Stranger Things: Runaway Max

The floor of the San Diego bus station was mostly cigarette butts. A million years ago, the building had probably been fancy, like Grand Central or those huge places you see in movies. But now it just looked gray all over, like a warehouse full of crumpled band flyers and winos.
It was almost midnight, but the lobby was crowded. Next to me, a wall of storage lockers ran all the way down to the end. One of the lockers was leaking a little, like something had spilled inside and was dripping out onto the floor. It was sticking to my shoes.
There were vending machines on the other side of the lobby, and there was a bar over in the corner, where a bunch of skinny, stubbly men sat smoking into ashtrays, hunched over their beers like goblins. The smoke made the air look hazy and weird.
I hurried along, close to the lockers, keeping my chin down and trying not to look obvious. Back at my house, when I d imagined this scene, I d been pretty sure I d be able to blend into the crowd, no problem. But now that I was here, it was harder than I d pictured. I d been counting on the chaos and the size to cover me. It was a bus station, after all. I didn t figure I d be the only one here who was still too young to drive.
On my street or at school, I was easy to overlook twelve years old and average height, average shape and face and clothes. Average everything except for my hair, which was long and red and the brightest thing about me. I yanked it into a ponytail and tried to walk like I knew where I was going. I should have brought a hat.
Over at the ticket windows, a couple of older girls in green eyeshadow and rubber miniskirts were arguing with the guy behind the glass. Their hair was teased up so high it looked like cotton candy.
C mon, man, said one of them. She was shaking her purse upside down on the window ledge, counting out quarters. Can t you cut me a break? I m barely short. Only a buck fifty.
The guy looked sarcastic and bored in his ratty Hawaiian

Brenna Yovanoff was raised in a barn, a tent, and a tepee, and was homeschooled until high school. She spent her formative years in Arkansas in a town heavily populated by snakes, where sometimes they would drop turkeys out of the sky. When she was five, she moved to Colorado, where it snows on a regular basis but never snows turkeys. She is the NYT bestselling author of The Replacement, The Space Between, Paper Valentine, Fiendish, and Places No One Knows. She currently lives in Denver.