A/N: Anything you recognize isn't mine. Now here's chapter 27. It's a short one. Enjoy.

XXVII.

i ride, you ride
bang

Twenty-three hours later, Bella slipped on a pair of denim shorts and a tank top. She quickly put on a baggy sweatshirt and laced up her sneakers, and she was ready. Leah, clad in an identical outfit, was also ready. Scared, but ready.

They were supposed to head out of Emily's house and go to where Quil kept his pickup truck five minutes ago, but Kim was running late. Impatient, Leah and Bella were about to go collect her themselves when Kim finally burst through Emily's front door.

"You're late," Leah said. "What's up?"

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," Kim said, "I got held up at home. Parents are on my ass about Seaside."

Bella and Leah snickered; Kim rolled her eyes to cover up her nerves. The idea of Venice just didn't seem real.

"So are you sure you don't wanna come, Em?" Kim asked, throwing on a sweatshirt. "We could really use you."

"You guys will be fine," Emily assured her. "You only need one getaway driver."

Kim shrugged. "I guess."

"And my laptop's fucking up," Emily added. "Embry's supposed to come by and fix it later, anyway."

Leah wanted to call her cousin lame, but she held her tongue. It was a good thing that Embry would be with Emily tonight instead of at work, anyway.

"Let's head out, then," Bella said, exiting the house. She paused and turned around to wave. "See you on the flip side, Em."

And with that, Leah and Kim followed her into the dark.

From Emily's house, it wasn't a long walk to the spot that Quil liked to keep his ambiguous pickup truck. The hidden area was just off the dirt road at the edge of the rez, near the trees.

Kim's whisper was loud over the padding of all their sneakers in the dirt. "Why do we have to take Quil's truck?"

"Shh!" Bella hissed. "But if you need to know, it's ambiguous, he keeps the keys in it at all times, it doesn't have a fucking license plate, he hardly drives it, and he'll be too high to even notice it's gone."

"And you know this much about Quil's truck because…?"

Bella smiled to herself. As much as she was glad to no longer be with Jacob, which meant lying to both herself and him, she'd had a lot of fun with him in the short time they'd spent together. Fooling around in Quil's truck in broad daylight and nearly being caught had been so much fun.

"I've been around," she said to Kim, brushing it off. "Now get in and start driving."

Kim complied, and Bella and Leah hopped in the bed of the truck.

"Do we have everything?" Bella asked.

Leah stuck her hand in the bag between them, feeling around. She felt the masks, the hammers, the "guns," and the backpacks. "Yes."

Bella smacked the roof of the truck twice, saying, "Let's go," and the truck roared to life. They were off.

The wind was cold against Bella and Leah's faces as Kim drove as fast as she legally could to Port Angeles. The roads were empty, and all the lights were down. The county was as dead as the people who inhabited it—the badlands were nothing but a cemetery. It was about damn time to blow this place. It was so devoid of color that nobody knew what it meant to live here anymore.

It was about damn time for Bella to color in her own world again. How had she ever taken that power away from herself?

Upon approaching the coffee shop, Bella slapped the roof of the truck again, indicating for Kim to slow down. They were here. Bella and Leah hopped out of the truck and paused before they headed towards the front doors. Bella had no fear whatsoever; she must have absorbed all of Leah's bravery, because Leah was fucking terrified.

In the darkness, Leah could barely hear her own voice as her heart pounded frantically in her chest and unavoidably pulsed in her ears. "Are you sure we can do this?" she whispered as she tried to put on her mask.

Bella slipped her ski mask on over her face, and before adjusting it, she brought her hands up to fix Leah's. "What?" she asked. "Do you wanna make Kim do this with me, or do you want me to take your sorry ass home?"

"No. No. I wanna do this."

"Then think of it as… As Halloween or something. Be somebody you're not. None of this is real."

"None of this is real," Leah repeated.

Bella shoved a fake gun in the pocket of Leah's sweatshirt and placed a hammer in her hand. She equipped herself and then threw the bag back into the bed of the truck.

"Now let's fuckin' kill it."

Kim slowly rounded the diner with the headlights off and the music turned way up. It was Quil's kind of music, for the most part—deep trap shit that nobody else liked or could focus on—but she didn't mind.

She drove carefully as she peered into the diner, watching everything unfold. One second, Bella and Leah, clad in shorts and sweatshirts and ski masks, were smashing windows with their hammers. The next, they were holding fake (but real-looking) guns up to people's heads. And the next second, they were shoving wads and wads of cash into their backpacks and running out. It was all very swift. Like snapshots.

Bella and Leah were back in the bed of the truck in no time, and there was only dust left behind them as they all sped off. The girls in the back were hooting, and even though Kim knew they'd get away, she couldn't get far enough away from the sinking feeling in her stomach.

None of this is real.

The girls dumped the truck at a junkyard in Sequim and then caught an early bus back to La Push. They didn't get back until far past sunrise, and they hadn't slept at all while waiting. Money and goals didn't sleep, and neither did they. (Kim was too scared, but she wouldn't admit it; Leah had gotten over her fear once she got money in her pockets.) Bella and Leah, carefully but inconspicuously guarding the money in their backpacks, talked about all they were going to do once they got to the promised land. Kim stared down at her shoes and wondered if she was going to get new ones on the way.

Emily was asleep on the living couch when the other girls returned, and Embry's arm was wrapped around her in a totally platonic way. Her laptop was on the coffee table; maybe they hadn't made any repairs at all. Leah tried to forget Sam existed. It wasn't hard to forget, though—the guy was hardly home.

"Embry," Leah whispered, poking him in the arm. His eyes started to flutter open. "It's late," she added.

He looked down at his watch and then at his surroundings, realizing he was still at Emily's house. "Shit," he muttered. "I gotta go to work." He quickly stood up and started to put his shoes on.

"Take it easy, man," Leah called as he headed out the front door. "You're gonna need it."

He didn't know what she meant by that—and then Kim remembered that he worked at the very diner that they had just robbed. He hadn't been there at the time of the robbery, of course, but he would see the aftermath this morning.

It left a bad taste in Kim's mouth.

Bella softly poked Emily in the stomach. "Hey, pretty girl," she whispered.

"Wake up, little bitch," Leah said.

"C'mon, Em, can't you smell the money?"

"It's right here for ya."

The other girls kept poking and prodding Emily until her eyes slowly opened. She sat up a little against the couch. "What's up?"

"We did it!" Bella exclaimed. "We did it, we did it, we did it!"

"Okay, it is way too early for this shit," Emily said. She looked to Leah, a possible voice of reason. "What happened?"

Leah stood up and dumped the contents of hers and Bella's backpacks onto the couch. Wads and wads of money fell out, along with the hammers and fake guns and ski masks.

"Oh my God," Emily murmured. Then her mouth curled into a devilish smile. "Why are we still here, then?"

A/N: Up next on Friday: more feminine camaraderie and musical references galore.

Thanks,

HS