Week 1

When I ran away, I forgot to bring my guitar. 

What a hot mess I am. It was the only thing I cared about now, too. When I was twelve, my dad plucked it out of the dusty corner of a music shop in Anchorage and carried it down here. Back when he still cared, of course. I could still remember it sitting in the corner of my room, the faded leather case, slapped with tags and stickers from places I didn’t know, nestling a 1980’s model with beat-up wood and diehard strings. I had no clue how to play that thing, but the fact that it seemed so bright and worn and out of place against the drab walls and the gray town made me happy. 

I planned on picking it up after school. But my plans changed during English class, when Vera glared at me and I could feel the rumors circling around me and I thought, if I stay a single minute more in this place, I’ll crawl out of my own skin.

I probably ripped out half my hair in English. I didn’t even wait till the end of lunch to escape—a stupid move. 

The tracks were deserted when I came down to them. The train station was empty—lunch break? I skirted around the booths and the chairs, and after tossing a quick glance over my shoulder, I lifted my legs up and over the bars, and ran, my combat boots clunking hard on the platform. Off to maybe a hundred yards or so, the smooth ground gave away to the plunging ravines and mountainsides, and the tracks became wooden platforms, supported from below, yet seemingly suspended from air. 

For a hell on earth, it was a beautiful view—it was May, and I could still see the snow-covered peaks of the hilly mountains, the distant view of dilapidated tracks left over from the decades of the mining rush. I slung off my backpack and sat down.

I couldn’t escape by train. I had no money for a ticket.  

I laughed, a low, light-headed chuckle to myself. “What are you doing?”

Getting out of here. 

Everyone knew. Vera, Joey—they had told everyone. And now no one looked me in the eye. Talked to me. It was three years of a hard-pressed secret that exploded, as it would in a claustrophobic town fifty miles east of Anchorage, built on the bones of the old mining days. A secret that, according to Mom and every neighborhood lady who gossiped, solidified the devil in me. 

I had to go somewhere. I couldn’t stay. I looked at the sky, and then at my feet again, and then thought of my car, which was still sitting in the repairs shop for a paint job.

Where would I even go? Oregon? California? Maybe I could go to San Francisco. I had a picture of it in my guitar case—a small postcard of lush hills and cars and sea, as filled with color as our town was devoid of it. I wrapped my hand around the keys in my pocket. Everyone would be on lunch break at the repairs shop—I could easily sneak in and take it.

The paint job could wait.