Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel

by Christopher Harlan

  Let’s start where it makes sense to start. Yes, she was beautiful. Crazy beautiful. I-didn’t-think-girls-like-you-really-existed beautiful. Wait, now. That’s too common of a compliment, isn’t it? Every man says it about the woman he loves, and every woman humbly accepts, not always believing that it’s the truth, but loving that he cared enough to say it. In actuality, we aren’t specific enough, because there are types of beauty, and there are types of beautiful. She was the type you read about; the type you see on the big screen but never actually know in person; she was the type of beautiful they meant when the word was invented. They were thinking of Anna, they just didn’t realize it.

  But let’s get past the superficial stuff. What was she like? For one, she was low maintenance, no fancy designer bags or anything like that. She had the kind of frugal practicality that only a poor girl could have; a unique view of material things that makes romance more challenging than advanced calculus, ‘cause I couldn’t buy her shit without a lecture. I tried to get her flowers this one time—a dozen roses—and she just looked at me like I had lost my damn mind because, well, flowers cost money and then just die, so why bother? I could buy groceries for the week with the money you spent! She was wanderlust embodied; fragility in strength's clothing; someone always just barely keeping her inner demons at bay. But she was also really weird and funny at the same time. Check this out.

  The girl loved to sleep. She'd sleep in till like 2:30 in the afternoon on weekends, text me good morning, and then take her lazy ass back to sleep! And can you believe that when she'd wake up for real around 3, she had the audacity to tell me she was about to get breakfast. Are you joking, I'd ask, there's no such thing as 3:00 pm breakfast, it just doesn't exist. You, my friend, are about to have lunch, and a fairly late one at that. Lies, she'd tell me. That was her word, lies, she'd say it as a way to tell me she disagreed with whatever I was saying. And boy did she love to disagree with me - I think it might have been her favorite thing to do.

  Back to this breakfast thing, though. So I'd reiterate my point cause I was right, and I wasn't about to just let it go. I mean, there's no breakfast at 3:00 pm! You couldn't even make a valid brunch-based argument at that hour. No, I told her, you're just the girl who slept through the real breakfast, and now had a bad case of the I-Slept-Through-Real-Breakfast-So-I’m-Gonna-Make-Some-Shit-Up blues. You can’t just change all the known rules of social behavior in order to accommodate your own laziness. Just accept it; you messed up, start thinking about what you want for lunch. Lies, she'd repeat. She had this habit of letting me go on short rants to make my point, only to reply with a single word that was intended to transmit that everything you just said is total crap. You tried it. Get your life message. No lies, I'd continue, I speak the truth and you just don't wanna admit you lost the argument cause you're competitive, but that doesn’t make you right. Well, she'd say, I guess it's 8:00 am somewhere, right?

  She was the Catholicist of all Catholic girls (yes, it’s a word, I just made it up). Like I said, Peruvian, so I guess there’s no small amount of redundancy in calling a good, Spanish girl of any ethnicity a devout Catholic, it kind of comes with the territory. But she went hard. Catholic hard. Like, don’t-use-the-Lord’s-name-in-vain kind of Catholic; like, my neck will be adorned with a cross at all times kind of Catholic; like, no you can't put your hands there, I'm saving myself for marriage kind of Catholic. That last part was my least favorite one, but I guess that’s obvious. For her, Sunday wasn't a day off from work, it was God’s day, and I'd get a text only after Sunday prayers with Mamita was a wrap. She loved her huge family more than anything. Again, redundant. Spanish girl with a big-ass family. Even without a dad in the house this girl had two sisters, a mom, and about forty cousins. All the damn cousins!

