Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel

by Christopher Harlan

  After our tense exchange there was nothing. Radio silence. Unreturned texts followed up with panicked calls. It was predictable teen bedlam, but when she wouldn't return my texts I knew that things had gone wronger than wrong. She never cut me off. Never went more than fifteen minutes without returning a text. I don't remember how many times I actually typed that I was sorry, but it must have been a lot because every text after that, when I began an s-word my phone auto-filled the word sorry.

  It didn't matter how many times I wrote that I was sorry, they all went unanswered, as did the calls and voicemails I left practically begging her to answer me back. Two days isn't that long when measured on the continuum of human history, but in teenage relationship years it was an unbearable eternity. You all know what a panic attack is, right? Seen it on TV maybe, or read an article in the psychology section of the New York Times, something like that? Well if that's your reference, then understand that you know nothing, Jon Snow, and that real life mental illness made manifest is frightening—the sort that leaves you changed for having been its witness. I had my first one in my room, when all this went down. Thought I was dying. Thought Mom would be the one to find my body in my room and freak out. Turns out it was just anxiety. That was my first introduction to that type of thing, but the stress of the situation was starting to get to me physically.

  So after two whole days of trying to contact Annalise, my mind looked like the lawn of that weird guy who lives at the end of every block in America; like that house that Pennywise lives in in IT, the one whose grass is about as tall as you were, with gnats and mosquitos circling the air, and a foul, nondescript odor always lingering. That was my brain without Anna—an absolute mess of an existence. I did my best to distract from my growing anxiety, but nothing quite fulfilled its internet-based promise of relaxation and stillness of mind. In turn, I tried the following home remedies:

  Yoga: now if you think I actually went to a yoga class you're just a plain old silly goose. No way, man. Not into the mutual sweating and chanting on little expensive carpets while injuring myself, but I found some videos online that didn't look too hard. It was quite the realization to discover that there's literally no such thing as easy yoga. And, while I gained a newfound respect for people who did that shit for real, the strained contorting and the vertigo-induced breathing left me anything but relaxed. Which brings us to...

  Breathing techniques: I found this article claimed to be written by a former navy seal, talking all about the breathing techniques he used to stay calm under the extreme pressure of assassinating or kidnapping whoever-the-fuck in some country no American could locate on a map. He called it 'box breathing' I think - basically even intervals of inhalation, holding your breath, and exhalation. If by calm this dude meant that I'd pass out from being light headed, and wouldn't notice my anxiety, well then he was onto something.

  I tried everything I came across to relieve my anxiety, but nothing worked. Only one thing would work, and I knew that I had to talk to her, to work it out somehow, it was just a matter of getting her to answer me. From there I knew that I could talk to her. It was Sunday morning when I decided to make one final, heartfelt attempt. I knew that another 'I'm sorry, please answer me' text wasn't going to do anything (what was that old expression about the definition of insanity). I decided to use the only tool I ever really had—my words.

  The words really did visit me, but maybe that's not the right way to say it. More like the words always existed—they were like some omniscient entity that resided in a part of my brain that wasn't accessible whenever I wanted it to be. That place wasn't a room that I had the key for, it was more like a museum that had some very specific hours of operation. I could go there, sometimes, but never at pure will. There were always parameters, and most of the time I just had to wait, wait for the words to be audible to me, then all I had to do was get them recorded so they could live forever. I knew even then that the writer's greatest tool was his ability to listen to his own voice. That was true enough. But sometimes, in a bind, you had to push it; you had to bang the shit out of the museum door, even if it was after-hours, and demand to be let in.

  I thought of where we began, and then it became as clear as day. The rocks. Our rocks. The place we never left. The place where there was no jealousy, no pettiness. There were places like that, I realized, places that were so essential to goodness that they had this force field around them; this thin but effective layer of human memory that guarded everything inside that bubble, and wouldn't let anything bad penetrate, no matter what. Sometimes we found those places, and sometimes we created them. Anna and I had one, and I needed to go there to write the words down.

  I remembered the route without directions, as if the car knew where to go and I was just the mindless, heartbroken kid at the helm. Twenty minutes after I left I was there. I parked in a spot—not our spot but one on the same side—and sat staring at the rocks. There were people everywhere, but it didn't matter. I just starred, waiting to hear that voice, the one that would tell me all the right words to get her back. Ten minutes passed with no sound but the distant laughter and crashing of water against rocks. And then, out of nowhere, the words.

  It's strange to be here without you. It's a beautiful day; the wind rushes across my face carrying the smell of the water in its gust. From here the bridge decorates the horizon, hovering over the water as hundreds of cars fly by in the distance. As I watch the small moving dots speed by I think how little they know of this place. Most of them probably make this trip every morning, speeding by with eyes faced forward and coffee cups filling their hands. This is just another day for them. They drive by in masses, perhaps not even glancing to their right to see what must look to them a single line of tiny little stones carving a strip through the water. They have no idea what they drive over every day, but we do.

