Runaway

          Callie lies on her back with her head hanging off the edge of the bed. It’s nice here, the world upside down so that her head goes fuzzy and she can’t quite think right, like she’s just on the edge of becoming something new. The lines of her blurring and dissipating into the air. A caterpillar building a cocoon around itself and emerging remade. Reborn, reshapen. Her fingertips brush the carpet—a paisley pattern in an ugly combination of muddy brown and murky green. The mattress beneath her is hard and the sheets are rough from too many washes, but the hostel has a bed, and a shower. Most importantly, it was cheap. She doesn’t dare to use the credit card tucked into her pocket; the gravelly voices of the true crime podcasts her mother used to listen to while she did housework echo in her mind. Missing persons can be traced by their mobile phone and their financial transactions. Better to rely only on what cash she managed to grab before her hasty departure than risk being found.

 

          Three hundred miles sit between here and the rocky, salt-stained shores of her childhood. It feels like a confession, or like a surrender. It’s the farthest she’s gone, but it’s not enough. Not when she can still feel the scratch of sand between her toes; not when she inhales and still tastes the sharp scent of pine in her lungs. She wants to climb back into her car and go further. Wants to watch the trees fall away into flat, endless plains until she can’t remember that anything else exists. She wants to keep driving until she falls off the edge of the world and into another one entirely. Every moment she waits—every moment she spends standing still or sitting on this bed, inhaling and exhaling and trying not to scream—feels like another chance for the world to trap her again.

 

          The door creaks open. The hinges made a sound like a crackling laugh, echoing and hollow, like an automated Halloween decoration. Step in the right place and it lights up and bursts to life. You know it’s coming but it never works when it’s supposed to, so you’re frightened anyway.

 

          From where she is lying, Callie can only make out a pair of ripped jeans and muddy shoes, stained a pale brown that may have once been white. She sighs and flails around in an attempt to sit up, flailing woozily as her head spins. She blinks rapidly until her vision clears and she can make out the person who has entered.

 

          It’s a woman, a little older than Callie herself, with messy brown hair, pulled back from a face the colour of golden sand, her eyes a warm hazel not unlike the hostel carpet. “Hey,” the woman says, nodding in greeting. She crosses the room to sit down on the bunk opposite Callie, bending down to unlace her shoes. Her hands are calloused and her fingers are sure and strong in their movements.

 

          Callie nods back and regards the woman warily. She is, technically speaking, a missing person. It doesn’t work like that, she thinks, but she knows it’s a lie. Maybe someone will look for her, or maybe no one will. She isn’t sure. But the truth is that she ran away, and anyone could find her and drag her back.

 

          Her grimy shoes are unlaced, and the woman glances at Callie curiously. “How old are you? You

look awfully young to be here alone.”

 

          Callie tenses. “I’m eighteen,” she answers cagily. A lie, but only just. She’s almost eighteen—mere months away from adulthood and the freedom it promises. She had thought, as the days dragged by and her mother’s frown deepened like rivers after heavy rain, that she could make it. She had thought that she could outlast those last few months, and suffer through the rest of her senior year as she applied for colleges as far away from home as she could get. Watch her mother’s disappointment in her grow with every word she couldn’t say. Whether every harsh word and callous glance.

 

          She hadn’t meant to run away. It’s always been there, of course, this urge in the back of her mind, a voice that whispers leave, a voice that murmurs get out of here before it kills you. But she never thought she would give into it, not like this, with only a minute’s thought and even less planning, a frantic chaos in her mind that led her to climb into her mother’s car—never used now anyway—and drive until the night closed in around her and the streetlights blurred together. There wasn’t even a good reason for it, this time. No argument, no catalyst that sent her reeling in the dark until she couldn’t bear it anymore. It was simply a breaking, sudden, and unexpected. A cleaving. A clanging realisation that he couldn’t bear it anymore.

 

          The woman is frowning at her but fortunately doesn’t question her answer. “I’m Susan,” she says.

 

          She looks at Callie expectantly, and it takes Callie a moment to realise she’s waiting for a response. “Callie,” she answers. Maybe she shouldn’t tell her—maybe she should keep this clutched close to her chest like everything else—but Callie has spent so long wearing a stranger’s face for the sake of survival that she wants to claim something for herself, grab it, and hold it tight enough to break it, even if it is only her name.

 

          The corners of Susan’s lips quirk up in a smile. “Callie,” she repeats. “It’s a good name, that. Strong. Are you strong, Callie?”

 

          She doesn’t like how Susan says her name: too familiar like they’ve known each other for years instead of minutes. “Sure.” She shifts her weight nervously. “Does it matter?”

 

          Susan smiles wryly. “Everyone’s running from something, Callie.” She runs her hand across the blue and grey squares of the scratchy quilt beneath her. It’s like the one Callie’s mother made when she was a child, but smaller and thinner, the colours worn to a faded monochrome. She remembers watching her mother at the sewing machine, back hunched, feeding the fabric through the needle, the rhythmic sound filling her ears. That was years ago, now. When her mother still cared enough to try to be a mother. When she still thought she could love her daughter.

 

          Susan continues, snapping Callie from her thoughts, “You can’t change that. The only

thing you can control is whether or not you let it catch up to you.”

 

          Callie shakes her head and angles her body away from the woman. She’s been running for a very long time, even if she’s never dared to leave before this, and she doesn’t intend to stop anytime soon. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. She thinks of her mother’s scowl and her rare, brilliant smile. Her sister’s laugh. Her friends, her teachers. Her future. She wishes it hadn’t come to this—wishes she had been stronger. But she knows that going back will kill her, just as staying for any longer would have. “I won’t let it.”

 

          Susan nods like Callie has passed a test. “Of course,” she agrees softly, something sad and wistful shining in her eyes. “You’re so young.”

 

          Not anymore, Callie thinks. Youth dripping away like sap from a tree, sticky and wasted. Sharp and stinging on her hands and in her mouth. She’s not a child anymore, no matter how much she sometimes wishes she still was. She doesn’t think she has been for a long time.

 

          Tomorrow, she will leave the hostel. Tomorrow, she will get back in her mother’s car, and she will keep driving. Susan looks at her with something like pity, but Callie knows that this is the only choice she could have ever made. Tomorrow, she will run farther and faster than she ever has before. Tomorrow, she will leave and she will not look back.

 

Ayla Bushell is a 17-year-old writer from the UK and Australia currently based in Puerto Rico. An avid reader and writer from childhood, she has an ever-growing list of novel ideas she insists she will write one day. Apart from writing, she enjoys reading books that make her cry, listening to Hozier and classical music, and researching obscure historical figures.