The Girl in the White Van

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  HONORS FOR APRIL HENRY

  Edgar Award Finalist

  Anthony Award Winner

  ALA Best Books for Young Adults

  ALA Quick Picks for Young Adults

  Barnes & Noble Top Teen Pick

  Winner of the Maryland Black-Eyed Susan Book Award

  Missouri Truman Readers Award Selection

  TLA Tayshas Selection

  New York Charlotte Award Winner

  Oregon Spirit Award Winner

  One Book for Nebraska Teens

  Golden Sower Honor Book

  To Bruce Lee

  Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survive by bending with the wind.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  With a grunt, I brought the back of my right fist down on the bridge of my attacker’s nose. A split second later, my left hand clawed down the face, scratching the eyes, gouging the nose and cheeks.

  Right, left, right, left. Each shot set up my next. Right: leopard’s paw to the throat. Left: straight punch to the bridge of the nose. Right: roundhouse to the temple.

  And then my bedroom door swung open, taking with it the mirror—and my own reflection, which I’d been pretending was my attacker.

  As soon as the door started moving, my face heated up. Worse yet, it wasn’t my mom on the other side. That already would have been super embarrassing. It was Tim, my mom’s boyfriend.

  He hadn’t even knocked.

  “Hey, Karate Kid! Sweep the leg!” With a smirk, he sliced his hands through the air, accompanied by cartoon sound effects. “Choo! Choo!” He was wearing a brown Carhartt jacket over dark blue coveralls. One of his work boots kicked an imaginary target in midair.

  Dropping my hands, I turned away. A second ago, I’d felt so fierce. Now I just felt like an idiot.

  I was mad at myself for being caught by Tim. The fact that I was still in my pajamas made me feel even more stupid. My face got hot, which meant that my pale skin was betraying my feelings.

  Saying nothing, I picked my library book about Bruce Lee off the floor next to my bed and slid it into my backpack. I’d checked it out in the hope it would teach me some cool kung fu techniques, but it was mostly about philosophy.

  Reminding Tim that I was taking kung fu, not karate, would just prolong things. It was actually his face I’d been imagining while attacking my own reflection. He was my least favorite of all the guys my mom had ever lived with.

  Tim finally stopped making sound effects and karate chops. “Do you really think any of those moves would work in real life?” He took a step closer. “You’re just fooling yourself taking those stupid classes. If some dude really wanted to hurt you, you’d be toast.”

  Don’t respond, don’t respond, I reminded myself as I grabbed a sweater and jeans from my closet.

  He switched gears. “Your mom’s taking me to work today. So make sure you lock up when you leave the house.”

  Tim’s “classic” Camaro had broken down. Again. It was kind of ironic, given that he was a mechanic. Normally my mom was still asleep when I left for school. She worked swing shift as a CNA at a nursing home.

  “Okay,” I said, still not meeting his eyes.

  After making a sound that was halfway between a snort and a grumble, Tim finally left. I heard the bathroom door close. There went my chance of a shower.

  The first thing I did was lock my door, the way I should have earlier. As I got dressed, I fumed. Bruce Lee said that to survive you had to bend, I reminded myself as I pushed my feet into my black-and-white-checked Vans.

  In the kitchen, my mom was loading the dishwasher. Tim always left his dishes wherever he finished eating—the dining room table, the arm of the couch, even the bathroom counter. He must have dealt with his own dishes before we moved in, but now it seemed to be “women’s work.”

  “Good morning,” Mom said with no conviction. Maybe she was finally starting to sour on Tim.

  “You must be tired.” I poured myself a bowl of Life cereal and sat down on one of the two black kitchen stools.

  “I can take a nap later if I need to.” As she put a mixing bowl in the back of the dishwasher, her sleeve rode up her arm.

  I pointed at a spot on her wrist between tattoos. “Mom, what’s that?”

  She hastily pulled down her sleeve. “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing. Those look like bruises.” Four round dark dots in a row, each the size of a fingerprint. Someone had grabbed her wrist, and it wasn’t too hard to guess who it was. Even though I sometimes had the same marks, at least mine were from escaping practice wrist grabs in kung fu. Not from the real thing.

  She forced a smile. “He didn’t mean to. And he said he was sorry.”

  “You can’t let him treat—” I stopped midsentence as Tim walked into the room.

  “What are you girls talking about?” He looked from my mom to me and back again.

  “Nothing,” Mom said. At the same time, I said, “What to make for dinner tonight.”

  “None of that vegetarian crap. I need real protein. Something with meat.” Tim’s grin was flat. “Come on, Lorraine, let’s go.”

