“Run Liz! Run faster,” yelled Sam.

My name is Liz Montgomery, and you can’t exactly call me your average teenager.

I was running so fast I could not hear anything besides my quick heartbeat, my unsteady harsh breathing, and Sam and my footsteps. What exactly am I running from? I’m running from the cops.
“We have got you surrounded!” yelled a police officer with a megaphone. HA!
Sam and I grabbed our black duffel bags and put them through our secret passageway. Sam ushered me into the small cramped hole. It was just a shoveled hole, about five feet wide. He then proceeded to close and lock the rickety blue door.

It’s kind of weird. Our secret passage used to be bigger. Well, I guess we were just smaller, so it seemed bigger. It was located in the old town library. You had to go to the third row of book shelves, and then go to the 2nd book shelf. Behind a bunch of books is a door. Open the door and my secret passage is right there. The library was closed. It was about to fall and everyone knew it. Though it’s been like that since I was eleven. Since I’m sixteen now, it’s been ‘about to fall’ for 5 years. It’s not going to fall anytime soon, I hope.
“Come on, Liz. You slow poke,” Sam said “The smells getting to me” He started to make retching noises. The tunnel had a rank smell to it, it
“Oh, shut it!” I said “Did we get enough?”
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, well I’m talking about money.
“I don’t know lets just get out of here and back to the house.” he said. I wiggled the door on the other side of the secret passageway. It fell to the floor. “Not again” Sam muttered as I gingerly stepped onto the parking lot in front of our apartment. The duffel bags flew out of the hole and onto the ground. We peeled off the sticky black suits we were wearing revealing our basketball jerseys. We looked fairly innocent, everyone in town knew we played basketball and now that we took the garbage bags off our monogrammed duffel bags, it looked like we had actually come from practice. A very early practice though. We didn’t look at all like we had come from robbing a bank thirty minuets away.
“Let’s never go that far, alright? It took forever to actually get to the tunnel.” I said. “Okay, but we can’t hit up one place twice in a row,” Sam whispered. He was stating the obvious.

I’m pretty sure you want to know my story, why we just robbed a bank, and who we are. Well, Sam and I live in a small apartment together, and we are in no way related. We’re just best friends. When I was little I lived with my mom. My dad walked out on us when I was seven. Ever since then my mom has been a total drunk, she also did drugs. By ‘us’ I don’t mean my mom and I, I mean my little sister and I. My little sister’s name was Emma Lynne. Then when I was eleven something terrible happened. One day my mom got really drunk and got in an accident. Since my mom was drunk she was sent to prison.

Unfortunately, Emma Lynne was in the car and she was put in the hospital. Before I was going to be taken away, I learned what happened to my mom and sister so packed my bags and ran away. I checked in on my little sister everyday, I told the doctors I was her friend Abigail. The cops were after me because they wanted to put me in a foster home. Emma Lynne was seriously injured. Her leg was in a cast and she had some internal bleeding. There was a problem with her right lung. She had to get a surgery. It was experimental, but it was tried twice before and both people lived. When I went to see Emma Lynne she was sleeping most of the time and then one day before her surgery she told me the doctors knew I wasn’t Abigail and they told the cops. She said she knew the risky surgery the doctors needed to perform on her wouldn’t work. She gave me her gold cross necklace, and fell asleep. I kissed her forehead, and ran out of the hospital, knowing it was only a matter of time until the police would catch me.

A few days later I learned on the news that she did die, mainly because it was an experimental treatment. So, I went to my friend Sam’s house across the street. I told him I was leaving the city and immediately he volunteered to come. I’m glad he did, because I don’t think I would be alive if it weren’t for him. I stole my mom’s car, which I learned to drive by myself, and the help of an online manual, and left, with Sam in the passenger’s seat. I dropped the car off a mile away from our destination, the bus station in the next town over. It took us twenty minuets to walk to the bus station and I took out my savings and my little sisters savings, which was about $683 and paid for two bus tickets to Rhode Island. It dropped us off at Winston Town and we’ve lived here ever since. Sam came with me not because he wanted to protect me, well not only because he wanted to protect me. He came because his father used to beat him. He just waited until I was leaving to leave with me. Sam didn’t want to leave me behind; we’ve been best friends since we were both in diapers.

The reason we stole this money is quite simple. We need it to live. We own a small two bedroom apartment. Well, we sort of own it; we have four more months of payments. The payments are for $500. It’s not like we’re irresponsible, like we’re too lazy to get a job. We both have jobs; we work weekends, nights, and breaks in the school year. Yes, we are two teenage kids living alone that go to school. I like school, I want to be an education person, and I want to be a doctor when I grow up. Though the jobs we have aren’t enough to make ends meet. I have a job at a restaurant as a waitress and Sam works as a mechanic. A lot of the money, well a big chunk goes to transportation. The rest goes to living expenses, food, clothes, and school things. I guess you could kind of call us irresponsible; we have robbed four banks in the past 3 years. Well, in the past 2 years 7 months. It’s not like we can get the money anywhere else and we only take what we need. The most we’ve stole was $4,000. We actually stole that tonight.

We walked up the stairs quietly, so no one would hear us. Seeing as it was past four o’clock, we weren’t worried about anyone catching us as long as we could keep quiet. I unlocked the apartment door and turned on the light in the kitchen. We put our duffel bags on the island in the middle of the kitchen.
“Liz, I’m going to the store to buy food for tomorrow. Lock the door behind me, stash the money and go to sleep, you look exhausted,” Sam said while grabbing some 5’s and 10’s from the bag. He walked up to me and kissed my temple and walked past me to the door. He then stopped and said “We’ll be alright, Lizzie. We’ll be alright.”

Then he shut the door and left, I could hear his footsteps quietly going down the flight of stairs. I did as he said and locked the door behind him. I grabbed the bags and brought them into Sam’s room and put the on his bed. I unlocked his brown floorboard with the key around my neck; next to it was the gold cross Emma Lynne gave me. Sam has a key just like this one. Then I put the combination in the small safe. The combo was 4-14-93, my birthday, I’m not sure why Sam set it to that date, but it made me smile every time I opened it. I went in my room to get my pajamas and I put them on and I checked my cell phone: Wednesday 4:39am. I went back into Sam’s room and fell asleep on his bed.

I woke up tangled in Sam’s maroon sheets. He wasn’t next to me; I picked up my cell phone. It read: Wednesday 8:54pm. “Just in time” I murmured. I got up, stretched, and went into the living room. I sat on the big blue reclining chair in front of the television. I turned it on and went to channel seven almost immediately. Selena O’Grady was sitting behind her desk.
“Welcome to Channel Seven News with Selena O’Grady and Robert Johannasin. Another bank robbery with in a ten mile radius has been reported of last night, or early morning. Police have been investigating and there are no alleged suspects. It is thought that they are the same robbers from the Wellington Bank robbery 7 months ago. In other news a 16 year old boy was shot at a Pick It Quick last night in Winston Town. A robber walked in and when the young boy noticed his gun he tried to stop the commotion. The boy jumped on the robber and yelled at the clerk to get out of there, the man had a bomb. There was a bomb tied to his waist. He struggled to get the gun out of the robber’s hands and during the struggle the bomb went off, it shot the boy and the masked robber killing both in the process. The clerk called for the police, but when they arrived at the scene the building blew up. The store clerk said he knew the boy.” A picture of a man in his fifties popped up. He seemed tired and distraught, and when he spoke his voice came out unsteady, cracked, and full of sadness. “The boy was only 16, he was so nice, such a kind boy. His name is Sam Beston.” The image on the television again was that of Selena. “Any family members of Sam are urged to call (612)-555-1344.”