by Rachel Gold
Under the blankets with Blake, I didn’t care. She was watching me with her intense look, like my face meant something. Maybe it did.
I kissed her for a long time, bypassing warm and going right to hot. Pulling up my sweater, I disentangled it from the shirt underneath in a shower of static. I managed to wriggle out of it and drop it next to the bed without causing the blankets to slide completely off. Blake was laughing and unbuttoning her overshirt and holding the blankets more or less in place. She kicked off her socks and I did the same even though my feet weren’t warm. I wanted to feel the skin of her feet with mine.
She put her hand on my breast over my shirt and bra. Somehow it was more intense than if she’d put her bare skin on mine. She rubbed her thumb around the rise of my nipple. I felt her thumbnail catching on the ridges in the fabric of my shirt, creating tiny waves against my skin.
That went on forever and the other breast was forever. My jeans and shirt and bra had to come off because I was sweating. Blake shimmied out of most of her clothes too. We were both in underpants. She slid her hand under the fabric of mine, exploring before rising up my belly to my breasts again.
If you added this evening to the time in Bear’s parents’ basement, she’d already touched me more than Sierra had in our entire relationship. My breath stuck hard in my throat. I pushed myself to inhale deeply. The air caught the heat rising through me and blew away the pain.
I kissed Blake, wanting to express everything I couldn’t say. And that went on until her hands made kissing impossible.
* * *
The phone rang. The house phone in the kitchen that nobody had the number for. We’d been sitting in the living room most of the afternoon, me and Blake and Cyd, talking about everything. We all stared in the direction of the phone and Cyd got up. When she stepped back into the kitchen doorway, her face had an avocado green tone.
“Lauren, it’s your father.”
Lake ice cracking, drowning fear pulled at me, but I levered myself up and went to find out how bad this was going to be.
“I know where you are,” he said.
“I’m in the Cities. I told you.”
He read off Cyd’s address. The current address, not the old one.
My knees went shaky and I had to sit down on the kitchen floor. I didn’t say anything. He continued talking, “That girl you used to stay with was happy to give it to me. Some friends you have down there. Are you ready to come home?”
“No,” I said in a small voice. “I’m not coming back.”
Blake slipped into the kitchen, settled onto the floor, and offered me her hand. I interlaced my fingers with hers and held on.
“Yes, you are,” my father said. “Do I have to call the police?”
“Yeah,” I told him, more volume behind that word. “Go ahead, call the police on me. I’m not going back. I’m not living there anymore.”
“Fine. You have twenty-four hours to change your mind and then the police will be involved. You are seventeen years old, you can’t run away to—”
I hung up on him.
“He’s calling the police?” Blake asked.
“Tomorrow. I have until tomorrow.”
“You can stay at my place for a few days. Give you more time.”
I shook my head. “Sierra told him where I was. She’ll give him your address too, if she hasn’t already.”
I pulled out my cell phone. He hadn’t turned it off yet. Probably sure I’d come home within the twenty-four hours. Probably waiting for me to call him. I called Mom but she didn’t answer so I called Isaac.
“Hey, La, what’s up?”
“I ran away,” I told him.
He laughed. “Good one. Did you join the circus?”
“Isaac, I’m not kidding. I’m in the Cities. I’m not going back to live with him anymore.” My voice cracked on the last word and I gulped in a breath to keep from crying.
“Oh shit,” he said.
We were both silent for a while.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m staying with friends. He says I’ve got twenty-four hours and then he’s calling the police.”
“You actually ran away?”
“Mostly. I mean, I did all my classwork for the rest of the semester and handed it in first. We only had three weeks left.”
He was laughing again. “That’s my sister, the most prepared runaway ever. You did your laundry first too, didn’t you? What’s your grand plan?”
“I want to see if I can take my last semester at a high school here. I can live with Cyd and Bear. They’ve got space in their basement.”
“How long have you been planning this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’ve been trying to tell Mom, but I couldn’t figure out how. I told her I couldn’t live there anymore, but not about leaving. I didn’t think…I thought you were busy with school and partying and stuff.”
I heard him sucking his teeth, a soft, whistling sound.
“What a mess,” he said. “You need to sit tight, okay? Let me talk to Dad. Will you do that?”
“Twenty hours,” I said, surprised at the pure metal strength in my voice. “That’s how long you’ve got until I’m gone.”
“Lauren.”
“I am not going back,” I said.
“What’s so bad about living with Dad? Is he doing something to you?”
“No. That’s just it. There’s nothing there. He leaves for days and days. He never listens to me or pays any attention to me. He uses me like I’m there to clean and do the fucking garden. He doesn’t care about anything I do. He wants me to be like him and I’m not. There’s nothing there! I can’t live in nothing, Isaac. I can’t!”
I was yelling into the phone, crying. Blake had an arm around me and she took the phone out of my hand.
“Hey, this is Lauren’s friend Blake. She’s okay but she needs some space. Can she call you back?”
There was a pause and Blake said, “Yeah…yeah…okay. Gotcha.”
She hung up the phone and hugged me. I cried on her until I was afraid of getting snot in her hair.
