Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel

by Christopher Harlan

  I wasn't worldly, but for some reason my far flung hypotheses involving Peru's geopolitical obliteration didn't seem as crazy as all that. After all, I was pretty sure that we in the good-old Northern part of the continent were blissfully ignorant of the woes of our southern neighbors. Most of us didn't know anything about the counties that actually bordered us on either end. South of Mexico might as well have been another universe; I would have been hard pressed to name a political party, a head of state, a national dish, or a major export of any country in Latin America, so the idea that an unknown Peruvian civil war had come to a swift, late night end with some sort of nuclear device, didn't seem so far out of the realm of possibilities.

  I checked the news feed on my phone, feeling somewhat sociopathic that I was actively hoping for the destruction of an entire country just to keep my (could I have called her my girlfriend at that point?). . . closer to me. But I suppose I knew that it was unlikely to see the headline "Former South American country decimated in the early morning, map being redrawn for schoolchildren" adorning any front pages.

  What I did have on my phone was a good morning text from Annalise.

  Morning. I actually slept last night. Must have been all the steak. I love Peru but hate leaving you for this long. Don’t worry. No Juan’s. I’ll text you when I land.

  She’d kept to her word that she’d text me before getting on the plane, the wheels of which had left the ground about two hours before I had woken up. The text was nice, but it hardly replaced the comfort I normally would have enjoyed knowing that I’d see her in person, but it was all I had. There was no bringing her back, and according to all available social media news sources, Peru had not met the war-like, destructive end that I had hoped for, so instead of more horizontal pining, I decided that getting up and being at least semi-productive was a better idea.

  It’s in moments like that one when the Bleh appeared, ready to hang out like that dirt bag friend who invites himself over, cleans out your fridge, and then stays around way past the lengths of social acceptability. It took a hold of me, and my attempts to be a productive citizen were undermined by the paralysis of my mind. I wasn’t egocentric, I knew that I was just one of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of other teens going through pretty much the same thing. Hell, in a weird way I was happy for once to have normal problems, but I was also a rookie at that game, and my inexperience was showing itself.

  But the one thing I knew how to do was move ahead when I was mentally injured. It was what I was best at. We all had family problems, and girl trouble, and stress about school. My feelings weren't exceptional in any way. I was going to drive into school with Pete today. I picked him up at his house looking despondent as hell, and he already knew what was up. “Peru still there?”

  “Yeah, nothing on my news feed about its annihilation. Sucks.”

  “Does it?” he asked, a little disgusted with me. “I think there’s something seriously wrong with you.”

  “Well I could have told you that already. But why, specifically?”

  “Why?” he asked, raising his eyebrow at me. “Let’s take a moment to analyze. I get being into a girl, trust me, but I’ve never wished for the destruction of an entire culture just so I could keep that girl domestic. That’s nuts.”

  “Yeah, I know. I don’t really want that, obviously.”

  “But if you were in the same situation and simultaneously the totalitarian head of some rouge state with nuclear capabilities?”

  “I probably would have pressed that little red button about 4am last night.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “Also no secret. In all fairness to the Peruvian people I would have sent a diplomatic telegram warning them of their impending destruction from the hellfire of the good old U.S. of A if they allowed Anna’s flight into their airspace. I’m sure they would have conceded before anyone was actually incinerated. I mean, who would take the complete destruction of their country to allow one American girl in for a Christmas vacation? No responsible leader I know of.”

  “Again,” Pete said, looking at me seriously. “Let me reiterate. You’re a sick little puppy who’s obsessing over this girl.”

  Maybe Pete was right. Maybe I was a little obsessive. But then again, she was my first real girlfriend (I’d started calling her this in my head even though we’d never designated any official titles, but maybe that was me obsessing again). This was my first rodeo, so maybe a little obsessing was in order.

  School was school, only I was locked up in in-school suspension for the better part of the day, with two more days of student incarceration to follow. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying my time in there, but the fact of the matter is that I didn’t have to deal with anyone’s crap. No annoying kids, no more teachers’ dirty looks, nothing but my lonesome, some assignments, and time to think. Truth was I would have very much preferred to spend the rest of my high school career locked up in in-school suspension, but that just wasn’t in the cards.

  They really did try to treat it like a prison. They’d escort me to the bathroom when I had to go, and walk me to the lunch room with a security guard like I was on some Hannibal-Lecter type shit. It was ridiculous, but it did make me feel way cooler than I was in reality. After 9 periods of that silliness the first day of my sentence was over, and I was a free man. I was still thinking about Annalise, of course, so Pete and I decided to go to the guru of all things involving females our age: Jason.

  There was a Jason in every high school in America, and probably internationally, too. You probably knew a Jason or two when you were a kid. He was that dude in high school who always got girls, even though doing so violated every natural law of the universe. Kid was ugly as hell. Nerdy too, but not comic nerdy like me. N-E-R-D-Y, like Dungeons & Dragons shit. He was also shorter than should have been acceptable in a male at our age, I towered over the kid like I was a giant, yet he had girls around him like those hippos in Africa that have birds living on their backs. He was never without a girlfriend, and if one dared to break up with him there was a long line of contenders waiting to fill her spot. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were cool enough with each other for the occasional hang out, mostly to pick his brain on just how the hell he managed to acquire such strong female attention.

