May 1, 2015
April wants to run away with someone, but she doesn’t want to face the consequences, so she takes her Alaskan Husky with her.
April’s Dad thinks that running away is a sign of weakness, but she knows the real sign of weakness is facing the fact that you can’t find an outlandish solution to your problems and fulfill your dreams at the same time.
April’s brother says that if she runs away she’ll be found and she’ll get in trouble. April says if she doesn’t run away she’ll never find herself and she’ll never feel safe from her fears.
April reads in magazines that runaways are often on drugs and have no futures. April wants to get high on the fact that she can leave her house for two hours and call it running away without anyone knowing about it. Her future would be bleak if she wouldn’t be able to roam the back alleys and eat chicken tenders from the local deli with Butch, her Alaskan Husky, under the fading summer night sky.
The last time she ran away for two hours, and she collected cans along the back gates of alleys and along street gutters and turned them in to a recycling truck that gave her five cents a can. She went to a gas station that sold junk food and bought a miniature pecan pie to celebrate herself. The pecan pie stood out to her because it was whole yet alone at the same time, and she kind of felt like this sometimes.
She felt like running away this time because over the next few days there was to be bad weather, and she didn’t want to be cooped up inside all day. While she was munching on her individual portioned pecan pie, she looked up to the clouds and felt how she must have been the luckiest girl in the world to need to run away with no real problems. She saw on the news sometimes that kids her age were in trouble with the law, pregnant, abused, and she needed to run away because of the weather?
She guessed, in her head, that she could play the overprivileged, lost sight of the future because she had everything done for her card, as was the case with many kids in her school. No one directly talked about things like this, but they were there. Kids smoked pot because they were bored. The smart kids did their homework, got drunk on weekends, and occasionally left the city for college and were never heard from again. Boredom. It was an infestation. It was a plague. It was something that could only be controlled by the relationships formed by the fact that April and her friends knew that everyone was facing it, not just alone. April passed a huge mansion-like house in the alley, and a sense of dreaminess swept over her. Tell that to poor kids in the city, Albert, April said, patting her dog on the head, as if she was dreaming out loud. Dreaming out loud. This was an action that April could manifest through something outside of the boredom. Maybe she would be a writer, maybe a basketball player. Maybe she’d learn to play the harp. Whatever it was, it needed to be out loud, so everyone could hear it, and everyone could see April for what she wanted to be.