Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel

by Christopher Harlan

  “Where did you grow up?” she asked. “Where I’m from happy homes are like Big Foot—everyone’s got a story of their existence yet no one’s actually seen or been inside one. I guess they exist, who knows. But from my experience, you have to go somewhere else to find them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.” Just then Pete texted again and the sound startled me a little. He wanted to check out and get some food. “Can you be ready in twenty?”

  “Fifteen. Let me go shower.”

  She jumped out of bed and went into the bathroom. I had already gotten ready, so I sat on the bed doing what I did best back then, overthink things. But her words stuck with me, always, and I started reflecting on what she said to me as I heard the muffled sounds of water hitting the shower floor. Here’s one thing I learned as a kid, and something I still believe as a man looking back: the people who screw us up owe a debt that can never be repaid. In fact, in a final poetic swell of victimization, the debt becomes ours. We have a chance to pay it back, or to leave it to our own children, as it was left to us. We have a choice, in other words, to make our damage into strength, or to make it into a family legacy. I didn’t know which side of that I’d end up on at the time, but it was clear which side Anna was already falling onto. She didn’t want to be bitter, and she sure as hell didn’t want to be as messed up as she was, but it had been passed to her like a genetic trait, like her hair or eye color, and it would have been easier for her to change one of those things than it would have been for her to just be normal.

  Maybe there was still hope for her, if hope wasn’t for suckers.

  Interlude

  My open letter to Annalise’s Dad, wherever his punk ass might be.

  Sir Whatever-the-Hell-Your-Name-Is,

  There are other salutations I could have used, all equally fitting of your obvious propensity for sucking at being a human being: dear Nameless Faceless Sperm Donor; dear Poor Excuse For a Man; dear. . .oh, you get the idea. Actually you probably don't, ‘cause if you got the idea you'd be here right now, in front of me, and I'd be calling your dumb ass by your actual name. I'd be calling you Sir for real, as in "Sir, I'm here to ask Anna to prom." But you and I don't get to have those moments. I don't get to call you Sir for real. We don't get to lock eyes and fight back our man-tears when you walk her down the aisle as I wait. Nah, that shit just isn't in the cards for us.

  Instead you get my open letter. I wanna be a writer, did you know that? One day you'll walk into a bookstore and you'll pass a table where my latest and greatest is sitting in a big old pile. You'll pick it up and read the back, see the praise from the New York Times, maybe see my picture in the bottom right corner. Hell, you might even buy it and give it a read, who knows, but you'll never know who I am to you. That's the guy who loved your daughter more than anything in the world. Anna, your baby daughter who isn't a baby anymore. I've been going on and on about you and me, haven't I? But you and I don't really matter. You're nothing to me and you don't know I exist, and that's just fine. But as far as Anna goes, you’ve got no excuses there, Sir.

  Oh you don't even know her name, do you? It's Annalise. Her mom named her that ‘cause you weren't there to do so. She's seventeen years old now. How old are you? Old enough to regret? Old enough to look back on your decisions in life and be ashamed? Ah, screw it, who cares. Why should I spend even a minute of my time wondering about your internal processes? I shouldn't, but I bet Anna has. I bet deep down inside of her, in that hidden place that makes us who we are, she has only questions where she should have statements. Too many interrogatives and not nearly enough declaratives, know what I mean? Probably too stupid to even follow me, so let me break it down. When she thinks of herself she doesn't hear a voice telling her how great she is, she hears a voice asking questions like "why didn't he want me" and "wasn't I good enough?" You did that, Sir. And I don't care if you cure all the Cancers in the known world one day, you'll always be a failure, ‘cause you missed out on knowing the greatest girl ever.

  But don't you worry, she's no victim. She inspires me. She makes me understand that things are possible when I don't believe. She's my savior and sometimes, when she lets me be, I'm hers too. She's got a character like parents only dream of cultivating; morals beyond reproach; warmth of heart, kindness; and the girl doesn't know what a lie is. Who else do you know like that?