  They travel over sacred ground, woefully ignorant of its significance. Maybe that's all the better, because this is our place, and its place in Our Story is only meant for us to know. This is where it all began; chronologically not very long ago, but really years ago when measured in what we mean to each other. This geography has become some of the most significant of my life. This place is a part of you, and now you're forever a part of me.

  As I sit here I watch the wind bend the reeds over towards the west, and even with just the crack of my car windows I'm reminded of how cold it is here. Not cold to you, of course, but cold to me. The sensation would normally be aversive, but this particular discomfort brings with it the strongest sense memories and when I feel the shiver manifest in goosebumps on my arm, I look over and I can see us there. I'm looking at the spot now, as a group of teenaged boys yell and race each other over the spot where we first sat and talked. I was so cold. But I can't feel that cold right now, all my mind can process is the memory of you on my left, sitting down on the stones, your hair blowing around as you told me deeply personal stories about your life and your pain. I remember the tone of your voice so clearly.

  The view is amazing, but it’s just not the same without you. This particular view is meant to be shared. This is our view. You told me that when you come here alone you listen to music and try to forget the pain that brought you here in the first place, but I’m here to remember. Part of me wants to reach over to roll up the windows, but I won't. The breeze forces its way inside the car, and I can see us there, as if I'm watching a film of us. There we are: me poorly dressed for the occasion, and you, your deep brown eyes fixed at an angle to my right, off in the distance, as I listened to your story.

  I can smell your hair and I can hear you humming—I love when you hum—your long black boots pressed up against the front of my car, and your eyes once again at an angle into the distance. Another strong breeze rushes over the right side of my body. The wind came from that direction the first time we were here, freezing my right ear and pushing your hair about your face as you spoke. We didn't stay on the actual rocks very long at all.

  The longer I sit her
e the more people pass in front of me: women pushing their babies in strollers; old men with their walking partners; grandmothers babysitting their grandchildren, and joggers breathing heavily as they bounce by with headphones in. All of them pass by where we sat that day, and none of them know Our Story, but maybe one day they will.

  I'm remembering, writing, and thinking of you, and those things are inexorably linked in a triad, which is to say that they don't exist separately, but come together to allow me to write words like these, as my thumbs start to cramp from writing so much. I perceive the pain but I don't really feel it, what I feel is that day when you leaned your head on my shoulder for the first time. I feel the tickle of your hair against my face as we kissed, and the sensation of your fingers running over my arm.

  It was then that I learned how much your kiss reveals about you. Your kiss is you, and maybe that's why I ache to never go too long without it. I don't love kissing you just because it invokes some physical response, but because everything that you are is transmitted in it. When we kiss we're alone together, ghosts to the world around us, and locked away in each other's hearts. Your kiss is us.

  I didn’t have any grand conclusion, but that’s what was in my heart to write. I thought that baring my soul would be enough, that it would remind her of how silly this fight was, and send her running back to me, begging me for more words. But when was it ever that simple? Oh, right, never. Never ever. Did you see it going any other way? Like, me having this epiphany, driving to the rocks, writing my little whatever, then Anna running back into my arms? Hope, right? For suckers. The words worked. They did something, because after I wrote them she texted me back, finally, after two solid days of not speaking.

  Eleven

  Where I can’t stop the momentum of her loss.

  Remember the movie American Beauty, where Lester, the main character and narrator, tells you in the opening line that he’ll be dead by the end of the movie? There were probably still people surprised at the ending, demanding their money back from the goofy high school kid who only took the job at the theater for the free popcorn. Even when you try to warn people they still get surprised. I guess it’s human nature to want a happy ending, but the opposite of a happy ending isn’t a devastating ending. The opposite of a happy ending is the truth. Real life.

  The nuclear annihilation that I had stupidly wished on the Peruvian people when Anna was on her way there came back to me twofold. Ground Zero was my car. I believe that somewhere, wherever that car is today, if you look closely you can see my nuclear shadow still burned into the driver seat. After I poured my heart out to her in that letter she actually texted me back that specific combination of words which, to my mind, have never done anything but inspire anxiety in all who’ve heard them: I need to talk to you. My heart sunk when I read them on my phone. I pretended to be less panicked than I was, and just wrote back that I was free now if she wanted to talk. Of course, she said, come get me. I’ll be right there, I told her. Which do you want first, the bad news or the bad news?

  My heart stated racing during what you can imagine was the worst drive ever. Lamb to the slaughter, only with the consciousness that the slaughter is coming. I pulled up in front of her house, the house she shared with two other families, and looked around. Normally I was so focused on her that the rest of the world kind of melted around me. I didn’t notice the little things around Annalise, only her. But that day, as I waited for her to come out and break my heart, I looked around. This part of the neighborhood might as well have been another neighborhood entirely. It was like a museum to the messed up housing of suburbia. This is where she’s from, I thought. This is where she needs to get away from, isn’t it?

