Chapter thirteen:
I walk across the street. It’s dark and late and rainy and cold. And the storm has hit, but it’s not nice just sitting in it. I prefer to be watching from my window rather than living and breathing the storm.
Lights have come on in windows.
People laugh and joke and cheer in houses.
No crying walls or screaming doors.
No tears leaking through broken windows.
Not here. This is a nice neighborhood, and I guess I can already see why she likes it here. Once upon a time, perhaps I would have liked to live here too.I bet you don’t hear prostitutes banging clients while you eat your soup, Carrie.
But it’s just stuff, and things, I’ll tell her. You don’t need it, you need me.
And she’ll agree.
Of course she will.
Because I’m right, and she knows that too.
There’s a small gap between her brownstone house and the next, and I slip down it, splashing through the mud. It soaks into my beloved sneakers, and I try not to get too annoyed that this is probably the end for them. They’ve survived rainstorms, but they won’t survive this night.
I keep going further into the shadows, hoping to see a window soon, because I don’t really like the dark, even though I know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Not really. And it’s weird because this reminds me of the time we ran away together.
It was dark and wet, like tonight.
We were hiding behind Mrs. McElvers’ shed in her back yard. It smelled of cat piss and rat poison.
“I’m not going back,” Carrie said.
“I won’t make you.”
“You don’t have to stay with me, Ethan. I don’t always need you to be here,” she said indignantly, her fiery eyes daring me to leave.
“But I will, Carrie. I’ll always be here,” I assured her, like I always did.
She shivered from the cold. Her bruised eye and cut lip were blatant under the moonlight. The light of a streetlamp fizzed on and off intermittently by the front of the house, and I didn’t like it. It scared me more than the dark because it needed to be one or the other. It couldn’t be both. It wasn’t allowed to be both dark and light. Night and day. Good or bad.‘You could only be one or the other,’I wanted to say to that light.
“Will he be mad?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Will she be mad?” I asked.
“She won’t even notice I’m gone,” she replied. “Not until he needs something from her because I’m not there.”
I didn’t know what she meant, so I said nothing.
Carrie opened her brown backpack and pulled out one of her mother’s bottles of cheap vodka.
She unscrewed the lid and took a large swig and then she offered the bottle to me. I shook my head no, because I’m too young to drink and so is she. And I don’t like the smell, so I can’t imagine that I’ll like the taste of it.
And then she laughed.
I didn’t like it when she laughed, and she knew that, so she leant forward and pressed her mouth to mine and kissed me when she saw she’d made me sad. I didn’t like the taste of her mouth. It tasted like the vodka and that tasted bad. But I liked her kisses.
I preferred her kisses to her mocking.
