Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  Simon was speechless.

  “What am I supposed to do here?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know, I guess,” he mumbled to the ground.

  “Figures,” I scoffed. “I have to go home.”

  Simon didn’t look at me. “Okay,” he said.

  I wished like crazy that he’d grab me and kiss me, or at least beg me to go back to his house, even though the last thing in the world I wanted was to sit on that stupid futon. We stood on the corner for another second—then I turned and started walking toward home. When I was about ten feet away Simon called after me.

  “It’s not his fault, you know,” he said. “It’s not my fault, either.”

  This remark made me furious—even though somewhere I knew he was right. I couldn’t even look over my shoulder. I knew if I did then I would say something I would really regret, so I just kept walking.

  12

  Simon texted me that night, asking if I was all right. Can you believe that? How amazing a person is Simon? I had treated him horribly and he reached out to me. But I couldn’t answer. I just couldn’t. I was so ashamed to have treated him like that, on top of which, I was still so angry. I didn’t even know at who; everyone, I suppose. But now I wasn’t talking to the only person in the world who understood me at all.

  I didn’t know what to do. It’s not like we were in school and could run into each other in the hall or the cafeteria the next day—we would have said, “Hi,” or something equally clever, and then it all would have been fine. And even if school was in session it wouldn’t have mattered since we didn’t even go to the same school.

  I got a couple more texts from Simon—R U there? Hello?—but the worse I felt, the more difficult it was to respond to him. I was in a spiral. What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been sitting on the edge of my bed on the brink of losing my virginity with the man I loved (well, we had gone a lot further than I ever had before), and now here I was, sitting on the edge of that very same bed, totally alone on the planet.

  I mentioned some time back that my mom had accused me of being a pessimist, but really, deep down, underneath it all, I have always had hope for a good life. I used to, anyway. This whole Thomas situation was unraveling everything. I needed to do something. I needed help. Bad.

  I grabbed the phone. I hit Favorites and tapped Simon’s name—right beside the ridiculous picture of him sticking his tongue out at the camera, a shot taken during happier times. Then I panicked. I hit the red button on the screen and ended the call before it connected. But the thing is, you can never be sure how quickly a call is disconnected on the other end. I’ve called people and then changed my mind before the phone has even rung, only to have them call me back in a few seconds and ask why I’d hung up.

  My phone started buzzing. For a second, I let myself imagine that Simon must have been sitting on that futon waiting for my call and hit the call-back command right away. But when I looked down at my phone, it wasn’t Simon calling. It was my dad.

  I had to get out of my room. I dropped the phone on top of the dresser like it was molten lava. I pulled open the middle drawer of the dresser, reached in the back where I kept my secret money stash, grabbed a bunch, and was out the door in seconds flat.

  I headed into town. I was going to buy a T-shirt I had seen in a window on Elm Street. I counted how much money I’d taken from my dresser—five twenties. More than I thought. I also had a five-dollar bill that was already in my pocket. Plus my flattened coins, which I guess weren’t worth a damn. As I walked, I fingered the three flattened coins in my pocket. I had begun to carry them with me all the time—my two and the one Simon had given me. A mere remembrance of our once-flourishing relationship.

  I was walking under the overpass that carried the train tracks, and then on a whim I veered off toward the railroad station. I told myself that it was a shortcut to the store—but I was heading back to the spot where Simon and I first became a couple, by the tracks where we flattened the pennies. Maybe it’s stupid, but if I couldn’t be with him, I wanted to at least feel close to him. Besides, there was never anyone around there.

  When I arrived at the tracks I reached again for the flattened pennies in my pocket—they felt so frail, like they might break if I rubbed them too hard. So I stopped. I stood on the embankment, looking for the exact spot where Simon and I had lain together on the rocks while I felt his breath on me as that train roared past us. I couldn’t find it. What was one of the most important shrines in my life was a dirty, unremarkable stretch of anonymous railroad track.

  Far off, I could see a train coming. I stepped up to the tracks. Even in the daylight, the train’s headlamp was bright. I looked down at the rails over which the steel wheels would roll in a few seconds. The train blew its whistle, as if it were yelling at me. I turned and watched it close in. I was only two steps from the track. The whistle screamed at me again. I looked straight up into the heavens. The sky was a dirty gray. The earth below my feet began to tremble. The train whistle screamed a third time. It was close now. What was I doing? I leapt back.

  The train roared by as if it were furious with me. The wind it created shoved me back some more. Dust and dirt flew up around my face and into my eyes and throat. I began to choke. I coughed until tears rolled down my cheeks. I started spinning around and around in circles, I didn’t know why. The rear of the train whooshed past. I became dizzy and stumbled and half fell, half sat on the small jagged rocks. Slowly, the turmoil around me began to subside and the air grew very still again. I could hear my breath.

  I looked down the track and the train was nowhere in sight. It was long gone. I had been forgotten.

  The station was not far in front of me. Inside, the air was super stale. An old man sat on one of the long wooden benches reading a newspaper. Two people were buying tickets from the nearby machines.

