Wheels Off The World

By Alexa Kim

Alice Reaver is not her real name but that's who she'll have to be at yet another new school in another new town that her fugitive father has dumped them in for her safety. It's been like this for eight long years, ever since they came home to find her mother brutally murdered. It was probably a message to her father, an almost reformed assassin. Maybe it was payback from the shady, quasi-government jokers he used to work for and betrayed or from one of his victims' families. Whatever.

After spending half her life lying to everyone she meets, discarding identities and hair colors like dirty socks, and learning how to kill in dozens of different ways, "Alice" is done. She's made some friends at Oxford High - her first ever. One of them needs the help of her lethal skill sets to stay alive. And maybe she's met a boy - or two.

Her father can let her have a life or he can kill her for breaking curfew and their survival protocol. But she's not leaving without a fight that will test everything he's ever taught her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexa Kim
• Release date: Dec 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310510410

Book preview

Chapter One: School me

It was my first day as a junior at Oxford High School. It was also my first day as Alice Reaver. I don’t get to pick my new schools and I don’t get to choose my fake names. I’m not allowed to do a lot of things that, according to my psycho father, enhance the risk that I’ll be found by the people who have been after us since I was eight. So I don’t have much of a life.

Lately, I’d been thinking about that a lot. Especially when I practice with the weapons we keep in the basement. Not a good combination for a hormonal teenager. Which is one of the reasons why the Pater forces me to go to school in whatever town we happened to be hiding in. He says complete isolation is a torture banned by the Geneva Convention for a reason. Also, the crazy man still hopes that I’ll be able to fit safely back into the general population. One day. As in some future I’m unlikely to live long enough to see. He’s such a liar.

Oxford High was only a mile and a half away from our new house, but I was under strict orders to drive the Bronco to school. Having the bulletproof shielding and run-flat tires of one of our cars was my father’s new requirement this year. Anything could happen in the eighteen minutes it took to walk the distance. Plus, when I turned sixteen a few months before, my father said I was of an age where the resemblance to my mom was pretty obvious. Which, as he likes to remind me, made it more likely that someone would show up to try to kill me or kidnap me or – whatever.

I like to verify factual statements. Something I’ve learned from living with a liar all my life. But I couldn’t tell how true it was – that I looked like my mother. I know what I look like: a quarter inch over five feet two, straight brown hair – when it’s not dyed, hundred and seven pounds of lean muscle and bone, and facial features that are so symmetrical they’re completely boring. I can’t remember what my mother looked like. Not when she was alive.

All the pictures of her, of us, were burned the night she was killed. My father torched them all, along with the house I grew up in. He doesn’t believe in leaving anything behind or in taking mementos of our past along into our future lies. So when he told me that I looked like her over a cake made of honey stolen from angry bees, gelatinous tree moss and mushrooms foraged during a training overnight in Yosemite, I kind of hated him. It wasn’t just because his gross cake left a metallic aftertaste from the magnesium wire fuse he used as a candle.

So sometimes I can’t be alone with myself in a room or a car. The silence inside my head starts to drown me. The rage that’s always there needs an outlet. I have to be outside, walking or running – doing something that makes me feel even a little connected to the world. And something my father would hate. So, on my first day in public as Alice Reaver, I totally disobeyed him and walked myself to school.

It helped that he wasn’t there to stop me. The Pater was away on another of his secret, disappear-for days-while-I-make-the-world-a-microscopic-bit-safer-for-my-child trips. What he didn’t know wouldn’t kill me.

I was about halfway to school when I entered my favorite block in the neighborhood. The whole state of California was suffering from another year of drought, but this particular street was shaded in cool greens by lines of lush old pine and ash trees.

At the corner ahead of me was a short, thin woman in her late sixties holding the end of a very long hose that probably weighed as much as she did. She was dousing the trees along her patch of sidewalk with precious water while dressed in oversized, fur lined boots and a bell-shaped housecoat dotted with tiny embroidered dragons. According to the Pater’s research, her name was Fleur Jones, a middle school teacher for over four decades until she was forced to retire the previous year. Her mother, Yolande, gave birth to her in the yellow and blue painted clapboard cottage behind her. Jones knew everything and everyone in the neighborhood – except us. She was in the kind of business where paranoia explained how she was still alive. I crossed the street to take the opposite sidewalk.