  After they left, my stomach was churning too much to let me finish my cereal. My mom refused to see how bad things were. And even when her eyes were finally opened, she would just do what she always did when things went sour: meet some new guy online and then jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Using a profile photo that was nearly as old as me, Mom had met and fallen in “love” with men all over the United States and then moved in with them sight unseen. Before Tim in Portland, Oregon, we had lived with Garrett in Houston, Texas; Adam in Hebron, Nebraska; Brandon in Brookings, South Dakota; and Paul in Saint Charles, Missouri. And before them were five or six other guys and places I’d already forgotten about.

  Pretty soon there would be another move to be with another man who would invariably turn out to have lied about himself and his life, in ways both big and small.

  Before we moved here, Tim told her that he owned the auto body shop he only worked at. The house was half the size he’d said it was. I was pretty sure he had even claimed a few extra inches of height in their conversations.

  He and my mom had managed to make it work for seven months. That was practically a record. But their arguments were getting more frequent. Which meant it was probably time for a change.

  The thing was, I liked Portland. You could be yourself here, and people appreciated that. Portlanders took pride in the Unipiper, a guy who wore a Darth Vader mask and rode a unicycle while playing the bagpipes. Vegans, Wiccans, transgender people, recumbent bike riders, stand up paddle boarders, people walking their pet goats, guys with elaborate beards, girls who didn’t shave their legs or pits, guys wearing utility kilts, people with rainbow hair, tattooed hipsters with huge gauges stretching out their earlobes—people
who would have been mocked in many of the towns I’d lived in—were celebrated here.

  And despite Portland’s reputation, it didn’t even rain that much.

  As I locked the door and set out for school, I did the math again. In one year and seven months, I would be eighteen. Old enough, in the eyes of the law, to live on my own.

  SIR

  My hands were slick on the steering wheel. My foot hovered over the accelerator of the old blue Chrysler New Yorker, my chosen vehicle for the day. I was going less than five miles an hour, but I didn’t touch the pedal. Outside it was close to freezing. I left the defrost button alone, even though I could barely see out the windows. The fogged glass provided cover. I had rubbed a small section of the windshield clear, enough to see straight ahead.

  Just enough to focus on the girl about a block ahead of me. She had straight brown hair and wore jeans and a bright blue puffer coat. She glanced over her shoulder. When she saw the car, her eyes narrowed. Turning back, she started walking faster, nearly scurrying.

  My own heart sped up. Humans are built to hunt. Like any predator, when they see the prey start to run, they want to give chase.

  Only was she really the one? I couldn’t afford to make another mistake. Instead of pressing my foot on the accelerator, I pulled over and took my notebook from my pocket. The car was quiet except for the sound of my breathing.

  Dec. 7. 7:50 a.m. Corner 36th & Kamin. Tall. Straight dark hair. Bright blue coat. Alone.

  I underlined alone twice. But where did she fall on the one-to-ten scale? I thought about her dark hair. Then considered her face, with its slightly receding chin. Finally I added a number.

  7.

  But after thinking about the long legs under her jeans, I added a dash and a second number.

  7–8.

  And then I began to hunt again. Hunt for the perfect girl.

  Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  With a battered metal fork, I pulled a long gray-green strand of something that had once been spinach from the school cafeteria lasagna and let it drop onto the brown plastic tray. Somehow the spinach managed to be both stringy and gaggingly soft.

  I was sitting by myself. Three or four schools ago, I’d decided there was no point in making friends if you were only going to move away again. You could promise you were going to still text or Snapchat, insist you’d keep in touch on Instagram, but it was never the same. Pretty soon people who used to be your friends were as distant online as they were in real life.

  I was pretending to read my Bruce Lee book, but really eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table.

  “It’s just so scary!” Alice’s voice slid on the last word. She sounded delighted.

  “What is?” Latoya asked as she set down her tray.

  “Courtney said some dude in an old blue car was following her this morning.” Preston popped a baby carrot into his mouth.

  I shivered. For the past couple of months, rumors had bounced around school about a driver trailing girls on their way to or from school. The car was never the same, though. One time it had been a black Oldsmobile, dented and boxy. Another day it had been a beat-up brown pickup with an aluminum cover over the bed. But no matter what kind of vehicle, they all had three things in common. The windows were always fogged up. The vehicles were always old and dirty, down to mud-smeared license plates. And, according to the stories, the driver was always careful to hang back about a block, drifting forward about the same speed as the girls walked.

  Latoya shrugged. “It was probably just somebody looking for a house number. Pure coincidence. You know Courtney. She’s always convinced that it’s about her.”

  “But there was that girl in Beaverton who disappeared from Island Tan, like, a year ago,” Preston said. Beaverton was the next town over.

  “I heard that she just ran off with the bank deposit,” Latoya said. “That that was missing too.”

  “Then why’d she leave her car behind?” Alice asked. Her gaze suddenly sharpened. I realized she was looking straight at me. Crud. My face got hot. She had caught me staring. Even though I immediately looked away, it was pretty obvious that I’d been eavesdropping. Time to leave. Careful not to look in her direction, I got to my feet and then picked up my book and tray.