  I always got them confused when she told stories about her extended family. Probably because she began each story referring to each and every one of them as my cousin so-and-so. Who, I'd ask. My cousin, so-and-so, you know, the one with the Hispanic name that sounds like the other Hispanic names. Oh, right, them! I never got them all straight. But it was confusing by sheer numbers alone, which were extreme by non-Hispanic standards. And to make things next-level confusing, the older cousins she was close to she’d refer to as her uncles, even though they weren’t. Every time I dared call her out on her complete lack of genealogical understanding (they're your cousins, you can't just call them by another title because you feel like it) she'd flip out and threaten to stop talking to me until I called them her uncles. Fine, I said, they’re your uncles, not your cousins, how dare I ever say otherwise. Girl literally made me say uncle.

  But bizarre family trees aside, family always came first for Anna. She lived with her two half-sisters and her mom in a small basement apartment that they rented, in a part of town that you could have accurately referred to as the wrong side of the tracks. Her oldest sister was about a high school career older than Anna, and the little one was just about to turn double-digits at the time our story begins. I didn’t really know either of them because Anna never let me in her apartment, but I’ll save that for later. But I knew that each of the girls had a different dad, none of whom were around, and that their mom was a Peruvian immigrant who understood more English then she ever let on, but spoke almost none.

  Annalise taught me more than I can fit in these pages, and maybe I did the same for her, but more than anything she taught me about hope, even when she had none herself, and she taught me about forgiveness even when she couldn’t muster any for those around her. Hope is for suckers, she’d tell me, and nothing good happens without something bad happening, too. It's fine, she'd say when I tried to comfort her, I'm used to it, I'll live. Mom used to say the same sometimes. I’m okay, baby, don’t worry about me.

  Mom. She's as much a part of my story as Annalise is, but the complex truth is that they're intertwined in a way that gets hard to separate logically, like when you put your keys and your headphones in the same pocket and try to pull just one of them out. Doesn't work. Their stories are stuck together, glued only by the impact each had on me a long time ago.

  Brace yourself for an elastic metaphor. I call it elastic ‘cause I'm gonna stretch it out, like Plastic Man used to stretch his arms to save people who were in trouble. It won't break, I promise. There are people who migrate through our lives like the background characters in a mediocre movie; the B actors of life who live on in freeze-framed memories, but who don't really matter in any way that you can conceive the word matter to mean. But then there are the ones who are cast in the important roles; the roles that matter and forever alter the narrative, and upend the lives we know, leaving our existence forever altered. We only get a few of these people, no matter how long we live, and Annalise was one of mine, she was the one. Loving Anna didn’t make me, but it may have saved me, and that’s a story that needs telling, so here it is.

  My book. My love letter. Our Story.

  Interlude

  Where we pause the narrative for me to tell you all about that most insidious of soul-killers.

  The Bleh was a force, a darkness without end, an event horizon.

  It occupied an unknown quantity of space, or perhaps it was space itself, a deformed version of it anyhow, into which those diverse emotions we called happiness went to disappear. Where they went was anyone's guess, but it was clear that their purest forms were never to be observed again. Maybe the Bleh was a wormhole, the other end of which produced the bastards of our happiness.

  Although the nature of its origins remained unknown, it was, without question, a family thing. It was an inheritance, a thing passed down through generations like some shitty heirloom nobody wanted, but got in their grandma's will nonetheless. Or maybe it was biological, its characteristics woven into the very fabric of our DNA. Or then again, maybe it was an environmental thing, our genetic expression gone mad, influenced by the most random of things outside of our control. It was probably all the above.

  As far as I could trace
back with my amateur genealogical skills, which were highly suspect, the Bleh first expressed itself in the new world, a gift from my great grandfather. That dude lost his mind and nearly killed his whole family one morning over coffee and danish to resolve some ridiculous issues that are lost to history. His family didn't fall under his knife, but the Bleh jumped from him (or perhaps it multiplied, who knows) to his children—all of them—four siblings who'd each have it manifest somewhat differently. My great uncle similarly lost his mind, though his Bleh made him suicidal instead of homicidal; my other great uncle was just weird, a hermit who no one ever spoke to, which was probably just fine with him. My great aunt never married, which didn't fundamentally make her crazy, but the reason for the lack of a marriage was her propensity towards strangeness ranging in intensity from ‘a little eccentric’ to ‘that strange lady who wanders the neighborhood late at night’.