  Out on the platform five or six people were waiting. I looked up toward where Simon and I had hung out and saw another train coming. The two people who had bought tickets from the machine came out. The train pulled slowly into the station and stopped. Maybe ten people got off. A conductor stepped out of the train and took off his hat. He brushed his hair back with his hand and stood beside the door while everyone on the platform got on board. Then the conductor looked up and down the track. He turned to look at me. I was only a few feet away, but I didn’t think he had noticed me before.

  “Going to New York, young lady?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Oh,” I said, “yes,” and I got on the train.

  I almost skipped on board. I turned left and went into the forward car. There were plenty of seats, but I walked to the very front of the car and then all the way to the back. The train started to gather speed and I was looking out the windows, left and right. Walking back up the aisle, swaying side to side with the motion, I felt giddy. I ended up on the left side, in a window seat, near the front, for no reason.

  I had taken the train into the city only a few times in my entire life. Once when my dad’s car was broken and we were going to the circus, and another time when my mom took my sister and me to see a matinee. And one other time when some friends and I went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center. Otherwise, my dad drove us—not that we went into the city all that much.

  Trains are very pleasant, except for the fact that very few things actually face the railroad tracks, so, consequently, you are usually looking at the back of people’s lives. And people throw a lot of junk out the back of buildings. My view was scarred by their debris. The redeeming thing about all this, however, is that the scenery moves by so quickly on a train. The instant after you see some rusted car or empty, derelict swimming pool—things that were originally intended to bring joy—the view changes and you can forget all about the sorry sight and take in the next little disappointment that life out your window has to offer.

  It was good to be in motion.

  The same conductor who invited me onto the train came down the aisle, collecting
tickets, which of course I didn’t have.

  “I can sell you one,” the conductor said. “But it’s five dollars more than if you’d bought it at the station.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, okay,” and gave him one of my five twenties.

  “Round-trip is twenty-six dollars.” He wasn’t as nice as he had been when I was getting on.

  “I know,” I said quickly. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t know what I was doing. “I just need a one way.”

  He nodded. “Thirteen seventy-five.” He ripped out the ticket, punched it with his old-fashioned hole puncher, shoved a piece of paper into the slot on the top of the seat in front of me, and handed me my change and the receipt.

  “I didn’t charge you the surcharge,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He winked at me and moved up the aisle. I generally don’t like winks all that much. They tend to be pretty cheesy, but he was very good at it. It was almost as if I couldn’t be sure he had actually winked, it was that subtle—perhaps the best wink I’ve ever gotten.

  Things out the window began to look grittier, grungier. There were refineries and big oil storage tanks. It all looked rather dingy, even the different colored cargo containers that were piled up. I didn’t care. Finally the train went underground into a tunnel. Then while we were still moving through the darkness, people started lining up in the aisle to get off. They just couldn’t wait to hit the city.

  I let most everyone leave the train before me. I nodded as they passed me, giving out what I hoped was a mysterious look of satisfaction—my Mona Lisa smile. I actually didn’t know what the hell I was doing, or where I was going to go now that the train had reached its destination.

  I followed the other passengers up the broken escalator. Why is it that broken escalators are harder to climb than regular stairs?

  The station was huge; I didn’t recognize it at all. There were fast-food restaurants selling pizza and donuts, pretzels, and Mexican food; newsstands with billions of magazines; and signs all over the place—for stores, train tracks, waiting areas. Arrows pointed toward the subway—I didn’t know anything about the subway or what the different colors and numbers meant—some of the signs had arrows pointing two directions for the same subway. People swarmed in all directions. A big board was showing various train departures, clicking and changing all the time. A crowd of people stood under it craning their necks. I wandered down a long hall, to another part of the station where there was another board with different train information changing every few seconds.

  I looked up at it for a while. I couldn’t decipher it at all. I didn’t want to ask anyone for help. For the first time since I’d left home, I really wished I had my phone. I could picture it in my mind, sitting on the corner of my dresser—a million miles away.

  I saw a red sign for an exit and walked up another escalator that didn’t work—and suddenly I was outside. If I thought it was bad in the station, it was complete chaos out here. It was beginning to get dark and cars had their lights on. The street right in front of me was bumper-to-bumper traffic; trucks were honking their horns. Someone jostled me into someone else going the other direction. My shoulder got slammed pretty hard, and I didn’t even see into who I had been shoved. I stumbled out of the flow of people rushing in and out of the station and it was slightly less chaotic—not calm, but at least I wasn’t getting run over. A long line of people was waiting to get into taxis pulling up by the curb.

  Up at the corner, a mass of humanity raced across the street, while another herd of people waited for the light to change in the other direction. Brightly lit signs announced the stores all along the block. I saw the sign for Macy’s. It was old-fashioned and it didn’t light up—there was just an arrow underneath the name, pointing the way. I was in Macy’s once as a kid, with my parents. We went to see Santa—which I hated—and my sister got lost. It was a real disaster trying to find her. The last thing I needed was to get trapped in the biggest store in the world.

