A/N: Hey there everyone! I'm back with a new chapter, yay! I know this one is kinda long and wordy, but it's one of those necessary chapters that help the plot advance. So bear with me, there's a lot more action and a few pretty good twists coming up…
I think every kid dreams about leaving home when they're older. You know, about how cool it would be to have your own place and make your own rules, do what you want when you want. Let me tell you something: there is a big difference between dreaming of something and doing it. Doing it is a hell of a lot scarier. Doing it when you're a member of a hated and feared minority doesn't help very much either.
My final shot had been Cassidy. But that conversation had gone less than stellar. So that was it, my last thread of hope was gone. It had shriveled and burned and crumbled away 'till nothing was left. My dad wanted to put me in a 'treatment facility', my mom was afraid for the lives of my younger siblings, and my best friend would forever hate my for taking her boyfriend away. It still all felt like so extremely long dream, like I was acting out some twisted Law & Order or NYPD Blue episode. The question tumbled about in my mind for hours: How could me, Zoe, have killed someone? Put Justin and countless others into a coma? It wasn't possible, it just wasn't.
I'd cry for them later, the ones who suffered because of me, but right then I was assuaged with adrenaline. Later there would be emotion, but right now there was only survival, instinct. I stumbled into the yard, breathing hard from my run. I went in through the garage, making sure to leave the one of the 2 doors open. I prayed that my dad would not check to see if the doors were shut before he locked the house up that night. He didn't.
I might be rash and stubborn sometimes, but I was far from stupid. I had a plan. I waited until my parents fell asleep, 'bout 11:30. I grabbed my dad's big, army-style duffle and proceeded to pack it full of everything I thought I might need. Jeans, shits, hard-wearing stuff. I was more worried about being cold than hot, so I went heavy on layering gear. Socks, underwear, contact solution. I had about a three month supply of lenses left, but after that, I was probably SOL, so I threw in my old glasses for good measure. Boots, my good old Birkenstocks. They'd hold up for a long time, and they were practical. Then there were the few things I couldn't help but bring.
I managed to shove in a some sentimental bits. A few soft-covered photo albums, a memory book from my softball team last year. Christmas picture of me and the family, stuff like that. And, wrenching them from their hiding place beneath my mattress, 3 beat up spiral notebooks that no one but me had ever seen, nor would ever see. No, they weren't journals or diaries, I never got the point of keeping a diary. These were, in some ways, more personal. Then that was it, there was nothing more to bring.
I paused in the doorway and realized with a sinking feeling that this might be the last time I ever saw this room . I wanted to be bold, brave, and brash at that moment, but in all reality, I just felt terribly depressed. But whatever lay in my future, at least it wasn't a life in a 'treatment facility'.
I'd composed a note to my folks. I told them how much I loved them, despite how they may feel about me. I gave my best to my sisters and brother, who I would never get to say goodbye to. Then I told them that I was heading west, towards California, to look for work and a new life. I said that I was sorry for all that I'd done, and that maybe one day I'd see them again and everything would be alright. It was a happy thought, but an unrealistic one at that. Then I left, looking for peace and a fresh start.
My house had a burglar alarm designed to go off if any doors were opened while it was engaged. Well, the solution to that problem seemed relatively simple: just turn off the alarm and walk out. Here's the catch though, the alarm rings 3 times when it has been properly shut off, and the ringing was guaranteed to wake my parents. So I was forced to find a way around that obstacle. What I did was remove the screen from my window and climb outside. See, I lived in a split level house and, although my room was on the second floor, the roof of the living room extended out from under my window. So after facing the 10 foot drop from the roof to the ground below (which was nothing when compared to the stunt I'd pulled in Cassidy's tree) I was home free…well, so to speak. With the garage door already open, I avoided another potential parent rousing noise. As quietly as I could I popped the trunk of my car, shoved my duffel into the back next to my bat bag, and drove off into the night.
My car…if you could call it a car was a typical high school vehicle, meaning it was a piece of shit. It was an eighty-nine, two door blue Chevy Beretta. It leaked power steering fluid like a sieve, had a giant dent in the passenger door from where the previous owner hit a gas pump, and had a muffler so loud that I'd been told you could hear it from a mile away. The roar of that blasted muffler may or may not have woken my parents as I made my escape that night, but it didn't matter anyway. By the time they'd figured out what happened, I'd be long gone. I had a destination in mind as I fled, and it wasn't California.
My dad's father had once owned 50 acres of premium farmland just over the state lines in Wisconsin. I say once owned because he passed away when I was six. My parents told me it was lung cancer and, seeing as how he smoked since he was nineteen, it seemed perfectly plausible to them. But I knew it wasn't true. He really died of a broken heart, missing the only woman he'd ever loved: My grandmother, who'd died just a short month earlier from natural causes. With them both gone, the property reverted back to my father and the rest of that massive Macyntire clan (my dad had seven other siblings). Most of my aunts and uncles lived in different parts of the country. Only my dad and my youngest uncle Nick, who lived in Indianapolis, ever visited the house anymore. The great white farmhouse, not to mention the barn and garage building, had become the perfect summer escape for our two families, but aside from that, the house was usually desolate and deserted. The barn was in pretty poor shape and the massive fields went unplowed. Uncle Nick and my cousin Jeffrey, who was 13 at the time, went out there to fish at the nearby lake every summer, but other than that, no one had been out there recently. It seemed like the perfect place for me to crash for a while…least until I got my head on straight.
