Behind me, Dad slammed the door.
A second later, I heard the deadbolt turn.
Click.
I will remember that sound for the rest of my life. I still hear it sometimes when I’m falling asleep. A small, ordinary sound, the sound of a lock doing exactly what locks are supposed to do.
For a while, I just stood there under the porch roof. Rain was blowing in sideways and getting my jeans wet, but I didn’t move. I was waiting.
Surely he’d come back. He’d open the door and say, Get in here, it’s freezing, we’ll talk about this in the morning.
Surely Karen would say something. She’d break down and tell him the truth, and he’d come running out with my coat.
Surely somebody in that house would remember I was only fifteen.
I watched the window. I could see the blue light of the TV flickering on the ceiling. I could see a shadow move across the hallway. Then the porch light went off.
He turned off the porch light.
So I walked away.
At first, anger kept my feet moving.
I marched down Linden Street under the flickering streetlights with my jaw clenched so tight my teeth hurt. I told myself I didn’t need them. I told myself I’d go somewhere safe, somewhere warm, and in the morning Dad would wake up and realize what he’d done, and he’d feel terrible.
I wanted him to feel terrible. I wanted it so badly.
But by the time I reached the end of our neighborhood, where Linden runs into County Road 9, I realized something.
I had nowhere to go.
My best friend, Priya, lived on the other side of town, almost seven miles away. I didn’t know her parents’ phone number by heart. I didn’t know anybody’s number by heart except my own and my dad’s. Everybody else was just a name on a screen. And the screen was upstairs on my nightstand.
Our neighbors were mostly older people I’d never really talked to. The Hendersons, who yelled at kids for walking on their grass. Mrs. Pike, who was in a nursing home now. A young couple I’d never even seen.
I stood at the corner in the rain and thought about knocking on a stranger’s door. What would I even say? My dad kicked me out because my sister said I had drugs?
They’d call him. Of course they’d call him. And he’d come down the street in his truck and tell them I was a liar, and they’d believe him, because he was the adult.
So I turned onto County Road 9 and kept walking.
Chapter Three: Four Miles
County Road 9 runs east out of our town for about twelve miles before it hits the highway. There’s a gas station somewhere out there. I’d seen it from the car. A Marathon with a little convenience store.
I figured if I could get there, I could ask to use the phone. I could call Priya’s house by looking up the number. Maybe I could even call my aunt Diane in Columbus.
I didn’t know how far it was. I thought maybe two miles. Maybe three.
It was nine.
Within ten minutes, the rain had soaked all the way through my sweatshirt. It got heavier as it got wet, and it pulled down on my shoulders like a lead blanket. Cold water ran down the back of my neck and down my spine.
My jeans stuck to my legs. My Converse filled up with water until every single step made a miserable squishing sound.
I kept turning around to look at the road behind me.
Every time a pair of headlights came over the hill, my heart jumped in my chest. That’s him. He changed his mind. He’s sorry.
But every car just kept going. Their tires hissed on the wet road, and their taillights got smaller and smaller and disappeared.
Nobody stopped. I don’t think anybody even saw me. I was a dark shape on the side of a dark road in a navy sweatshirt.
I thought about Karen while I walked. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Karen used to be my favorite person in the world. When I was little, she’d let me sleep in her bed during thunderstorms. She taught me to ride a bike. She used to braid my hair before school, French braids, so tight it made my eyes water.
Then Mom got sick. And Karen changed.
She was sixteen then. She stopped braiding my hair. She stopped coming home after volleyball practice. She’d go out with her friends and come home late and go straight to her room and lock the door.
When Mom died, Karen didn’t cry at the funeral. Not once. I cried so hard I threw up in the church bathroom. Karen just stood there in her black dress with her arms crossed, staring at the casket like she was angry at it.
The next spring, she tore her ACL during a volleyball game. Her right knee. I heard it pop from the bleachers. She had surgery in May, and the doctor gave her a bottle of painkillers. Oxycodone.
I remember Dad picking up the prescription at the CVS on Main Street. I remember Karen saying they made her feel like she was floating.
She was supposed to take them for two weeks.
I don’t know when they stopped being for her knee.
