It didn’t get any better from there. After Mom had her third glass of wine, she started talking about food prices and how expensive everything was getting. She and Aunt Allison got on a rant about how much kids cost, all of which, I knew, was a semi-veiled attack on Dad because Mom and Allison never agreed on anything. Then Dad said, “Great, Nancy, why don’t you make him feel even better about his existence?” At which point Mom told him not to put me in the middle of things, even though she kind of already had.
***
Later that afternoon, while Kris and Barry snored off their pie and ice cream on our couch in front of a football game, I caught Dad trying to sneak out unnoticed. “Where are you going?” I asked as he slung his travel bag and briefcase into the passenger seat of the Volvo.
“I’m sorry, Andrew, but I’ve got to get out of here. Your mother is making this impossible for me.”
“She doesn’t seem that happy either,” I mumbled lamely.
“Yeah, this was a dumb idea,” Dad said. I guess he was interpreting my comment as agreement. Anyway, what was a dumb idea? Having Thanksgiving together? Or having a kid together?
That afternoon I played card games with Mima and lost every one, even though I could tell she was going out of her way to let me win. “No offense to your mother, Andrew,” Mima said. “But this is a drag. Next year the two of you should come out and see me instead.”
“But what about Dad?”
“He can come if he wants to,” Mima said. “But I have a feeling he’ll be busy.”
RUNNING AWAY
I didn’t intend to run away. I just threw some stuff in my backpack and started walking. I guess I intended to make a statement. My face is still burning, and the whole way down Evergreen Street I keep glancing over my shoulder, looking for Mom’s car. But it never comes. This just pisses me off more, and I walk faster. I had figured on Kris and Barry wanting to do turkey and all that, but I had forgotten about football. After the third game in a row, I felt the yellow and white lines swimming in front of my eyes. Every time I got up to do something else, Mom would shoot me that look like I was deserting the family.
Finally I managed to ignore her death stare and I found refuge in my bedroom. I pulled out one of the books on colleges that Dad sent me as a means of communicating about my future. I figured now was that moment when there was absolutely nothing else I would rather be doing. I flopped down on my bed, brushing aside Barry’s dirty T-shirt and boxer shorts. It was wet.
“Jesus Christ!” I screamed and hopped up off the soggy sheets. I stuck my head out in the hall. “Barry!” I yelled. “You freakin’ slob, what the hell did you spill on my bed?”
Barry didn’t even look away from the football game. Kris shot my mother a distraught glance, and before I could say anything else she was dragging me back into the room by my sleeve.
“Your cousin Barry is going through a very rough time right now, Andrew, and I need you to be a little more compassionate.”
“Fine,” I said exasperated. “But does he have to be such a slob? Why does going through a rough time give you the right to dump soda or whatever on somebody else’s bed?”
My mother glared at me. “I don’t think it’s soda, Andrew.”
It took me a minute to figure out what she meant. “WHAT?! He pissed the bedmmph?” Mom thrust her hand over my mouth before I could get the words out and dragged me into her office “That’s disgusting,” I said. “And why didn’t he say anything?”
“I don’t know, Andrew. He’s probably mortified. Kris says he’s been having a lot of trouble at school with kids picking on him.”
It didn’t really fit with my ideas about Barry. I guess I just figured, from the way he talked about girls and hockey, that he had friends. He seemed to me like someone who would fit in pretty well. But what do I know about fitting in?
Mom went over to the bed and pulled off the comforter and the sheets. “It’s not that big a deal, Andrew. You did it when you were little. It’s mostly water anyway.”
I looked at the wet mark on my mattress. It vaguely resembled the mitten-shaped state of Michigan. “Easy for you to say,” I said. “You’re not the one sleeping in piss.”
“Compassion, Andrew,” she said as she went through the door, carrying the bundle of soggy sheets to the laundry room.
Sullenly I walked back into the living room, where Kris and Barry were transfixed by the men moving on the screen. I even felt a little bit bad for Barry. Until he opened his mouth again.
