may 22nd, 2025 - HOW TO RUN AWAY FROM HOME.v1 (short story)

I believe it was the summer after 5th grade. We had been talking about it for months. We passed notes to each other back and forth throughout the year. It was all planned on scraps of paper. I remember how humid it was that night. I was licking the sweat off of my upper lip. Tasting the salt, fixating on the flavor, letting it dissolve on my tongue. I waited for the knock, and there she was. Bag packed and everything, I left through the window.

We weren’t anything more than childhood friends at that time. We would hold hands occasionally, talk about boys, share the same bed during sleep overs, but we didn’t know anything about ourselves at that age. I think we just knew we wanted to leave. At least I knew I wanted to. I think she just wanted to come along. I wanted her to, I wanted her to be there with me for everything. Even that night, I was so scared, I wanted her there. I wasn’t scared of the dark, or even being caught, I think I was honestly scared of leaving.

We would giggle with excitement, hush each other’s giggles, and then repeat. Everything, the whole thing was silly. We were just being kids from an adult’s perspective but maybe at that age we really did feel it was something more, even if we didn’t know it. I remember making the first turn away from my shitty cul-de-sac, that shack of a house, looking back as it faded into the trees and mountains.

A terrible sinking feeling grew inside me, but it’s funny because I don’t think we packed for more than a day of travel. I don’t remember what I brought, probably my stuffed bunny, some socks. I don’t think we even knew hitchhiking was a thing. I mean shit, we didn’t know where we were going. We had be talking about it for so long, but we were just fucking kids, you know? We didn’t know anything–we didn’t know a damn thing.

I remember it felt like we had been walking for hours, but really it couldn’t have taken us that long to make it to the parkway. Our neighborhood is right next to it, it’s the only way into town from where we lived. We were so fucking stupid for walking on it. There’s no shoulder on the parkway, it’s just a narrow two-way mountain road. There’s no lights, and sections of it have unguarded sheer drop offs into the valley. But we walked it like it was a sidewalk.

I can’t help but to think it was our fault because we were walking where we shouldn’t have been. One second it was pure darkness, and then the next, headlights were lighting up the back of her head. I remember her turning around before I did, her face frozen in my mind like a flash photo–glowing like a halo. The next thing I knew, a car flung itself right in front of us, just a couple of yards away. I had pulled her arm and we ducked away from it before it happened. She was covered in dirt. I looked up and saw a heap of metal wrapped around a tree. I threw up at the sight of it. She was sobbing immediately.

That piece of shit must’ve been going so fast. Why the fuck was he going so fast? She ran straight towards it. She even tried opening the crumbled doors. I had to pry her away from it. It was leaking oil and gas, and smoke was fuming out of it. There was a goddamn family in there. A father behind the wheel. A mother beside him. A daughter in the back seat. It just didn’t make any sense. She screamed at me, crying to me, “We have to do something! Maude, please. We have to do something, we have to save them!” I knew they were dead before they hit the tree.

She was crying and kicking and I held her and held her. We sat on that road until the sky began to lighten up and the birds started chirping. No cars ever came. We never spoke about it to anyone. We never spoke about it to each other. We never heard about the car crash from anyone, we never learned their names. The road was cleared at some point. It was as if it never happened. We let it slip away like a bad dream.

We never tried to run away from home again. We did sneak out though. We snuck out a lot. I would go over to her house, or she would come over to mine. We did this almost every night over the course of several years. The night of graduation, she came in through my window again like she had done a thousand times before. It was all hot and mucky like it was the night we tried to leave.

We were making out on my bed. I was so frightened. He pulled her away so violently. I didn’t want him to hit her. He only yelled at her. She just cried and said that it wasn’t my fault and that it was all her. I saw her run out of the house from my window. He slapped me so fucking hard across the face. My mother just sat there and watched as he screamed at me. I cried for two weeks straight. I never saw her again after that.

Later on, she reached out to me over facebook, when we were in our 30s. I looked at her page for hours. She had a husband that she met in college, and a beautiful baby boy. She looked so happy after all this time. She had that radiance but it was not the same as it was before. She was still innocent, just a different kind of innocence. I didn’t respond to her. Part of me didn’t need to know all of that. I didn’t need to see her all grown up. I didn’t wanna think of her any differently than I had when I was a kid. She was what I needed for the time, although I can’t help to think of what would’ve happened if we hadn’t seen that wreck. If we had made it to where we were going, even if we didn’t know where that was. Maybe it would’ve been what I needed, probably not.