WE WAITED until everyone was asleep; then, we drove all night to Chicago. My mom wouldn’t know her van had disappeared until she woke at seven to get my sis ready for summer school. That first day, I worried about Sis making it to class on time, but Jenny said, “The world will go on without us.” I figured she was right. I would’ve liked to have kept going. Arizona, I guess. Maybe California. But we didn’t have the money for gas, and I figured it was best to let Jenny do the planning. She was the reason we went. I thought making the decisions might brighten her up. I never would have thought to go without her, but it’s true I didn’t like it when my mom said, “You’re spending too much time with Jenny,” or “I don’t like the way you look at her.” Sometimes my mom said nothing. When she looked at me, I got the feeling that, at fifteen, I was getting a little too big for her house.
The first few days, Jenny and I stayed close to the van. Moved it from spot to spot. When we were out, we kept walking, trying to blend in. When we saw nobody paying attention to us, or anyone else, we relaxed. We neared the lake and sat on the beach, hiked through the bird sanctuary, looked over the boats in the marina, and watched the skateboarders do their tricks. We spent our money on bananas and bread and peanut butter from Aldi, and we pulled the wrapped food out of the dumpsters at Mcdonald's or Sonic. Some nights we volunteered at the church on the corner to pass out food. That way, we got to eat too. The first time I said we should just go eat, but Jenny said we’d be less suspicious this way. She was right.
Jenny was hotter than blazes for a while. Boy, we steamed up that van, though we never got to where I thought we might. Before we left, we joked and teased one another that if we ever had some real privacy, we could…
When we had the chance, it just didn’t feel right. Before long, she ran out of her perfume, and we couldn’t shower. She started to smell like underarms and French fries, which didn’t exactly put me in the mood. So it was no great sacrifice. I knew I was ahead of the game. She took long walks along the lake all the way up to where the big apartments came to the water. She said she wanted to be alone, but I followed behind. At times, I wondered what she was thinking, but mostly I walked and kept her in view.
Some mornings while Jenny slept, I went to the soccer fields to sprint back and forth until I felt like I might pass out. Then I slowly weaved like I was dribbling the ball downfield. I hardly ever imagined shooting for goals because making good passes was more satisfying for me. I knew soccer season would start soon, and I wouldn’t be there. I didn’t love it that much, but when I played I forgot about everything else. I’d miss that. Even though I was tired, living like we were, I never got that nice spent feeling that only came after a long practice or a game—when I felt beat but refreshed. I tried on those mornings, but I never got there.
One day, Jenny said she wanted to go to church. Not to eat but to go inside and pray. We’d never done this before, and I said I wasn’t expecting much, but okay. As we walked over, Jenny wouldn’t look at me, and she mumbled to herself. I thought she was warming up for how to pray and what to ask for. It didn’t matter, though, because we heard gunshots coming from the church when we were a block away, then saw a car come speeding past us. Figuring it was the shooters, I ducked to hide, but Jenny kept walking. When I caught up to her at the corner, we stood and saw four bodies bleeding and groaning on the church steps. We smelled the powder from the guns. It took a couple minutes for the sirens to follow. We’d seen guys around the neighborhood before who looked like they might be in gangs, but we had never seen any guns or shootings. We turned around and walked back to the van. We tried talking about it a few times but never got anywhere.
On the weekends, big Mexican families grilled in the park and played terrible volleyball games on saggy nets in the dirt. They didn’t care they were bad, and they were happy to just be out there. We went through and took in all the smells from the barbecues, saw the meats smoking on the grills, and heard the sounds of the pop cans opening. It was kind of a mix between torture and satisfaction. Torture when we walked through, but afterward, it was almost like, “Hey, that was pretty good.”
Jenny spent some afternoons sitting under trees while she scribbled down poems that she wouldn’t let me read. Then we went to the marina, and she threw them in the water. She smiled, so I didn’t care. A few nights, it got so hot we took a blanket and slept out in the hollows of the golf course. It was nice to wake up with the cool dewy grass, to see the sun coming up, and to hear the birds.
They found us after about a month. A guy walked past our van. He headed towards Starbucks and recognized us from the news. I read in the paper afterward that he had seen the Michigan plates and that Jenny’s parents and my mom had been on the news asking about us. I hadn’t figured they would go on television because they wouldn’t have known where we were. We could’ve been in Canada, Cleveland, or anywhere a tank of gas and a couple hundred bucks could get us. But I didn’t mind. The police in Chicago were nice enough, and they gave us pizza and Cokes. I knew we couldn’t be in too much trouble because we were both under sixteen and hadn’t hurt anybody. I asked them about the shooting at the church, but they wouldn’t tell me much except to say no one had died.
The police from Michigan picked us up, and Jenny and I got to sit together in the back seat all the way home. My mom hugged me, and I told her I was sorry if she was scared. She said she was but knew I’d be okay. Jenny’s parents were crying when we got there. They seemed like tears of joy. Her dad came over to me, and he looked like he was going to give me a friendly handshake. He squeezed it with all his might and whispered, “You’re going to pay for this.” And then he backed off and smiled at me again when everyone could see. I didn’t care. As I said, it was all Jenny’s idea in the first place. Actually, it was her second idea. The first one was to kill herself, and when I told her it was no good, she said, “Well, maybe we could just run away.” And so that’s what we did.
Originally published in the Rathalla Review, Fall 2015 • All rights remain with the author.
Steve Nelson lives in Chicago. He earned his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has been published in The Rambler, Storyglossia, eye-rhyme, The Absinthe Literary Review, and elsewhere. His essay “Mind Wide Open” is included in the anthology, The Runner’s High: Illumination and Ecstasy in Motion. “Night at the Store” was published in Phantasmagoria and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
I've always loved this story!
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