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  “Yes, Art.” She nodded, her face softening.

  Art placed both hands on top of his stringy man-bun in distress. He still wore it that way even though his hairline seemed to be shrinking exponentially. His face crumpled, and he began to sob. Grace threw down the pillowcase and took him in her arms.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she cooed.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” Art blubbered. “I mean, cancer? I haven’t eaten a genetically modified food in decades!”

  “I know.”

  “Now I have to figure out a way to come up with tens of thousands of dollars to pay for them to pump me up with toxic chemicals and radiation so I can live? Are you kidding me?”

  “We will figure something out,” Grace said, rubbing his back.

  The Astralians had no official leader since Jimmy Joe James, but Grace, with her diplomatic ability to defuse any community conflict with her empathetic stare and soothing voice, had become the closest thing they had to one.

  “Um,” Genesis said quietly, making her presence in the shed known.

  Grace looked up from the hug. “Gen,” she breathed. “Hi.”

  “I . . . just . . . I wanted to throw my overalls in with the dirty stuff . . .”

  “Okay,” Grace said, turning to look back at Art. “First, can you do me a small favor, Gen? Can you go check the mail while me and Art finish up in here? I don’t think anyone has done that today. That would be such an important contribution, don’t you agree, Art?”

  Art nodded once and continued to sob, his face now nearly the same color as all the laundry. Genesis knew this was a nonsense ask for privacy; no one on the ranch regularly checked the mail. All it brought were bills and notices from the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. But still, she complied.

  As she stumbled into the midday sun and down the hill toward the ranch’s timber-and-iron gated entrance, Genesis could feel her lack of proper breakfast. When she first noticed a shiny red convertible in the distance, parked outside, she swore it must’ve been a low blood sugar–induced illusion.

  A woman emerged from the driver’s seat with wavy blonde hair and sunglasses almost as big as the handbag slung over her arm. Now Genesis knew she was hallucinating. She was picturing Ree Reaps again.

  “Hey!” the woman called from behind the gate, waving her arm.

  Genesis looked over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, you!” the woman said with a smile.

  Genesis began to walk the several yards toward her. As she got closer, the woman flipped her sunglasses up onto her head and squinted at Genesis. Her eyebrows and lips were painted on almost like she was a cartoon. It wasn’t Ree Reaps, Genesis quickly realized; she’d watched her “Five-Minute Makeup Look for Mamas on the Go!” tutorial three times and knew she’d never be so heavy handed.

  “Can I help you?” Genesis asked the woman from her side of the gate, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  Just then, she noticed a big, muscular guy in a black polo shirt emerging from the passenger side of the convertible.

  “Oh, Gary, stay put. It’s fine. I told you it’d be fine,” the woman said, reaching her palm out toward him to stop. “I’m sure this nice young lady isn’t dangerous,” she said in a stage whisper, rolling her eyes. “Old news, Gary! Anyway, hi. Do you happen to know the owner of this property?”

  “Um, well, there isn’t really one owner. We all kind of own it, I guess,” Genesis said, squeezing her hands inside her overall pockets.

  “Hmmm,” the woman pondered, pursing her lips. “Interesting.”

  She reached into her enormous leather handbag, which Genesis could now make out was patterned in letters of brown and gold. She didn’t know what they meant, but she was sure it was something expensive.

  “Ah! Here we go,” the woman said, finally brandishing a manila folder from the bag. “Okay, so see, according to county records, this land was purchased in 1999 by a woman by the name of Grace Ogilvy.”

  She pointed to the name on what looked like a photocopy of an official-looking document with a red-polished fingernail.

  “Do you know this Ms. Ogilvy?” she pressed.

  Genesis’s stomach dropped. She didn’t know a Grace Ogilvy, but she knew a Grace Astralian, the only person named Grace on the ranch. She’d never known what her legal name was before she dropped it, like all devoted members did upon joining.

  Genesis just shook her head. The woman stared at her critically for a moment before putting a friendly face back on.

