Life Before (10 page)

Gretchen raves about New York;
love
doesn’t even begin to cover it. But all her talk about shopping and Broadway-with-a-capital-B and the Met were just stories until now.

Forty-eight hours ago, I knew nothing, but laying a digital trail to New York forced me into lots of research. Now I know celebrities are as common in New York as cows in Laurel. In New York, old men sell street food in a hundred languages, and the skyscrapers stretch on for miles. The food and the lights and the girls and the subways of endless possibility are really freaking tempting.

If I had time to dick around, I would head straight for Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Or the New York Public Library or Gretchen’s beloved Metropolitan Museum of Art. I might also poke around her favorite neighborhood, Greenwich Village, which is hard to poke at online when you spell it phonetically. I want to visit all the places that make her light up like Christmas.

I just don’t have that kind of time.

Times Square is a fifteen-minute walk from Port Authority and I feel safe enough to make it. If Gary is following me, there’s no way he’s gotten this far yet.

I pull Jill’s Mariners cap over my face and gather my bags. Just another tourist. Nothing distinct about me. Nearly nine million people live in New York. It’s probably the easiest place in the world to get lost in the crowd.

Outside the station, the city is pulsing … at six o’clock on a Friday morning. I can almost literally feel a pull toward Times Square. Maybe I should have considered colleges here. Winters be damned.

A huge glass front window reflects the shops across the street, and Mom is in my head. When I was very little, she constantly washed the sliding glass door to remove my fingerprints and the smudges Jill left with her Chapstick. Smooch Smudges. That’s what mom called them. By the time we were seven, she gave up. And—

Someone is there. Someone’s reflection is several paces behind my own. He’s looking right at me. In sunglasses at 6 a.m.

I pick up the pace, like one of those Olympic walkers who always look like they need to pee.

The guy is still behind me, clad in white from head to toe, hat pulled down over his face, just like me. But I’m trying to hide. Is he trying to hide? He’s built like Gary. It could be Gary in a weird outfit. It could be one of Gary’s friends. Does Gary have friends?

What the hell was I thinking? I need the knife; it belongs in my pocket at all times.

I sort of run and look back to see the guy also sort of running. He has something small and black in his hand. A knife? A gun?

Why isn’t anyone else paying attention to the guy with the weapon? I break into a full-out run, inasmuch as you can run with an overfull duffel bag. Crossing a street against traffic doesn’t shake him.

Why didn’t I put my contacts back in when I got to New York? Shit.

I run up a street of tall buildings, duck into an alley, and slither past a malodorous garbage truck. Peeking from beneath the truck, I see the guy’s shoes trot by. He’s breathless.

“Almost there. Cross your legs and call the midwife.”

A phone makes infinitely more sense than a weapon in broad daylight. Panting, I lean against the cold, gray building and look skyward at the thin sliver of blue, stories and stories above me.

The garbage truck turns onto the street and I’m alone in the alley.

Cross your legs and call the midwife.

Laughing and crying are so similar. It’s like shitting your pants when you want to fart. One minute I’m laughing at the not-Gary guy, whose whole life is about to explode. A second later, I burst into sobs because I just had a near-death experience. Or thought I did.

Laughing at the misunderstanding, in tears because, really, what the hell am I doing? This isn’t an adventure. My first time out of Ohio, yes, but I’m not here for fun.

Did Mom feel this panic? I don’t think she knew Gary was going to kill her. For her, it was just another day in their relationship, not her last day on Earth.

I hope she blacked out and never realized it was almost over.

Someone interrupts my laughing-crying fit. “Sleeping here.”

She’s curled up next to a garbage bin, propped up in the corner like a rag doll. Everything about her—clothes, shins, face, hair—is a drab gray-brown.

It strikes me that the garbage truck’s stench didn’t leave with it; the foulness is hers. Jill’s obese grandmother always smells slightly of rancid cheese. This woman smells exponentially worse.

Do not plug your nose. Do not plug your nose.

“Sorry,” I say.

“I bet.” She spits and closes her eyes.

