RUNAWAY

A short story I wrote for the Monash Writing Competition 2016.

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Death.

It used to sound cool rolling off our tongues. Dee would laugh at the word and that maddening cackle would echo in my head. Everything was just a joke to Dee. Even death.

         I never knew what it meant, though. Not really. Any crackhead gets that it’s when your life ends. When your eyes close for the last time, I guess. I used to think that’s where it ended. Like, thank you – you lived – you did – you died. End of story.

         I guess I didn’t really think about death as a thing for the living. As a thought for the living, more like. Death in between the spaces of our fingers, fighting life every step of the way. Death in the cracks and corners of the walls, seeping in slowly. Festering.

         Me? I’ve only been close to death a handful of times. Only close enough so that I caught its scent, brushed by it ever so lightly. Once, we were driving on the highway. Just me and Dee. It was a cold night. The kind that is bearable at first, but slowly chills you to the bone the longer you’re exposed. I asked Dee to turn on the heater. His car was cheap and half the buttons were missing or needed to be slammed in a certain way to actually work.

“Heater? What – you a fuckin’ pussy, LJ?” Dee laughed and jabbed me hard in the ribs. He did that all the time. I never said anything. I wasn’t a pussy.

We drove around like this all the time. Sometimes, we’d stop over at the skate park and smoke. Graffiti a bit. Pointless tags, most of the time, like ‘VITMORT’ or ‘LJ–D’. But that night, we were going to the 7-11. Dee wanted to steal some stuff – cigarettes, beer, that sort of thing. He had the things in the back.

         I looked at the time on my phone. 12:14am. Huh, I thought, earlier than usual. I noticed the trees outside, their pointy, bare branches lit briefly by the headlights of Dee’s car, moving past me in a blur. It looked like they were on a continuous loop, like I was on one of those sit-coms where they play the background on a screen. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dee’s hand reaching to violently turn a button. Volume.

Oh, you gotta love it! Oh, you got– oh, you gotta love it!

I snapped out of my daze. The music was so loud I could feel the space around me vibrate – could almost touch the invisible wavelengths of sound. Dee was laughing and hooting as he turned a corner.

“Ready?” He shouted. His voice barely audible under the thumping of the music. He had a mischievous glow in his eyes, a grin so daring that I knew he was plotting something.

“For what?” I shouted back.

“An experiment!”

I was about to ask him what he meant but then the car lurched forward, as he slammed his foot on the accelerator. My back was flung onto the seat. My eyes watered from the sudden jolt and my insides knotted. And then I realised that there were cars in our path. Cars with people inside. Cars with families. Kids. I didn’t want to die. I sure as hell didn’t want them to die either.

“What the fuck, man?” I yelled. My heart raced. I didn’t have time to breathe properly. All I could see was a blur of lights as Dee swerved dangerously past the other cars. The smell of rubber burning infected my lungs. Some honked their horns and others rolled down their windows and began shouting things at us. Dee’s eyes gleamed in the dark as he rolled down his window in response. He flipped them all off and just laughed.

“This part! This pa– Some nights I wish I could go back in life, not to change shit, just to feel a couple things twice – fucking amazing LJ, you hear that?”

I had enough. “Stop the car, man! Stop the fucking car!”

His lip curled in annoyance. I clutched my stomach pleadingly and he realised he had to listen to me. As other cars passed us, still honking, Dee gradually slowed his car down until eventually we had stopped on the side of the road. The headlights were on high beam. The music was still thumping from his crappy audio system. I thought I saw a fox scamper into the bushes.

He shouted, "Dammit, LJ! Learn to have some fun once in a while, y'know?" He shook his head and looked away from me, one hand still draped on the wheel.