  His only distinction, besides his ability to convince even the hottest of girls that he was worthy of their time, happened in fourth grade when he got hit by a car. No joke. Smushed. Broken everything. Settlement lawsuit that would pay for a full ride to Dartmouth had he possessed the necessary intelligence to get in to such a prestigious institution. So here’s what happened. Jason loved soccer. I couldn’t emphasize this enough. The World Cup was his Olympics; had he been born in the UK rather than New York he would have been one of those hooligans who start fires and attack people in the stands when their team loses. As it was he was just a kid who was really into soccer, which he of course refused to call soccer. Futbol, he’d say in a fake Hispanic accent (faker than mine), I’m watching Futbol. Shit drove me nuts.

  So anyhow, one day he’s on the field for recess in sixth grade and he’s kicking the ball around with some friends. All of a sudden a kick that was a little too vigorous by our Guatemalan exchange student sent the ball off the field into the adjacent, teacher’s parking lot. Now the intelligent thing would have been to cast a glance left or right before diving after the ball, but Jason was an impulsive tweenager, and that dude leapt into teacher car traffic like his team’s victory in the World Cup depended on it. Had he looked he might have observed Mr. Sullivan, our science teacher, barreling off for his lunch break way too fast. But as history actually went, Jason neglected that age old lesson on looking both ways and the rest was a long recovery in the hospital. Now I was sitting with the older version of Jason, hoping like hell he could make me feel better about my girl problems.

  “Attention, my friends, it’s all about attention.” That was always Jason’s go-to line about girls. It was his contentio
n that most guys treated girls like objects, so much so that if you could just be a normal human being and listen to them, you’d catch them like a fly trap. Jason loved talking about this subject. I suspected he likewise loved the reputation he got as that-guy-who-gets-girls more than he liked the actual girls, but maybe I was just being petty and jealous.

  “That makes perfect sense,” Pete said. “But we’re not actually looking for advice on how to get a girlfriend. We both have girlfriends.”

  “Even Logan?”

  “Screw you,” I told him, only half joking.

  “Sorry, man, it’s just that. . .you know. . .you never, ever have a girlfriend. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later, right?”

  “Right,” I said, getting angrier with each syllable out of the kid’s mouth.

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Well, speaking of his first girlfriend. . .”

  “Wait, who are we talking about, just so I have some context.”

  “Annalise,” I told him. It was hard to keep the smile off my face.

  “That weird girl?” Jason asked. Now, at that particular moment I was faced with a strange, nano-second response choice. My impulse was to attack him, either verbally or physically (I hadn’t decided yet), but the other part of me—the rational side—decided to talk it out.

  “She’s not that weird girl,” Pete said, interjecting. “Have some respect, dude.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that. . .”

  “Yeah I get it. Anyways, now you know who my girlfriend is. Go on.”

  Annalise did have that reputation. I was aware of it before I even first talked to her. Reputations in high school were like temporary tattoos: easy to get, difficult to remove, and even when you did there was always a little left over on your skin. She was a bit of a lone wolf, a little odd, and she kept a small, tight circle of friends around her. She wasn’t part of the mainstream. She was the weird girl, and I was the weird guy who was falling in love with her.

  “So, anyway, he’s with Annalise now, and the girl just took off for a two week detour to South America with her family and my boy is bummed the hell out.”

  “Understandable,” Jason said.

  “You ever deal with this sort of thing?”

  “Not exactly. Never had a girl skip the country on me if that’s what you mean.”

  “She didn’t skip the country,” I yelled. “Have you ever had your girlfriend leave your vicinity for more than a few days?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “My last girlfriend went to the Ozarks for a week for a family trip.”

  “Where the hell are the Ozarks?” I asked.

  “Down south, somewhere, I think. I’m really not sure. But what of it?”

  “How did you deal? How did you not lose your mind? How did you not spend every waking minute thinking she was with some random dude in the Ozarks doing. . .southern shit.”

  “Man, you’re going through some stuff, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I told Jason. “First girlfriend, you know? I don’t know how to deal with shit like this.”

  “Now it’s starting to make sense. If this is your first rodeo I get where your head’s at. But don’t stress, man, it’ll be easier with the next girl, trust me.”

  The next girl? Did he say the next girl? His words shook me. I couldn’t imagine another girl, or not having Anna in my life, and what he was saying played right into the fears I was already feeling.

  “Well, let’s just focus on this experience for now,” I said. “We don’t all have girls orbiting us.”

  “I don’t get it either, dude, I’m not much to look at, I admit it. But like I said, listening is the key.” He loved repeating that mantra over and over again. In the future he’d become a self-help guru, one of those life-coach types who wrote a paperback every three months repeating the same recycled advice on how to self-actualize and be the best you possible. “But the best advice I could give you is just to keep busy. Keep your mind off shit. Get a hobby. Get a dog. Focus on school. No, forget that last thing, school sucks, don’t focus on that. But distract yourself somehow.”

