Snared

1

A storm raged overhead, pelting the road and the SUV with rain. The family vacation wasn’t getting off to the best of starts. It seemed to Lindsay Morgan that the rain was following them, like some kind of nasty omen telling her the family vacation was cursed. The closer to Redlands Beach they got, the louder the rain beat on the car.

With her dad driving and her mom in the passenger seat, Lindsay sat in the back, listening to music on her iPod and texting with her friend Kate. The drive had exhausted her and the storm was doing nothing to improve her mood. She knew the vacation was important to her parents, especially her dad, but Lindsay had spent the last few weeks dreading the trip. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. She’d been helping Kate with a totally important party, and now she couldn’t even go! Of course, her dad was quick to point out that Lindsay had always enjoyed trips to her uncle Lou’s place. But she’d been a little girl then. At sixteen, Lindsay wasn’t feeling any glee for the retro.

She was certain her dad just didn’t get it. She’d grown up. She was in high school. She was popular and received good grades. Though her teachers sometimes flinched at her often harsh humor, they couldn’t help but see the intelligence behind it. Oh, she could be snide and sarcastic, and more than once a friendly burn had been taken as meanness by kids who didn’t know her, but it usually only took a few kind words to mend those feelings, and often enough Lindsay found herself with another friend. Plus—and Lindsay felt certain her father did not get this—she could take care of herself. When she was faced with a problem, she found a way to fix it. She didn’t let it stress her out or piss her off; she just made it work. Lindsay Morgan was practical that way. But she’d tried to fix this trip—had done everything she could to avoid it—and it hadn’t worked.

She might not have been so bummed if her parents were taking her to a happening beach like Cancún or the Hamptons or even Atlantic City. But they weren’t. They were going to her uncle’s house on Redlands Beach, and though it had sand and ocean, it fell way short of an A-list destination. True, Lindsay’s memories of the place were a bit fuzzy, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. She remembered her uncle and other men standing on the shore with their fishing lines sunk in the ocean (which was probably why his house always smelled like fish guts). There were noisy children racing from the surf toward their chain-smoking mothers and their beer-drinking fathers. The “good” restaurant in town served fried clams in a plastic basket. On reflection, she considered the beach some kind of trailer trash econo-resort, but her folks said it was an up-and-coming town.

She’d asked to stay home, arguing rationally at first. When logical pleas tanked, Lindsay resorted to a more emotional approach. Tears were involved. They didn’t work. Anger soon followed, but it didn’t get her anywhere. There was no way she could get out of the trip. Her parents had already taken the time off work. So Lindsay was faced with ten days in her uncle’s house—away from her friends and an epic party.

Just thinking about it made her sad. Everyone from school was going to be there. BlackBerrys and cell phones had been buzzing about it for weeks. All the cool and cute would be gathering at Kate’s house. (Her parents were vacationing in Paris!) It would be a red carpet event with beer and banging tunes, and Lindsay was going to miss it.

Lindsay’s motivations weren’t totally selfish either. Yes, she badly wanted to go—who wouldn’t?—but Kate needed her, really needed her, and that was important, too.

Lindsay loved her friend like a sister, but Kate was about as organized as a chimp, not to mention the fact that she was panic waiting to happen. Lindsay knew the second one little thing went wrong with the party, Kate would freak like a meth head on Cops. She had said a billion times she couldn’t pull the party off without Lindsay.

The invitation tragedy was a perfect example. Kate had wanted to use paper invitations, and that would have been okay, but she bought boxes of invites with a picture of a kitten wearing sunglasses on the cover. Inside they read“ Come and party with the cool cats.” If Kate had sent out those wholly cred-killing invites, she’d never have lived down the humiliation. So Lindsay wrote the invitation for Kate—email only—and she made it sound like a total secret, because Lindsay knew the best way to get the word out was to tell people to keep quiet.

Lindsay often thought that she would make a great party planner, or maybe a wedding planner. She was able to look at any event, no matter how complicated, calmly and thoroughly, and spot the details others might overlook. Last year she organized the freshman dance, and instead of throwing some high-school hoedown with a pop tune theme, she made it memorable. She did an industrial disco night called Batcave, with painted wall panels that made the gym look like a dungeon and a wrought-iron bar for sodas. It was a total hit. Everyone at school talked about it for weeks.

Kate just can’t do this on her own. I should be there, helping her.

But she wasn’t; she was in an SUV with her parents, driving through a downpour headed to Redneck Hollow, and no matter how she tried to hide her disappointment—because she knew the trip really meant a lot to her dad—she just couldn’t.

It was like being kidnapped or something. She was a prisoner, and her two captors sat in the front seat, acting all happy and crap.

When the power on her Treo died, cutting off Lindsay in midtext, she couldn’t help but groan. Her connection to home and her friends was severed. She hadn’t bothered charging her cell phone completely, because she preferred the PDA. So her cell phone had died an hour into the trip, and now her Treo was toast. How much worse was this trip going to get?

A hand touched her shoulder, and Lindsay looked up, startled. Her mom had turned in the seat and was looking at her with a shadow of frustration on her brow. Her mom’s lips were moving, but Lindsay couldn’t hear what she said because she had her tunes cranked. She pulled the earbuds out and said “What?”

