I am China-who-swallowed-herself. I’m China-the-walking-throat. I’m China-being-digested. I’m looking at my mother in her black latex bodysuit. She’s forty-two and her body could pass for twenty-five. Dad’s coming home. There’s a party tonight. There will be strangers in my basement begging for mercy.
I miss Stanzi and Gustav.
I’m sick of Lansdale Cruise because she can’t be trusted. Yesterday she told me during the drill that she has leukemia. In a week she will tell me it’s in remission. She has done this two times before. The whole cycle makes me feel like a basketball being dribbled.
We walked to school together today and I told her I missed Stanzi and Gustav, but she said they’d be back.
“Runaways always come back,” she said.
But we both know that’s not true.
I ask Mom, “Is it true that runaways always come back?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Some do. Some don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Is there something I should know?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Maybe later.”
I go to Stanzi’s house to see her parents. They look worried and ask me if I think Stanzi is okay.
“Gustav is a very trustworthy boy,” I say. “They’ll be back. I know it.” Right then, my esophagus clenches and I feel like I might vomit, so I walk out the front door and go home.
I call Shane and he tells me he ran away lots of times and never went back. He says, “What makes you so sure that Stanzi and Gustav will come home?”
I say, “Because Stanzi knows I need her.”
“Life isn’t all about you,” Shane says.
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing’s fair,” he says.
“I want to run away, too,” I say.
“So do it.”
“Are you home tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come to you, then. Around noon.”
He sounds happy. “I’ll see you then.”
But by the time I say I love you, he hangs up and my esophagus morphs into stomach walls, coated in acid.
When I get back home, four cars are parked in the driveway. The door isn’t locked. I go to my bedroom and pack a bag for running away.
If you’ve given up on
every
possible
solution
to an unmentionable problem,
then your plan to run away is probably real.
If you’ve packed three bags of trail mix,
a curling iron you won’t ever use,
three quality letters that spell C-A-N,
then your plan to run away is most likely real.
If you don’t cry
and you feel nearly human
and you feel nearly whole
and worth something other than
cheap laughs and sick jokes
and you feel like maybe
tomorrow
will
be
the
day
when
you
really
feel
right side in.
When you burn your journal from last year
when you were in love
with an untrustworthy weatherman,
then your plan to run away is
as real as it can get.
I let the last embers burn in the fireplace. They glow orange-red and they flake off and fly up the chimney because paper is light, but ash is lighter and Irenic Brown is lighter even, than paper and ash and everything that doesn’t matter.
When you burn your journal, it’s easy to forget things. It’s easy to forget people. If Stanzi and Gustav don’t come back, then I won’t miss them, same as I won’t miss my mother and her basement of pain and I won’t miss Lansdale and her fauxkemia and I won’t miss the bomb threats and I won’t miss English class behind the lilac bushes in the corner parking lot where we discussed Oliver’s “Goldfinches” and its themes and meanings way too much because it was on the test last year.
I miss Shane.
He’s already burned his journals.
He never told anyone, either.
We keep each other’s secrets.
It’s time for us to be together for real. Even if we sleep on the streets. Even if we don’t have anything to eat. Even if we end up coming back here. It’s time for us to be together.