“Hey,” he said without glancing away from the screen. “You know how I know you’re gay?” I couldn’t believe he was starting in on this shit again. “You don’t like football,” he said, and then he choked on a swallow of soda so it came out his nose.
“Come on Barr Barr,” Uncle Kris said, still staring right at the game. “Don’t make a mess.”
A MESS? I wanted to scream. How about the mess you already made in my bed? I stormed back down the hall and into my room. That was when I packed my bag.
I dumped out my backpack onto the bare mattress, careful to avoid the wet spot. I had brought home most of my textbooks in an effort to impress upon Mom my interest in improving my grades. I scooped up all the books and loose papers and looked around the room for somewhere to put them. I used my big toe to nudge my desk chair away from the desk and dumped the pile there. When I pushed the chair back in, you could hardly see the stack. As an afterthought I went back and grabbed the notebook I’d been doodling in and my copy of Into the Wild.
Into the backpack went a couple changes of clothes, some clean underwear, my toothbrush, and my extra glasses. I grabbed all the cash I had, which wasn’t much, and the emergency credit card Mom gave me but told me never to use. I also had a check from Mrs. Grindle down the street, who’d paid me for raking her leaves the last two Saturdays. It wasn’t much, but I figured it was enough to get me a bus ticket to Indiana. If I had to use the credit card, that wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like I was trying to hide where I was going. I planned to call Mom and tell her where I was—just not until it was too late for me to turn back.
When I turn the corner of Evergreen Street and Washington Avenue, it really kind of hits me. No one is coming to stop me. I’m really leaving town on my own. The bus station is on the far end of Washington, and even though there’s a public bus that runs along Washington, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t run often on holidays so I just keep walking. It feels good to walk. I’m kind of afraid if I stop walking to wait for the bus I might lose my momentum all together.
I keep trying to rationalize my escape in my head as I walk. Going to Mima’s isn’t such a big deal. I’ll be back in a few days, and Kris and Barry will be gone. Mom will be pissed, sure, but she’ll get over it, or at least forget about it when the first post-holiday crisis erupts at school. I’ll just have to fly under her radar for a little while, which is what I do most of the time anyways.
***
The Glens Falls bus station is really just a holding room with uncomfortable plastic chairs, bad fluorescent lighting, and a few snack machines. Mom and I spent some time here waiting for Mima’s bus the last time she came out. There’s not even a real public bathroom. If you want to use the bathroom, you have to ask for a key and then they buzz you back into this other room that’s like a break room for the employees.
It’s pretty quiet, even for a holiday. There are just a few people in the seats waiting for the bus: an old lady with an enormous pink scarf wrapped and rewrapped around her head, and a fidgety guy wearing a mechanic’s uniform and tapping on his leg with a rolled-up newspaper.
In the corner there’s a group of kids who look about my age. They’re kind of clumped up, sitting on their sleeping bags and backpacks even though there are plenty of chairs free.
The man behind the glass at the bus station window has mahogany skin flecked with lighter brown birthmarks. He has a double chin and a couple rolls where the base of his skull meets his neck. He’s eating a tuna fish sandwi
ch; I can smell it through the glass, and he has a tiny bit of mayo smeared on his upper lip. His eyes are glued to a tiny color TV and what looks to me like a Mexican soap opera.
“Can I help you?” he says, still watching his show.
“Yeah,” I say nervously, “I need a ticket to Bloomington,” I pause, “Indiana.”
“Can’t do it,” he says. My heart sinks a little bit. “Furthest I can get you tonight is Cleveland. Bus leaves in an hour. You can catch the first bus to Bloomington in the morning.”
“That’s fine,” I say, relieved that there is a bus at all. “I’ll take a ticket, round-trip, I guess.”
For the first time the man looks up at me. He takes a bite of his tuna sandwich and chews it carefully as though considering both. “How old are you?” he asks.
“Sixteen,” I answer, too quickly to lie.
“Your parents know where you are?”
