Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel

by Christopher Harlan

  A few minutes later we pulled into the parking lot by the rocks, two school truants on the run from the fake high school authorities, basking in the smell of the air as it bounced off of the water. It was another beautiful day, cold but sunny, like the universe knew we would be coming back to our special place again. No amount of crisp blue water, or fresh air, or beautifully positioned stones in the water could command my attention more than she did. Sorry nature, you know I love you, but you just don’t compare to Annalise.

  We parked and made our way back down to those stones, and after a few tenuous steps we were in the middle of them, surrounded on either side by water and wind. It was like a scene from one of those old films where everything is heightened by the environment; all that was missing was the crescendo of an academy-award winning score in the background. It played in my mind, if not in reality.

  What was unmistakably real was Annalise; her black hair tossing about her face as she stood to my left; the bundle of her coat as it clutched her body underneath, keeping it warm from the breeze. I was of course freezing again, but I hardly noticed. I felt the sensation in my ears the most, they were always the part of my body that was least friendly with any sort of cold, but I refused to wear hats because I looked like an idiot in hats. I felt the tingle begin to intensify, but I felt no pain at all. Once I found my footing on the lopsided stone beneath me, I distributed my weight firmly between my feet, this time they were covered by shoes that could grip the terrain underneath.

  To my left Annalise stood gazing as she did, and for a brief moment I looked off to my right, and as I did I absorbed the scenery that decorated the horizon. It was nothing short of stunning. When I shifted my weight back I almost didn’t realize that I was engaged in one of Annalise’s ninja-attack kisses, but my arms found their place wrapped around her waist, as the puff of her coat thinned when she pressed into my body.

  As we kissed I split in two, with half of me engaged in a kiss that truly belonged in the annals of historic kisses (there was no such thing, but there should have been, and had there been this would have easily made the top three). The other part of me was experiencing the entire moment from a distance; detached from my body in a way that allowed me to experience it like I was watching a film of us. I thought about all sorts of things in those few seconds; I thought that for the first time in my life my 5’8” frame felt every bit of 6’8”, as I angled my head downwards to kiss her. It wasn’t just an issue of physics and math that made me feel that way, she made me feel bigger than I was in every way imaginable.

  I felt that wind again, intense even on a nice day like this one, gusting against our bodies aggressively. The tingling that I felt a minute ago was replaced by a sensation that I would normally call pain, but I couldn’t feel any pain while I was kissing her, my body simply wouldn’t register it. That physiology thing again, you know? In the hierarchy of sensations, the feeling of her lips against mine trumped any pain the body could possibly imagine. When she pulled away my Annalise drug wore off, and almost immediately that intellectual pain became actual pain. “You’re a potato,” she said to me, and my cheeks shot up towards my eyes. It was the oddest and most wonderful thing I’d ever heard. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew that I liked it when she said it to me.

  “I’ll be a potato if you want me to be,” I joked back, holding her close to me in the gusting wind.

  “It’s not what I want you to be, it’s what you are.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what that means?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “If you’re lucky. But then again, you may never know.”

  “But it does mean something?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll try to figure it out.”

  “You can try,” she said, smiling. “But you’ll never really know.”

  The bridge in the distance formed a metal horizon line, floating over the water as hundreds of cars sped over it, on their way to no one knew where. They looked like little dots to me, and as I watched them I thought about how little those dots knew of this place. Most of them probably made that trip every morning, speeding by with eyes facing forward and coffee cups filling their hands. This was just another day for them. They drove by in their masses, perhaps not even glancing to their right to see what must look to them like a single line of tiny little stones, carving a strip through the water. They had no idea what they drove over every day, but we knew, didn’t we, Annalise?

  Squatting down on the rocks, the breeze decided to relax itself, and my ears were thankful to feel blood flowing through them again. When the wind calmed into nonexistence, I could appreciate the view even more; it was as beautiful as always. Inside I was as calm as the wind, so I decided it was a perfect time to discuss what I really didn’t want to discuss. “So,” I began. “When are you leaving for Peru?”

  “I’m leaving next week, and I’ll be back after the holidays.” It was mid-December. Even though it was cold at the rocks, the general weather had stayed unseasonably warm, and until she mentioned the holidays I had almost forgotten the time of year. She was going to be gone for two weeks. Two. Damn. Weeks. “Oh, that’s cool,” I lied. Don’t really know why I even bothered, because I could see on her face that she read my bullshit as if it was written on my lying forehead. Her right eyebrow shot up to the sky in a look of disapproval that scared me a little. She saw that something was wrong, but she couldn’t see all the way inside of me. I still had my walls up just like she did. We both had a side business of wall building.

  But the truth I was trying to hide was that the idea of her leaving devastated me in ways that defied typical means of explanation. There wasn't an easy comparison I could make because nothing standard compared. I was a sensitive kid and shit like that hit me hard. The rational part of me knew that she was just taking a short vacation with her family, but she might as well have told me she was leaving and never coming back. I don’t know why I reacted that way. Maybe it was insecurity, or maybe I was just done with people leaving me for any period of time. Who knows, but what I can tell you was that her news birthed a chasm in me, a deep and palpable abyss that I couldn’t see the bottom of, no matter how much I peered over the edge and squinted. This was all very dramatic, I know. More heightened teenaged emotion, right? Right. But my pain was so real in that moment that I could scarcely fathom the true nature of its existence.