  “Huh. All right. Well, you know what, honey? Why don’t I just give you my card, and you can pass it along and see if anyone else knows Ms. Ogilvy?” she asked, reaching back into her bag. “And if you find her, you tell her my client is looking to make a veeeerrrry generous offer for her property.”

  She took out a small white card from a bedazzled metal case and handed it to Genesis through the gate with a wink.

  Faith Johnson

  Licensed Real Estate Agent

  Community Development, Hope Harvest Church

  Genesis let out a small gasp. Despite living just a few miles from the church, she had never met any of its members in the flesh.

  Blessings, Genesis thought as she watched the convertible speed away, leaving behind a cloud of dust. B-L-E-S-S-I-N-G-S!

  2

  HOLLY

  Holly hadn’t planned to lie to her friends about where she was going for the summer. Like the other lies she told them, it just kind of slipped out.

  The first domino fell on the first dress-down day of Holly’s first year at Hawthorne Prep. She had been struggling to make friends for weeks at her new fancy private school when Marissa Roberts complimented her shirt and asked where it was from. Holly told her she bought it at Brandy Melville, when in reality she’d thrifted it from Savers for three dollars because that was all her mom could afford. When Marissa invited her out to a fancy sushi restaurant with the rest of the group, Holly only ordered green tea, and when they asked why, she said she was vegan even though her favorite food was cheese. When they all turned sixteen and got gifted Teslas, she invented a fear of driving though she’d actually passed her license exam on the first try after practicing in her stepdad’s used Kia.

  After a childhood of moving around and never having a best friend aside from her own mom, Holly was now fitting in (she even got to stop lying about her secondhand clothes once the other girls decided thrifting was cool, though they certainly weren’t doing it out of necessity). She planned on keeping things that way, hoping no one ever got close enough to her to find out her whole life was a construct.

  The more lies she told, the worse the truth became. Now she was hiding more than the reality of her family’s finances, and she didn’t have a single friend she could confide in about it.

  So there it was: I’m going away this summer. To visit my dad. Um, in Iceland. I know, soooo random. Yeah. He’s Icelandic. That’s why my hair’s so blonde. I’m half Icelandic.

  As she stared at the Bridger Range from outside Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, she wondered if her friends would be able to tell the difference between these peaks and valleys and the Icelandic ones if she took a picture and posted it to Instagram. Maybe if she added a blueish filter? This was her stupidest lie yet. She considered not posting anything all summer, and if they asked why, she would say it was because an international phone plan was too expensive. But besides making her look cheap, wouldn’t that make them question how she was still able to answer their texts?

  A pickup trunk honked a few feet away from Holly, interrupting her brainstorm on how to dig herself out of this hole of her own making. She looked up and realized it was her dad waving to her through the window of a Ford F-150. He got out and walked around the front of the car.

  “Hey. How was the flight?” Danny asked, giving her an
awkward one-armed hug.

  “Good. How was the drive?”

  “Good.”

  He smiled at her and blinked twice, then reached for her suitcase and placed it in the back of the truck. Conversation was never his strength, but in texts and emails he’d sounded enthusiastic about her visit, even venturing to use a smile emoji once or twice. He’d told her how he’d stopped working in construction to run the town diner he’d inherited from his uncle. Holly had a hard time imagining this; one of her few vivid memories from visiting Violet was his terrible cooking.

  They headed out to drive the remaining two hours north to Violet, listening to the staticky local oldies radio station.

  “So, uh, do you want to talk about what happened?” Danny asked her after about forty-five minutes, staring straight ahead at the road.

  “Not really, if I’m being honest,” she said, giving him a tentative glance.

  “Maybe some other time.” His shoulders relaxed; he was relieved, as if he could cross off his one fatherly task of the year from his to-do list.

  By late afternoon, they passed the NOW ENTERING VIOLET sign and turned down Main Street.

  “You know, the town’s changed a lot since you were a kid,” Danny said, giving her a glance. “Might never compete with Los Angeles, but they sure as hell are trying.”