  Now my grandmother was another story altogether. Her expression of the Bleh was on some next level. Hers transcended the general strangeness imparted to her siblings, and instead she became just like her abusive father; someone capable and willing to spread the Bleh to others. Enter my mom. The Bleh was passed onto her through the damn umbilical cord, right into the bloodstream. It lied dormant for a little while, but even by the age of ten that shit was playing games with her, convicting her she didn’t wanna live anymore and making her depressed before she was old enough to even spell the word. Like many forces in this world, it goes by different names, most of them too imprecise and vague to have much meaning, depending on who you ask: mental illness, a chemical imbalance, just plain crazy. A beast with man heads. A force with many names. But its lack of a proper name doesn't make it any less real.

  What about me, you ask? I had it too. No doubt it lived inside of me. How could it not? It was my inheritance after all. But I was a fighter like my Mom, who never met a Bleh she couldn’t scrap with. That was also my inheritance. That was the strange part. I was the inheritor of both my destruction and my salvation; it was only a matter of which one got to me first.

  Two

  Where I realize that even when thrown by my best friend with the noblest of intentions, a french fry in the face is still really annoying.

  Our Story begins in a typical, all American high school which sat only a few blocks from my house. I’d gone to Catholic school for 9th and 10th grades, but after my parents finally realized the error of their ways in sending me there I ended up at the local high school. You remember the type; a large, box-shaped building crammed with angry, lonely, and silly adolescents. That place where the day started too early and ended too late, and where we came to follow rules for a living.

  That was the world I lived in when I met Annalise, the building where kids spent the most formative years of their lives; that strange dramaturgy where we pretended to be who we thought we were. It was a stage, where the daily dramas of breakups, failed tests, and personal problems got played out for huge, unwanted audiences to see, judge, and leave a review on Yelp. And occasionally we learned stuff, too. I hated high school. We just never got along; one of those toxic relationships you hear self-help authors talking about on daytime TV talk shows. We were bad for one another. Abusive, no good enablers of the very worst qualities in each other.

  Sixteenth century bell schedules.

  Notes copied off blackboards into marble notebooks.

  One more year of my life to get thoroughly zombified.

  On one of those momentous occasions when a teacher taught me something, I remember my World History teacher telling us about The Encounter; the first time that Europeans landed their blue-eyes on the shores of the Americas (and we all know how well things went from there). The name stuck with me. Two worlds colliding, meeting for the first time, and each changing the other forever. Well, Annalise and I had our own Encounter, and it happened on a Monday.

  It was a wear-your-hood-in-school kind of day. But then again, what day wasn't? That morning my homeroom teacher called me Emo because of said hood, but that was just the kind of things teachers said when they needed to classify you. You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions. I'd been called Emo more than once at school, but I guess I was too Emo to care what adults called me. It was a normal first day of the week, unspectacular except for what eventually happened, and for the fact that I was about to get ruthlessly pegged in the face by my so-called best friend. The sensations of hard, hot, and wet all hit my cheek at the exact same time. "Did you just throw a fry at me?" I couldn't believe I had to ask such a thing, but I was pretty sure that’s what had just happened.

  "Yeah, so?"

  "So?" I asked. "What the hell? And it's a greasy one, too."

  "That's what bothered you about it? So, like, if it had been a little drier you'd be cool with it bouncing off your cheek?"

  "No, I wouldn't," I declared angrily. "But it would have been less offensive."

  "I didn't mean to offend," my soon to be ex- best friend said back to me. "I meant to get you out of la la land. Wake up, man."

  “I was day dreaming of happier things,” I told him. “Sure as hell better than this place.”

  “Logan, an impoverished African nation in the middle of armed rebellion is better than this place. When did you become so obvious?”