  “That makes sense, thanks. I’ll give distraction a try.”

  “I’m telling you, it works.”

  It works? Okay, Jason, I thought, let’s just see about that.

  For two long weeks my sad teenaged-ass waited as Annalise walked the colonially invented streets of Lima doing God only knows what. As you can imagine, time dragged on like a slug pulling it’s disgusting self across your garden and leaving that weird slime trail on the grass. But I did gain an education of sorts while she was gone. I learned that Peruvian Wi-Fi could be dubious as shit, and that I had to continuously resend my texts over and over, waiting and wondering why it took a solid three hours to get my ‘Hey, what’s up, how’s your day going?’ returned to me with a little smile emoji. In my overactive, insecure mind I imagined Annalise taken captive by the South American drug cartels when she got off the plane. I’d seen a show once where the cartels sent their guys to wait for pretty girls at the airports and then pretend to be a car service for the girl’s family, only to eventually kidnap the girls, demand a ransom, and then take the girls to jungles where they're forced to work synthesizing drugs or as mules.

  In some scenarios Annalise was half naked in the Jungles of Peru making meth. In others, though, she wasn’t upset at all. As terrifying as the cartel fantasy was, I knew deep down that it was the inner workings of a fucked up, prone-to-exaggeration mind. But the scenario that recurred the most, the one that really frightened me, had nothing to do with drug cartel fantasies, or crashed planes, or anything so dramatic. The thought that literally kept me up most nights of those two weeks was that Annalise had forgotten about what we had before she left; that she’d met some Peruvian kid who was my South American counterpart, someone from her culture, who could speak her language and grew up in a similar household who would just be…easier to be with than I would. Some kid who wasn’t from a messed up family like mine. Did she even want that? I didn’t really know the answer at the time, but my sad boy brain yelled the answer over and over to me.

  The next two weeks were a mix of good moments, bad moments, and a lot of waiting around. When she was at her family’s home Anna had Wi-Fi, and we texted back and forth like normal. When she went out almost anywhere else the Wi-Fi was either dial-up-modem slow, or non-existent. I was happy to be speaking to her at all while she was away with family in another country, but it was in those other moments that my mind started racing with insecurities. A two hour gap between texts was two hours to invent reasons other than Wi-Fi as to why she wasn’t writing back, and that never ended well.

  On several occasions, after allowing my crazy thoughts to escalate into crazy moods, I found myself inadvertently taking it out on Anna when she would finally return a text. I’d write back one word responses like ‘okay’ or ‘fine’, knowing that each was an indicator of the opposite emotion. When she would ask me what was wrong, I’d predictably text ‘nothing’, and continue down the dark road of immaturity. More than once our conversations devolved into mini-fights, mostly (or entirely) due to me not knowing what to do with my own sadness and insecurity, and acting like a complete tool ‘cause I needed attention. Those talks followed a predictable pattern, and we had at least three of them during her trip. After each one I felt absolutely terrible, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Each time I felt insecure, or jealous of fictitious Peruvian guys, I would say something petty, or engage in my attention seeking texts. Then we’d argue back and forth, usually with Annalise asking me what the hell was wrong with me, telling me ‘bye’ when I went a little too far, me apologizing profusely and begging her forgiveness, then us getting back to normal.

  It became a predictable but unhealthy series of interactions, and I noticed three things about them:

  I can be petty as all hell when I feel jealous. I never realized this about myself because there were no girls in my life
, really, and therefore, there had been no opportunities for me to act petty and jealous in the past.

  I didn’t like that I kept repeating the aforementioned petty behavior. It escalated so badly that at one point, Annalise christened me Petty Crocker.

  Annalise never gave up on me. This was the most important of the three because this was all happening via text, many countries removed from each other, and it would have been easy as all hell to just cut me off, but she never did.

  She got mad at me, for sure, and she would text things that would cut right through me and bring me back to sanity, but she never held a grudge, and things always got back to normal with us. I had never been this deep into a relationship, and I noticed that I wasn’t being close to the best version of myself. A year of my life had been spent pining and wanting this girl—that Peruvian goddess of my dreams—and there I was acting like a dick, about to forsake the best thing that had ever happened to me. Whether she held a grudge or not, I knew that I wasn’t being myself and that I needed to stop being Petty Crocker.

  After my third shameful display, I realized that something needed to be said, something not in the moment of my heightened emotion, something I could plan out. I noticed a pattern developing in myself, one that was grander than my increasing pattern of pettiness. I noticed that the writer in me was awakened by her being in my life; that I could speak most clearly to her when the voice I had inside was allowed to speak. After the third, and last, time I needed to explain myself, but in those moments the words that went from my screen to hers weren’t really me. They were some sad teenaged boy retarded version of myself, and Annalise need to hear from the real me. The voice in my head spoke the words, and I typed them as quickly as they came into my head: