Authors: Dan Carr
“Open my door!” Murray yelled.
I ran over to his shed and stopped in front of the door. I peered through the crack. I couldn’t see Murray, but I could hear him right behind the door, waiting for me to slide the bar across and let him out.
“Hurry,” he said. “If we get out, we can run to the woods. And maybe jump the fence or something. And then we can figure it out from there.”
I had never really thought about it before, but right then I realized what I’d been missing about Murray. He was a distraction from what was actually gong on. He was someone fun to listen to, someone who did bold and bad things, and therefore, someone who was lower in life than me. Deep down, I knew I was better than Murray, and that was why it was better for me to have him close by. Bad people were nice to be around because then I could say “at least I’m not
that
”. But I had that with Jordan. And I didn’t want that anymore with anyone, because eventually, I’d be the bad person everyone knew they were better than.
“Val, hurry up. Get me out of here.”
“You’re exhausting,” I whispered.
And I left him.
There was no reason to let him out. I never wanted to see Murray again, and that was the nice thing about meeting new people from other places—you never had to see them again if you didn’t want to. Right then, I had forgiven Murray, wiped my hands clean of him, and started to make a nice, distant memory of him of my own design, that way I’d never have to know for sure if he makes it or not.
I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing, but I ran as hard as I could, and I disappeared into the woods before anyone could see that I was missing.
When I was on the track team in junior high, Coach Allen told me that the key to sprinting was to know you were faster than the person next to you. That was important. If your head believed it, your legs would pump whatever your mind saw.
I came last that year.
Running through the woods was just like that year I came last. I had no enthusiasm to keep going. When the exhaustion finally caught up with me from running through the dark forest, I stopped and leaned on tree to catch my breath. I had a stitch in my side and I squeezed it to make it go away. It didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t a sprinter until then.
I collapsed to the ground. Just to hide. It was lightly raining all around me, and I made a snow angel in the mud. The rain smashed my face, and I closed my eyes and felt every rain drop on its own.
There were a lot of things to be worried about. Like when I was going to be caught. I was aware that I wasn’t going to be free forever. I was aware of the situation, of the woods, of myself. That I was going to be in trouble, and maybe put into a new program—a military one that the really bad kids went to. But I didn’t care. Things suddenly felt different for me.
A girl had decided not to be alive anymore.
Bambi wasn’t supposed to die. It was supposed to be someone like Lisa Hatcher. Or Twin. Someone who was bad and would greet death with open arms. Why didn’t Bambi have options? Why didn’t she see them? She was so far gone in herself, I guess. She didn’t know we were around to talk her out of it if she asked. We were in our own little worlds, and didn’t think to help.
I knew I was trying not to cry. It was difficult, and I wiped my muddy hands across my face. The sky was completely dark, and through the trees, high above me, were shiny, little stars.
Instead of thinking about Bambi, I thought of Jenny Shoulders.
I knew what had actually happened to Jenny Shoulders—in her head, at least. I knew why she had chucked a chair through the window, I knew why she had jumped out of a two-story building, and I knew why she had tried to escape. My simple interpretation of Jenny Shoulders was that she just didn’t have a real good reason not to do any of it. And she broke her leg trying to do something she just really felt like doing—
It had been exciting picturing the possibility of getting out—of a crazy girl taking a chance, and it paying off. And when it wasn’t the case, that nobody had gotten anywhere, it destroyed a lot of things we had been daydreaming about. Just feeling some excitement over an idea, and losing it, was brutal on the brain. And when you were already at a low, something as silly as disappointment—not so silly, after all—could kill a person.
Jenny Shoulders didn’t care about anything. And when you didn’t care about consequences, and outcomes that could happen when you did other things, you weren’t thinking clearly. There was a simple kind of self-awareness that being terrified could knock into a person, and when you were blank—dead inside—that was when you didn’t know what you were really doing. That was why the system was designed the way it was. New Horizons. Basinview. Life. It was horrible being scared, and any sane person would do anything not to feel it. We weren’t actually crazy. We were just constantly on the fence, waiting to fall either way. And none of us seemed to know which side was better.
It took just a quick second to get to my feet again, and I was sprinting. Moving in the dark forest was hard. Branches kept pulling at my clothes, and it was hard seeing in the dark. The blisters on my feet were screaming at me but I pretended not to feel them. What I really hoped for was that the counsellors didn’t know I was gone.
“There is no better motivation to run than getting away from something else,”
Coach Allen had said.
“Just pretend someone is trying to get you.”
I wasn’t ever allowed look back when the baton was being passed up to me in the 4x1 race. I was supposed to put my hand back and the runner behind me would place it in my hand—a teamwork kind of thing. But I always had that urge to look behind me.
I looked behind me, in case there was someone chasing after me. But there was only fast moving trees, and then I smashed into something—
My back hit the ground, and I laid there like I wasn’t shocked by the fence coming out of nowhere. The scary part was that my breath was taken from me. I leaned forward to try and catch its rhythm again, but it was a case of hysterical cries. It felt like maybe I wouldn’t be able to find the track that routine breathing was always on. Like my lungs were never going to remember how to breathe again.
But I found it, somehow, and the panic slowly subsided into relief. My head ached from slamming down into the ground, and the trees still didn’t have their edges above me. After five seconds of blurriness, everything slowly began to clear. I took a couple deep breaths, and I let my eyes wander up and up, where the fence and barbed wire kissed the sky. It was amazing how tall it could go, how it went all the way around—
There was a hole.
It wasn’t really much of a hole. Just a crawl space. Where the fence had been cut at the bottom, and some desperate soul had dug beneath the area. It looked like a dog had made it. A wild animal. A human, probably.
