixed up into one mess that Lori doesn’t know where to start with.
She can’t stay here. She doesn’t know how, but she knows that Rich’s death, Taylor’s death, her father’s attack - that’s on her. She knows it like she knows her own name.
There’s blood on her hands here in this small town. She can’t move back in with the girls – none of them will even look at her. Taylor’s face, staring up at the ceiling blank and gone, blood all around her, dripping onto the floor – that's not something she can face.
So, she leaves.
It’s not well thought out, her plan, more motivated by the need to get out than to get anywhere in particular. But anywhere is better than the blood she left in Ankeny.
She uses her father’s old busted up car that’s not going to last her as long as she needs but that’s a hurdle she’ll jump when she reaches it. She le a ves her father in the dust, with his affair and his hypocrisy, and she takes her choice with her.
Lori Sorenson is not the reverend’s daughter in the middle of nowhere Iowa. She is not some pompous, stuck up bitch as the other girls say . She’s not a murderer as the town people say. Lori is just another person on the road. There is nothing special to her, there’s nothing different about her from the next person.
It's exhilarating, and it's everything she doesn't want.
The first day, she drives until the tank is nearly empty and her eyes are drooping and Taylor’s voice is harsh in her ears, whispering and whispering until she pulls over. Taylor’s voice disappears along with the cut of the engine. She cries in her car, parked in some parking lot in a town she doesn’t know the name off.
She is as nameless as the town – they both have o ne but no one cares to learn it.
The first night, she gathers the meagre amount of cash that she had saved from her job in Ankeny and the little bit more she’d scrounged out from her father. It will last her a week or two, but her cash suppl y is not endless. She knows how to wait tables, and she plans to use that . Lori will get through this. She will survive.
The receptionist doesn’t spare her a glance. Rough hands take the cash and work through the motions like a well-oiled machine that hasn’t known anything different. Her name badge says Amy. Amy will not remember Lori beyond this moment. She means nothing to Amy beyond a profit.
It settles her, like an icepack on hot skin . She’ll live when she’s ready, make herself memorable when she wants to be.
For once, it is her choice.
The third night, she dreams of Rich. He doesn’t say anything to her. He stands on the road, the moon lights his face, glowing. He smiles at her , all soft and fond like she didn’t get him killed.
She prefers it when he screams at her, claws at her like a wild animal. At least those dreams make sense.
She picks up work here and there at the desperate diners she spots as she passes through town after town. She tells them a different name each time, testing out the words on her tongue like a new flavour of ice crea m.
She can’t go back to being the person that she was. The person that left Ankeny bathed in blood and pain. She left behind a wake of destruction and a trail of dead bodies of people who didn’t deserve to go the way they did.
Today, her name badge says Marci and the colleagues she works alongside know Marci, not Lori and not the blood that co ats her fingers.
She thinks she should be scared how easy she falls into a pattern, how names fall off her tongue like she believes that’s who she is , how she bribes a mechanic into helping her learn how an engine works, how she drifts between places and people and barely gets a glance. She can pull herself upright and smile and laugh and talk and capture someone’s attention so easily, or she can drift in the background like a plastic bag getting caught around people’s feet in the push of the wind .
She meets him two years after Ankeny. He looks as different as she feels. He’s bigger than when they met in Ankeny , more muscle and scars then when she was filled with rage she didn’t know what to do with and when blood was still wet on her hands.
She feels old, and he looks ancient.
Sam, Lori says. Her uniform for this diner is too big for her, stained and worn, and the name tag says Julie and Sam’s credit card has Billy stamped into the plastic like it define s him .
He looks up at her from where he’s crammed into a booth alone , old weary eyes, skin youthful and full.
Lori, he says .
Two people filled with lies and pain, false names and a story that’s convenient for the moment. She thinks, as they talk rushed and quiet, he is meaner th an she knows, the old scars that litter his hands speak to violence that she can never understand – and yet she is colder than he knows, all her soft edges are worn down to rough and chipped and damaged.
In another world, she thinks they could have been something. In a world where Lori is not a lost and bloodied veteran of violence she doesn’t understand and where Sam doesn’t hold himself like a soldier and his eyes don't hold so much agony .
They hold each other’s gazes, chattering about meaningless topics as she works until Sam is drawn away by whatever monsters lay in wait for him outside the diner's doors.
She scrawls her number on a napkin, and he writes his own on her hand in gentle strokes .
They won’t work in this world; they won’t get any further than furtive glances and the careless hope of a one-night stand .
For him, it will end bloody. For her, it will end quietly.
But they both will end unknown.