Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — 2nd Place
A Packing List for Aspiring Runaways
1. You’ll need a bag. Something sturdy and nondescript. Don’t get stuck on high-tech fabrics and secret compartments, reflective tape and waterproof linings. Your best options are well-made and bland: neutral tones, lots of space inside. Check thrift stores, garage sales, or the downstairs closet where your parents keep the winter jackets and forgotten shoes. Push aside the ugly sweaters reeking of mothballs and your father’s old suits in their slick plastic garment bags. Pause when you find the black tote, its buttery leather soft beneath your fingertips. Unloop the straps from the hanger and reach into the yawning potential. Press your hands into the corners and measure the space with the spread of your fingers. Perched on your shoulder, it will be big, but perfect. You’ll need to practice walking with it so it doesn’t catch in the bend of your knee. Your parents will be pleased to see you doing something feminine.
Over time, the bags will get smaller — the zippered front pocket of your backpack in junior high, makeup pouches and pencil cases stuffed with essential items. You’ll tuck them into your purses, your tote bags, on top of your books in your carry-on. You’ll walk through the travel size sections of convenience stores, considering the expiration dates on dissolving breath strips and eyeglass repair kits smaller than your palm. The pouch in your bag is never fully full, just in case you find something you need.
2. Take notes. Make lists of the best places to disappear from, of the things you need and the things you want, of your no-gos and your dream destinations and your monetizable skills. Keep track of when your father goes to work and when your mother takes her naps before leaving for night shifts. Cross-reference with the timetables of your brothers’ after-school routines and look for windows of opportunity.
They might not be obvious or wide enough. Don’t get discouraged.
Update the pros and cons as you learn more and walk further. When men start to follow you, first with their eyes, cross off the emptier places. Opt for crowds and lights. Practice your lines.
“My father is meeting me here.”
“I’m waiting here for my parents.”
“There’s my father now.”
Take Jessie R. off your list of Trusted Friends the first time she yells across the classroom that you can’t run away to her house because she’s mad at you. Roll your eyes and yell back that you wouldn’t run away to her smelly house if she paid you because you don’t want to get fleas. Don’t cry, not even when Mrs. Baker makes you stay after class and tells you that you’re not acting like yourself, not even when Jessie gets both Melissas and Amanda L. to laugh with her every time you walk by them the next day.
At night, after you are alone again, open the window so you can breathe air that doesn’t smell like him and go through the notes in your head. The columns are drawn onto the insides of your eyelids. Recite the pros and cons and plans until you can see yourself creeping down the stairs, out the front door, down the street. Pass Jessie’s house on the corner and keep walking.
3. Cans with pull-tabs are best, until you can find a spare can opener. You have to take them one by one, spreading out your theft so that the gaps in the pantry are not obvious or alarming. Take one can of artichokes and wait at least a week before taking something else. Ask your white friends’ mothers if they ever eat artichokes while everyone is playing freeze tag on the lawn. Make mental notes of the recipes they sketch loosely in the space between answering your question and turning to frown at you. Say “thank you” over your shoulder and rejoin the game before they can ask you why you’re asking. Put the artichokes back in the pantry that evening.
Take the canned fruit cocktail next, and look forward to not having to fight your brothers for the halved cherry (you know you won’t have Cool Whip to mix with the fruits and syrup, or cardamom pods to crack and stir in, but at least you’ll never again have to fight for that dull pink treasure and its waxy squish, like Chapstick that’s been in your pocket for too long).
No glass, no foods that need to be cooked, no granola bars or graham crackers. You learn that ants can smell their sugar even through the plastic wrappers. Hide your bag while your father searches your room for the source and finds only the package of crackers you placed under the bed. He takes the books — all fiction, which is not for studying, which is not allowed — that tumble to the floor when he lifts the mattress, but you still have the ones folded between your clothes in the dresser. You know those others by heart, anyway.
4. The active ingredient in pepper spray is capsaicin. Pour body spray out of one of those pink plastic bottles, from a set you got as a birthday present from one of your aunties — one who told you she’d held you as a baby and looked hurt when you said you didn’t remember her — and refill it with watery red hot sauce. It will smell like glitter and vinegar and your throat and eyes will sting for days. Check that the plastic cap is secured to prevent accidental sprays whenever you have a moment alone.