It was by far, the longest drive I'd ever made. I stuck to the back roads, driving blind with my lights off, and getting lost often. My father could make the drive in just over an hour. It took me all night. If you haven't already figured it out, I lived in a pretty big freakin' suburb south of Chicago. For a high school jr. who's only been driving for a year, getting to that house in one piece was a pretty big feat. Even so, as I rolled onto the gravel driveway at 4 in the morning, half asleep, it didn't even matter.
The garage was actually more like a small barn, designed to hold farm equipment as well as vehicles. But for the past several years all it had held had been old college furniture, boxes of baby clothes, and other pieces of junk that various family members chose to store here. Needless to say, such objects limited my ability to get my car inside, and I was too nervous to leave it out in the open, less a neighbor realize that I was here and call my parents. So even though I was dead on my feet, I hauled and shoved and slammed odds and ends out of my way 'till just before dawn. It was tight, but I squeezed that glorious wreak of a car inside.
Then I went into the barn. It was dark and musty within, and felt empty with the absence of the livestock it should have held (my Poppy raised dairy cows and grew field corn). I knew my father had hidden a spare key out there, and either I would have to find it, or break a window to get inside. But thankfully it didn't come to that. My dad was a fairly predictable person if you knew him well…and I did. He'd hidden the key in a jar on nails on an old workbench in the back room. The same place he'd hidden our own home's spare key in our shed.
After much aggravation and struggling, that rusty junk of a lock gave way, and I pushed in through the basement door and climbed the stairs into the house. Utterly exhausted, and shaking with fear and fatigue, I fell into a fitful sleep just as the sun rose on the horizon.
Let me tell you something, everyone gets lonely sometimes, but none of you have ever experienced loneliness like this before. I was utterly and completely by myself. Didn't see anyone, didn't speak to anyone, wasn't around anyone. And I was terribly depressed. I'd been living at the farmhouse for just about three weeks. I know it doesn't seem like that long a time, but also remember I'm a teenager. Human interaction…hell, human contact is a vital part of my life. For as long as I can remember I've gotten up in the morning and gone to a school bursting with people, or woken up to a home bursting with people. Now, there was no one. No sounds of people, no smells of people, no presence of people. It was just me, myself, and I.
Back home I'd often wished for some peace and quite, some time alone with my thoughts. But at the farm I'd have given my right arm for the distraction my family provided. Instead I got an old, rabbit-eared TV with poor reception, and my dad's stereo from college. The synthetic voices both offered provided little comfort.
For three weeks I hardly left the house, venturing outside only at night and in the back of the house where I couldn't be spotted from the road. I never left the property at all. I didn't really need to since the house had a fine supply of non-perishables: mass quantities of Mac n' Cheese and Campbell's soup. Thank God for my aunt and her Sam's food club card… But truth be told, I was afraid to leave.
So what did I do to fill the long and empty hours of the days? Very little. I read the few books I'd had in my bag or in my car, and my uncle had some old Tom Clancy stuff that he'd left at the house to read on a rainy day. I watched some TV, tried my best to cook with what little ingredients I had, and played around in the workshop in the basement. But what I did most of the time was write. Remember those notebooks that'd I'd taken with me? How I said they weren't dairies? Well, they weren't and they still aren't today. They were filled with stuff I'd written though. Poems, a few attempts at haiku, but mostly stories or parts of them. There were some outlines of plots that I'd thought up, but hadn't found the time to write about. There were character charts and descriptions. There were snippets of dialogues between characters, but no stories to go with them. There were just pieces of plots, missing characters to fill them. All together, the books were a jumbled mess of partially completed stories and ideas, but to me they were my future.
You've probably already figured out that I'm not exactly a stellar student. I wasn't looking at a future involving Ivy Leagues colleges, believe you me. In fact, the only thing I had going for me was my pitching. At least, most people thought that it was all I had going for me. They figured I'd get a scholarship, but no one ever thought much past that. But, then again, no one knew that I'd been writing since the eight grade. I knew needed a focus, something to aim for in life. When I found out that I not only liked writing, but wasn't half bad at it either, becoming a writer became my goal. And now, with the uncertain future I was facing, it might become my only means of survival.
I remember how that thought sent shivers down my spine. It was still too painful to think beyond the next day, the future was just too uncertain. During the day I could keep myself busy, keep my mind off such things. But at night when I slept, there was nothing I could do to escape the dreams. They were awful, and I would be thrown awake, shaking and crying and, most nights, lying on the floor. I started sleeping in short bursts, often awake before dawn, and sleeping as the sun went down. I would walk around the house at night, afraid to sleep and afraid of being awake. Many times I would emerge from my nightmares to find the TV, which I usually left on so the house wouldn't be so quiet, blinking on and off with the power surges I was creating. Obviously my isolation was not helping me with my control as I'd hoped it would. And so I'd walk, up and down the halls, pacing in the dark, just wishing it would all go away. But fate has a sense of irony, and she wasn't quiet done toying with me yet, because as I walked one night, right around 2 am, I heard a noise outside. Curious and alarmed, I peeked out the upstairs window of my bedroom. What I saw made me instantly thankful that I was having trouble sleeping….
