Excerpt from Sugar Run by Mesha Maren, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"No," she said, and it had really hit her then, she was leaving. In twelve more hours it wouldn't matter what shit favor Tressa needed or what retaliation she'd dream up later. Another world existed out there, another world that had kept on jumping and skipping and spinning for the past eighteen years.

* * *

The rain quit but the trees still glistened through the bus window and the clouds sat low enough to hold on to. Just past Dawsonville the bus skirted a lake, the water dark and high to the brim, and from there they raced on toward the shadowed spikes of a city.

The highway ducked straight into the downtown and Jodi watched the buildings emerge, rocket ships of glass and chrome stretching so tall she couldn't see the tops. Streams of people rolled across the sidewalks, clutching newspapers, cardboard cups of coffee, and cell phones. Jodi had seen the new phones on TV over the years but out here they looked even more odd: oversize metallic insects gripped tight in every hand.

"Atlanta," the driver hollered. "Fifteen minutes."

Jodi stayed in her seat, knowing for certain if she got off she'd somehow manage to get left behind. She craved a cigarette but opened the bottle of Jack instead and let the scent burn up all her thoughts.

Three sips in, the door to the bathroom opened, letting loose the smell of cigarettes and a chemical reek. She could have sworn the bus had emptied out but there, right in front of her, was the mustached man. He smiled a false-sweet smile and ducked his head down under the luggage rack.

"Hey, honey."

Jodi pulled the paper bag up around her bottle.

"Hey, now, hey." The man hunkered beside her. "Hey, I ain't like that. I ain't gonna tell nobody."

Jodi shrugged and held out the bottle to him. Men like this were always popping up right in that moment of pleasant silence. Always jumping at you, like the groundhogs Effie taught her to shoot back down into their holes.

"You're going to Jacksonville?"

Jodi swallowed her sip of whiskey slowly. "Chaunceloraine."

Every time she said the name it sounded stranger and she'd have figured she made the place up if the ticket man hadn't nodded and printed it on her slip. The word itself was like something she'd bitten off, too big and complicated to chew. And her plan was nothing but a thin line connected by fuzzy memory dots, an invented constellation that only she could see. Paula's parents' address was gone, stoved up somewhere in her brain with the other memories she'd worked so hard to pack away. All that remained was the name of the town and Paula's little brother, Ricky Dulett

* * *

Past Atlanta the rain-choked rivers gave way to flooded fields. Raw clay banks, limp tobacco plants, and peach trees. The water was a skin pulled tight between long rows, dimpled now and then by a gust of wind. Through the tangled branches the orange fruit glimmered, and around the edges of the groves, men huddled under tarps and stared at the gray belly of clouds.

They stopped in Montrose and Soperton, Cobbtown and Canoochee, and each time the bus rolled onto an exit ramp Jodi's gut pinched and she turned toward the window, searching for road signs, relieved only when she saw it was not her stop. She did not want the ride to end. Once the bus stopped there would be the street and all the new decisions that would come with it. She got the bottle back from the mustached man, took a long swallow, and quite suddenly those eyes—Ricky's blue, blue eyes—hovered in the near distant space.

Excerpted from Sugar Run by Mesha Maren. Copyright © 2019 by Mesha Maren. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.