  In my messed up mind she was leaving and never coming back, and I would be left with only my memories: of recollections, of yearning, of surprise emails and late night texts, and, of course, of her sweet kisses. All those thoughts unfolded in seconds, the emotions a series of dominos, falling in such synchronized rapidity that it was impossible to tell which came first; which was cause and which was effect. It didn't matter; it all just became sadness in the end.

  "Logan," she called out to me. I had been staring without realizing that I was doing so. Lost in thought, as they say, only I was lost in more than thought, I was just plain lost.

  "Yeah, sorry," I snapped back, doing my absolute worst at attempting to sound normal. “I was just. . ." I trailed off. "I'm just a little sad that you're leaving. We were just getting started." It was as honest as I could be. I didn't know how she would react, but it almost didn't matter. I had no choice but to let her see me as I really was in that moment.

  "I'm sad, too, actually," she said. "I feel the same as you do. This is special, you and me, and I really don't want to leave right now, but I have to go see my family. We do it every year."

  "I know, I understand. I was just worried, like, you wouldn't come back, or you'd forget about me. You know, you'd meet some tall handsome Peruvian guy named Juan or something, and forget all about our time here at the rocks. Peru has rocks, too, right?" I was so insecure, but my insecurity was only acceptable when paired with my vulnerability, because I was under the false belief that the only way to prevent my worst fears was to name them out loud, however crazy they sounded. Annalise looked down and gave
me her love-grin.

  "Yeah, there are rocks in Peru," she answered. "Lots of rocks, and beaches, and beautiful places with handsome men. And yeah, I’m sure that some of them are even named Juan." As she spoke those words my heart sank. "But," she continued. "Those rocks aren't these rocks, and those guys aren't you. I don’t want them, I want you." Our eyes met in that moment and the look in hers spoke to me in ways that her mouth never could; I would have been hard pressed to ascribe an adjective to that look as it wasn't just loving, or beautiful, or even romantic. It was something I didn’t have the words to describe, and yet I understood it entirely.

  “Thank you,” I said. I don’t know why I said those particular words, or even what they meant in that context, but they made sense to me to say. I leaned over and kissed her. What else could I do in that moment? I felt connected to her, and highly vulnerable, and still a little bit sad, despite her reassurances, but there was nothing else I could do except tell the insecure voice in my head to shut the hell up, and just experience that moment for what it was.

  After the rocks, Anna and I spent the early afternoon together. I took her to lunch at the same diner Pete had embarrassed the hell out of me in the other day. I introduced her to their killer coffee, and she introduced me to the existential questions of life.

  “So I decided to finish my senior year,” she said.

  “I remember from our text the other night. I think that’s a great idea. I’m glad you came to that conclusion.”

  “It wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t finish, you know. It wasn’t that at all. I know I can get through some dumb math and science classes. It’s just that. . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just that things are really hard at home, and I don’t have time to do projects or homework after school, and I sure as hell don’t have time to study. I’m tired all the time. Plus I have a lot of responsibilities.”

  Responsibilities. That word and I were tight, like two kids who were forced to be friends because their parents were friends, but they really hated each other and just hung out out of habit. “I know all about that,” I said. “When my dad left I had to become, like, the man of the house. I’m used to it now, but it was really rough at first. I went from doing almost nothing to doing everything because my mom can’t.”

  “Like what kind of stuff?” she asked me softly.

  “Cooking, cleaning, shopping, driving her to therapy, picking up her prescriptions, doing laundry, everything.”

  “Shit,” she said. “That’s a lot. I do a lot of that, too.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It feels like a lot sometimes.”

  She looked up and thought for a moment, like she was trying to choose just the right words. “Well think of it this way, you’re practicing.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re practicing. In fact, if you think about it, you’re kind of lucky.”

  “Lucky?” That was an adjective I never would have paired with my life at the time. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the way I see it, you can’t control your parents’ marriage, and you sure as hell can’t control your mom’s issues, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed, still not knowing where she was going with this.

  “But all of the things you’ve had to do after he left, those aren’t bad things, are they? They’re the things that we all have to learn how to do at some point in our lives anyhow, right? You’re just getting some early, on the job training so you’ll be more prepared later on in life. Seems lucky to me.”

  I’d never thought it that way. Of course I hadn’t. Of course it took Anna to make me look on the bright side of things, even if I still hated having to be a seventeen year old adult. “That’s a new way of looking at it. I guess you’re right.”

  “Why thank you,” she said, smiling. She looked so beautiful that I sometimes lost my train of thought when I was talking to her. She wasn’t hot. Hot was cheap. Hot was ordinary. She was beautiful in a way that no other girl I’d ever met was. Her beauty created futures in my mind; landscapes of possibilities that were waiting to be filled with dates, people, memories, houses, and the little beautiful babies Annalise just had to have one day, because how could her babies not be beautiful?