Backing away from her, I turn to face the street again. At my first opportunity, which happens to be a McDonald’s, I slip into the bathroom. First the knife into my pocket, then the contacts into my eyes. I am so not ready for this.

I hope my glasses are in the bottom of my backpack. No use looking now; if the glasses aren’t there, there’s nothing I can do about it.

I can do something about breakfast, though. After inhaling hotcakes and sausage, I say a silent apology to Janice for my loss of appetite at her house.

From my perch, I can see New York City through floor-to-ceiling windows. This is it: I am traveling. And already I’m doing it wrong: a breakfast I could buy anywhere in America. Anywhere in the world.

Hundreds of miles from home, I’m just watching the world walk by. New York City, with its bustle and business, could be a movie to me. I need to go out there.

Am I being a coward again? Is my cowardice self-preservation, or still the wrong thing? I have no idea.

Times Square could be my reward for all those hours on the bus. And my last hurrah before I really go into hiding.

Gary wouldn’t kill me in Times Square. He’s not even here. Not yet. I would have seen him on the highway. He would have caught up with me by now. It’s going to take him a while to realize I’m gone, and then a while to figure out where I went. And with any luck, he’ll be caught in the meantime.

This morning, Times Square should be safe. Just twenty minutes.

Right?

What would Jill do? She’d rush right out there. But, again, she’s prone to stupid and daring shit.

Tucker? He would never have come this far in the first place. He has a dozen relatives who would take him in at a moment’s notice.

What would Mom do? I don’t know. I hate doing exactly as she tells me, but there’s still value in consulting her. Or there was. I could use her advice right now.

Fact is: if Gary is in New York, I’m toast. And I would rather die in Times Square than in McDonald’s.

It’s a moot point. I keep coming back to this:
Gary is not here yet.
But I am, and Times Square is right there. Mom has never been there.

She’ll never go, either. And she’ll never nag me about cleaning my room again. Or deny me the car again or buy the wrong shaving cream again or nose her way into the basement when I have friends over again. And she’ll never ask embarrassing questions about my date with Gretchen, if there ever is a date with Gretchen. There are so many things she will never do. And things we’ll never do together.

But I’m still here. I get to keep having new experiences and doing the things I want to do.

I dart out of McDonald’s and head toward Times Square. I hear it before I reach it—the loudest intersection ever. Times Square is also visually loud: ads everywhere, news feeds, cameras, food carts, street performers. Coffee for five bucks. People requesting spare change. Lots and lots of long New York legs, even before eight in the morning.

The allure of this place makes me feel closer than ever to Gretchen. Does she know yet, that I’m gone? I wish I could tell her what I was seeing. I wish she could tell me where to go and what to do and how to make my time here count.

The street performers are unreal. This enormous dude—he must be nearly seven feet tall—twists his arms behind his body in inhuman ways. Then a brief pause and he moves like water across the concrete. This is art unlike any I’ve ever seen.

With all of Times Square at my disposal, I can’t take my eyes off these dancers. I spend half an hour—backed against a wall so I can see all the other passersby—awed by this guy and his whole troop of friends.

The hubbub emboldens me: I really could just disappear, right here. Embrace the fake plan and hunker down in New York’s youth hostel—for surely there must be one, somewhere—and bide my time until I can return to Laurel.

I defuse the idea almost immediately. New York is too expensive. Even if I could afford a couple nights in a hostel, I probably couldn’t also feed myself. Getting anywhere in New York requires cabs or subways, and I don’t have change to spare. Plus, if Jill spills the beans, people will come looking for me in New York. I need to bounce.

I’ll come back once this whole mess is over. Maybe with Gretchen. Jill and Tucker, too. Hell, we could have our big adventure here instead of the Adirondacks.

Now that’s a plan.

In the Port Authority bathroom, I change into jeans and a T-shirt and pull Jill’s ball cap over my hair. Jill suggested I chuck my old T-shirt and shorts in the trash at the station but that seems unnecessarily drastic. Only murderers and people being hunted by the police toss their clothes in the trash.

Plus, I only have so many pairs of shorts.

Tucking my fake ID into the front of my wallet, I am now nineteen-year-old Georgia resident Graham Bel.

