Tawny picks the rest of us up after school on Friday, when nobody will look twice at a car full of teenagers, and we get going immediately.

The trunk and the glove compartment are pre-stocked with food, mostly of the dried fruit and beef jerky variety, and all of the things we've been smuggling out of our houses for days: changes of clothes, blankets, toothpaste and deodorant and ibuprofen, and stuff we can sell (read: Brandon's factory-wiped phone and some of Crow's video games). None of us brought binders or textbooks to school today; our backpacks are full of things like toothbrushes and cell phone chargers that we couldn't go even a day without. Fey has her notebooks, Brandon has his Kindle, Crow has three pairs of earbuds, and all of us have all of the cash we could find, save, or steal. We've prepared for this for a while.

It doesn't take long for us to get out of town, and we all relax at least a little bit once we're outside of the city limits. Brandon offers to be DJ, plays generic pop songs that nobody loves but everyone except Crow is alright with, and Crow has his earbuds in so it doesn't matter what he thinks. There isn't enough space for all of us, so Squirrel and Crow (the only ones that will fit) are belted into the same seat.

Squirrel gets a text from her sister Leila twenty minutes in: what do i tell our parents when you dont come back from the church trip?

She reads it out loud to the rest of us. "Tell her to pretend she thought your parents kept you home," Storm says. "Your dad got weirdly restrictive a few weeks ago, right?"

Brandon can't even imagine Squirrel's dad being restrictive, but he supposes their standards are probably different. We agree that Storm's idea is a good one, and Squirrel texts her sister back.

"It doesn't have to last forever," Tawny reminds us. "It only has to last long enough for us to get a head start." We all know that already, and anyway it doesn't mean anything coming from Tawny because she lives with a family friend and doesn't have anyone on her trail, but none of us tell her so. We go back to listening to Brandon's pop music.

The day passes uneventfully. Squirrel and Crow get into three arguments over petty things, like whether pineapple belongs on pizza (Squirrel says it's delicious when it's done right, Crow says she's a heathen who's never had real pizza in her life) and the D&D alignments of all the rest of us (Crow thinks we're all chaotic good, Squirrel thinks Crow is clearly chaotic evil). There are six of us, so we go through half of the beef jerky, most of our water, and a solid but undefined portion of the dried fruit. When it gets dark Fey takes a turn driving so Tawny can rest, and we leave her alone in the front seat while the rest of us sleep.

Nobody is looking for us, yet. We've all made sure of that.

Brandon:

This whole thing was my idea. Maybe I shouldn't admit that, but I'm not my father, it's true and I'm saying it out loud.

I told my father that I was going on a school field trip, I went to the school library and printed out fake permission slips for him to sign and everything. He didn't want me to go — he hasn't been on speaking terms with my teacher since before I was born — but I said my grade depended on it and he signed the forms.

I told my teacher I was going on a family trip, I forged a note from my father and everything. He offered me a place to stay if I wanted to avoid my family — which was tempting, Lord it was, Rusty's treated me better than my father ever has — but I said it would be important and he said he understood.

Rusty and my father haven't been on speaking terms since before I was born. They aren't going to check with one another. And by the time the trips are supposed to be over, I'll be long gone.

Halfway through the second day, we've eaten all the food.

We have to get gas anyway, and Crow and Fey offer to go into the 7-11 and get us more food. "More beef jerky," Brandon says. "Something with caffeine. Not too much snack stuff, we only have so much cash." Crow rolls his eyes, but Fey agrees easily.

Tawny fills up the gas tank. We all use the bathroom and fill up water bottles in the sink. When Crow and Fey get back, Fey's holding a plastic bag that's barely full.

"Here's what we bought," she says, and pulls out a 5-Hour Energy Drink and a pack of gum.

We all stare. "...That's not a lot," Squirrel says.

Crow grins and empties his backpack. There's four bags of nuts, a soda, three more packages of beef jerky, and two candy bars. "And here's what we stole," he says, and even Squirrel looks impressed.

We eat well that night.

Crow:

The first time I ran away, I was five years old. I don't remember what it was about, I was too young for it to have been about school, but I took a blanket and a flashlight and six sandwiches and I stayed in my treehouse for two days before I went back home. I'd had a huge fight with my mom the night before, but when I got home she wasn't mad about the fight at all.

I kept doing it. Sometimes after fights with Mom, sometimes after not-so-great test grades, sometimes after a fight with a friend, back when I had friends that weren't Brandon's crew. I always came back, after a few days.

Thursday night, the day before we left, I got home late on purpose and gave some bullshit excuse. I haven't been caught stealing since I was seven, but Mom assumed I'd been doing something illegal — technically she wasn't wrong, but nobody has ever cared if you ignore the No Trespassing sign in the field behind the church and nobody ever will — and she blew up at me, exactly like I planned.

How long do you think it'll take everyone to realize I'm not coming back this time?

They look for the white girl first.

Part of it is that Squirrel is the only white girl — Crow and Fey and Storm can all pass for white if they have to, which is part of how we haven't been caught stealing food yet, but Squirrel is actually a pretty white girl who's gone missing. Part of it is that her excuse wore out the fastest; Leila played dumb when only she got home from the church trip, but that didn't stop her father Rusty from putting out a search for Squirrel and none of us thought for a single second that it would. Part of it is that the whole town knows and respects Rusty. The end result is the same: when Fey pulls up the website for our town newspaper, the only missing person is one Samantha Firestone, red hair green eyes 5'2", answers to Squirrel.