I felt sick. I opened the car door and got out, slamming it shut. The fierce winter wind whipped around me. I only made it a couple steps before I started throwing up on the grass by the road, holding onto a sign pole for support. The music was still pounding in my eardrums, slowly becoming a high-pitched ringing. I tried to forget what I had just experienced, but it kept coming back to me in flashes. The honks. The horrible blur of lights. Dee's car slamming us around like rag dolls, as he dodged in between cars. The pressure in the pit of my stomach. I kept throwing up nothing in particular as I tried to suppress these things.

         Then, I felt a cautious hand patting my back. Nothing was said. It just comforted me until my breathing was normal again and I had only the lingering taste of vomit in my mouth. I spat the last of that taste out. I wiped my lips clean with the back of my hand and just looked at him. We didn’t say anything.

This was how Dee and I worked. He pushed me as far as he could, I’d eventually crack, and we’d silently coexist for a little while. For as long as I remember, we’d always been like this.

         I met Dee the same way most our age meet people: school. He was this uncontrollable force, untouchable. Mischievous. There wasn’t a class where he’d just sit down and shut up, and not a kid who didn’t laugh at his jokes. Despite all that though, he had no friends. No real ones, anyway. There were the ones that liked to cause chaos with him sometimes, but they’d scamper like scared mice under the eyes of teachers. Part of me thinks that Dee never needed anyone, anyway. He had that kind of ‘with-or-without-you’ attitude. It showed through his sparkling hazel eyes, clear as anything. Nothing bothered him.

         Then there was me. The quiet kid. I was an average student, not anything special but not a total dropout. Always in between. When Dee’s mom met me for the first time, she was surprised he had made a friend at all – let alone one like me.

“Daniel, why can’t you be more like your friend?” She would ask him, stroking his hair affectionately, not truly meaning it. He would roll his eyes in mock embarrassment and then kiss her cheek. She was hardly ever home.

I guess what I was looking for in life was a bit of excitement. Thrill. Something to make my heart race right to the brink. And Dee always gave me that – that adrenaline high. Without him, things were just flat. Predictable. I guess in a way, I grounded him too. Stopped him before things got too out of hand. This was how Dee and I worked.

         Nothing much changed as we got older. Dee got expelled from our local high school in his freshman year for defacing a teacher’s car with a switchblade. I did it too – drew dicks and wrote stuff on the ugly yellow paint. We were at the far corner of the car park when we heard gravel crunching on the opposite end. He turned his head to me swiftly.

“Run,” he said. When I opened my mouth to protest, he drew a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

I quietly slinked off into the bushes, running off school grounds until the coast was clear. He stayed. He confessed to everything when they caught him. Dee never gave my name up, though.

         After he was expelled, I stayed in school, though my attendance was low. Especially in senior year. I skipped a lot to hang out with Dee. I’d jump over the wire fencing that surrounded his house and enter through the back. The squeaking metal safety door was always open. He’d usually be in his room upstairs, and if his mom weren’t home, he’d be smoking pot. He was doing just that one afternoon, a couple months after the night in the car.

“Here comes the man,” he said with a droning, lazy attempt at excitement as I entered his room. He was lying on his bed, one hand behind his head, facing the ceiling.

I was a little sweaty, having walked to his house under the afternoon sun. That day was one of the first sunny ones in spring, I noticed. I sat down on his floor, my back leaning against the wall cluttered with posters, mostly of half naked girls or rappers he liked. I just chuckled at him and fished my red lighter out of the back pocket in my jeans. Not to smoke. I hardly ever did that. I had a habit of flicking it on and off, studying the flame as it appeared and disappeared over and over again. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I heard some birds chirping from outside his window.

“You hear about Stacey?” I offered.

“Yeah. Crazy bitch.” He exhaled, deep in thought.

“Why do you think she tried it?” I asked.

“Why do you think anyone tries to kill themselves, LJ?” He answered sarcastically, glancing briefly at me before returning his gaze back to the ceiling.

“I… I don’t know. I don’t really think that was her intention.”

He propped himself up on one arm to face me when I said this, and his eyes narrowed. “You don’t think that was her intention?”