  “No, thank you. Leave it to you to look on the bright side.”

  “So are you a good cook?" she asked.

  Now that was indeed a loaded question. The short answer, the one that would have just garnered me a quick and impressive smile, hug, and maybe another kiss would have been:

  Yes, I'm an undiscovered talent in the culinary world, a diamond in the rough as they say. Right now I'm only making pork chops and mashed potatoes for my mom, but once those in the industry know of my particular gastronomic prowess, I’m gonna light the world on fire and win numerous James Beard awards like those dudes on Top Chef, thanks for asking.

  Now even though such bravado was totally out of character, it was the kind of thing I'd have liked to have been able to profess in order to impress a girl who had me wishing I was more than I was, but at the same time I was no liar, and to say any two syllables of that elegant bullshit would have been toxic to what I was trying to do. So I went with the tepid truth of the matter.

  "I'm alright, I won't be appearing on any TV shows, but I can avoid messing food up with the best in the world."

  "Don't sell yourself short, I bet you can cook your ass off."

  So here was the truth. I could cook my ass off, but it had taken a long and winding road to get there. I’d dabbled in cooking when I was kid, it always interested me, but my interest waned when I realized that there were things I could better spend my time doing, like reading comics and playing video games with Pete. After that, chopping onions and making sauces took a back seat to all things electronic or Marvel-related. I still loved the idea, but it took the dissolution of my previously perfect, nuclear family for me to really cut my teeth in the kitchen.

  Once I had to be our household cook I had to make sure that shit wasn’t disgusting or harmful. I took to the teacher of us all, YouTube, and I learned some basic stuff that your average medieval peasant worried about contracting the Black Death probably knew more about than me. Cooking temperatures, knife skills, how to rest meat, all of it. Those things would have been like some bizarre alien language to me had you said them to me before my Dad walked out the front door, never to return. But now? Now I had some skills in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to brag to impress a girl, even Annalise.

  “I’m getting better since I have to cook all the time.”

  “Well maybe one day you can cook for me.” I probably looked hilarious trying to stay cool when she said that to me, my face struggling to maintain its cool exterior while I low key tried to keep my heart from beating its way straight into a panic attack.

  “I’d be honored, are you kidding? But I’d need to know what kind of food you like before I could really make you something good.”

  “Can you make Spanish food?”

  Oh no. Here it came. “Nah, I’m fake Spanish, I’m sorry.”

  Anna almost spit out the sip of coffee she’d just taken. “I’m sorry, you’re what?”

  “Fake Spanish. Oh shit, I’m sorry, have you never met one of me before?”

  “What are you saying right now,” she asked, laughing as she did.

  “Oh, we’ve never talked about this, have we? Okay, time to do this right here and now, are you ready?” She nodded, fighting the smiles back. “Well, I know that I sound Spanish as shit with the last name I have, but I’m a fake Spanish person.”

  Anna almost fell over laughing, but she played my little silly game for fun. “Okay, I’ll bite. A fake Spanish person?”

  “That’s right, pleased to meet you. If you’ve never met one of us before I’m happy to be your first.”

  “So what makes you fake, exactly?”

  “Well that’s a complicated question, but I guess the most egregious example of my fake Spanish-ness would be my inabil
ity to say or understand a damn word outside of ‘hola’ and ‘gracias’ which, as you can hear, I can’t even say right.”

  “Okay, I’m starting to get the picture,” she joked. “What else?”

  “Let me see, there’s so much, where do I start. My grandfather, who I never met btw, was from Puerto Rico, but I’ve never been. My mom speaks Spanish fluently but I can’t say anything right. What else? Well, I can’t cook Spanish food at all. Not that I can’t, exactly, but I never have. I eat and cook like a white boy—my Dad’s genes expressing themselves in his absence so that I have a memory of the man one day. I don’t even like spice that much.”

  “Me either!” she yelled.

  “Wait, you’re Peruvian, correct? You’re real Spanish.”

  “Half Peruvian, if that’s even a thing. Now that I think about it that sounds dumb. My mom’s from Peru and my equally absent dad was Mexican, from what I hear anyhow.”

  “What you hear?”

  “Never met the man. He got my mom pregnant eighteen years ago and split to God-Knows-Where. He’s probably there now with more illegitimate Mexican babies than he can count.”

  “That sucks about your dad, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Ditto.”

  “But enough about those losers, back to what I was saying.”

  “Right, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Where were we? I lost track. It’s hard to keep all of my fake characteristics straight, you know. Right! Can’t speak, can’t cook, can’t dance.”

  “Woah, woah, woah,” she said. “Can’t dance? I can forgive the speaking and the cooking, but no dancing?”

  “Not like a good Spanish boy should be able to, no. I’m afraid not. You?”

  “It’s like my favorite thing to do. I love parties just for the dancing.”

  “I can’t say the same.”

  “Okay, I agree, you are fake Spanish. I’ll have to show you our ways.”

  “I know, I admit it freely. I understand if you wanna break things off now.”

  “Shut up,” she said, grabbing my cheeks and kissing me gently. “Fine, I can live without the dancing, but I would like you to cook something for me.”