“Of course they do, silly!” A girl has suddenly appeared beside me and links her arm through mine. She’s much shorter than I am and has short, spiky black hair and an upturned nose with a little bump on the bridge. She reaches up and ruffles my hair.
“Please don’t do that,” I say.
She ignores me and looks up at me with dark brown eyes. “You don’t think we’d let him get on the bus all alone, do you?” She smiles winningly at the man behind the counter, who looks as confused as I do. “Mom’s in the car.” She holds her hand up to her head mimicking a phone and tosses her head back and forth in fake conversation. “On the phone again. She wants you to come out and say good-bye once you get your ticket.”
I nod bewildered. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she says and pinches my cheek the way the old ladies at Mima’s place always like to do. I pull away, annoyed. She smiles, winks at the man behind the counter, and saunters away.
This bizarre display is enough to convince the man behind the counter to print out the ticket. I push sixty-four dollars underneath the glass partition and get back a bus ticket and thirty cents in change. This, along with a few crumpled dollar bills, will have to last me until Mima’s.
I have an hour to kill until the bus leaves, so I pick a chair in the corner near one of the snack machines and settle in to wait. I pull my copy of Into the Wild out of my backpack and open up to the page where I left off. But I’m not reading. I’m watching the bus-ticket girl and her friends in the corner.
THE FREEGANS
There are five of them hunkered down in the corner of the bus station, sitting on backpacks and rolled-up sleeping bags. In addition to the bus-ticket girl, there’s another girl with long blonde dreadlocks facing away and lying across the lap of a kid wearing an army vest with an enormous anarchy symbol drawn on the back. An Asian-looking kid wearing a giant pair of headphones over his fauxhawk is talking too loudly to a tall guy with a short, scraggly beard as he makes peanut butter sandwiches.
My stomach growls as I watch him dip a pocket knife into this jar of peanut butter and then drip gobs of it onto the bread. Every once in a while he stops to lick the excess off the top of the knife where it swivels and folds in. I ignore the obvious hygienic problems here as I watch him distribute the sandwiches. He’s sitting cross-legged as he does this—a way I’ve only ever seen girls sit. He’s also smiling so sweetly—like one of those naked babies that fly around in those giant Italian paintings. He just keeps smiling and handing out sandwiches. I’m so busy watching him that I don’t notice when the bus-ticket girl reappears at my side.
She slams herself down into the seat next to me, rocking the entire row of interconnected plastic chairs. She has two sandwiches in her hands.
“You want one?” Her voice is deeper and scratchier than before.
I shake my head. “No, thanks, I just ate at home.”
“Okay,” she says, almost smirking. “Suit yourself. I just know that when I first ran away, I learned pretty quickly that you should take food whenever it’s offered. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to take candy from strangers.”
She gives an appreciative chin nod and takes a bite of her sandwich. “Good one. How about a puppy?”
“Anyway,” I say, “I’m not running away.”
“Sure, traveling alone on Thanksgiving is just more convenient and hassle-free because everyone else is sitting down and eating with their families. Plus there’s nothing more pleasant than an empty bus station on a cold night. I get it.”
I ignore her sarcasm. “It was a last-minute decision … to go to my grandmother’s house.”
“Does anyone know where you are?” she lifts the softened paper American Airlines tag still looped around my backpack strap, left over from Mom’s and my last trip to see Mima, and reads it. “Andrew?”
I shake my head again. What was the point in lying?
“Then you, my friend,” she says as she jerks the tag off the strap and crumples it in her hand, “are running away.”
She shoots the crumpled tag at the nearest waste can. “You’re old enough that most people won’t bother you about being on your own. But until you get where you’re going, it’s better to avoid being identified if you don’t want to be. If you don’t give the police or anyone your name, the worst they can do is throw you into state or foster care. And that sucks, but it’s not that hard to get out of.”
“Your area of expertise?”
“It used to be.” Her voice hardens slightly. “I’m nineteen now, so I’m pretty much free to go wherever I want and do whatever I want. I’m G, by the way,” she says and sticks her hand out for me to shake.
