Perpetrator's Note: This really is an inexcusable piece of crap, but I just couldn't help it. The remake of The Hitcher was pretty bad, but there was some serious chemistry going on between John and Grace--which had to be more a natural thing between the actors than anything else, because the writing sure couldn't have had anything to do with it. (As a huge fan of the original, I will admit I was biased against the remake from the start, but even if I hadn't been it's…really not a good movie, yet at the same time it's curiously addictive. Sean Bean and Sophia Bush definitely help with that.) Anyway, this is the sort of crap that would be pardonable if I were ten years younger, but as it is I really ought to know better by now. Oh well--everyone's allowed to write crap once in a while. XD
That said, I do highly recommend the original, as it's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen, and, since Rutger Hauer is the scariest man on the face of the Earth, it winds up downright terrifying at times.
Also, though Hitcher II was atrocious, certain plot points have been worked into this fic, because if they weren't there wouldn't be a fic. XD (Also, writing someone as young as Grace has been cracking me the hell up. Srsly.)
And, just to make this author's note EVEN LONGER, the title is taken from the song Turn the Page, originally by Bob Seger and later covered by Metallica.
Summer, to put it bluntly, sucked.
Admittedly, autumn hadn't been stellar, and winter had been dark and cold and grey, but that had suited Grace's mood, really. Spring was offensive, though--all those trees, pretty and blooming and, to her, utterly jarring. And now summer again, a full year since It happened.
She always thought of it that way--It, with a capital I. There was before It, and there was after, and everything in both those times seemed to pale in comparison with the nightmare clarity of that one horrible day. Those memories wouldn't fade, no matter how hard she tried to erase them, and how many fucking therapists she saw. All that was indelibly etched in her memory, and she knew damn well it would never, ever go away.
Naturally she hadn't gone back to college--no way in hell could she have handled that. She'd spent the last year living in her parents' basement, holed up like a hermit and, more often than not, doped to the gills. There was nothing like Valium to make the world nice and pink and harmless, and Grace had been eating it like candy for months.
Physically, she bore little resemblance to the girl who had so blithely set off with her boyfriend last spring break--she was too skinny now, her skin unhealthily pale and her eyes lost in bruise-black shadows. She looked, as one of her visiting friends had said, and whom she had overheard, 'like some kind of meth addict'; it was a cruel statement that her friend hadn't meant for her to hear, but it was also true enough. She'd gone from a pretty girl to something like a wraith, but that didn't really matter. Nothing did, when you got right down to it.
She'd also overheard her parents talking to one of her legion of therapists, not two weeks ago. The state of New Mexico had actually been paying all her medical bills--they held their law enforcement responsible for everything she'd gone through, and by some miracle had actually put their money where their mouth was. As a result, Grace had dealt with more counselors and therapists than she could count; she knew they meant well, but shit, it wasn't like they'd gone through it. It wasn't like any of them could know, could understand the guilt and numbness and the godawful nightmares. The numbness was both a blessing and a curse--she hadn't been lying when she'd told John she didn't feel anything. It was like a protective cocoon, a layer of cotton wool that shielded her brain from the world and everything in it.
Which made what her parents had said…worrying. Grace had only heard half the conversation, but from the sound of things they and one of the therapists were conspiring to actually send her out of the house--more than that, they wanted to send her back down south, back to the desert. What good in all fucking hell that would do, she had no idea; personally, once she'd pulled her life back together, she wanted to move to freaking Alaska--as far away from New Mexico as was practically possible. (Except then she'd be into 30 Days of Night territory, and oh God she'd watched that movie with Jim, hadn't she? Everything came back to him and It and hey, she had more Valium. As Jim would have said, Score, dude.)
She was lying crosswise on her bed now, her feet propped up against the wall, hair--so stringy, now, uncared-for--pooling on the floor beneath her head. Everything was upside-down this way, different and the same all at once, flipped around like everything else seemed to be. She twisted a little, placing both her hands on the carpet--pale blue, the nap wooly and slightly coarse. It was strange, but the number she grew internally, the more sensitive her senses seemed to become; it was like there had to be a kind of balance, somehow.
Maybe I could walk like this, she said, picturing herself as a spider, scurrying into a corner. See how long I could keep it up.
…Yeah, Grace was definitely a little high. High, and more than a little unstable, and suddenly entertaining ideas that she really shouldn't have. She blinked at the dark legs of her desk chair, thoughts floating through her head and ricocheting off each other like balloons in seemingly Brownian motion. Struggling, she sat up and tiptoed up the stairs, pausing at the door to listen. Her parents often talked in the kitchen while her mother made dinner, and had said all sorts of interesting things they hadn't wanted Grace to know about.
"I just don't know if it's a good idea," her mother said, the words accompanied by the brisk thunk of a knife hitting the breadboard, chopping some vegetable or other. "It's only been a year, Alan. She didn't just lose her boyfriend, she lost him in…well, it's horrific. She ought to go back someday, but I just think it's too soon."
