Lorelei Sawtelle

A Place to Belong Lorelei Sawtelle

I never had to thumb a ride before. I wasn't any good at it. You'd think somebody would have a little pity for a girl with a camo backpack. It took me eight days to get out of Denver. I didn't have a choice. He might be behind bars, but he had friends on the outside. Eight winter nights when I slept in the driest places I could find. I slept in an empty church one night; it was colder than an ugly witch's heart in there, but I was out of the snow and sleet. I walked in circles trying to get across interstates, through traffic jams, around bad neighborhoods, and to survive crossing dozens of construction zones. I slept the next three nights in the frozen middle of nowhere repeatedly waking myself up screaming in my nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves. I snuck in the back door of a bar and spent the fourth night warm and toasty on a shelf in a storage room between two men, Captain Morgan and Jack Daniels. The fifth night after escaping from Denver I tried to sleep in a café booth at a truck stop near Byers. The waitress and her boss woke me up and told me to leave. I don't know why they wouldn't let me stay. They weren't busy; it was way after midnight and almost nobody was there. A trucker grabbed my sleeve as I dragged my backpack past the last table on my way out the door.