  Holly sat up in her seat, craning her head out the window and feeling like she had stumbled onto the set of a Hallmark movie.

  The space where the run-down pharmacy used to be had been transformed into something proclaiming itself an “all-American gastropub.” The soda fountain next door had been turned into a coffee shop with a sandwich board out front advertising matcha lattes and avocado toast. What used to be a discount appliance depot was now piled high with a display of faux-distressed signs that said words like FAMILY and FAITH. One space looked like a knockoff version of the chain of blow-dry bars where her mom, Courtney, used to work; through the windows, Holly could see a row of women having their hair stretched and curled into identical styles. The sidewalks were full of people and strollers. Most of the women wore either floral-print dresses or jumpsuits that went to their ankles.

  Most baffling of all, the massive marquee above the movie theater, which frustrated Holly as a child because it was always showing movies she’d seen three years previously and never the hottest Pixar movie of the summer, was no longer advertising showtimes for films, just “Sunday Services.”

  “Wait, wasn’t that the gum factory?” Holly asked, pointing in the distance toward a now-repurposed industrial warehouse with an enormous sign out front that read HOPE HARVEST II EST. 2017. A group of girls about her age took a selfie in front of it. Holly subconsciously slumped in her seat.

  “Yep,” Danny nodded. “The Reaps family bought it a few years after the accident. Turned it into some kind of church slash store slash restaurant slash who knows what . . .”

  “Who are the Reaps family?” she pressed.

  “You remember that church near the highway overpass?”

  “Kind of.” She didn’t.

  “Well, that’s been there for years. Your grandparents used to go every Sunday. But, uh, Pastor Reaps’s son took over a few years ago, and him and his wife . . . they’re trying to make Violet this . . . this . . . Jesus-themed Disneyland. Basically.”

  Holly raised her eyebrows. “Well, at least that’s good for the diner. You must get a lot more business now, right?”

  Danny just frowned. As they pulled into the diner parking lot toward the end of Main Street, the answer was clear. There were only two cars, and the restaurant’s vintage metal exterior was rusting—a beacon of authentic distress unlike all the reproductions being sold down the street.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Holly said, though suddenly she had lost her appetite.

  When they went inside, there were a couple of old men drinking coffee at the counter and a family sitting in the corner booth, getting yelled at by their waitress.

  “Sir, I can’t tell you what each of the nine grains are. We don’t bake it on the premises,” she said in a raspy voice. “All I know is we offer four kinds of toast: white, wheat, rye, and nine grain.” The waitress paused and splayed her fingers to count the varieties. “If you’re uncomfortable consuming a bread of which you do not know all the ingredients, I suggest you order one of our three other toast options to accompany your meal, which I might add, includes eggs, bacon, pancakes, coffee, and juice. Realistically, you’re not even gonna get to the toast. It’s too much food. People order this every day. I swear I dump their uneaten toast in the trash about seventy-five percent of the time—”

  The dad raised his palms. “Hey, now what kind of hospitality is this, young lady?”

  The waitress let out one humorless laugh. “You want hospitality? Go down the street and pay eighteen dollars for eggs, see if I care!”

  Danny pinched the bridge of his nose and rushed over to the table.

  “Zoe, let me handle this. Um, sorry about that. The grains in the bread are . . . wheat, barley, rye, quinoa, millet, oat, uh . . . shoot . . .”

  The man’s wife slapped her laminated menu on the table. “You know what? We are just going to go down the street. The only reason we came to this dump was because the wait over there was too long, but now I can see why it’s worth it. Expect a lengthy Yelp review from us later. C’mon, kids.” The family filed out of the booth and left.

  “Danny, I’m sorry,” Zoe said, turning toward him. “They were just totally being a pain in my you-know-what.”

  She was a lot younger-looking than her voice let on she and Holly had to be about the same age. Her unnaturally red hair was in a ponytail with jagged short bangs across her forehead, and eyeliner was smudged around her eyes. She wore multiple earrings up and down her ear and a pin on her apron that said JESUS DIED FOR MY SINS! WHAT AN IDIOT! I WOULD NOT DIE FOR HIM!