  Anna came out of the house with no phone, and I had the weirdest memory. I remembered that scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone tells Michael that whoever comes to him to arrange the meeting is the traitor, and to always remember that. That’s what I thought of when she said we had to talk, and that’s what I thought of again when I saw her walking towards the car. This time it was just her, wrapped in an oversized light grey hoodie, leggings, and those black boots I’ll always remember her wearing. She jumped in the passenger side, her eyes red either from crying, not sleeping, or maybe both. I’d learned not to ask, and I already knew a little bit about the craziness she lived in everyday, so instead I just leaned over and kissed her. When she gave me that cousin-peck instead of a boyfriend kiss I knew this was it, all that was left was to go through the motions.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Potato. Can we drive somewhere?”

  “Yeah, of course. Where do you want to go? The Rocks?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “Not there. Anywhere but. You pick, just go.”

  “Alright.”

  I didn’t know many places to go, so I went to the giant, oversized parking lot of the grocery store that had opened in our town the previous year. It was just a grocery store like Lance Armstrong was just a good cyclist. What I mean to say is that it was a mega-mart, a giant corporate chair store on its third cycle of Human Growth Hormone, where you could do just about everything except your taxes. The parking lot was accordingly ridiculous. You could have housed a third of America’s homeless population inside its perimeter, so I chose the farthest spot from the store so we could have some privacy. I needed it, and I only hoped that no one was around to see what was about to happen. What threw me off was that she just started crying. Bawling. Movie shit. The fact that there was no warning, paired with the fact that she was never that vulnerable, threw me for a weird loop, and I instinctually reached my arm around her shoulder to comfort her. “What’s the matter? What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She said it again and again, broken words spoken though a sobbing face, but I made them out just fine. I knew what the sorry meant. I knew that she wasn’t apologizing for cutting me off, or for our fight, or the things she’d said. She was apologizing for breaking up with me, which she had yet to officially do. Like I said, we understood one another, in love and in tragedy. “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, rubbing her back. I don’t know why my first thought was to make her feel better when I was the one getting hurt, but that’s how I was with her, and I could see the pain it was causing her to have to do this.

  “Don’t lie,” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s okay when it’s not.”

  “Look at me,” I told her, and I did it with a confident command in my voice I honestly didn’t know existed until I used it in that moment, but it worked. She looked up at me with those tear soaked brown eyes, and I had to fight to hold back tears of my own. “You’re right, it’s not okay. Not at all. But no matter what, I don’t want you to be sad.” I was telling the truth when I said that, mostly because the whole thing hadn’t hit me yet. But besides that, there were types of love just like there were types of beauty, and in my hierarchy of loves the selfless ones stood squarely at the top of that pyramid. Those are the loves that care more about the other person than yourself, and that’s what I felt for Annalise. I never wanted anything from her. I only wanted to give her what she wanted. But I couldn’t do that. So I guess my love was like that fighter who loses on the scorecards but still comes across like the moral victor because he gave such a valiant and stupidly brave effort. That was my first love. A moral victory.

  “There’s no helping that,” she said. “Not now, not ever.” I could hear the depressed voice, the Bleh, I knew it better than any seventeen year old should have.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “I’m moving,” she said. It was the first I’d heard of anything like that, and it was about the last thing I expected to hear.

  “Moving? Where?”

  “Peru,” she said, and my heart dropped again. There was moving and then there was MOVING. I stupidly thought she meant that she was going away to college, and before she spoke I was ready to counter with the naive ‘we can make it work’ speech, but those h
opes had been shattered instantly with the name of a single country spoken out loud.

  “When?”

  “Next week,” she said.

  “What!”

  “I can’t stay at my house anymore, Logan, I just can’t. It isn’t you, and it isn’t us. I need to get away from her and that’s the only option. My family there said they’d take me.”

  “But I don’t get it,” I said, totally confused. “Why so suddenly? You’re not even going to finish out the year?”

  “I know this will be hard for you to understand, but I have to save myself. She wants me to go, and it’s something I have to do. I. . .I hurt myself for the first time in a year.”

  “You did what? When?”

  “Yesterday,” she told me. “I’m not proud of it, okay. I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m depressed as hell, but Mom and I had another bad fight. We’ve been having those almost every day.” Every day, I thought, she never told me about them. But I stopped asking questions once I realized that this wasn’t what she wanted, it was what she needed. She needed to get out of this place, she needed to get out of that home before it ruined her forever.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Potato.”

  “I wish that was enough.”

  I clutched her head and put it against my chest, and I could feel the dampness of her tears and the warmth of her face through my shirt. How long we sat like that I couldn’t tell you. Even with the distance of time I get too choked up in my own memories to accurately remember, but we sat there a while. There were more words spoken, of course. More apologies, more declarations of love, more assertions that she never meant to hurt me. Promises that we’d still keep in touch. Breakups 101, right? But for me it was a cut so deep that I didn’t even bleed. Didn’t feel the blade. I was eviscerated. My body just hadn’t fallen over yet.