In minutes, we’ve mixed in with the other tourist families while we search for the pathway that leads paying Belle Paris Hotel guests in and out of a special side door so they can access the private water taxi stop that takes vacationers to the parks. Thanks to the interactive online hotel website, one complete with trip advice from hundreds of customer reviews, I have every detail of this place and how it works, memorized.

For example, the water taxis run up and down a man-made canal every ten minutes or so. They’re free to anyone. It’s hop on, hop off, no questions asked, 8AM-midnight. They pick up at all hotels on the waterway then stop at the parks. They also cover the nearby outdoor shopping mall and even a mega water park. Plenty of places to get lost fast if needed.

After finding the pathway, it didn’t take long to find our way to the key-card access side entrance reserved for Belle Paris guests. In minutes a family came out, Sage and I caught the door before it shut, and walked right in. No problem.

This is a tactic we learned at other hotels after our money ran out. Because of my smaller size and young-looking face, it’s easier to pretend we’re just kids that have already checked-in to the hotel. Instead of entering front doors and being asked a bunch of questions we don’t want to answer, we simply act like a normal brother and sister walking around hotel hallways without our parents. That’s the easy part. The hard part is how we have to constantly pretend we’re relaxed and that we’re having fun just like everyone else.

Only we’re not having fun. This is life or death. For the last few days we’ve been sneaking into hotels to simply survive. We’ve been so stressed about it, about switching to sleeping in our car, worrying about food, and of course there’s the overall stress and worry we’ve carried ever since our dad went missing in action. It’s escalated to the point where Sage and I are exhausted, we’ve also forgotten what real fun feels like, that’s for sure.

But this job—this interview. It’s the turning point for us.

It has to be.

As we walk out of the long hallway that leads us past hotel room after hotel room and get to the edge of the main lobby, Sage gently bumps my shoulder to get my attention. “Robin, do you see any signs pointing to the complimentary breakfast buffet? I thought I’d start with filling my pack with anything that’s edible before going to the pool. This place must have awesome food compared to the highway hotels, huh? Maybe instead of just apples and bananas there’s blueberries and raspberries. But…hmm.” He taps his chin. “How to transport raspberries back to the car?”

“There isn’t a free breakfast buffet here,” I answer, marveling at the fancy velvet, crystal and marble that’s been used all over this place.

“What? No free breakfast? Why not?” His eyes go gumball-round as he, too, takes in the opulence of this hotel.

“From my research, five star hotels don’t seem to do free food.” I shrug. “Everyone simply buys breakfast. Who knows why, but it means more shifts for me to work, I guess.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He takes in the food buying, five-star-hotel kind of humans milling around as we enter the main part of the lobby. When he speaks again the buoyancy has left his voice, “That parking dude was right. We do not belong here. I kind of want to abort this mission. Do you? Should we?”

“Don’t be intimidated. It’s just another hotel. One with finer sheets and thicker carpets maybe, but the rest of it is just a…hotel. And we’re experts now. It’s got a pool. A business Center. Gift shop. Elevators and hallways, meeting rooms and maid carts. We’ve got this. Besides we can’t stop now. This hotel pool is the best yet.”

He nods his response, still frowning while gaping at the chandeliers.

At the threshold of the more crowded, atrium ‘check-in’ area of the lobby, we stop talking and paste on what I hope are confident expressions. Only, the place is so huge, shiny and sparkling it’s all we can do not to let our chins hit the floor even more. We’ve already spotted the entrance to the pool and are heading in that general direction, but along with the stream of other tourists, we pause to admire the fountains, the massive indoor orchid garden, as well as the cool fake river filled with very real fish cutting through the edge of the marble floors near the windows.

Even though things seem to be working and no one has said anything to us, when we reach the large open area in the center of the lobby, I’m finding it hard to breathe. That’s because I swear our Dollar-Rama flip-flops echo against the marble floors so loudly I feel like they’re setting off imposter alarms. Worse, I have this irrational idea that everyone’s suddenly staring. All I want to do is grab Sage’s hand and agree to his idea of a retreat. But we can’t. First, because our dad taught us to never retreat. And second, because we’ve come so far and risked so much for this.

Oh, and third: Because I have no other choice. Sage is counting on me.

During the first two nights of our three-day road trip here, we were paying guests in some normal hotels. Nothing like Belle Paris, but nice as far as we were concerned. Unfortunately, our budget didn’t consider the raised summer rates, or summer gas prices. Because I was paying cash instead of using reservations, I got stuck paying really high rack rates.

I also didn’t plan for the part where we were going to get robbed.

At the third hotel, someone must have seen the cash pile that I’d zipped into the front pocket of my wheeled suitcase. In the few minutes it took to walk Sage to get a soda from a vending machine and check out the pool, the cash was stolen, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Reporting it would have meant we’d have had to call the police. Police would’ve asked us questions about where we’re from, and about our parents just how everyone does. And questions like that will not be answered until I’m eighteen and I have a legal paper stating that Sage is to be my responsibility until our father comes home.

Luckily, the bastard who took the cash didn’t get all of it. I still had $146.75 in my pocket. Enough for the gas that got us all the way to Orlando, but not enough for much else. I mean to call our guardian, Joanie, the person we ran away from back in North Carolina as soon as we’re settled. And, of course I’d ask her for help if it got to that point. I think, aside from being pissed off at me for running away, she’d help us. But so far, we’ve been all right, and I don’t want to play that card unless it’s an absolute end-game emergency.

We didn’t run away because she was abusive, heck we aren’t even enemies. Not really. It’s just that Joanie and I simply have different ideas about how my life and Sage’s life are going to go. With my dad and her own husband missing as well—and both men missing for over a year, she’d decided she couldn’t keep extra teenagers in her house permanently. She’d decided she’d wanted to move on.

To bury her husband—all the way with a tombstone and a church service.

Sage and I refused to do the same with our dad, because we want to keep believing that everything is going to turn out fine. That he’s somewhere. Alive. We haven’t had word and we refuse to think anything but positive thoughts, which is why Joanie, Sage and I had been fighting so much.

Her idea was to put my brother into foster care after I moved out to start university in New York City after this summer.

My idea was that her idea sucked.

Sage agreed.

I told her that I was fully capable of taking care of my brother. I’ve always taken care of him, even before Dad went missing, but Joanie thought it was a bad idea. With things escalating to where Joanie and I were fighting more and more every day, and worse, she was about to go forward with her plan and call social services to figure out how to dump us, we bolted.

As much as I understand why she wants to move on with her life, I’m sure she understands why I ran away with Sage. Our father is not dead. He’s just missing. He will be back, and eventually, Joanie and I will work things out. I know we will, because she did give us a home for more than a year. Because she is the wife of our father’s best friend. Because, like I already said…they’re not dead, just missing. She’ll see that she was wrong, and in the meantime, I need to do what’s right for me and Sage.

Besides, so far, everything we’ve set out to do has worked perfectly.

Almost. Sort of perfectly, anyhow.

Like, maybe not how I pictured it working, but each time something goes off plan, a new thing appears to save us. Out of necessity—desperation, denial? I’ve shifted from being a control freak to doing that trust-the-universe, Jesus take the wheel kind of thing. And I know, I just know, everything is going to be okay.

I’ve already decided it’s for the best we wound up with no cash and stuck sleeping in our car. After our hotel stays, I realized that every single desk clerk is way too curious. They were always wondering, who we were, and asked us, where we were from, then mentioned how we both look so young to travel alone. And, of course, when you check out, they always asked, where we were going next. By the time the money was stolen, I was so paranoid there’d be police waiting for us in the lobby when we woke up that I was getting nonstop heartburn.

I never told Sage about my fears, or about the stolen cash. After the money disappeared, I told him we’d run out. Simple as that. He accepted my lie because he’s like my dad. Honorable to a fault. I know he assumes I don’t lie either, because that’s how Dad raised us. But until Sage is secure and there’s no chance he’ll be taken away from me, my world and who I’m supposed to be as a person has flipped upside down. I’ll lie my ass off every day of the week if needed to protect that kid. I’ll also sell my soul if it would keep Sage happy and with me.

So far he hasn’t complained once, nor has he asked to go back to Joanie’s house. He may be only in eighth grade, but he gets what being sent to foster care would mean. Pure hell, that’s what. And we’ve been living there since our dad went missing. Why go twice without fighting it?