When Mrs. Baker walks by your desk during the spelling quiz and pauses to sniff the air, don’t be soothed by her attention lingering on Daniel sitting beside you. Dump the pepper spray behind the trees at the edge of the school field and throw the bottle away in the dumpster by the park. Rub your hands in the black soil of your parents’ garden before you go inside. Your mother will insist that you wash your hands clean with dish soap. You’ll still smell the hot sauce under the chemical lemon scent, but faintly, like a memory.
Remember that you have teeth and nails and fists. Remember that some people won’t try to hide that they hurt you. Practice punches and kicks on your pillows. When you ask yourself why you haven’t fought back, punch harder.
5. You only need a few drops of Super Glue to make a repair. Broken plastics and even some metal pieces, as long as they don’t need to bear pressure, can be mended with a thin line of adhesive. Your mother will unstick your fingertips once, warning you against playing with the glue by recounting the gruesome cases she has handled at the hospital. You’ll have nightmares about the teenage boy who chewed absently on the plastic cap until the vial burst between his teeth, and the patients who tried to use the glue to hold deep cuts together, like liquid stitches.
It will hurt when she eases your fingertips farther apart. When you flinch, she will bend closer to you, her breath hot on your face as she tells you about lumpy sutures sliced open and skin rolling up like a window shade, about rotting flesh under rock-hard clumps of dried glue. You will recoil, leaning back as far as you can while she keeps a steady grip on your wrist. You won’t notice when your fingers separate from one another. It’s the sting of solvent against your tender skin that will tell you she’s done it.
She’ll dress each fingertip, swaddle them in band-aids, kiss your knuckles and say, “Now, take care of them.” You’ll stay at the far end of your chair, looking for the face that lurched towards yours. Your family’s moods are like weather; learn to read the signs.
6. Collect maps from the gas station, the AAA office when you accompany your mother while she renews her membership, the glovebox of your father’s car. Learn how to read them on long drives and practice alone at the far corner of the park, by the path older kids take to smoke or make out or pretend to smoke or make out.
Trace routes between your town and your possible destinations. Edge your see-through pocket ruler along the curving lines of roads on the map, squishing multiplication equations into the margins of your notes. Double-check your work. It usually comes out different each time, but jot down approximate miles.
When you can drive, cruise the streets of your new town. In the back of your mind, keep track of how many gallons are in your full tank and how many miles you can cover. When you see the signs for highways that will take you west, or north, or south, at every junction and every red light, hesitate. Hope.
7. Tuck your supplies into the bottom of your bag and place your decoys on top. When someone looks inside, they should not see your rations or the silver gleam of your homemade grappling hook. Barbies and Koosh balls create a good amount of visual noise. A journal and a book to read provide cover for a pouch, as well. Pack up the papers you’re grading for your 9th graders, your favorite pens and your travel coffee thermos. No one will notice the supplies hidden among the clutter.
When your friend reaches for your purse on the seat beside her after dinner one evening, try to intercept before she struggles to lift it. She’ll ask you why your bag is so heavy and you’ll think about the folders of student work, the journal and the pencil case stuffed with writing implements, the go-bag condensed into a makeup pouch. A pair of flats and a change of clothes that you brought just in case, a spare phone charger, and two or three books.
“Always be prepared, right?” you’ll joke, hoisting the bag onto your shoulder like it’s a perfectly acceptable weight.
“Be prepared for what?” she’ll ask.
Laugh, change the subject. That night, when you go through your notes in your head, look for an answer.
8. Put your favorite photos in an envelope and tuck it into a safe place in your bag. The front of your notebook, or maybe behind your rations. When you leave, you’ll only have what you can take with you.
When your parents notice the blank spaces in the family albums, lie and tell them you used the photos in a project for school. You cut yourself out of some of them. When they find the scraps, know it will be bad. You can handle bad.
On the walls of your apartment, hang photos of yourself, your friends, your husband. Put up the photos from vacations, from walks around your city, from parties, from the weddings of the people you love. In an envelope on your bookshelf, there are photos of you as a child, blank spaces where your family once stood. You don’t have to call them family from here.
You’ll take the train downtown. Some days, you’ll catch yourself trotting down the stairs to the approaching train only to realize you’re on the wrong platform. You’ll lose your coveted post-work seat because you leap up two stops early.
The crisp brevity of your new address, climbing the subway stairs into clusters of ambling tourists gawking at your neighborhood — these will feel familiar someday.
You’ll look forward to what is yours: the smiling faces in the bread shop, your husband stirring soup in the kitchen (your kitchen), the chirruping cats who rush to greet you when you climb the stairs (your stairs) and open all the doors (your doors) so you can watch them run.