Here! You! she yelled.

The woman’s voice surprised me. It was incredibly loud for such a frail-looking body. She dropped her hose and stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at me.

Child, come over here and say ‘Hello.’ she commanded. There is something addled with parents these days – not putting simple good manners into their children. Who the hell is going to save the world if the children can’t be raised right? The woman continued in her tirade as though she was talking to a crowd instead of just one sixteen year old girl trying to get to school.

I looked around me, noticing a few blinds and curtains twitch as the woman’s neighbors came to their windows. I wasn’t supposed to engage with people. My father and I were trying to stay invisible, unmemorable. I decided that a teenager who ignored an old woman was less likely to raise suspicion than one who actually paid attention to adults. I kept walking.

The woman muttered to herself loud enough to be heard on the next street. Stuff about how I was a rude brat and schools ought to let teachers smack students with rulers. Progressive stuff like that. I hunched my shoulders, waiting for her to hit me with a spray of water.

Noooooo! she screamed. Help! Help!

At first I thought she had taken her fussing about me to a new level. I wondered if my father forgot to check her records for mental illness. But when I glanced in her direction, I realized she was staring into the yard of the house next to hers.

A primitive chain-link fence ran the property’s perimeter. Most of the tiny grass yard on the inside was being sat on by one of the largest dogs I’d ever seen. It was a Rottweiler at least twice my weight and probably cross-bred with a bear. The woman tried to drag her hose to the fence, but it was wound around one of the trees she was watering and wouldn’t reach past the sidewalk. I finally saw the tiny bit of fur that flitted around the edge of the dog’s property. I couldn’t tell if it was a kitten or a shaggy rat.

Jelly! Jelly, you come away right now! screamed Fleur Jones.

She finally gave up on the garden hose and crab walked toward the big dog in boots that threatened to trip her with every step. Her oversized straw hat toppled off its cushion of tight, salt and pepper curls. When the old woman attempted to climb the four-foot high fence, my mouth dropped. I had visions of the huge dog crushing her body between its massive jaws like a twig. Right after it stepped on the tiny creature that started yapping insanely.

I gritted my teeth and took another step toward the direction of school. I couldn’t be late. I couldn’t do anything that drew attention to myself. I couldn’t get involved with this loud, grouchy woman.

I’m coming Tiny. I’m coming to save you, sweetie. The woman crooned to her soon-to-be dog chow. Then there was a thud on the gravel strip that surrounded the fence. I closed my eyes when she cried out, My hip! I’ve broken my hip!

Come on! I shouted inside my head. No way!

I’m so sorry, Tiny, said the woman in the saddest voice I’d heard outside of a movie about Anne Frank. She was lying on her side, on the gravel outside the fence. The foot attached to the leg she had fallen on was now bare and twitched feebly. Her fingers grasped the metal links without the strength to lift her.

I turned my head away and took another step toward school. And another. When she started sobbing, I groaned – and pivoted on my foot. Another voice came on loud inside my head. The Pater’s. What the hell do you think you’re doing? You know THE RULES. Suicide and getting involved with strangers are NOT ALLOWED.

Well, I said to the imaginary but totally accurate imitation of my father, YOU SUCK and YOU’RE NOT HERE. SO THERE.

Yeah. Not the snappiest. But they were just voices inside my head.

The Rottie’s haunches bunched and its fangs appeared, like it was ready to leap over the fence onto the old woman or toward the tiny appetizer. I broke into a sprint and hit the fence with a booted foot that made the steel mesh bow inward and levered myself up and over. I landed between the big guy and what I could finally make out as a teacup Yorkie. I thought for a second that it should be illegal to breed dogs smaller than rodents.

I kept my gaze on the Rottie -- because it’s a terrible idea to turn your back on a vicious dog. The yapping behind me got louder and accelerated just before something tried to bite into my leg. I looked down and saw the miniscule tan and silver haired dog trying to gnaw through my boot. Its three-pound body hung horizontally from my ankle. The big dog let out a body-shaking sigh of relief and lay down on the grass.

Jelly. Jelly, baby. You stop that. Let go of the child right now. The woman said to her rabid pet.