  “That’s the third time this week, Zoe,” Danny whined. “And you’re wearing the pin?!”

  “What? It’s just a joke!” Zoe exclaimed.

  “You know I don’t personally have a problem with it, but we’ve at least got to, you know, sing for our supper with this crowd, if you get what I mean.”

  “Oh my god!” Zoe blurted out, completely ignoring him. “Holly!”

  She jumped up and swung her arms around her. Holly’s shoulders stiffened, but she reciprocated.

  “Uh, hey,” she said.

  Zoe pulled out of the hug.

  “You totally don’t remember me, do you?” she asked with hurt eyes. “We used to play together in my kiddie pool and braid each other’s hair. All these years I’ve considered you my best friend, and now you’re back . . .”

  Holly’s mouth gaped. “Well, now that you mention it, um—”

  “I’m kidding! I’m totally kidding, oh my god, you looked so freaked out,” Zoe said, playfully swatting her arm with her order pad. “Anyway, it’s so good to have you back in town. I know Danny’s been looking forward to having you here. Hasn’t shut up about it for weeks!”

  Danny shifted uncomfortably. “Holly, what can I get you to eat?” he asked.

  “Um, I don’t know. What’s your specialty here?”

  “Hmm. That’s a good question . . .” Danny pondered for a few seconds, making it clear that this was more of an existential inquiry than Holly had intended.

  “How about some pie?” Zoe interjected. “That’s my favorite.”

  “Pie. Yes,” Danny said, looking dazed and walking toward the swinging kitchen door. “You two catch up. I have to check on some things in the back. Be careful around this one, Holly,” he called over his shoulder. “She’s a bad influence.”

  Zoe stuck out her tongue, then gestured for Holly to take a seat at one of the battered red vinyl stools lining the counter and made her way around to the other side. Holly
felt so instantly welcomed that it took on the reverse effect of making her uncomfortable; she wasn’t used to people being so unabashedly friendly. At home she sometimes felt like she was in a contest with her friends for who could be the least earnest.

  “Do you want me to be honest with you?” Zoe asked in a low voice, opening the pie case on the counter.

  “Okay,” Holly said skeptically.

  “The pie is the only good thing we serve here. And Danny doesn’t even make it. We get them from the Astralians.”

  “Australia?!”

  “No, Astralian without the u. Danny’s told you about them, right?”

  “Wait, like that cult?”

  “Yep. Jimmy Joe James was hot, but he was so bad at names. And following the law, I guess. Anyway, they bring us milk, eggs, and bread too. The eggs are good, but only if Danny or Arnold, the line cook, doesn’t burn them. Which they both tend to do,” Zoe said, scooping up a piece of apple pie with a cutter and putting it on a plate. “Whipped cream?”

  “No thanks,” Holly answered. “I didn’t even know the Astralians still existed.”

  “Yeah, they’re just, like, old hippie farmers now,” Zoe said, sliding the pie across the counter. “Then again, I don’t know. They homeschool their kids and everyone wears purple and they only move around in packs. Like, who knows what trafficking ring they could be running right under our noses?” She paused to stare out the window. “Though I’d take that over whatever the hell is happening out there. My dad freaking died in that gum factory, and now Ree Reaps is selling inspirational plaques inside of it! Totally tasteless.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry,” Holly murmured, staring at her pie, her mouth going dry.

  Zoe shrugged. “It’s fine. I was little when it happened. But, hey, enough about me. What brings you here this summer of all summers?”

  Holly thought about telling Zoe the truth; she seemed like the type of person who didn’t judge. Or, at least, didn’t judge people she liked. There was a high chance if Holly told her what she’d done, Zoe would write off Holly as a spoiled brat. Anyway, she decided opening up to Zoe would be admitting that she was her real peer, the actual type of person who could relate to her, not the girls with shiny hair back in LA.