like a kitten, though we'd raced tons of people across the black freeways at more than twice the legal speed.
And I remembered Alice laying with me on the dark leather backseat. Somehow during the long cold night, my head had ended up against her granite neck. My closeness didn't seem to bother her at all, and I know it didn't bother me: her cool, hard skin was oddly comforting. The front of her thin cotton shirt was cold and damp, mostly with the tears that streamed from my eyes. Sleep evaded me throughout the night as my mind continued to torment me; my aching, red, sore, and sometimes-dry eyes strained open even as the night finally ended.
Dawn broke over a low peak somewhere in California. The gray light, streaking across the cloudless sky, stung my eyes. But I couldn't close them; when I did, the images that flashed all too vividly, like a slideshow behind my lids, were unbearable. Charlie's broken expression; Fredward's brutal snarl, teeth bared; Rosalie's filthy glare; the keen-eyed scrutiny of the tracker; the dead look in Fredward's eyes after he kissed me the last time... I couldn't stand to see the images twist and tumble. Couldn't stand to see Charlie's brutal snarl, teeth bared; Rosalie's keen-eyed dead look in eyes that weren't even hers; the tracker's broken eyes after he kissed me; and all the other things I saw behind these lids. So I fought against my weariness and the sun rose higher.
I was still awake when we came through a shallow mountain pass and the sun, behind us now, reflected off the tiled rooftops of the Valley of the Sun. I didn't have enough emotion left to be surprised that we'd made a three-day journey into one. I stared blankly at the wide, flat expanse laid out in front of me. Phoenix—the palm trees, scrubby creosote, haphazard lines of the intersecting palm trees, green swaths of swimming pools, turquoise smears of swimming pools

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Chapter 20

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