The bus terminal wouldn't do. They wanted money there… After walking a few blocks, Sonya found a coffee shop. It seemed like it would be a friendly place.
There was a line coming out the door, since it was morning rush hour. Sonya couldn't buy anything, but she could pretend she was going to. So she got in line.
A man stepped in line behind her. She smiled at him, but he frowned and looked at the ground. The person in front of her never turned around.
So this isn't a great place to mingle.
She left the line and meandered down the street.
Even though she was worried she might have lost Dmitri, or that he wasn't the person she hoped he was, or that he might hurt her, or someone else might hurt her, she still felt alive in a way she never had before.
Sonya had lived alone and supported herself, but had never felt as independent as she felt then. The danger, the uncertainty, the poverty. In a strange way, it all made her feel free.
Hmm, I'll ask for directions to New Jersey and maybe someone will offer me a ride, Sonya thought.
She walked up to a car with an open window and said hi to the driver. He didn't even look at her. He stared straight ahead like a zombie.
She walked to the next car and tried again, but the driver rolled up the window.
“It's a little early to be working, baby!” a man shouted at her from another car.
Omigod, they think I'm a hooker.I didn't think my outfit was that slutty, but it's so weird looking, everyone must assume I'm seeking attention. And these pants are pretty tight. Oh geez.
Sonya put her head down, blushed, and hurried away from the road. She went up to a newspaper stand and asked the elderly vendor how to get to New Jersey.
“New Jersey? Young lady, I don't think you should be… doing whatever you're doing. All sorts of crazy people out there.”
“I'm not, um, working. I had to borrow some old clothes and I have to get to New Jersey.
“Hmm. Well, my son runs the butcher shop right behind me. Go tell him I sent you. He makes deliveries across the river every morning.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Sonya talked to the man's son, and an hour later she was passing through the Lincoln Tunnel, then into New Jersey. He dropped her off at a gas station in Secaucus. There she found a trucker heading south down I-95, and she was on her way home.
Hitchhiking. I never thought I'd do that, let alone in New Jersey with a trucker. It's like being in a movie.
Everything lately has been like a movie, but most of it not like any movie I'd want to live… or even watch.
Now that she was settled in for the ride, her thoughts turned to the madness of the previous days:
So that's it? Dmitri gets pissed off about nothing so he has an excuse to leave me?
Maybe Halim read my diary and found out secrets about me, my dreams, my memories. Maybe he was spying on me like Dmitri said, but maybe Dmitri knows that because he was spying on me too, or he got all the info about me from Halim.
Maybe Dmitri went to my apartment himself after I left with Halim. He could have read my diary and my mom's letters. Dmitri could be Halim's spy. And he used that information, plus the things I told him, and whatever else he dug up from my past, he used it all to make up that crazy story.
Who knows? These guys are sick in the head. All of them.