  As I was scraping the remains of my sad lasagna into the gray rubber garbage can dedicated to compostable food scraps—very Portland—someone behind me said my name.

  “Hey, Savannah.”

  I turned. It was Daniel Diaz. We knew each other from kung fu. In class, it was hard to keep my eyes off him. I told myself it was because he had such perfect form. He could do a spinning hook kick that made him look like a human helicopter. He was a senior, so we didn’t have any classes at Wilson together. But almost all the other kung fu students were adults, which gave us a kind of bond. At least I was always hoping it did.

  “Oh, hi.” I felt my face flush again, but for a different reason.

  In kung fu, I was just an orange belt, one up from white. Daniel was a green belt, only two ranks below black. He had been taking kung fu for five years. Some martial arts schools routinely promoted students every few months, without really making them prove themselves. But our school prided itself on not being a belt factory. There were adults in our classes who had been going for longer than Daniel but who weren’t much higher in rank than me.

  “So you’re reading about Mo Si Ting?” Daniel asked as he scraped his plate into the bin.

  “What?”

  With his fork, he pointed at my library book. “That was Bruce Lee’s nickname when he was a kid. It means Never Sit Still.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Did my responses sound as stilted to him as they did to me? “Everyone always says he was the best. I was hoping I could pick up some new techniques.”

  Daniel tilted his head, making his thick black hair fall over one eye. “And have you?”

  “So far, it’s mostly been a lot of sayings,” I admitted, setting my tray on the rubber motorized belt.

  Daniel set his tray next to mine. “That might make sense, actually. Bruce Lee wasn’t a big believer in memorized techniques. He thought martial arts had become too stylized, so that they weren’t practical anymore and wouldn’t work in a real fight. For him, any technique was good as long as it was flexible and fast, without a single wasted motion. He called it ‘the style of no style.’”

  This was the longest conversation I had ever had with Daniel. “The style of no style,” I repeated, secretly blessing the Multnomah County Library. “I like that.”

  People were stacking up behind us. I saw a few of them noticing Daniel noticing me. By unspoken agreement, we moved into an empty corner.

  “Which of Bruce Lee’s movies is your favorite?” Daniel asked. “Mine is Enter the Dragon. That scene where the bad guy escapes into the hall of mirrors and Lee has to deal with all those reflections of himself. It’s epic!”

  “I actually haven’t seen any of them all the way through,” I admitted. “Just the bits and pieces you can watch for free on YouTube.” I simultaneously winced and smiled. “Like that one scene where he’s fighting Chuck Norris and he yanks out his chest hair and then blows it off his hand.” I mimed Bruce Lee’s actions as I spoke.

  “Way of the Dragon,” Daniel said immediately. “Which is good, but not as good as Enter the Dragon or Fist of Fury.” He grinned. “If that scene had been in Fist of Fury, I guess they could have called it Fist of Furry.”

  “Ouch!” I groaned at his pun.

  “I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie ever made. When I first saw Way of the Dragon, I thought maybe that body hair was fake, because when Chuck Norris turned around there were even big clumps on his shoulder blades. But when I googled it, it said it was real. It must have been cooler to be hairy in the seventies.”

  The bell rang, and everyone started making for
the doors.

  “See you at class tonight?” Daniel asked.

  Nodding, I tried to respond with a modest smile. But despite my best efforts, it stretched into a grin.

  Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  The rest of school passed in a happy blur. There was something about Daniel that left me wanting to break my rule about not making friends.

  When I got home, I made cornbread and, mindful of Tim’s complaint, chili with more meat than beans. The salad, I knew, would just be for my mom and me. Even as my hands washed and chopped and stirred, my thoughts were consumed with thoughts of Daniel. His brown eyes with flecks of gold. His long-fingered hands. How he was just the perfect height, so that if for some reason we ever hugged, I would be able to tuck my head under his chin.

  Like always, I ate before Tim got home. Then I put a lid on the chili and left the cornbread in the oven so it would still be warm for him.

  I sprawled on my bed and did homework. I tried to stay in my room as much as possible, especially when my mom was at work and it was only Tim and me. When I finally heard the front door open, it was a half hour later than normal. He must have had to hitch a ride from one of the other guys at the shop. Tonight he didn’t even try to talk to me, which was a relief. Out in the kitchen, I could hear him muttering to himself, but not the actual words. Then the TV went on.

  I checked my phone. Almost time to go to class. Once it started getting dark earlier, my mom had wanted Tim to drive me, but we both insisted that wasn’t necessary. And now of course he couldn’t. I changed into my green T-shirt and black athletic pants, then put my book and my orange belt in my backpack. It was really more of a sash, black cotton fabric with an orange stripe sewn around one end. Passing the test for it a month ago had been one of the proudest days of my life.