When I reached down to remove the dog, it almost took off my pinky finger with its sharp, little teeth. I snatched my hand away and it landed on its feet in the grass. Feral, black eyes looked me over for a more vulnerable spot to attack.

Here, Jelly. Look at this delicious treat for my lil widdle Jelly Bean, said the woman in a syrupy voice.

She was on her feet, holding out a strip of cooked sirloin. The big dog’s nose twitched and he rose hopefully. The little terror charged at him, barking so loudly a man yelled out from the next block, Shut that mutt up! Tiny cowered and put his massive head down between his paws. Jelly Bean trotted to the fence, slithered under and snatched the meat from Fleur Jones’ fingers.

The woman shook the pain off her feeding hand and picked up the creature with her other arm while it was distracted eating. She smothered it with kisses, saying, My sweet monster. Bad, bad baby. Got to leave Tiny alone. You know what his daddy said. If he finds you bit his dog again, they’re going to call animal services on you. Precious, precious baby girl.

I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulders and hauled myself out of Tiny’s domain. I was almost five minutes behind schedule and there were fang-size holes in one of my pant legs.

Well, maybe there’s some worth to you after all, said the woman. She sounded very doubtful as she looked at me.

I scowled at her and said, Broken hips heal pretty fast around here.

She smiled and kissed her demon dog again. Well a woman my age can’t take chances. The creature finished chewing and hissed at me, wrinkling its hairy snout.

What is your name? she asked.

My eyes widened a little. It took me a second to remember the name I was supposed to use while we were stuck in Chatham.

Alice, I said.

Something changed in the old woman as she studied me with her sixty-seven year old eyes. Child, you don’t look like an ‘Alice,’ she said finally. In fact, you don’t look like you’ve been a child in a very long time.

Something massive and heavy surged inside me. It’s been a long while since I’ve looked a stranger in the eye. It’s been even longer since anyone has really seen me, other than my father – who only looks for weaknesses. My breath stuck in my chest and my eyes watered. I turned away from her and started walking.

Stop by this afternoon and I’ll give you milk and cookies, she called out. Kids still like that, don’t they? When I didn’t respond, she added, I might have a job for you.

I didn’t look back. I wouldn’t be able to take this route to or from school again. I said goodbye to the trees.

Draped over a set of dusty knolls, Oxford High was a collection of classroom trailers and rectangular stucco boxes built starting in the 1960s. The oldest permanent buildings housed the gym, admin offices and core classes, which educated the minority of students most likely to graduate. Dotted around the real buildings were temporary satellite trailers that had been serving as classrooms since the district’s population outgrew the school – during the last century. On flats of land below the main buildings were the track, football and soccer fields. The school couldn’t afford to hire gardeners to cut grass or for the water to grow it, so the fields were patches of packed dirt and stubborn weeds. Most of the cars in the school’s cracked asphalt lot looked like they had jobs after school like delivering pizza, gardening or the movement of stolen goods.

If I had driven in, it would be just less than four hundred yards from the cluster of school buildings to my car. A distance I could run in less than a minute. This would have made me one of the fastest high school athletes in the country – if I were allowed to participate in team sports. But that would attract too much attention.

There were lots of other things I was forbidden. Having friends, telling people the truth and dating were just a few on a very long list. It was so long – or never – since I had or did any of these things, I wasn’t bothered much by their absence. But I did love to run fast. It’s the one time that everything else falls away – even – especially – who and what I was.

To run as fast and as far as I wanted, I had to do it in the dark when no one could see me. Oxford High’s running track was a quarter mile around with one lane marked in a paint that reflected just enough moonlight. I knew because I put it on at 2:00 a.m. that morning.

I tore my eyes away from what I already considered my own personal track and looked at the kids milling on the brown lawns between the school buildings and the street. Lying spread-eagle just outside the shade of an old sycamore was the resident weed dealer. Oakley sunglasses wrapped his head in a dark band and he smelled like he’d just bathed himself in the rank stench of a water pipe. From a purely objective perspective, I had to admire the muscles visible through his thin, green t-shirt and baggy pants resting below cut abdominals. Two girls with sparkly nose rings hailed him as Riley. When he turned to check out their legs, which were barely covered by ribbons of denim, I saw the M shaved into the back of his head.