“You know, you could talk to us if you’re bored.”

“I could, but that would negate the whole not-talking-to-you thing.”

Her dad laughed, and her mother just shook her head.

“We’re sorry about Kate’s party,” her dad said. “But try to have a good time. You used to love the beach.”

She really wished he’d quit saying that.

“I also used to wear diapers, but I don’t see any of us clinging to that tradition.”

“You’ll feel better when we get there. Believe me, it’s nicer now.”

Lindsay rested her head against the cold window. The vibrations from the road and the rain beating down massaged her temple. Outside, the day grew darker, and the downpour rapped harder on the SUV’s roof. All she could see were blurry trees and more blurry trees, the same view over and over, like an animated message board avatar.

Of course, there was a major difference. She was trapped in this image.

Lindsay sat in the SUV while her parents shopped at the grocery store on the edge of town. She’d tried to see the city’s shops and offices through the storm, but everything outside the car was a big gloomy smear. So she searched her iPod for a song—not a specific song, just one that might make her feel better. Scrolling along the titles, she came across a cool tune by Green Day and jabbed the Play button, but after listening to a few grinding guitar riffs, she poked the button again and turned it off.

Lindsay pulled the earbuds loose, wrapped them around her iPod, and dropped the player on the seat. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the door, staring at the front of the supermarket. Come on, Dad, she thought, watching the glass doors slide open and closed for shoppers. Hurry up.

She felt certain her mood would improve when they reached the house. The SUV and the storm felt so confining. She would have gone into the store with her parents, except her mom would have constantly asked her opinion about food and junk to make Lindsay feel involved, and she just wasn’t in the mood. The house would be better. She could charge up her phone and Treo and reconnect with Kate so her friend didn’t have an attack over the party. And bonus, her uncle Lou was out of town. That was such a relief. Lou wasn’t a total freak, but he came close. He was loud and annoying and told the worst knock-knock jokes ever. Her dad said he was in Arkansas, fishing with friends, which meant she’d get the guest room, and her parents would take his. At least she’d have some privacy.

But what was she supposed to do for ten days? She couldn’t hang with her parents the whole time, though she imagined that was her dad’s plan.

“You might meet a nice boy on the beach,” her mom had said before they left on the trip.

Yeah right, Lindsay thought. Redlands Beach is probably crawling with gap-toothed Cletuses. Likely they swim in cutoff jeans and show off their hairy backs. Gross.

She smiled and shook her head, but she did find a ray of hope way in the back of her thoughts. Maybe she would meet a boy. It could happen. People from all over went to the beach in the summer.

The glass doors of the store opened. Lindsay squinted through the storm and saw a fat guy in overalls hauling two bags of groceries into the downpour. Sadly, that was the kind of guy who’d probably be prowling the beach, his round belly rolling over the top of his swim trunks. Or worse, what if he was feeling saucy and decided to wear a thong?

Lindsay groaned and laughed, imagining that very thing. “So sick,” she whispered to the empty car.

Though totally unlikely, some hot guy’s parents might have kidnapped him, too. That would be cool. They’d meet on the beach. He’d have blond hair and aquamarine swimming trunks, like the kind she saw that OC stud wearing in last night’s rerun. His name would be something totally cool, like Jaimie or Josh, and he’d be eighteen and headed off to college after summer. Every afternoon they’d meet on the beach and then hit town for coffee and stuff.

As she thought this, the doors of the market slid open again. Two men stood in the opening, side by side. One was tall and slender, the other short and round. The rain blurred their faces, so Lindsay only got a vague impression of what they looked like. Both wore slick black parkas against the rain. The round one held a sack of groceries. The thin one opened an umbrella, then handed it to the round man. The thin man opened a second umbrella that he raised over his head, and the two men stepped into the storm.

They walked slowly, seeming to match each other’s steps perfectly in a creepy kind of dance. The mushroom parts of the umbrellas floated over their heads, gliding smoothly through the battering rain and wind. Lindsay squinted harder and slid across the seat to get a better look at these strange men. A chill ran down her back, and her hands trembled.

When the men reached the front of her parents’ SUV, the tall one looked through the wind-shield at her. His head turned slowly, though his shoulders didn’t move. He didn’t stop walking, didn’t even pause. He kept looking at her, though. His narrow face was blank and motionless, his eyes black with shadows. And his head kept turning, as if it wasn’t attached to the rest of him.

Lindsay’s stomach knotted with fear. The guy was creeping her out bad. She checked the doors and made sure they were locked; then she curled her legs up tight to her chest and held them with her arms. She looked down at the screen of her iPod and stared at the letters without reading them. Anything to distract herself from the curious freaks with umbrellas. She counted to ten, feeling certain that at any moment she’d hear the sound of the door handle click and crack as the two men in black tried to break into the car.

On the number nine, with her heart beating so hard she thought it would burst through her chest, a loud rapping startled her, and she yelped. Her head whipped up, away from the iPod screen, and she saw her dad’s face, dripping wet, pressed up against the glass. He was pointing at the door lock and shouting “Hurry up.”

Lindsay sprang forward to disengage the lock. Behind her dad, she saw the two men in black drifting deeper into the storm.