  “About the same time you decided it was cool to throw your lunch at my face to get my attention. A tap on the shoulder would have worked just fine.”

  “So what were you fantasizing about? No, wait, dumb question. So is today the day?”

  The day he was referring to was the one where I actually grew a set and talked to Annalise. And yes, I’d decided that it was, in fact, the day. I’d tortured myself for an entire year over this issue. That’s a full twelve months of self-induced frustration, and romantic comedy-like pining from a distance. I’d decided that it was finally time to act.

  “Yeah, it is.” Before I was done with my affirmation another fry hit me. “Shit, what was that one for?”

  “For lying. You’re a terrible liar.”

  I spent a year telling myself that every upcoming day was the day, the talking-to-Annalise day; mark it on your calendar. I’d say it before bed, as though sleep would make it a reality when I woke up, like those fools who try to learn a language when they’re unconscious. I’d made the false declaration of speaking to her so many times that I didn’t even believe myself any more. Apparently Pete didn’t either. Maybe I was a terrible liar.

  “Thank you, I guess.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “Wait, so being a good liar is the goal?”

  “Don’t try to confuse me,” he said back. “There’s only one goal, and so far you haven’t come close to accomplishing it.” He was right, of course, but it wasn’t my fault. That’s just what girls as stunning as Annalise did, they made you hesitate.

  So enter Pete, the best of the friends I ever made, if you needed a title, but if I was being polygraph-honest with you, he was my only real friend. I had acquaintances, sure, and kids I was cool with at school, but the word friend meant something to me, and Pete was the only one who fit that criteria. We went way back, farther than most friends in high school went, to a kindergarten class of long ago, where we bonded over a shared package of Fig Newtons my mom packed for my snack, and our mutual hatred of our Megabitch of a teacher, Ms. Maron.

  Now, when I call her a Megabitch I do so for a reason. The woman was pure evil; sent from some yet undiscovered level of Hell that even Dante would've struggled to articulate properly. She was a panic attack generator; the kind of teacher that sowed the seeds of hating school nice and early. Everything made her angry. It was like she woke up each morning just barely suppressing the urge to murder someone, and then drove to work to teach five year olds how to color and count things. She existed in a near constant state of irritation, and when she had dominion over our five year old lives, she was nothing short of the type of evil you imagined lived under your bed when m
om and dad shut off your nightlight and left the room.

  My general weirdness and misanthropy came later in my life, but I was a pretty normal little kid. I was prone to intense contemplation and scowls that made me look way too serious for my age, but still, pretty normal. I was nice, polite, and I smiled. This got me automatically pegged as the good one, and Pete, with his penchant for disregarding authority, got labeled the troublemaker. This perception followed us throughout our childhood and adolescence, haunting Pete with an unfounded reputation for all things rude and disrespectful, the kind of rep that gossipy teachers (which, let's face it, is all of them) just loved to internalize. Pete was ruined at five, condemned to mostly unfounded stereotypes that would shape his self-perception and behavior for years, and for what? Who even remembers? Kid probably asked for another serving of fruit punch or some inane shit that was enough to set that crazy woman off.

  And what really made our friendship work was the balance between our personalities. In some ways we were simpatico, blood brothers. But our temperaments were North and South poles. Whereas I was overly analytical, Pete was uncomplicated in ways that just made our friendship work. Take this Annalise thing. While my overly serious self was contemplating all the different outcomes of approaching Annalise, weighing the pros and cons and formulating elaborate strategies, Pete was more of the screw it, just walk up and start talking to her mindset. Since middle school he'd always been the one talking to the girl while other guys were too afraid to do much but stare like creeps. A side note is appropriate here: not being creepy when you’re secretly in love with a girl is harder to accomplish than it may sound. Trust me, whether you've ever stopped to take a selfie in this state or not, when you're in the midst of some intense contemplation about a particular girl, best to not look directly at her for too long. There's just no way yet invented to not look like a stalker who’s contemplating the most efficient kidnapping technique to employ.