He must have seen me indulge in a little moment of disgust at who he was. He spread his lips in a wide smile and gave me a thumbs-up. Nodding, he said, I get with action chicks.

I knew from his online posts that he got with a lot of girls. The boy was an equal opportunity sleaze. I wiped all expression from my face and picked up my pace. It was seven minutes to first bell and I needed to get inside to pick up my class assignments. The four boys stationed across the front path to the main building had other ideas.

Hey, girlie. What’s your business here? said the chubbiest of the group.

Chica, tell us your name. You might be fine if you fixed yourself up a little, dressed like a girl, you know? This from a guy who looked like he spent more time grooming his hair in one morning than I spent on mine in a whole month.

Taking the question as rhetorical, I didn’t answer. Besides, I liked my Doc Martens. They were indestructible, made me taller and were retro chic.

The alpha of this quartet stepped in front of me and brought his face inches from mine. Not a good move on his part. First of all, I liked my personal space. I liked having lots of it. Second, I hadn’t spent much time around another human being since my mother died. (My father didn’t really count – as anything remotely human.) So I’d been minimally socialized and was probably not fit to be among the general population. Something this boy was going to discover the hard way if he didn’t back off.

They’re expecting me in the front office, I said. Like, now. I stepped to one side but he did the dance with me. Strike two.

Well to get in there, you need to pay out here. Twenty dollar per newbie.

His head bounced a little to the rhythmic patter of his own words. I tightened the chest strap of my backpack, bent my knees a little and flexed my hands.

This is a public school. I am part of the public. I am not paying you anything. My voice was low, just loud enough for him to hear me. I was giving him a chance to back away and save face. He could tell his cronies that I offered him something other than money for passage. I didn’t care what they thought of me.

Instead, he brayed, You ever heard of fi-nite re-sources? He poked me in the shoulder with a finger while stretching out the last two words.

I debated whether to just break that finger or remove it from his hand.

Blissfully unaware of his proximity to severe pain, the boy continued moving his lips, The way I see it, every new student takes something away from the kids who already go here. Ergo, you need to compensate me for a deterioration in the quality of my education.

Ergo? Despite myself, I was impressed by his grasp of the problems posed by the ever rising student-teacher ratio in public schools and his entrepreneurial spirit. There were two hundred and thirty-four kids in my year at Oxford. Almost a third of them were new and/or bused in on gas guzzling, black smoke belching, yellow death traps from the agricultural areas just outside of Chatham. Some kids got on the buses at five in the morning to get to school by eight and then did the reverse trip at five in the afternoon. More than half wouldn’t make it to senior year given the drop out rate for the district. This boy might have had the brains to graduate – if he didn’t get expelled for robbery first.

But, again, I didn’t like my personal space invaded and I really hated strangers poking me in the shoulder or anywhere else. I shook my head, If I pay you, I’d have to pay everyone else. Can’t afford it. My dad’s not made of money.

I gave him his last chance to walk away intact. And yet, there it was. His hand rose from where it was safest, next to his side, and approached extreme danger – me. I grabbed his wrist. His eyes widened and then narrowed as he realized I was going to push back. He was almost a foot taller than me and muscular, but he didn’t have my training. No other kid in the world had my training.

I was about to turn his forearm under and push it behind him when we were interrupted. Javier Octavian Menlo! You leave her alone!

The voice belonged to a girl, but the tone and delivery was that of an irritated mother. The boy stepped back. His chest deflated like a leaky balloon. A teenager about my height but twenty pounds heavier approached with an armload of books and disapproval creasing her tan forehead. Her dark hair fell in shiny waves to her waist and when she slapped the top of Javier Octavian Menlo’s head, she had to stand on her toes to reach.

Stop it, Mina! I was just fooling. No harm done. My would-be-extortionist waved his arms in the air like flags of surrender.

Don’t make me have a talk with your mama. Now get to class and take your sorry little gang with you. The girl glared at each offender in turn as the boys folded like a flimsy tent and trailed Javier into the school building.

I hadn’t needed her help, but Mina prevented a situation that would have drawn unnecessary attention. I could have paid the money Javier had demanded. But that would have just encouraged him or the other school bullies to bother me again. Once their bluff is called, bullies usually went away and found weaker prey. Although these days, no one should confront gangs unless she’s a black belt in at least one martial art, and has some combat training – like me.