Sage asked me once how I could put my scholarship and my dreams of being an artist on hold just for him. Without a blink I told him that art school could wait. and that I don’t care one bit about my dreams if it means he’s living with strangers.

We’ve never brought it up again, and I think that’s because he knows deep down that I do care some about pausing my university for him, and mostly we don’t bring it up because he feels so guilty. He thinks this is all somehow his fault when it’s not, it’s no one’s fault, it’s just what’s happening.

Ever since we started sleeping in our car, I haven’t been able to sleep. Sometimes thoughts creep in long after midnight when I’m feeling a little sorry for myself. I wonder what I would be doing if I weren’t trying to be Sage’s legal guardian. I also can’t stop envisioning how things would be if our dad had only come home as scheduled.

Sage would be running all over base hanging out with friends. I’d be working on my portfolio and painting every day, or sketching non-stop like I did before Dad went away. I’d also be hanging out with the friends I left behind. Friends who don’t even know yet that I’ve run away, because I lied to them, too. They think I’m missing the last week of school and graduation so we could go on this great trip to Hawaii. Maybe the endless churning in my stomach would be from excitement about what my dorm would be like, instead of related to how worried I am about Sage being hungry all the time.

I try not to think about any of that too long, though. Because when I do, I get disappointed in myself. How can I long for such trivial things when my dad may be someone’s prisoner, in a country no one will tell me about because what’s going on with our dad is still classified military information?

Sage and I have never discussed our fears about Dad out loud. Not once. I figure that’s because Sage and I are so very much alike. He probably has his own lists of longings, fears, and what-ifs that he’s swallowing down, too.

With Joanie planning her own husband’s memorial service in front of us while making the foster care topic a reality, we must have each decided without talking about it, that staying close to each other and taking off would be much easier than going to funerals and talking about what happens to our hearts if we don’t hear from our father soon.

In under one day I got the job interview at Belle Paris lined up, and Sage got everything we owned shoved into the car while Joanie worked late one afternoon. And that was it.

After we’d run out of money, Sage was the one who came up with the hotel-hopping idea. We discovered that if we didn’t hang around the hotels for too long, no one seemed to care what two extra kids were up to. The hotel clerks never knew if we checked in before they started work, or knew how long we were ‘staying’.

We’d pull up to the hotels that seemed the most crowded around 9AM, dash in the side doors as the guests came out to load their cars, grab breakfast, chat casually with employees or other guests, stockpile what we could carry to eat later, and then we’d drive down the highway. When we got tired, we’d find a park to hang out in, then after a while we’d locate another hotel, do the same entry method, but instead of breakfast we’d rest in pool lounge chairs, grab a nap and a swim. Sometimes we’ve showered in locker rooms to clean up, and even hopped on the business center computers to figure out which town down the road we could stop in next.

To make it so he and I didn’t feel like we were stealing, we said we were only borrowing things. We’ve kept a list of addresses, food eaten, and showers taken. Once I’m employed, I can pay it all back. And I will. I swear. We’re not stealing. We’re borrowing.

Sage pulls me out of my thoughts as he rubs the goose bumps the sudden blast of air conditioning has given his arms. “How could you want to work here? It’s so big. We don’t fit in here. It’s obvious.”

“The money’s going to be amazing. You’ll see.” I act like I’m not about to puke from my own ongoing surge of nervousness and I force a grin. “And who wants to fit in? I want to look like staff, not like a guest, right?”

“I guess.” Sage pulls the brim of his tattered ball cap low to hide his eyes and locks his thumbs under the straps of the ragged military-issue canvas backpack that was retired just before our Dad’s latest deployment. As much as I love it, it does make the kid stand out some. And he’s right. My polyester school-choir-uniform pants (the best I’ve got for an interview) seem like they’re shining in all the wrong ways thanks to the sun beaming in from the glass above. Even so, I go on with my pep talk, hoping he buys it: “Should anyone question you, one phone call can confirm you have a sister who’s at an interview. We’re golden, so when you’re by yourself, please don’t worry. Okay?”

“I’ll worry, but I’ll be okay. How about you don’t worry for once?”

I roll my eyes and don’t answer that, because he and I both know, me, not worrying is impossible.