Chapter Forty-Four
I packed all my stuff again. It was way too much, so I condensed it down to what I could carry in the hiking backpack Bear loaned me. It sat at the top of the back stairs, where I could grab it and go.
I didn’t trust my father to wait the twenty-four hours he’d given me. He would wait for morning. He was sharper mentally in the mornings and I wasn’t—he’d use that to his advantage. He’d play this like a court case, taking every bit of high ground he could. If he called the police after his morning workout and breakfast, how long would it take them to get here?
What happened when the police showed up? I remembered a year ago standing in my school, watching the police take that ranting boy out to their squad car in handcuffs. Would they put cuffs on me? Would I try to run?
If I was going to run, it had to be before they got here. I’d told Isaac twenty hours, but I didn’t think I should wait that long.
Everyone brainstormed places for me to go. Bear offered her parents’ house but Sierra had that address too. Kordell said he’d call his oldest sister and see if I could crash on her couch for a few days. I didn’t love that idea, but it was the best I’d heard.
It got late and we agreed to reconvene the Council of Runaway Abettors in the morning. Cyd and Bear went into their rooms, leaving me and Blake on the couch. Her expression was thoughtful and sleepy.
“We should go to bed,” I said.
She didn’t make a joke. She didn’t look at me. Her fingers tapped a pattern on the side of her knee. She sighed and said, “I could call my mother.”
“Um?”
“To see if you can stay with her for a while.”
I picked up her hand and played with her fingers. “Do you want me to?”
“She’s not always good about her meds,” Blake said. “If she’s not taking them, I don’t want you to see that but maybe you should
. Maybe you should see what I might be like.”
I wanted to say “I don’t care” but that sounded dismissive. I ran my thumb back and forth across hers, feeling all the ridges at the knuckle.
“Sometimes I’m afraid of you,” I said. “I mean, when I first met you, I was super afraid because you show what you’re feeling and you feel so much stuff. But I love that. And, you know, sometimes I’m afraid of myself too. I’d rather be afraid than numb. I’d rather need you and crave you and be afraid for you and be afraid of you and be afraid of how you make me feel and need to feel all that than go back to not feeling anything at all.”
I paused and added, “I should have been afraid of Sierra and I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t feeling anything. And I don’t need to be afraid of you. No, that’s not what I mean. I feel like I messed it up, I understood it wrong, like what I thought was feeling afraid of you was something else completely.”
“A pair of shocks?” she asked.
I grinned at her. “A whole drawer full of shocks.”
“Lauren, don’t fuck up your life because you think you have to be here for me. I’m okay.”
“Hey, I’m the crazy one. You’ve got a disorder, but I’m the one who’s been a robot for most of my life. I mean, when I tell this story to other people I am totally going to blame you for fucking up my life, but in the right way. You fucked up my fucked-up life.”
“Double negative,” she said.
“Exactly. It needed fucking up. And I’m not saying I never want to meet your mother, or that I don’t want to know all that. I do. I’ll figure out how to handle it. But maybe not when I’m fleeing the police.”
Blake chuckled. “What do you want to do with your last night of freedom?”
“Snuggle.”
She raised her eyebrows at me.
“I’m kind of scared,” I said. “I mean, I’m terrified. Could we curl up in a ball for a while?”
In the drowsy place between sleep and waking, in the cold basement bed, under the pile of blankets, with my arms around Blake, I thought about Cypher and Zeno. I pictured them in their spaceship. They were close to the black hole they’d teleported through together. Zeno stood in front of the viewport staring into the blackness so deep that no light, no information came out of it.
How long had I been standing there, on the edge of nothing, feeling myself pulled away toward the void?
I thought about Blake being Cypher, the Master of Secrets, the assassin, a girl with equal parts brightness and darkness. Blazing like a quasar and sinking into herself like the black hole.
I wanted to be myself, my true form, whatever that turned out to be, and I liked the person I was around her. I liked trying to follow her when she was talking about infinities, and I liked trying to make her laugh when she was wrapped in foggy plastic-wrap. I liked just sitting with her.
In my near dream, I watched as Cypher came up next to Zeno and touched her arm. “You’re brooding,” she said.
“I’m looking at where we’ve been,” Zeno replied. “And trying to figure out where we’ll go.”
“You can imagine, but you can never know,” Cypher told her. “The multiverse is an awfully mysterious place.”
* * *
I was getting dressed when the bell rang upstairs. I grabbed socks and jammed my feet into them, hunted around for my shoes.
Cyd’s voice carried down the stairs. “It’s Kordell.”
I dropped onto the bed with a sigh, but I kept putting on my shoes anyway, less frantically. It was nine thirty am. I figured I had an hour or two until the police showed up.
In the living room, Kordell was sitting on the couch with Blake. Cyd was in the armchair with a big mug in her hands.
I got a slice of cold pizza and a Pepsi and slid onto the couch next to Blake. She put her arm around my shoulders. We sat quietly for a bit and then she and Kordell started talking about the new cards that had been added to their game.
The doorbell rang again, and a knock, and Isaac’s voice calling, “Lauren, it’s me.”