Before I could turn away and continue on my original objective, the girl put a hand on my arm. Sorry about that. My cousin. He’s at that idiot age. I’m Ramona – Mina to friends. You must be new or Javi and his goons wouldn’t have hassled you.

And you must have changed his diapers at some point. I should have only thought them to myself, in my head. But these words were spoken. They were an attempt at humor. By me. I didn’t do humor. I wasn’t supposed to do humor. I wasn’t allowed to engage in extraneous dialogue with strangers.

Mina grinned. I’m not that old, but I did practice on my seven younger brothers and sisters. I’ve done my quota. I’m not having children unless they each come with a nanny and a butler.

I couldn’t help it. I smiled back at her. The expression felt weird on my face. I was exchanging a moment with someone and it wasn’t something necessary to maintain my cover. I should have walked away as soon as her cousin backed down. But ignoring Mina would have been rude and I couldn’t be rude to her. My father never warned me about the power of naturally maternal people. I don’t think he ever had a mother.

The administrative offices were crowded with confused students and worried parents on the first day of school. Like a busy deli, the school had a spool of numbered tickets set up on its front counter. I got a pink stub with 99 and sat with my back to the wall in a molded fiberglass chair that was butt-breakingly uncomfortable.

Slouched in the next chair with a baseball cap pulled down over his nose was a boy with long legs and, from the ribbing visible through his faded t-shirt, a nicely muscled torso. Sixteen-year old girls are allowed to look. After a summer of being stuck mostly inside a series of safe houses enduring my father’s version of home-schooling, it was nice to look at some real, living, breathing boys – er – people. And not have to imagine attacking them with knives, guns and random objects

I should have just surveyed, assessed risk and moved on. There were eleven other boys in the office – some cuter – some ferocious. But something about the boy was wrong. He was too still, too intense, too perfect. Which seemed like a weird set of judgments to make about a boy I didn’t know.

So I reverted to my training and mentally laid out the red flags: (a) the jeans on his legs, carefully frayed at the hems, pockets and knees, bore a discreet red tag that meant it retailed for at least three hundred dollars; (b) the faded cotton tee had a design silk-screened on the center of the chest that identified it as being part of a designer collection which sold four ounces of cotton at more than two hundred dollars; (c) the shoes were one of a kind and had been hand graffiti-ed by an up and coming rap star – again, not cheap or even reasonably priced. Then there was the platinum tank watch wrapped around his wrist. Even his tan looked uber expensive.

The Pater didn’t allow television in any of the safe houses so I spent a lot of time using magazines to study the human population. All the ones with pictures of pretty people devoted a lot of print to clothing and accessories. What the boy next to me wore cost more than the annual household income of the average Oxford High family.

My clothes, on the other hand, were readily available at the local mall, Target or Wal-Mart. Or, like the vests I wore on training sorties – with their Velcro closures and concealed pockets for handguns, ammunition clips and incendiary devices – home-made. At that moment, I was costumed to blend in with the locals, to be the girl no one notices or remembers. Skinny black jeans and clumsily laced-up Docs, tissue-t with horizontal magenta stripes that complement my dyed, purple hair and a khaki rip-stop nylon jacket.

Are you done yet? His voice was smooth and deep. A lack of hesitation in the flow of words implied his family owned the world.

I had been staring at his body while trying to figure him out – in a spaced-out, seeing-beyond-the-obvious sort of non-focused stare. Not in a lascivious or covetous kind of way. I hoped. He pushed back the bill of his hat and glared at me with deep-set eyes that had rings of green surrounding brown irises.

I rarely talked to people, even to my own father outside of cursing at him in my head. I’d never spoken to a boy I found attractive. So it was a huge effort to squeak out, Sorry, I was thinking about something else. I could feel the word LIAR etch itself across my face.

Right. Could you do your thinking looking at someone else? I’m way out of your league. With that, he returned his hat to its face obscuring position, crossed his arms over his chest and pointedly dismissed my existence.

It took me a second to realize that the feeling of being hated for no good reason is the same as being punched really hard in the gut. Which I had been. So I knew. I was suddenly almost grateful to my father for teaching me so many ways to retaliate.

The boy next to me was not someone born or bred in Chatham. He did not belong at