Lorraine.
            Lorry had to crawl the way they do in the army, to get through the hole in the inner chain-link fence. Her growing belly made her thicker. A fragile cushion she needed to protect. She whispered a thanks to Marcus, who must have cut through it last night, just the way he said he would. No option to climb it with those spirals of razor wire.
            She’d stuffed all her clothes under the blanket on her vacant cot to look like her sleeping self, leaving her only what she had on, a pair of scrubs and a T-shirt with the smiley Joy House horse head on it. Moving around was the only thing keeping her warm on this frosty night. The flashlight on her phone would have helped but that was the first thing they confiscated when she entered two months ago. Grand Raymond’s scroll that hung on the cafeteria wall started with number one, “Be a right thinker and leave the evil world behind.”
            Now she had to find the hole in the outer fence, ten feet away from the inner one. Between them they’d let the brush and briars take over, probably thinking no girl would be foolish enough to get caught there. But Lorry knew how to part the prickly ash, ignore the nettles and make her way over the tangles of raspberry canes that could rip into her thighs and never break.
            An owl hooted overhead, so close she jumped, and then laughed silently at herself. She who loved the woods, should not be spooked by a barred owl.
            She went prone again to crawl along the outer fence, a few feet one way, then the other, logging up more scratches on her arms face, ankles. No hole. It had to be somewhere or he couldn’t have made that cut in the inner fence.
            Her heart amped up, but at least no guards to hear it. They wouldn’t know she was missing till morning. Try again, maybe she’d gone too fast and missed it. She could take all night. Damn her throat was dry.
            Out there, headlights on the road, beyond a long mowed area. They didn’t have yard lights panning around like in a prison, so she’d be able to walk across it, like she was enjoying a night walk on the grounds of a park. Marcus would be parked out there waiting. That was the plan. But why hadn’t she thought to ask him to come to the fence so she could find the hole?
            Something was digging in the ground nearby. Awfully late for a squirrel. Raccoon maybe, hunting for grubs. No skunk smell. Then a chittering sound, and that nailed it, a coon, like the ones she’d hear on walks in the woods when she needed to escape the farmhouse where her parents argued over money, crops, or what to do about her bad behavior.
            Maybe it had found a disturbance where digging was easier. She moved towards it but not too close. A cornered coon could do a lot of damage.
Too late. The fence clanged like it was throwing its body against it and the chittering became snarls and hisses. Too hard to back up in the brambles, so she threw her arms in front of her face, and told herself to lie still, it was only trying to defend itself. When its claws slashed into her arms screams volcanoed up in her throat but she willed them to stay there.
           She waited while the hisses turned back to chitters and the coon went back to digging. It must have found plenty to eat because by the time it ambled away she was shivering from being so still and the blood had stopped dribbling down her bare arms.
            When the coon’s chatter faded to nothing, she lifted her head and moved forward. It had dug deep into the earth, making the passage Marcus had cut in the fence easier to scramble under. She touched her deepest cut, still oozing something, and enjoyed the pain. A good trade for the coon’s favors, finding and improving her escape.
            On the other side she stood up, cradled her injured arms against the cold, and looked for Marcus on his borrowed motorcycle. Not there. Her numb legs refused to work, until she commanded them to stumble along the fence-line. The clear moonless night sucked the heat right out of the ground and everything that walked on it.
            Marcus was plan A, and she didn’t have a plan B. Hard enough to arrange this in the first place, and it only happened because Level One Sentinel Penelope looked the other way while Lorry borrowed her phone to send texts. If anyone found out, they’d bust Penny to Third Class Cleanup, or even kick her out.
            Maybe he was just late. If only she could talk to him. There was no one else. If her parents found out they’d send her back, the way they sent her there in the first place.
           The open space they kept mowed around the compound stretched out before her like the emptiness between stars, but she had no choice. Here on the peninsula the only way out was the narrow strip of land that was mostly highway. If a police car stopped, maybe she could pretend she was practicing for the track team, and loved to come out to the peninsula at night. Right. They’d know she was from Joy House, and were used sending escapees back.
            She imagined a summer beach and tried for a casual stroll, but it was hard to walk slowly with such a distance to cover. The stars helped, and she stared at Orion and Sirius to distract her, and to make it look like she was an ordinary star gazer.
            On the road finally, she kept on going till it joined the main highway, where the land became a narrow strip with the ocean right down there on both sides, not far off the shoulders. An occasional pair of headlights made her stop and look toward the ocean, like it was the most ordinary thing to gaze up at the stars with the waves pounding on the rocks down below. She longed for a single headlight.
            Should she give up and try to hitchhike? A scratched up ragged creature no one would suspect of being an escapee, sure. Morning would be too late. They’d go out searching by then, the way they did for Natalie last month. Grand Raymond in his golden robes made her stand in front of him in the great barn with her shirt down around her waist, shivering her penance. She didn’t die, but she never could make herself warm anymore, not with the biggest jackets in the old tack shop.
            If Lorry returned now on her own volition, she might not have to stand naked in front of him with her swelling belly. But she might, and maybe lose the baby under the stress. Of course, that wouldn’t bother Raymond who had made her sign a paper to give her daughter away anyway. Her own parents signed papers too, to force her to carry the child and then toss it away like so much garbage. They probably wished they’d done that with her.
            Where was Marcus?