My heart knocked on my ribcage, asking to come out and see what was going on. It was the secret knock when ideas came super close to exploding out of your body.
If I climbed through, Blue Lake was right on the other end of the property. And right in front of it was a line of chained, useless canoes.
I peeled myself off the ground and immediately pushed myself beneath the fence. The cut metal scraped across my back, and I pushed my chest across the ground until I had to drag myself with my arms. The back of my shirt got stuck on a piece of metal, and I pulled until I heard a rip. When I got to the other side, I reached back and felt the hole between the letters of NEW HORIZONS.
I was really free.
And instead of running right away, I took a breath, looked around, and sat down. What an escape. Just out in the woods, sitting around, doing what I wanted. Where was I going? What was I doing? I covered my face with my hands and thought about the area around me, and I traced it in my head. Where I would walk—just right along the fence—all the way down to the shore, and to the dock. And then what? Paddle away?!
I got up off the ground and looked through the fence where I had been before. It didn’t look any different than where I was. It was a fence in the woods. But I knew where I was. In my head, I knew I was finally on the right side.
I ran.
There were flashlights everywhere on the inside of the fence. When they got close to the edge, I stopped running and lied back down in the mud again until they went away. The skin on my stomach felt raw by the time I saw the lake shimmering through the trees. I had no idea how I was going to get across the wide, open space of the fence across the cliffs without being seen. But when I got there, instead of stopping and thinking, I did what my body told me to—
I bolted.
There was no other way to do it. There were no flashlights pointing in my direction, and I grabbed onto the fence and shimmied across the ledge of the cliff like I was some brave, Jenny Shoulders type. But I was nervous, and my hands didn’t move off the fence as I shuffled along, ass out, legs apart, with my chest grazing the metal. When I got to the stairs, I climbed over the railings and ran as fast as I could down to the dock.
There were my canoes. The one on the end, the dark green one, wasn’t tied up like the rest. It had been missed, and it was free.
I ducked behind the row of canoes to keep cover from both the counsellors and the rain. The green canoe was right beside me, and I found the chain that wasn’t looped through it.
I felt like a kid, and I remembered how exciting it was to be one. To be little Valerie Campbell, excited to be on the lake.
Tiffany was our canoe instructor one year. She had braces, which was weird for a 30-something-year-old. It was all you saw on someone like her. But she was passionate about canoeing, and a good instructor because she dumbed the process down.
“Treat a canoe like another human being,”
she had said. “A
nd if you do that, there is no way you could ever knowingly hurt it.”
I pushed the canoe off the stand and it fell into the sand. The wind blew the loose strands of my hair into my face, and thunder suddenly cracked around me. There was nothing delicate about the situation, and I treated the canoe how humans usually treated each other because I knew if humans could take it, that a canoe certainly could. I grabbed the rope tied to the bow and pulled it over my shoulder to the water. I could hear Tiffany clearly yelling behind me.
“Val Campbell! It takes two people to lift that—you must ask for help!”
But I couldn’t ask for help. I was completely alone, there was nobody around, and I knew I could pull it through the sand on my own.
There was no paddle, which I realized just as the water touched the bow of the canoe. I dropped the rope and ran up to the wooden crate near the end of the dock, where life jackets and paddles were chucked in a pile. I grabbed the first paddle my hand wrapped around, and when I got back down to the canoe, I pushed it into the water.
I jumped in. The canoe rocked, but it never tipped.
“Fuck you Tiffany,” I said before I began to paddle. Dip after dip, that paddle went hard into the water. My shoulders felt the pressure, and I had no idea what I was doing. All I remembered was Tiffany, and how her tips had prepared me for my escape.
“Dip your paddle right in and push off. Pretend like your paddle is thirsty and needs water. Give it what it wants.”
I pretended my paddle had never been more thirsty, and I dipped it so low that I knew I had to be doing something wrong. But I didn’t stop—any technique that was consistent and moved the canoe quickly was good enough for me. I didn’t want to stop, and even though I was tired, I was too motivated to stop paddling. I kept going.
Lonely Island was straight ahead of me, and I saw the dark spots and small shadows a distance away that were neighbouring islands. Most importantly, I saw the one thing I had seen that night we’d camped out, the thing Murray had showed me.
The light.
From the middle of the lake, the light looked like a little star. But it wasn’t a star because it wasn’t in the sky. It was on land. It was the light of civilization, and I was going to get to it.
I paddled toward that spot, and when I got close enough to see what it was, I took my paddle out of the water.
Even in the rain, and the black of night, Blue Lake was pretty. It was the only time Blue Lake could maybe be blue since we couldn’t see that it wasn’t. During the day, Blue Lake was the brownest lake around.
There was a cottage straight in front of me at the shoreline. It had a boathouse with a sliding door to pull boats into, and a dock to tie up to.
I pulled up to the dock and jumped onto it without tying up my canoe. It didn’t hurt to leave the green canoe there, all alone, because I knew I had given it a last, real adventure without schedule or rules. The waves swept the canoe quickly to the shore of the property, and I ran down the dock in the pouring rain. There was a crack of thunder, and a bolt of lightning lit the sky behind the cottage. It was pretty, and I was scared of trespassing on someone else’s land, but mostly afraid of being seen.
Sensor lights came on when I ran up the side of the cottage, and I ran down the driveway without looking at the front of it.
The road was at the end of their long gravel driveway, and I was relieved to see random streetlights scattering the dirt, one way road. It was lit just enough for me to see where I was going, wherever that was.