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I listened to my mother’s voice over a video posted on Facebook.
“Louisa,” she said, “please come home. It’s been three days since we last saw you. We all miss you. We want you back again. Louisa, please come home.”
Who leaves something like that online after they found their daughter? I guess she wants everyone to keep feeling sorry for her. The next time I leave, the press will find it and then it will be all over the internet that I was a “troubled girl” with a “history of running away.” Don’t worry. That’s coming.
I didn’t decide to leave all of a sudden. I had been planning it for a long time. I bought a burner phone in cash so that no one would be able to use the signal from my usual phone to track me. Anyway, I needed the new phone to be able to look up stuff about stealing. No one on TikTok shoplifts any more, it’s all about picking pockets. I just needed to get hold of someone’s wallet long enough to make a couple of purchases on their bank card. I knew that within two to three hours they would notice something was wrong and cancel the card, but that would give me long enough to get as far away as I wanted to be.
Carol still won’t shut up about it. I knew she wouldn’t, because I planned it for the day before her wedding. She had the wedding anyway. She was still on her honeymoon in Barbados when they found me three weeks later. That’s because there was one bad minute. Paul saw me. Paul always lived next door to us. Carol hates him more than she hates me. My mother never liked him either. No one at school liked Paul. I didn’t have an opinion about him before, but now I have to say I agree with everyone else. He’s the one who told the police I was missing.
They were using facial recognition software or something to track me down. I had expected that, too. I knew that anywhere in public my face would be all over CCTV, so I was using prosthetics. I had to get the train to Crain a couple of times to buy stuff from a specialist costume store. There was no way to do it online without being traced.
I cycled to the station and left my bike in some alleyway. Then I bought a round-trip ticket to Crain. That would make them think I was coming back, so they wouldn’t start looking for me too quickly. At the Urban Outfitters in Crain, I bought a few clothes that had been all over social media for weeks. There must be thousands of 19-year-old girls, fair-haired, my height and weight. Some of them would be wearing this exact same outfit they’d been seeing on their feed constantly for the last week and a half, at least until the next trend came along tomorrow. I dropped my old phone into a trash can outside the store. At first I thought of throwing it into a river or something, but then it occurred to me that the contents of the can would end up on a garbage truck somewhere. If anyone was trying to track me from the GPS on my phone, that would serve as a nice distraction for a few hours.
Then I took a train to Chandler. That’s where I’d been heading all along. I changed my face in the toilet aboard the train. But by the time I arrived, the police already knew where I was. Paul was using a drone or something. He’d programmed it to look for me. I know it can’t have been the first time he did that. Who did he test his system on? Was it me, or someone else? I’m sure he’ll have no end of internship offers after this. At least they haven't connected me to the missing bank card, otherwise I wouldn't be coming home for a long time.
It’s not like it was in the 19th century when you could just walk two towns over and change your name to John Mousefather. Or Lois Taylor. That was the name I was going to use. Maybe it sounds a little too obvious, but then, I took the chance that no one would think I would choose a name so similar to my old one. It had to sound familiar for me too, so that I would act natural, as if it had been my name all my life.
My parents aren’t really glad to have me at home with them again. Carol said, “I know you would never have meant to spoil my wedding.” She knows that’s exactly what I wanted. At least, at that time it was. When the police brought me back, I realized all I wanted was to stay. I wanted to stay so much that I felt like hanging on to the stair rail and screaming. Even if I did, though, it’s not the same now. Things won’t go back to the way they were, and I spent weeks preparing to run away. All that time and effort will just be wasted if I don’t make it come to something. Nothing is hard to do unless you get upset or excited about it.
I’m gone.