She looked at me with Rory’s bright blue eyes narrowed down to worried slits.
“Shit,” she said. “Mom got off early.”
We scrambled out of the store and charged across the parking lot, leaving the clerk drooling behind us. I stumbled again on the gravel. Katie charged around the car and jumped behind the wheel.
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “You said I could drive.”
She had the engine running before she even closed the door. “You drive like what you are—an old lady. Just get in.”
Katie threw twin jets of gravel from the wheels getting out of there and nipped through the light in the middle of town while it was definitely on the red side of yellow. For the first couple of blocks I was worrying mostly about what we were going to do if we got pulled over, but then I started worrying about what would happen if we didn’t.
“What are we going to do?” I grabbed a handful of dark wavy hair and twisted it around my fingers. “We’re not us.”
Katie was staring straight ahead, an intense look on her super pretty loaner face. “Mom is stopping at the grocery then going by the DQ for some food. We’ve got maybe half an hour once we get home.”
“To do what?” I could hear my voice rising in panic and swallowed hard. “Put on a different dress?”
“No, mommy.” Katie barely slowed as she plowed through the next intersection. “I think I know how to turn us back to us.”