“Andrew,” I say as I accept her firm handshake. She’s small but solid. And I can’t decide if she’s pretty or not. She’s not unattractive, but there’s something about her looks that’s kind of serious, almost severe. “Just G?”
“Yeah, Maria Regina actually. It’s terrible isn’t it? Sounds like a nun or a pasta sauce. So I’m just G. What about you? Do you go by Andrew? Andy? Drew?”
“It doesn’t matter, whatever is fine.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
“I really don’t care.” And it’s true. Well, up until this moment it’s always been true. Andrew, Andy, Drew, whatever. It’s all the same to me. Moving so many times, I kind of got to the point where it was enough if someone remembered the basic gist of my name.
“Whoa. This is your name we’re talking about here, not the condiments you put on a sandwich. This is how people greet you in the world. How they form their first impressions of you. How they decide if they’re going to walk all over you or not.”
I just shrug the way I always do when I want uncomfortable conversations to end. But G isn’t going to let me off the hook that easily.
“Okay,” she says. “We’re going to decide this right now. I’m going to introduce myself to you again, and whatever you say this time, that’s your name. Okay? I’m G,” she repeats and sticks out her hand.
“Andrew,” I say and shake it again. She seems satisfied with this.
“Good. Drew’s okay, but Andy’s a little weird. It always reminds me of those dolls. Remember Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy?” I don’t really, so I just shrug my shoulders again.
Over in the corner, the girl with the long blonde dreadlocks gets up from the floor and walks out of the bus station. She comes back carrying an enormous Hula-Hoop covered in black and white stripes.
She sets the Hula-Hoop down and proceeds to remove several layers of clothing. Off comes a rather large, black hooded sweatshirt. Underneath is a brown cardigan sweater that Mima might wear. That sweater comes off and underneath that is a smaller sweater; that only comes halfway down her stomach. She’s wearing a short skirt, like the field hockey girls wear, a pair of red-and-white-striped tights, and black combat boots.
Altogether she looks like a grungy version of Pippi Long-stocking. G and I watch as she picks up the Hula-Hoop and begins to swing it around her stomach. E
veryone in the bus station is staring as she gets the thing going faster and faster. It’s hard not to. Even the guy behind the glass is temporarily distracted from his show. He looks like he’s trying to think of a reason to tell her to stop but can’t come up with one. This girl has the most amazing stomach muscles I’ve ever seen, not that I’m an expert. I try not to stare at her midsection but it’s next to impossible. I focus instead on her face, her brow furrowed in concentration. Her eyes are focused on the floor and the spinning hoop on her hips. Underneath her dreadlocks, which I’ve always thought were pretty tacky and gross on white people, she’s really pretty. She has sharp cheekbones and perfectly shaped pink lips. She’s like a hot girl in disguise!
“That’s Emily,” says G, sounding a little annoyed. “I guess she’s just practicing. It’s not like we’re going to make anything here.”
“Is that what you do?” I ask without ever taking my eyes off Emily and her undulating midsection.
“Sort of. That’s Lyle over there,” she points at the boy with the anarchy vest. He has light brown hair that looks like it’s on the verge of thinning and enormous sideburns as if to compensate. “He and I do a trapeze and ropes act. Jesse made these.” She holds up the peanut butter sandwiches and offers me one again. This time I take it and bite into the squishy wheat bread. The peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth, and I shovel it off with my tongue. Jesse’s hands are stretched over his head, and the sole of one foot is pressed into the opposite leg in what looks like some kind of yoga pose. “Jesse’s kind of like the MC. He’s a storyteller. He’s just kind of got a way with the audience. You’ll see what I mean.”
I cock my head to the side, wondering if they’re actually going to perform here in the bus station. With my mouth full of peanut butter I gesture at the ruddy-cheeked Asian kid in the headphones.
“That’s Tim Lin. He’s kind of new. So far he’s just along for the ride. He’s been recording us for some college project he’s doing. He seems all right. And you’re pretty much seeing what Emily can do.” There’s that hint of annoyance again.
The Other Way Around Page 4