Chapter Text
There’s stranger things on a Saturday morning than you’d ever imagine.
Like a baby-blue van covered in stickers and flowers, zigzagging through traffic as if chased by ghosts.
Inside it, four “kids”, though only one of them still technically is. Amyrah, nineteen, blonde and bossy, a hand gripping the wheel. She’s muttering under her breath about parking tickets. Beside her, Kyle clings to the dash like it’s a lifeboat. In the back, Chloe and her little sister Marie (eighteen and fourteen) are holding onto anything they can so they don’t “fly away,” as Marie dramatically puts it.
Amyrah zigzags through Saturday traffic with the kind of ease that looks practiced; one hand on the wheel, the other fidgeting with a necklace she never takes off. The van is ridiculous and loud and impossible: two floors crammed with stickers, lilac paint, hand-drawn flowers on the windows.
They’ve just lost the traffic police when Marie gasps.
“There’s a dead girl on the side of the road.”
Amyrah almost laughs, almost... until she sees what Marie’s pointing at. There she is: a girl slumped on the sidewalk like someone had set a pretty doll down and forgotten to check if it was breathing.
A girl, maybe her age, sprawled near the guardrail in party clothes. Heels, a miniskirt, a sparkly top.
“What the hell…” Amyrah murmurs, already jerking the wheel. She cuts across three lanes and parks like she owns the road.
The others yell, but she’s already out of the van.
The girl on the ground doesn’t look dead. She looks cold, her cheeks and nose flushed pink. Amyrah hesitates, glancing back toward the van. Chloe’s already halfway out the door, and together they lift the girl carefully.
Inside the van, warm and ridiculous and decorated like a teenager’s impossible dream, they set her on the back seat, just between Marie and Chloe. Marie studies the girl for a long minute. “She looks like an angel,” she says softly. “A weird, sad, sleepy one.”
While Amyrah climbs back into the driver’s seat, Marie keeps studying the girl. A Sharpie word is sloppily written in her arm, “whore” it reads.. Marie grabs a damp wipe from the glove compartment and gently scrubs it away. Then she slips off the girl’s heels, setting them aside, and replaces them with a pair of pink flip-flops from the van’s messy floor.
“Comfy now,” she whispers, even though the girl’s still asleep.
Amyrah doesn’t look back again until they’re near the deli, their usual Saturday spot. She parks close enough to keep an eye on the van, and the four of them pile out. To anyone watching, they look like siblings grabbing breakfast. But the truth sits heavier: no home, no money, no plan beyond the next meal.
Still, they laugh. They order one plate of eggs, one of pancakes, and one juice. They share everything. And through the window of the van, behind lilac-painted walls and dangling ivy, the “dead” girl sleeps like someone waiting to be found.