  Then something flashed in my brain—a poster I had seen back in the station. Why I suddenly remembered it, why it jumped into my mind at that instant when I had no memory of even noticing it in the first place, I can’t explain.

  I had been looking at so many things, but the poster must have subconsciously registered in my overworked brain. On it was a painting of a train rushing past a lighthouse. Overlapping that was a picture of a happy family—mother and father, child and grandfather.

  I slithered through the crowd and made it back to the station. I walked down another broken escalator and marched right up to the poster. It said what I had thought it had said. The Downeaster. The train went to Maine.

  That’s where I was going. Suddenly and without question, I was going to Maine to see my grandfather.

  The ticket counter was off to my left and the line wasn’t too bad.

  “I’d like a ticket for the Downeaster, please,” I said to the woman behind the glass.

  “The what?”

  “The Downeaster, the train to Maine.”

  “Sweetie, there’s no train to Maine from here—oh wait, you want that tourist train. Honey, you get that in Boston. You have to go to Boston first and self-transfer there from Back Bay to North Station. But I can sell you the whole thing if you like. Next train in twelve minutes.”

  I couldn’t really follow what she was saying, but I said, “Sure, that sounds good. How much is it?”

  She slapped a few keys on her computer. Her nails were very long and very red. I don’t know how she hit the keys without breaking those nails.

  “It’s $136 one way, sweetie.”

  I had a little more than ninety dollars left. She must have seen my face drop because very quickly she said, “You know, you can go over to the Port Authority and get yourself on the bus. That’d be a lot cheaper.”

  “Okay, where’s that?”

  “Sweetie, you can take the C or the E train one level down, or you can go out to Eighth Avenue and just walk uptown—same direction as the traffic—to Forty-Second Street. You can’t miss it.”

  “This way?” I pointed behind me, to where I had just come in.

  “That’s Seventh Avenue. Go down that hall to the other end and go up the escalator and you’ll be on Eighth.”

  And that’s what I did. I went down the hall, up an escalator that actually worked, and started walking in the same direction the cars were going. For the first time the thought of just going home occurred to me. But what would I do once I got there? I couldn’t call Simon, not after the way I treated him, and then ghosting him like I had. And why had my father been calling me? He never calls me unless there’s a problem; he always texts—my mother teases him that it’s his way of staying young. I was pretty sure the call had something to do with my visit to Thomas. I kept walking. Ahead I saw a massive building with a giant overhang. Taxis were double-parked, horns honked. People were crossing the street between cars.

  “This must be the place,” I actually said out loud, like I was in a movie or something.

  Under the huge, ugly portico, people were swarming. My toes got run over by a large wheelie bag. The person pulling it didn’t even notice. I walked through the glass doors and right in front of me there was an information booth, but no one was working at it. Another huge crowd of people milled about, and the same junky restaurants that I had seen at the train station lined the halls. There were also a lot of people just hanging around, not going anywhere. This place was similar to the train station, but a little seedier—to use one of my dad’s words.

  I walked over to a newsstand. The man behind the counter looked like he might have been from India. “Do you know where I get tickets for Greyhound buses?” I asked him. I had no idea if Greyhound was what I wanted, but they were the only bus company I knew.

  “Downstairs,” he said in a beautiful singsong accent, pointing toward an escalator that I hadn’t noticed. “There.”

  I started to walk away from the counter—th
en I turned back. “Where are you from?” I asked him.

  “I am from Bangladesh,” the man said in his singsong.

  If that’s what everyone in Bangladesh sounded like, then it was a place I wanted to visit soon, even if I had no idea where it was. I waved my thanks; the man smiled brightly.

  “Have a safe trip,” he called after me.

  The Greyhound office was on the right at the bottom of the escalator. There was that great sign with the skinny dog all stretched out, looking as if he was running really fast. I was so happy to see that sign that I ran off the escalator. I smacked right into an old lady.

  “Watch it!” she shouted at me, stumbling back.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said to her, and reached out my arms toward her. She pulled away from me like I had Ebola, and muttered something. I wasn’t sure exactly what she said, but it definitely contained the word “fucker.”

  I burst into tears. I had no idea that was coming. I tried to stop it right away—the last thing I needed was to be crying in the middle of the bus station in New York, with all sorts of child poachers and derelicts hiding close by. It took me a minute to settle back down. I kept my face low and wiped my tears. I glanced around, but no one seemed to have noticed me. There were two agents behind the counter and I slowly approached the one that didn’t have anyone buying a ticket. The counter was high, and since I’m height deprived, my chin was basically touching the top of it. I rubbed my eyes and made a show of being tired so that he wouldn’t think my eyes were red from crying.

  “How much is a ticket to Maine?” I asked the man behind the counter.

  He had black hair plastered down to his head. His part was crooked. He wore large black glasses that made his eyes seem very large. “To where, to Portland?”

  “In Maine, yeah,” I said.

  “Round-trip or one way?”