Prologue
Sasha - Last Christmas Eve
I see him, but he doesn’t see me.
I’m practicing for the future. That’s how hunters work. You gotta be sneaky.
His friend, who I have seen before—but who ignores me like I’m dust—goes into the back room to meet my dad. It’s a gun run, so I don’t pay any attention to him. But this guy, the guy who looks like he could be a hunter, but whom I’ve never seen before, which makes it unlikely (though not impossible), that he is a hunter, stops to look at stuff after his friend tells him to wait.
He picks up a knife.
“That knife sucks,” I say from my seat across the aisle. “I wouldn’t buy that one.”
He checks the brand, then the blade. “Yeah, this is crap.” He puts it in the basket and I make my move.
I set my Little House book down and walk over to him. “Wanna see the good ones?” I ask. He turns and looks surprised that I got so close without him hearing me.
I’m good at being sneaky.
I show him the good knives and he looks at me like I’m weird. They all look at me like that once I let them into my world. They know I’m different. This guy—Ford, he says his name is—he knows I’m different. He jokes with me about grownup stuff. He laughs and listens to me when I help him shop for his mom and girl-who-is-a-friend. I gift-wrap his two presents, and while I do that, I realize something.
I’ve known almost from the moment he walked in that he’s a good guy.
His friend peeks out of the back room and tells Ford to leave. Things are getting complicated. My stomach does a little turn at that word. I don’t like it. I like things to be simple. Complicated is bad. I switch my frown to a smile before Ford catches it. “You have time for me to gift-wrap your knife.”
“It’s for me, Sasha. It doesn’t need to be gift-wrapped.”
“It’s like a present to yourself, Ford. Just go with it.”
He laughs. I keep my back to him and concentrate on my gift-wrapping as he asks why I’m working today.
Why am I working today?
Buddy, I think to myself, you would not believe me if I told you. I reach in my pocket and palm the little hard drive I took from my dad last night. He was drunk. My dad hardly ever gets drunk. And as much as I’d like to believe my Christmas Eve is going to end up with me sleeping soundly at my grandparents’ ranch tonight, I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s happening today.
When the hunters show up, bad things happen.
I pull the flash drive out of my pocket and slip it inside Ford’s knife box. When he opens this tomorrow, he’ll find an old battered piece of plastic covered in stickers. If he plugs the drive into his computer, he’ll see photographs. All my best moments in my short life.
And maybe that’s the end of it. Maybe he tucks it inside a drawer somewhere, laughing at the little girl up in Wyoming who got attached. Maybe he never thinks of it, or me, again.
I can only hope.
But I don’t think that’s what’s gonna happen.
I think that by the time this is all over, he might wish he never met me.