Sometimes art is just life amplified - I'm not sure if that makes the writing easier or more difficult. This takes place two weeks before May I and ten years before Love Like Crazy.
Tonight I feel like the world won't miss me,
So much to say but there's no one listening,
If we're alone are we all together in that,
I threw a penny in a well for wishing,
And prayed for all the things I think I'm missing,
A little time is all I really need
-Art of Dying;
Alone. Alone. Alone.
Never before has she been quite so alone.
Hot tears pool beneath deep green eyes as the sixteen year old wraps the leather jacket tightly around her abdomen as she slides behind the wheel of the Chevy. Her head bows to rest against the steering wheel as she lets a few slip past her guard to splatter against the worn denim of her jeans; everything hurts and she needs to disappear for awhile. With a sniffle, the brunette pulls away from the wheel and slips the keys from her pocket, slipping them in the ignition, and pulling out of her best friend's garage. A wrist swipes at the tears that won't stop falling as she weaves her way through alleys and side streets before finding the highway that heads north.
Austin Grace Hawthorne is alone, so alone that she swears her bones ache because of it, for the first time since she was five years old. For the past eleven years there has always been someone but now, well, now they're all gone. Andrew left a year ago, whereabouts unknown. Danny left six months ago to play ball for the team out of Syracuse. Don left six weeks ago to start his training at the police academy in upstate. Of course there have been daily phone calls from Danny and Don to make sure she's not dead but it's not the same. Of course she could still go down the street, slip past the creaky storm door, and curl up next to Grace Messer on the couch but it's not like it was. She's alone without a place to run, a homebody without a home (because the place with a bed and her father is certainly not a home). She feels like she might just drown in loneliness.
The gas tank is on the verge of triggering the light but there's a fifty burning a hole in her pocket and it will get her a little bit further, just far enough. Traffic thins out as she makes her way through the maze of city streets that twist together into New York City and she heads out of the city, toward New Jersey, and the twisting mountain roads that lay just beyond in the bindings of upstate New York. She stops at an A&P to fill the tank, splurging on a Coke and a pack of American Spirits (thanking a God she hasn't talked to in awhile that no one cards the abused girl). The cashier eyes her bruises and she fights the urge to tell the man to 'fuck off' because, really, whose business is it? People who supposedly give a damn have never changed a thing.
Pearl Jam is her drug of choice as she rolls down the window and lights a cigarette. She drives with her knee, left hand flicking ashes out the window and the right slams against the wheel as the song speaks all the things that are trapped, wrapped up tightly inside of her. "Don't call me daughter," she screams along and turns the volume up even higher. "Not fit to be, the picture kept will remind me..."
She's praying a cop doesn't stop her as she speeds through a vacant red light in a small town somewhere near the New York state line. There's something about the vibration under her fingers when she guns the engine and flies over railroad tracks with the lights blinking that calms her soul; something about controlling the chaos that makes the world a bit clearer. Somewhere along the way she registers that her speedometer is almost maxed out and she contemplates slowing down but instead pushes harder on the accelerator until the red arrow kisses a hundred. It takes every ounce of strength Austin possesses to keep from swerving off the road and into the trees, an out.
Instead she skids to a stop on the side of the road, leaving a trail of burnt rubber behind her, and opens the door to puke. Everything hurts and she could do with a trip to the hospital but hospitals mean questions and questions mean that her dad will just take it out on her later. The teenager lifts her shirt and examines the bruises that are forming across the muscles of her stomach, wincing when she presses gently against the black and blue mark over her diaphragm – pretty sure that it's just bruised since she's still breathing. Tears threaten to spill again but this time she shakes her head and wills them away because he's not worth the energy.
Austin slides back behind the wheel and guns it through a u-turn, heading back toward her beloved city. She wishes that she could bring it in her to just keep driving, abandon the car when it runs out of gas, and keep walking until it's all gone. All of it. Every memory of broken bones, battered skin, and words that cut deeper than both.
When she drives past her ex-boyfriend's house and realizes that he's not waiting to cheer her up with a dorky smile and a warm hug, she nearly gives into the tears. Then it's Danny's house when she drops the car off and she sees Grace and Lou having dinner through the dining room window and her boys aren't there and it doesn't feel like home. She walks past her own house to the gas station where she scrounges through her pockets for quarters where she loads them into the payphone and waits for the machine in Danny's hotel room to click on. "Baby, it's me. Please." She bows her head and rests it against the cool metal of the phone base as the tears pull her under. "I need you, Danny. Come home. Please, please, please. I need you."
Austin slides the phone back into it's cradle, dries her tears on the back of her wrist, and lights another cigarette in order to make the walk back to the residence she shares with her parents take as long as possible. The summer air has a bit of a chill to it, fall is almost on the horizon, and she wraps the coat around her like it's armor that can protect her from the world. She stubs the half-smoked cigarette out on a fence post and tucks it back into the carton before slipping the carton into her pocket and walking into the house. She makes it up the stairs before she get caught in the shadow of her big brother's vacant room and the stark realization that the one person, beside her parents, who has been there since the day she was born has left her.
Then her father's breath is on her neck, she's pleading for her life and he's throwing her against the wall as his fist pelts her skin. When she collides with her mother's glass table she tries to stand up because, dammit, she is going to fight but then his foot is coming at her and she's out of options. A soft sigh escapes the boundary of her lips and she lets go because this is the end. Austin Grace Hawthorne is going to die and she's going to die alone.