  So, in conclusion, you, Sir, are a gargantuan pile of steaming dog shit, as both a father and a human being in general, but this is ancillary. I could take shots at you all day, but forget all that and remember only this: whoever you are and wherever you are, if you live to be 150 and have 10 other children, you'll never be anything but a failure to me, because you're the one thing that I can never give to the girl who deserves the world. And for that I'll never stop hating you, even if she did.

  Sincerely, Logan Rosario Santiago

  Ten

  Where I tell you about our fights, both real and fake, and where Petty Crocker makes his triumphant return to the narrative.

  Remember my disclaimer when you started this thing a while back? The one where I told you this wasn’t your conventional love story, and that not everything ends picture perfect? I just wanted to remind you of that before we moved on.

  After Comic Con, the next few months went along like normal for everyone. All of us were happy to be ending that crazy social experiment called public school, but scared for what came next at the same time. Like any complex emotional experience, we all handled it in our own ways. Pete went full Pete and didn’t bring any of it up. That didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling the same things we all were, but he wasn’t expressive like that. Anna didn’t discuss the future, like ever, almost as if it was an abstract concept to her that was a waste of time to get into. And me? I was surrounded by people I felt like I couldn’t quite talk to about certain things, so I just did what I always did, I wrote it down.

  As far as Anna and I went, things were good for a while after our trip to the city that fateful night. It wasn’t until a little bit after that I started to see the wheels coming off of our relationship. I could look back, biased as hell, and tell you it was all her, and that I was just a nice guy doing my best, but that would be some bullshit that would insult what really happened, as well as your intelligence. So understand I’m telling my account of things; my interpretation; my story. If you wanna know hers, go ask her, wherever she might be, I still have her number if you need it.

  So nothing happened, per say. The beginning of the end was less Big Bang than it was the culmination of a lot of little things. But if I’m being honest, it was my frustration that started to expose the cracks. Like I said, she could be super secretive, and at first I had blinders on because I was so happy to even be with her that I was willing to overlook some things that bothered me. But over time I came to realize that she wasn't really hiding from me: she was hiding from a past that I had little knowledge of, and only deduced through the fractions of stories she chose to share. There were never moments like in the movies with us, never a long conversation where she just told stories about her past and I sat with a comforting arm around her. I got only broad strokes.

  “You never tell me about your Mom,” I told her once. “You know all about mine. Why don’t you ever talk about her?”

  “Well, what do you wanna know?”

  That question killed me. It was the international code for I’m gonna make you work to find shit out. But I was game to play along, I had questions ready. “Let’s start basic. What’s her name?”

  “Monica.”

  “Monica, great!” I said, realizing how dumb it sounded.

  “Is it?”

  “No, not her name, I meant great that. . .nevermind. Your mom’s name is Monica, got it.”

  “What else?” she asked.

  “What does she do for a living?”

  “She’s too screwed up to work.” That sounded familiar. My mom had been on psychological disability since I was kid, only this sounded different. “Stereo
typical as it sounds, she used to work doing housecleaning in some of the richer neighborhoods until she hurt herself.”

  “So what happened? She doesn’t do that anymore?”

  “One day when she was cleaning a window she leaned on it and sliced her hand on the pane of glass as it broke. She got fired for breaking a window and the lady took the money out of the small amount she paid my mom. Then we got stiffed with the emergency room bill later on. We didn’t have insurance, so the visit and stiches cost us a few hundred dollars that took forever to pay off.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry.”

  “It was a few years ago. She hasn’t worked since, so my older sister and I contribute to pay the rent. That’s why I work. I don’t really need the money for myself.” She wasn’t kidding about that. She was about the most low maintenance girl imaginable, like I said before. Not only did she not have any expensive or fancy things, she didn’t want them. I guess being raised so poor taught her the value of money that most of us honestly didn’t have until much later in life.“So is she depressed like my Mom is? What do you mean by messed up?”

