“Back in” meant away from the border towns. Back to the major cities, where the money was a little easier to come by. They always got so close. “Once we get to Canada, we’ll lead an honest life,” he would tell her. But he didn’t know what honest meant.
Lucky wanted to scream; she wanted to cry. Lately she’d been feeling this way more and more. Like the world didn’t make sense—like her world didn’t make sense. No other kids lived like this. She knew it. And she was done.
She tried all her tricks to get the tears to stop threatening, but nothing worked. One trickled down her left cheek. And while she was distracted by that, her father grabbed a hank of her long, curly, waving flag of hair, and snip—it was lying there like a dead animal on the floor. “Was that so bad? Easy-peasy.”
She jumped from the bed. “How dare you?” she shouted, and he flinched.
“Keep it down, for heaven’s sake! I told you, we’re in trouble.”
“We’re always in trouble. Always, always, always!”
He shrugged, because there was nothing to say to that. They were always in trouble because they were trouble.
She glanced at the door then. There was a tingling in her fingers and in her bare toes, and there was that word singing through her head. Run. She thought of the vast forest that started just behind the rooming house, how cool and green the mossy floor of the woods would feel on her feet. She could eat berries and bark to survive. She could hide in a tree, and he’d never find her.
Run, run, run. She turned, she opened the door, and she ran before her father realized what she was doing. She would do it all by herself. She would go to Canada. She didn’t need anyone. Least of all him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lucky took the stairs, all twenty flights down, and exited the Bellagio through a back door into the heat of the Las Vegas morning. She found a dumpster and disposed of the bag containing her hair and cell phone, and the passports. She had flushed her SIM card down the toilet upstairs.
She pressed her large sunglasses against her face, hitched up her backpack, and walked out onto the sidewalk, into the teeming mass of tourists on the Vegas strip. She ducked into a shop and browsed the T-shirts, found a pink one that said Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas and a matching baseball cap.
“Do you have a changing room I could use?”
She closed the door, ripped the tags off a hot pink belt bag, and put it in her backpack.
Next, she went to a Duane Reade, bought rust-brown lipstick, the wrong shade of foundation, and mouse-gray eye shadow.
Then she found a coffee shop bathroom, where she layered the makeup on, smudging a little lipstick on her teeth. After, as she walked down the strip again, she felt her body tighten and her muscles coil defensively. She couldn’t help but brace herself. For someone to start shouting her other name. For a firm hand to clamp down on her shoulder and tell her she was under arrest.
Eventually, she reached her destination: she was at the Bellagio again. As she walked through the ornate front doors and toward the casino’s security, as the sounds of the slot machines grew louder and the air grew still and cool instead of desert dry, as she thought of the young pimply poker player from the night before and the new strategy she would employ to connive him, she felt her fear give way to anticipation. It rose through her body like fizz in a champagne flute and curdled her stomach.
She headed over to the bar, where she ordered a diet cola on the rocks with lime. “No rum, no rye, no vodka?” the bartender asked, one eyebrow raised.
“No, thank you,” Bonnie Skinner said. “I abstain from liquor. I’m just parched, though, from this desert heat, except too much soda gives me the—” She patted her belly and grimaced; the bartender looked away. “So I like it in the little glasses.” The bartender started polishing snifters, and she smiled down at the bar top. She’d done it; she’d managed to turn herself into a woman people barely noticed.
Lucky wandered away from the bar and through the slots area, her drink in hand, listening to the endless barrage of money going in and money coming out. The house always won; she knew that. But it wasn’t the house she was interested in.
She kept moving, pursing her lips and squinting at different machines as if trying to decide on the right one for her, but not landing on one. The sound of the slot machines was an endless, swirling ka-ching. She walked toward the green-clad tables for blackjack, roulette, craps, baccarat, and finally poker, where she’d been the night before. She stopped when she reached that last table. There was a rail around it, a table in the middle, penned in. She leaned against the rail. Four men were playing the game. As she approached, one of them stood, shook his head in frustration, and left. Two of the remaining men—one late-middle-aged, the other one younger, with greasy black hair in a ponytail—were hunched over their cards as if their lives depended on it.
The third player was the person Lucky was looking for—the pimply kid from the night before, still wearing the same clothes. She’d expected she might have to wait around for him for a while, but here he was, looking like he hadn’t slept yet. He sat in the same relaxed position she remembered, hands folded over his cards. He leaned forward and raised. The two men at the table met his bet. The black-haired man raised, the middle-aged man folded, and the pimply young man smiled. Then he did something she had noticed the night before, too: he touched a medallion around his neck. She peered at it, but from this distance she was unable to tell what was engraved on it.
“All in,” he said.
Players fell in and out over the next hour. The kid won every time. Lucky leaned against the rail, pretending to be rapt.
Eventually the kid checked his watch. “Time for my afternoon siesta,” he said to the dealer, sliding chips across the table as a tip. Lucky counted them: seven.