Two nights after my academic execution, I was back at it—this time in Deanna Anderson’s bedroom. It’s a thing with me. You toss me off a cliff, I’m gonna look for a deeper canyon. Deanna was the sheriff’s daughter and, if you asked anybody in Waldo County, about as pure as winter snow. I knew better, and so did she.
Her room was an anthropology exhibit in pink and white. There were stuffed animals with marble eyes, a faded ballerina poster, and a Bible on the nightstand that was so well-thumbed, half the pages were dog-eared. It made me feel guilty for about three seconds, but I got over it by the time my hands were under her sweater.
She tasted like mint toothpaste and the beer I’d convinced her to drink out behind the bowling alley. We were both nervous, jittery with the kind of energy that only comes from doing something you know will fuck up your life. I liked her, and she liked the way I didn’t care about the rules. It was a bad recipe, but it made for one hell of a night.
She was on top of me, straddling my hips, her hair swinging forward to brush my face. I tried not to laugh at the little unicorn on her pajama pants, but it was hard when her mouth was fusedto mine, and she was grinding on me like we were in a slow-motion rodeo.
“Does it hurt?” she whispered, tracing my cheek with her thumb.
I grunted. “What?”
“Getting expelled,” she said. “They said you were gone for good.”
I shrugged, running my hand down her back. “I was never really here, anyway.”
She smiled, and it was a real one, not the fake smile she saved for teachers and parents and all the other human obstacles in her life.
We lost ourselves for a while, half-clothed and tangled in sheets that smelled like lavender and something more innocent. I let her take the lead, let her do whatever she needed to prove she wasn’t just her father’s good little soldier. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want her, but there was something else, too—a hunger to leave a mark nobody could rub out. Besides, we were both eighteen.
She slipped her shirt off over her head, her perky little titties the best thing I ever saw, up to that point in my life. I squeezed those motherfuckers until they turned purple and then marveled at them when I let go. She screeched through the pain and then pulled off her pajama bottoms. I jerked my shorts and underwear down, and she stared at my dick, her mouth open in awe.
That was my first signal that she was a virgin. The second signal came after she plopped herself down on me and, upon entering her, felt something tight, give. Moments later, dick covered in blood, she dug her nails into my chest and rode me like a fucking cowgirl on a bronco. She fucked right through the pain. I didn’t come, too fucking terrified at my dick covered in blood.
When it was over, we lay in silence, breathing hard. Her skin glowed in the lamplight, golden and perfect, but her eyes were somewhere else. I’d seen that look before. It’s the one people get right before they do something irreversible.
I reached over and found the lighter in my jeans, sparking it up for a cigarette I wasn’t supposed to have.
She took a drag. Didn’t cough. Just exhaled slow, like she’d been waiting her whole life for that taste.
We didn’t hear her father’s cruiser in the driveway. Maybe because the windows were closed, or maybe because we were idiots.
The knock on her door was the opposite of polite. It was the sound of every bad decision I’d ever made coming home to roost.
“Deanna!” The sheriff’s voice could’ve shattered glass. “Open this damn door!”
She bolted upright, hair a mess, eyes wild. “Shit, shit, shit, Al—”
I moved before she finished. Jeans barely zipped, shirt half on, I crashed toward the window and shoved it open. A blast of cold air slapped me in the face. The screen popped out, bounced once on the porch roof, and clattered to the ground.
Her door started to rattle. She was at my side, hands frantic on my back. “Go, go, go!” she whispered, and for a second she kissed me—hard, desperate, all teeth.
Then I dropped to the roof, boots scraping shingles, and made the jump to the wet grass below. It was farther than it looked. My ankle almost rolled on landing, but I kept moving, the sound of her father’s yelling getting louder.
I ran for the street, legs pumping, heart hammering so fast it felt like I was vibrating out of my own skin. The sheriff was already out the door, keys in hand, cursing my name to the empty Maine night.
My dirt bike was behind the old VFW hall, where nobody with a badge ever went. I hopped the fence, scrambled through the sticker bushes, and found it waiting just where I’d left it. It took three tries to kick it over—cold engines always need coaxing—but when it finally roared to life, the noise was pure freedom.
Headlights fanned out behind me, the sheriff’s Tahoe chewing up the road. I gunned the throttle, tires spitting gravel. The wind cut tears out of my eyes, or maybe that was something else.
I didn’t look back. Not once. I tore through town, past the 24-hour Dunkin’, past the new housing developments and the shuttered paper mill. I hit the main drag and opened her up, watching the numbers on the speedo climb. Thirty, fifty, seventy, and higher.
The last thing I saw in my mirrors was the blue-and-red flash of the sheriff’s lights, shrinking, swallowed by the dark.
People say there’s nothing north of Bangor except trees and the void. I was okay with that. I rode until my hands went numb, until the world thinned out and the stars came down low enough you could almost touch them. The air out there was so cold it made my lungs burn, but I liked the pain. It meant I was still here, still moving.
At some point, I pulled over. Killed the engine. Let the silence pour in, thick as blood. I lit another cigarette and watched my breath curl up to the sky.
I thought about Davidson, and Melissa, and Deanna, and my mother somewhere mopping floors for a company that didn’t know her name. I thought about how easy it was to leave, and how hard it was to be left.