  “Why do we have to talk about this?” she asked. To me it seemed obvious; I wanted to get to know who she was and where she came from, but it was always like pulling teeth to find anything out.

  “We don’t,” I told her. “Never mind, it’s fine.”

  Trying to decode her family life or her past was like a jigsaw puzzle with only five center pieces—disjointed and incomplete—but it was all she ever gave me, and if I ever asked for more the subject got changed quickly. Sometimes I’d text her and ask what she was doing when I was bored at home, and instead of telling me she’d just want to know why I even asked.

  “Why does that matter?” she’d say.

  “Just asking.” I’d tell her.

  “Are you, like, keeping tabs on me?”

  “No, I’m literally just making conversation. You could say you were anywhere and it’s fine, I’m just asking.”

  Then I’d get, “I’ll text you later. I’m out with some friends.”

  It was through conversations and fights like I just described, that I started to see the differences between the homes Anna and I came from. It was true that from the outside we seemed similar. Two Spanish kids (albeit one of them fake) from messed up homes, with mentally ill moms, and dads who’d fled the coop a while back. But the more I found out about her home life, the more I saw the differences. Her Mom seemed to have broken her, and mine was the complete opposite. I knew she felt guilty that I had to take care of her; that she felt like a burden because she knew I couldn’t help but get caught up in her depression and anxiety.

  When I say Anna had been broken I know it made her sound as if she was fragile and weak, so maybe it would be better to say that parts of her had been broken so young that she never learned the difference between being fucked up and being normal, like she had a type of emotional blindness that made her unaware that the way she was wasn’t healthy. Imagine your toaster had a busted handle, or didn't actually toast your bread when you pressed the lever down. Now imagine being so unaware of that fact that every time friends or family came over, you offered them a nice crispy piece of toast with that gourmet blackberry jam you just got at Whole Foods. Now, if that man in my silly hypothetical really existed, I’d like to think one of his family members or friends would pull him aside and tell him stop offering everybody a piece of toast. But fixing emotional damage isn't as simple as getting your crazy, delusional ass to the store to get a new toaster. That kind of broken took a special someone to even recognize its existence.

  I knew the difference because even though my home life had never been perfect, things were pretty good before Mom had her breakdown. I’d seen the world before and after the crash, so I had a basis of comparison, a perspective that Anna severely lacked, and because of that it made telling her anything really difficult. She didn’t want to hear from me on issues with her family, not even to help. Actually, she especially didn’t want me to try to help.

  She’d listen for hours as I vented about whatever was bothering me, and she was, to date, one of the best listeners I’ve ever met. And if you think that’s a minor thing then you haven’t met that many people in your life, because to be truly heard is a rare thing indeed. After I spilled my guts to her it was like therapy, and she'd chase away my anxiety like carefully dosed Xanax, minus the Xanax. She'd look at me with such loving, intense focus that she made me believe my words were the most important ever uttered my Man. This never wavered in Anna—she was never too tired or too busy to listen—I’ll always listen, she'd say, but when it came to confrontation, we interacted in a different way entirely.

  The first time ‘it’ happened (our little fights became 'it' when we worked them out after the drama had subsided, as in let's talk about it) I’d just had enough of her being secretive. See, she never even agreed with my classification.

  “Why are you being so weird and secretive?” I’d ask over a text or in a conversation, to which I’d get back something like the following.

  “I’m not being secretive. Just ‘cause I don’t tell you every little thing doesn’t mean I’m hiding it from you.”

  “Actually, that’s literally the definition of secrecy, Anna. Why are you so worried about why I wanna know what happened that day you were (fill in the blank here, there are a number of words that would have completed this type of sentence back then: crying, complaining, sad, weird, distant. . . all those work)?”

  “I’m done,” she’d write back.

  “With what?”

  “With this,” she’d say. Now what exactly this was, was itself a matter of debate—being occasionally insecure I’d think she meant the entire relationship, but more often than not what she meant was let’s change the subject, please.