I used this ID last month to get into
Easier with Practice
, an uneven if not wholly intolerable NC-17 film. I flashed it at the door, but this is different. This is semi-permanent. I’m not Xander anymore, not for the foreseeable future. Being Graham for more than five seconds is weird.

That movie was a celebration for Tucker’s eighteenth birthday. Will I be home for my eighteenth birthday? Do I still get to celebrate if I’m Graham?

That’s another problem for Future Xander. Or Future Graham, as the case may be.

I stuff my Alexander Fife ID into my backpack’s tiniest pocket with Gretchen’s lip balm and WWJD. With a formal and upright posture befitting one Alexander Graham Bell, I step up to the Greyhound window. “One ticket to Burlington, Vermont?”

The guy doesn’t even compare my face to the awesome fake. He types in my name, hands over my ticket, and directs me toward the staircase with grace, like it’s some game show instead of my actual life.

Door number three! A Greyhound bus! Bound for the dreary north!

Jill has been with me up until this point. She knew when I left Pittsburgh and when I arrived in New York. Knowing her, she even tracked my bus online. And she knows I was eager to see Times Square. But she doesn’t know what’s next, or that there
is
a next.

When I step onto this bus, no one in the world will know where I am or how to reach me. It’s equal parts freaky and freeing. Eight minutes before we’re scheduled to depart, nausea seeps in again. I’m about to jump off a cliff into oblivion.

S
EVENTEEN

After hundreds of miles, Burlington looks an awful lot like Pittsburgh. It smells a whole lot better than the bus, though. These people reek. I’ve been traveling for twenty-four hours, but some passengers have been traveling for days. The stench is almost unbearable.

Round concrete planters of happy flowers dot Greyhound’s sidewalks, and a constant stream of airplanes roars overhead. Only slightly cooler than Laurel, but far cooler than New York City, this parking lot could be early summer almost anywhere.

Burlington has to be right. Vermont is the one detail of my escape plan firmly affixed in my head. It has to be right.

Jill was right about
Masterful Sudoku
: it lasted as long as I needed it to. I toss it into the nearest recycling bin and wait for my bags a few yards away from everyone else’s stench. Rocking between my feet, I cultivate the appearance of an unapproachable person. Hat over my face, hands in pockets, I’m broadcasting an image:
Disaffected teen. Disaffected teen. Stay away.

The driver unloads some crazy stuff, including a huge empty birdcage. Several passengers, including one enormous woman whose foot fat extends over the edges of her flip-flops, have military-issue camouflage duffel bags.

A worn, middle-aged woman pulls two huge birds from her trench coat and releases them into the cage. Her stench has an excuse, apparently, and I cringe thinking about the inside of that jacket.

A tiny old lady claims a crate of oranges and a striped yellow backpack embroidered with the word M
UMS
and a huge heart.

My own duffel is full to bursting, and I’m carrying it into the vast unknown.

At least I hope it’s vast.

What am I waiting for? I still get to live, whatever that means now.

This is the tricky part. I have done a
lot
of research about New York City, but I didn’t dare research Burlington’s geography, in case there was some tricky way for Gary to track Jill’s computer traffic. In Burlington, I know nothing but the hostel.

I score a free map and two brochures from the station’s information desk. The hostel is less than three miles away, and I have literally nothing else to do. Satisfied that Gary hasn’t trailed me this far yet, I heave my duffel over my shoulder and head west on foot.

_______

An hour later, drenched in sweat and Burlington’s humidity, I’m not impressed. The hostel’s glass door, complete with press-on sticker letters, is sandwiched between a Salvation Army and a repair shop. The T is half missing, so looks like a H
OS
¯
EL
with a really high hyphen. Through the door, I see only a narrow, tall staircase.

It is remarkably quiet. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be here, like I’ve entered someone’s house uninvited. At the top of the stairs, a pock-faced receptionist is absorbed in her magazine.

Here we go.

I open my wallet and put my cash on the counter. “Hello?”

She doesn’t look up. “Do you have a reservation?” Her British accent gives me flashbacks to
Doctor Who
marathons with Jill.