There's another text from Leila — i'm trying to get them to go east so i really hope you're going west — but we are going west, so it's fine. We go to a rest stop and have Squirrel take a selfie lying in the grass, which she puts on Instagram with the caption Hey from Ohio! when we're actually in Kansas, and we all cross our fingers.

It's not that much of a problem, Storm reminds us. We're way more worried about Brandon's family than we are about Squirrel's, and anyway there's no way that Rusty will recognize Tawny's car. Plus, they think Squirrel's in Ohio, which is a solid half-day's drive in the opposite direction from our hometown in Indiana.

Still, it's more than enough to put us all on edge.

Fey:

I wouldn't wish joint custody on anyone, but at least if you want out, it's easy to get out.

Our parents don't speak anymore. They didn't split me and Storm up, because we cried too much when we suggested it, but they wanted to, and I've never really forgiven them for that. So when I told our dad that we wanted to stay with Mom this week, and told our mom that we wanted to stay with Dad, they didn't question me. It helps to have a reputation for being a good, sweet kid.

It still isn't a reputation that I want, though. That's the other reason I left - nobody in this car looks at me weird when I swear. Nobody here thinks I'm endlessly patient so of course they get to demand whatever they want.

Fuck Indiana. I'm out.

We get our first message from Brandon's father at three in the morning on what is technically Monday, just after we cross the border into Colorado.

Brandon factory wiped his phone so it would be harder to track, so it's Tawny whose phone rings. She puts it on speaker before she answers, and before she has a chance to say anything we all hear Tiger say "Is your brother with you?"

"No," she says. Tawny pretty good at lying, but her voice shakes. "Why would he be?"

Tiger snarls on his end. "Tell him that if he isn't back in a week I'll track him down and make him wish he was never —" and that's where Tawny hangs up and powers off her phone so he can't call back.

Everyone knows about Tiger Claude Mason — it would be hard not to, in a town as small as ours — but whispered rumors about attempted murder when teachers aren't listening don't compare at all to seeing his son have a panic attack in the backseat because of a phone call.

Crow offers him a bar of chocolate (stolen from Safeway the day before, but the thought is there) and Storm wraps one arm over Brandon's shoulder.

Fey was driving fast before, but she drives even faster after that.

Tawny:

I got out of my father's house when I was eleven. I left my brother Brandon behind then, I still feel bad about that, but he was nine and he would have held me down and besides, I'm helping him out of there now. That counts for something. It has to count for something.

Back then, I went straight to Blake's house. At that point he'd already broken off his friendship with my dad, so I figured nobody in my family would look for me there and I was right. I'll say this for my father, he raised a smart group of kids. Blake never gave me shit for anything, not even wanting to leave now — just told me to be careful and have fun.

I'd missed my brother, is why I came. That doesn't seem like it should be enough but it's why. I got him out of Tiger's house - that counts for something, even though I left him behind back when we were kids, right?

Right?

We all took as much cash as we could, and we've been pretty good about not spending much, but by Utah we're running dangerously low on gas money.

Storm drives us to a town with a fountain, and all six of us go through the fountain for coins, but even after we repeat the process three times we don't have enough to be sustainable. We all look at each other for a moment, and then Brandon sighs and says, "Looks like we're doing more stealing."

At the next gas station, while Crow and Squirrel are inside stealing food, Fey goes up to the guy at the pump next to ours and flirts mercilessly. She's good at it, too, good enough that he doesn't notice when Tawny switches the pump with the gas he already paid for with our pump — until Crow and Squirrel get back with more than twenty dollars worth of food (which they paid less than two dollars for), and we drive off before he can yell at us.

He's pissed, we can tell that much from his expression in the rearview mirror, but he was driving a sports car so none of us feel too bad about it.

Squirrel:

I wasn't going to leave at first. I swear to God I was not. I love my family, I love my sister, I love my parents, I am perfectly alright with my life.

But. I'm not going to say I never fantasized about getting a bus to Indianapolis and going to the airport and getting a one-way ticket. I'm not going to pretend that Nowheresville, Indiana was enough for me. It wasn't.

When I found out Brandon was running away I didn't blame him. If I'd had Tiger Claude Mason for a father I'd run away too. But I didn't want to go with him until my father got way more restrictive — he started demanding my passwords when he never had before, looking through my desk drawers, generally breathing down my neck. I don't know what he was expecting to find, but when I found a tracker on my bike, that was the last straw.

I told him and Mom that I was going on a church trip with Leila, and then only Leila actually went. I knew full well they'd start looking for me as soon as she got home, but hey, two days is better than none, right?

When we get to California I'll ask Leila if she wants to join me. I don't miss the rest of them.

When we get past the California-Nevada border, we realize that our plans all centered on leaving Indiana, and none of us have any idea where in California we want to go.

We pause at a rest stop, examine maps on Crow and Storm and Squirrel's phones. Nobody really wants to go to Los Angeles, and also it's more than nine hours away, so that's right out, and the Bay Area gets shot down for its sky-high cost of living. After twenty minutes of arguing we agree on Chico, a mid-sized town in the Sierra Mountains, and suddenly we have a plan.

Storm:

I'm just here for my sister. They tried to separate us before, and I'm not letting it happen now.

We get to Chico at half past four on Wednesday, and the six of us tumbling out of the car feels like pure freedom.