Marcus
            Marcus always went to bed late, with all the homework he had to catch up with after his job at Bike Works, so by the time he wheeled his Honda out of the driveway his parents had been asleep for hours. It wasn’t till he was half way down the block that he started the engine.
            He’d already smuggled Dad’s bolt cutters from his basement workshop, and now he squeezed them under his arm while he sped out to the peninsula road. Lorry needed him. On the road near the fences he found a dark driveway to hide his bike, and walked across the open lawn, concealing the long-handled cutters against his torso.
            Because he had Googled how to cut through a cyclone fence by cutting a vertical line link by link and then pulling them apart. The first hole went well, but then he had to get through a bunch of brambles. Damn, she didn’t tell him about that. Still, the fact that they could communicate at all was a miracle. He almost didn’t believe the message on his phone from that unknown number, until she signed off with their secret greeting, “corn meal mushroom love.” He’d erased it as soon as he responded with a date and a promise to pick her up, in case his phone got into the hands of his dad, who didn’t approve of a girl who’d run away from her upstanding parents again and again.
            He made a hole in the inner fence after he plowed through the brambles, which was the hardest part of the job, but he thought he was trapped when he couldn’t find the first hole. God, it should be opposite the inner one. It took so much time the sky was beginning to lighten and he had no time to stomp down the brush to make it easier for Lorry.
            He made it home before anyone knew he was gone. But he couldn’t sleep, thinking about how they’d pull it off the next night.

Lorraine
            She put out her thumb, what else could she do? A car slowed down to a stop and her heart ticked up double when she made herself walk to the open door.
            “Can you take me into town? My car broke down.” It was the first thing that came to her mind.
            A man’s voice, that sounded kind, unless she just wished it to be.
            “You look cold, forget a jacket?”
            The warmth inside smoothed her, until he asked, “Can I take you to your home?”
            No way, her parents would send her right back.
            “If you could take me to 307 Oak, that’d be great.” Marcus’s house was 310, close enough. But she couldn’t knock on his door either.
            “Fine, but I need to make a stop for gas.”
            Her plan to ask to use his phone would be a giveaway that she was a phoneless Joy House inmate. When they stopped at Fast Fuel, she went straight to the rest room, and then up front asked the clerk if she could borrow his phone. A young guy, not much older than her, gave her his phone and she made a call to Marcus. But he didn’t answer so she could only leave a message.
            “Please M, it’s me,” but she only had time for “mushroom.” I’m at Fast Fuel but have to get away, will be on the highway looking for your headlight.”
            Then she raced out, catching a glance at her ride making a call in front of the donut aisle. Great, he was probably calling Joy House right now.
            She made it out beyond the lights of the gas station, and dove into the wind break hedge that was thick enough to conceal her.

Marcus
            This was the night. But when he left the house, his father was there sitting on his bike, with the bolt cutters in his hands, moving the handles out and in, in slo- mo.
            Still, he tried, “Just going out for a walk before I start calc homework.”
            “Nice try Marcus, but who do you think I am?”
            Dad had found the cutters on the wrong peg in the workshop. “We can’t let you throw your life away like this young man.”
            Marcus started on his feigned walk, and then ran. Since he was in track and his dad was 44, he got away, but how could he go back? Dad would lock him out of the house. Four blocks away he considered, how to tell Lorry he’d be late, or maybe not there at all. He could still get there, with another bike, so he kept on running till he got to the shop. A trusted employee, he had a key, and hopped onto an old Ducati he’d been working on.
            Out on the highway, his blood kept him warm, though nothing else did. He drove the peninsula highway, to the road near the fences with their holes, and waited. Lorry wouldn’t have a phone, but he automatically fished for his anyway, and found her message.
            Oh my God, he drove right past her without knowing, how did he miss her? Well, he wasn’t looking then. He raced back to the gas station, and then slowed down on the highway going back to the mainland, looking at every bush.
            Was that her, walking along like an injured deer?
            She turned, he stopped, she got on, they sped away.
            But a van raced up behind them, searchlight and all. Not the police. They kept on with the van at their heels, for hours it felt like. He had gas and her arms around his waist.

Lorraine
            They’d caught her, what was the sense of driving on? But Marcus did, and kept on till he got to a road that wound up into the hills. Oh she had the right man, and hugged him all the harder trying not to think if he was noticing that new cushion on her belly.
            Not even a Joy House van could keep up when they really started to climb. On they went while the searchlight faded behind them. Miles and miles, on till morning.
            When he pulled into another Fast Fuel, she could finally give him a real hug and speak to him. “My cornmeal mushroom, we did it.”
            She’d often seen his tears after a motorcycle ride, all that wind brings it on especially with no goggles. But they kept on coming. “We have to keep you out of there.”
            He had enough cash for one of those dying motels way off the main road, in a little town nearly as dead. She began to believe her words. But she had to say something about her bulging middle when they crawled into bed. Yes, pregnant.
            His? he asked. “Of course.”
            She hoped it was true. She was much too far along for it to be Level Two Sentinel Jasper’s who cornered her the day she arrived at Joy House four months ago, wasn’t she?
            Later she’d tell him about that, but not tonight.

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Mary Lewis has an MFA from Augsburg University. Her nominations in 2023 are: Pushcart, Best of the Net Anthology, the Best American Series. Antigonish Review, Cleaver Magazine, Inscape, North American Review, Sensitive Skin, Superstition Review, Wordrunner, and The Woven Tale Press.