Everyone turned to me. I got up and threw back the bolt on the door, but when I opened it, Isaac was standing there with our father.
I stepped back. Isaac came in, our father behind him. They were both in suits: Father’s was the dark charcoal gray he loved and Isaac’s was a navy blue that brought out the unfortunately yellow undertone of his skin. He looked like the tie was choking him. He must have put it on to impress our father, to show that he was on his side.
I wanted to run out the door and keep going.
Blake got in front of me. Cyd and Kordell were frozen, staring, but she moved to put her body between me and them.
She seemed half the size of my father: six inches shorter, compact and slender compared to his broad-shouldered, jacket-enhanced form. She set her feet and put her hands on her hips, like a winged fairy creature getting in the face of a dragon.
He ignored her and took another step toward me.
Blake pulled out her phone. “I will call the cops myself,” she said.
My father paused. “I’m not hurting her. She’s the one violating the law. You make that call.” But he stepped back.
Blake glared at him. He stared at me. I looked at the floor and wondered if I could run fast enough with that big pack of Bear’s to get away from here.
In this standstill, Isaac went into the dining room and came back carrying two chairs. He set them down on the floor with the hard crack of wood on wood.
“We are talking,” he said. “No one is calling the police. Everyone sit down.”
He wasn’t as big as our father, but his voice snapped in the air like a whip. I went to the couch and sat. Blake came and wedged in between me and Kordell, her phone in her hand.
“Lauren, tell Dad what’s going on,” Isaac said.
I glanced around the room. In front of all these people? Cyd, who I liked but felt like I didn’t even know yet, and the same with Kordell.
“Um.”
“You are seventeen,” my father said. “You live under my roof. I make sure you have everything you need.”
He hadn’t sat in the chair. He stepped toward the front window and clasped his hands behind his back. I could see how he came across in the courtroom: both imposing and—not friendly exactly—but someone who could understand you, relatable.
I pushed off the couch. I couldn’t sit still.
Pacing between the end of the couch and the doorway to the dining room, opposite my father, I said, “You give me money to buy food and clothes. You treat me like an intelligent dog. You never listen to me.”
“You never say anything worth listening to,” he countered.
“Dad,” Isaac said in a warning tone. He was in the chair he’d carried in and set in front of the television, facing the couch.
The people in the room weren’t in exactly the right places for a courtroom, but I got the impression of Isaac in the judge’s position with the couch and the armchair serving as the jury. I was the defense, my father the prosecution.
My father turned to face Isaac. “I raised you after your mother left both of you. I taught you to be strong and successful. Look at how well you’re doing in college, in your internship. Do you think I mistreated you?”
“No,” Isaac said.
Step, step, turn. My father moved and spoke, “You never complained that I didn’t listen to you. While you’ve been away at college, excelling, Lauren has been spending her time in frivolous pursuits: reading comic books and watching cartoons, not getting the grades she could, wasting her time. She needs to learn self-discipline.”
“Lauren?” Isaac asked.
My eyes burned, throat tight as a fist.
“They’re not cartoons,” I said. “They’re anime and manga and graphic novels. They’re art. And they’re a million times more important than those stupid roses and some glossy pictures in a shallow magazine about who has more money. I don’t want your life.”
He settled his weight b
ack on his heels, tensed and stretched his arms with the hands clasped.
“You may think you don’t want it,” he said. “But try to get along without my money and see how far you get.”
“I don’t need your money.”
“I’d like to see you do without it.”
Cyd put her hand up and said, “Objection.”
My father and Isaac stared at her.
Cyd said, “You’re telling her she’s got to do what you want in order for you to take care of her. But it’s a parent’s responsibility to take care of their child regardless of whether they’re doing life the way that parent wants. Maybe you have to consider that your kids aren’t the same. What one needs, well, the other needs something else. That’s your job as a parent to figure out.”
“Do you have children?” he asked.
“No.”
“You can join in this discussion when you do. Until then, Lauren, you’re coming back to the house and you are going to finish this year of school and get the grades you need.”
I saw in his face how my eyes must look when I’m not feeling anything—when I’m flat. I wondered if Sierra and Blake saw that. When the deep brown lost all warmth and drew light in.
Is that what Sierra reacted to when she said I was cold? Was it hard to connect to me? To love me?
I turned to Blake, her eyes like the kingfisher trapped behind glass, still and moving in a thousand directions at once, haunted, shadowed. Her mouth was tight with fury. Without a smile, her face seemed plain, and not nearly familiar enough, and so right that my chest ached. I wanted to see her face every day until I could recall her perfectly behind my closed eyes.
Did my eyes look like nothingness to her? Did they look like my father’s? Maybe we had it backward the whole time and she was infinite and I was zero.
But I didn’t need to stay in flat nothingness. Blake had said that flat was how I did sad, so I let myself feel the sadness. How lonely it was in the big, empty house. How much it hurt every day that my father who was supposed to take care of me never wanted to be around me, didn’t love me, didn’t even like me.
I was still facing Blake as the tears rolled down my face, but I turned to my father without trying to wipe them away.