“No.”

Dee raised an eyebrow. “So you think she was just having a fucking good time overdosing on coke and whatever the fuck else? You think she was having fun?”

“I think she was stupid. That’s all. I mean, why would she try to kill herself? Her dad’s rich. She’s got everything she could want or need. There’s no reason for her to. Kill herself, I mean.”

He flinched. A small, outward flinch – a blink and aversion of eyes that could have been missed, but wasn’t. And then he was back to normal. I thought maybe he liked Stacey once. Maybe that’s why he’s so pissed. He sat up fully on the bed.

“Aren’t we all trying to kill ourselves?” He said, resting his bud on the ashtray beside the bed. His face darkened dramatically. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or being serious.

         “Drugs, alcohol, thrills – aren’t we trying to? What makes it any different to cancer or disease? That’s still our body trying to kill us. Our brain is a part of our body – like, like, we can’t say it’s worse or better than our cells mutating and going bad on their own, any worse or better than us choosing to make them do that. And from the moment we’re born we try to kill ourselves. Isn’t that why we live? It’s all – it’s all a game, don’t you see? We’re just playing life to see how long we can last before we die, like, ‘THE END! HIGH SCORE! YOU WIN! YOU WIN! YOU WIN! YOU FUCKING WIN!’” He shouted and shouted until he was panting and he thrashed his fists into the mattress. Spittle flew from the side of his mouth and I thought I saw those hazel eyes glistening. But I looked again and they weren’t.

I didn’t say anything.

And then he started laughing. Cackling. So hard that his face went red and his eyes disappeared into slits and he was clutching his stomach. “You should see your face, man! You think I’m serious?  Dude, I’m fucked, but not that fucked!” He reached over to me from the bed and jabbed me in the ribs. Hard.

He usually joked about these things. So I began to laugh, too. “You’re fucking insane, Dee. Give me some of whatever you’re smoking,” I said. I brought my hand up to my forehead and laughed so much. A deep, relieved laugh.

Dee’s humour wasn’t always so dark. When he was in school, he would pull pranks on teachers or whoever else happened to piss him off. Once he got expelled and I didn’t see him every day, he changed. I guess he grew up a little. Not in the way he expressed himself or acted or even laughed. It was in the things he didn’t say. The things he held back sometimes. I could see his mind buzzing but it was like he understood silence. His mom had an old CD she used to play in the car when we were younger. Those words – the sound of silence – those haunting, chilling words, stuck with me. That’s what I think Dee had come to understand.

         A couple weeks later, on Wednesday afternoon after school, I was walking to Dee’s house again. He mentioned a few days earlier that he wanted to visit the skate park that night. I had the cans in my backpack. The aluminum clinked against itself every time I took a step, causing an irritating, mechanical beat to my walk. There was a stronger wind that day, so I was walking fast to keep warm until I reached his house. I hauled the backpack over his fence first, and then pulled myself up, swinging my legs over, one after the other. I saw the safety door swinging open, hitting the wall as the wind pushed it constantly into the brick wall beside it. Sometimes that happened when Dee wasn’t home, so I shrugged and trudged upstairs.

         But he was there. Asleep on his bed, his back facing the doorway. Now was my perfect opportunity to get back at him, to get on his nerves for once.

“Oh my god, man! What kind of shit is this?” I laughed loudly. “You a fucking pussy, Dee?” I shouted playfully, imitating him from the night in the car.

But he didn’t respond.

I shook him hard. His body moved helplessly, loosely.

That’s when I saw his face.

His hazel eyes stared into nothing.

Saliva glistened beside his mouth.

He clutched an empty bottle.

“Oh… oh… oh…”

I stumbled backwards and tripped over my backpack. I felt bile in my throat rising. I clambered and scrambled, moving backwards, unable to look away.

All I could remember was that time he’d said, “Run.”

And so I did. I kept running, running, running. ✦