A chair scraping, her father sitting heavily at the kitchen table. "They say she needs it," he said. "Something has to shake her up, or she's just going to stay like that. They said…Christ, what did they say?" He fell silent, groping through his memory. "They said she's internalizing everything, and the longer she does it the worse it'll all be when she snaps. It's not like she wouldn't be supervised, either--Janet and Philip both said they'd go with her."
Janet and Philip. Philip and Janet. Did she really want to spend time down there, with both of them? No. Definitely not. Like all the others, their intentions were good, but they'd just stand and look at the countryside or whatever and expect her to do…what? Cry? Scream? As John would say, did they want her to be a whiny little bitch? Probably. They'd talk about getting in touch with her feelings, about how it was okay to let go and let it all out. Yeah, because letting go had done her so much good when It happened. Right.
Fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck all of them with their kind smiles and good intentions, fuck the look in their eyes that said quite clearly that they thought she was batshit insane. Yeah, she was cracked, and she knew she was cracked, but none of those smiling professionals were going to be able to glue her back together again. Maybe nothing could. She didn't know, yet. If they wanted her to go, she'd go, but she'd damn well do it on her own terms.
Night. Grace didn't like the night, the dark--it reminded her too much of Jim, even now, reminded her of what had happened to him. It was the only time she'd be able to leave, though--if she tried to get out during the day, someone would stop her. They'd talk to her, break down her fragile resolve, try to help again. No, it had to be night, and it had to be this night, or she'd never have the guts to try again.
She still had a car--a little brown VW squareback, lacking in horsepower but definitely way ahead in terms of fuel consumption. It had been a while since she'd driven it, but it still had half a tank of gas, and could easily get more--all she had to do was stop along her way and clear out her savings account at an ATM, and she'd be set. She could go almost anywhere with that money.
Her luggage didn't amount to much, and only took two trips to load. Summer though it was, it was chilly, the grass cold against her sandaled feet, and she shivered as she shut the hatchback and climbed into the driver's seat. She'd left her parents a note, taken plenty of water and assorted snack food, and now had nothing to stop her hitting the road.
Nothing but the shakes. Part of why she hadn't driven in what seemed like ages was the effect that sitting in a car never failed to induce--whole-body shivers, rising from her feet all the way through the crown of her head, that could last anywhere from two minutes to a quarter of an hour. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they'd called it, the same thing all those Vietnam vets had come back with. Fuck.
They only lasted maybe five minutes this time, and she guided the little car out into the silent, empty street, cruising toward…something. Freedom, maybe. Grace didn't know what, but just now she didn't care--for the first time in over a year, a kind of…of peace descended on her, the peace that came with the avoidance of all thought. All she had to do was exist in the moment, pay attention to the road and the wind that blew in through the open windows. This was…
…going home.
It was a weird-ass thought, but it seemed so right--part of her had never left the hot and dusty highways of New Mexico, and in going back there she might be able to retrieve it. Maybe then this shit could stop, and she could actually find something like life again. Real life, not the doped-up, hazy limbo in which she'd spent the last year.
She turned on the radio, picking up some old rock station, and half an hour and two stops later she'd hit the highway, cruising the empty tarmac as fast as her little car would go. Some old-school Bonnie Tyler song was blaring--something about a total eclipse of the heart. Appropriate. Almost scarily so.
Grace drove until dawn, just in time to cross the border from Colorado to New Mexico. It was a different border--the northern, rather than eastern--but it had the same sign, the one welcoming everyone to the land of enchantment. She snorted--there was enchantment, all right, but it was the sort normally found in the darker brand of fairytale, the type where Grandmother actually gets eaten by the Big Bad Wolf.
Her parents would call her soon, she knew, panicking like hell. Right now, though, she needed sleep; what little explanation she had to offer could wait. Somehow, she doubted her parents would swallow an I just have to go, okay? It wasn't therapy if she did it her way, and now she was--irony of ironies, thank you, Dad--unsupervised. Like she was some sort of child playing truant from school.
She hauled some of her luggage out, checked into a cheap hotel, and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
Her arrival had not gone unmarked. He couldn't see her yet, but he could feel her--had felt her as soon as she'd crossed the line, into his territory.
Little Grace was coming home.
Perpetrator's Note: Okay, so that canon from Hitcher II I mentioned? That's connected to this. The upshot of it (since I really recommend you avoid the movie, as it's mind-destroyingly bad) is that Ryder is a kind of demon who reincarnates every time somebody kills him. As plot-twists go, it's just a little retarded, but convenient for me all the same. In my own personal idea of canon, it's like zombie-ism without the whole, you know, dead bit--also completely ridiculous and far-fetched, but then the movies themselves weren't exactly grounded in reality, so shhh. I just might get away with it.