  What always messed me up about our fights was not only the fact that they were happening at all, but how they always seemed to creep up on me when I least expected them. What I thought was a benign question would be a full out trigger for her. There’s an old boxing expression about how the most dangerous punch there is—the one that’ll knock you right on your ass—is the one that you don’t see coming. That sentiment held true when it came to our fights, which were like that feint left hook that your eyes perceived about a nanosecond too late. Anna had a lot of those. Eventually I developed a type of reflex for them, like I could anticipate their occurrence with some degree of accuracy, but that particular skill set took some painful trial and error, the type that ended in a lot of apologizes and heart emoji’s.

  I was telling you about the first time though, right? Remember those friends I mentioned before? Anna had this small but loyal group of friends she hung out with, kids she was tight with going way back to elementary school. Good kids, I'm sure, but not my friends by any stretch, I wouldn't have known much of their existence even if ran into them on the way to science. I didn’t mention them in here because they honestly were never part of my life. I didn’t hang out with them, we didn’t interact outside of an occasional ‘what’s up’, and Anna rarely said shit about them when we were together.

  One afternoon I sent Anna my usual ‘good morning beautiful’ text (imagine a blushing smiley and heart emoji at the end of the sentence if you wanna picture it right). I asked her if she wanted to hang out after school for a little—maybe go to the rocks or something. She texted me back the she couldn’t, ‘cause she's going out after school. Where, I asked? Okay, now it's important to identify where shit goes sideways in a conversation—in my opinion, that exact moment, the starting pistol of our first fight, began with her reply to my text. It's irrelevant, why do you need to know that, she said. Before we even get into what happened next, let me cut to the final act just so you have some clarity. . .there was nothing shady or weird going on. No other guy. No dealing of crystal blue meth as a side hustle. Didn't need time to have a mandatory meeting with her nonexistent parole officer, nothing dramatic like that.

  I just reach
ed a point where it didn’t matter what was really going on, the secrecy bothered me too much to let go. I brought it up. I brought it up in a way that wasn’t nice. The first time we had a legit fight I thought it was the end. Goodbye love, goodbye happiness, it was great getting to know you, have fun wherever you're off to, send postcards so I can see how happy I'm not. Seriously. Curtains. Devolution. Tears and words that hurt. It was about the last thing I had ever envisioned happening to us, but there we were, regardless.

  When you look back on these things after the fact they're always more clear than they were when you were in the fog of it all. In the absence of someone yelling at you, you can actually reflect on your own silly bullshit that led you to that point. Pettiness. Aggression. Insecurity. These are the people in your neighborhood. All that clarity shit is for later on, though. In the midst of all those emotions there's no introspection, there's only war to be waged in Pettiness's name.

  What was it even over? Nothing. Teenaged bullshit. Jealously. Nothing that ever mattered as much as what actually mattered—how much we loved one another. How quickly that sentiment found its place on the back-burner. Why were you talking to him? Oh, you're texting your ex? How long has that been going on? Wait, what? He told you he still has feelings for you? Does he know you have a boyfriend? And you didn't tell me this why? Oh, okay, sure, you say it's over but how do I know? Yeah I trust you, but. . .yeah I know what trust means, but you think he's not gonna try some shit? What do you mean 'so what if he does'? Are you crazy? No, I didn't mean like that, I'm sorry.

  Before I had a girlfriend I believed that I would have been a better boyfriend than all those douche bags I saw who got the girls and treated them like shit. I used to see them in the hallways, and think in my most acute self-righteousness that I was better than those guys. I thought that jealously was beyond me, that I was too good for it, but you don’t know who you are until you’re in a situation. I was capable of some next-level insecurity when it came to Annalise, but that was my inexperience. I had no reps, no muscle memory. I had no experience to be confident in. Instead, I was like a poor person who found a suitcase full of money that everyone knew I’d found. I didn’t know what to do with it, and I was scared that someone would inevitably try to take it from me.