#cuz now im gonna sit here forever wondering what bullshit I told EVERYONE about me and it makes me so fuckinh sick and sad

[lids-flutter-open]

mediocre character development stuff under cut sorry if ur on mobile its long text

its abt my character elaine first person pov cuz im trying to write some extra-textual sketches to figure out some scenes

Dawn came up over the hill as the bus was edging closer to the Oregon border. Chad was sitting next to me slumped into his seat with his head to one side. His hair was longer than mine had been a year ago and it was oily from days camping. He hadn’t shaved and his skin looked like a mess. He smelled like cigarettes and campfire smoke. I looked at my reflection in the bus window in the blue light of the early January morning and winced my skin clean with the spell I’d learned from Irma back in Kansas. I wished I could scrape the outer layer of my skin off with a rock or a very wide razor file. I looked over at a woman who was reading a book with a  little lamp she clipped onto the cover. She was clean and wore jeans with rhinestones and had gotten on the bus in some tiny town late the night before. I had noticed she was giving me sidelong glances. I thought about how I would like to be her if the opportunity presented itself. I bet she was the child of an auto mechanic or a copy shop clerk and took classes at her local community college. Her hands were all manicured and clean on the pages of her novel. She looked like she was in the middle of a good part now and didn’t care about us any more.      

We went over the border and I sort of half expected them to stop us and search for fruits or werewolves on board, even though I knew that since we were on a bus we were pretty much cleared to go. I took my wallet out again and looked at the fake ID I’d gotten back in L.A again just to make sure it didn’t look too fake. It had my mom’s first name on it and then a made up last name. Next to it were three cards from Rodney that I usually kept hidden in my socks. I kept expecting Rodney to cancel them but whenever I used them they went through. The bus rocketed through these forests of green icy tall trees and into Oregon and I fell asleep for a minute and missed the second the sun came over the edge of the horizon.

Salem was a small town in the middle of a lot of highway. It’s the capital, but you wouldn’t know it. You can see Mount Hood on a clear day. The first time I visited I was deeply underwhelmed. There was a diner or four and a small downtown that you felt was gonna get filled up in the next ten years with antique shops. People here were mostly white and mostly drove cars everywhere. The land was flat and it was on a river. It was the third biggest town in Oregon, which goes to show that not many people really live in Oregon. Chad told me that the main thing here was the state and then a potato chip factory and then berry farms outside town. And timber. I hadn’t been to Salem in a couple years and it hadn’t changed much. This time of year the roads were covered in ice and when we went over bumps there was this kind of terrible sense you could slip. I watched the sunrise through the window. It looked like cat vomit. I checked through my bag for everything I needed to set up camp and then everything else I had on me that hadn’t gotten too heavy. I had a swimsuit from the three months Chad and I had lived in a house on a beach with this dude who turned out to be hooked on Oxy. I had four diaries. I still had a mix tape from Felix, who was dead and buried somewhere in Missouri. I wanted a cigarette but Chad and I had had a fight about how it was bad for him so now I was trying not to smoke and anyway I only had three Camels left.

“You want me to read your Tarot cards?” I turned to Chad. “I still have the set you gave me.”

He mumbled in his sleep. I looked over at the woman reading the book and thought about what she would do if I asked to read her cards. She was the only other person that was sitting towards the back of the bus. Up near the front there were three heavyset short men who looked related, all zoning out or sleeping under their knit hats and heavy coats. The bus was overheated and I felt sweat dripping down my stomach under my sweatshirt.

Chad woke up as we got into the Greyhound station across from the hospital. He sat down on the curb at the edge of the street and smoked the last of his weed. We waited for Josh, his friend, to show up.

“How’s being sober?” Chad asked me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t feel like there’s something dead in my mouth and it’s morning at the same time.”

“We can fix that,” Chad said. “You want breakfast somewhere? We still have a little cash, right? We can eat some dead stuff.”

“I’m saving that cash to buy a Jeep.”

“You got your cards too,” Chad said.

“My Tarot deck?”

“Whatever, I know Rodney isn’t gonna cancel those. He doesn’t even pick up his mail, he probably has no idea what you’re spending.”

I watched the rhinestone jean girl get into a van with a man that had a giant piercing through his nose and wondered what I didn’t know about her. I wanted to ask Chad if he’d seen her but he was standing up and walking around and stretching and the moment was gone. I looked around and wondered where there was some place to get breakfast. There was a hospital across the street and next to it was the university.

  ***

The cops came up the steps and everyone was going in a million different directions and I felt like this ripple down my spine of sweat and fear. I looked at Aysel. She was standing in the middle of everything looking stupid and lost as people ran all over like shrimp on a beach. I couldn’t see her friend. Chad pushed past me back into the living room and Carmen bolted out the back door. I saw a lot of the people from downtown who weren’t wolves give panicked glances to one another. I knew they were thinking, fuck, what the hell did we get ourselves into? I wondered if one of them was a plant, or one of our crew, but at this particular moment it didn’t matter a lot. I saw everyone running into the basement and wanted to scream that that was the most idiotic fucking thing you could possibly do unless you planned to like hide under a pile of coal like it was the Soviets coming to collectivize us in 1918 or something, and as far as I knew there wasn’t any coal down there. I ran over and grabbed Aysel’s hand and said something mean under my breath to Chad. Aysel’s hand felt all sweaty. We weren’t going to make it out before the cops came in but we could get out of sight so I hung onto her and tore around the corner and flattened myself toward the floor. We were near an exit and there was nothing blocking it. If there was some kind of distraction I thought we could make it. The cops might surround the place but I had bets that the back garden wasn’t covered yet. I thought about the time in Philly when someone had beat apart the fuse box with a hammer when the cops got called because they had a hiding place right near it and all the lights went out and nearly everyone got away. If I turned out the lights the cops might just start shooting and plant guns on our dead bodies later. I couldn’t hear any helicopters but I thought there might be some I couldn’t hear, because everyone was being so fucking loud.

I told Aysel to be ready to run and meanwhile I was thinking about how she probably could not run fast enough.

Chad was standing there like a stupid idiot and shouted some bullshit and tried to be all heroic. His body was all tense and upright. He said something loud I don’t remember and then the cops opened fire and I yanked Aysel’s arm out of her tiny arm socket and we fucking bolted. I hated running from shit then and I hate it now and I will hate it forever. I stopped smoking but my lungs still hurt all the time and I can still barely breathe. The safe house in Salem was ok at least because it’s up against all these private yards that you know the cops won’t clamber into so you can throw yourself through them and lose people pretty fast. I got leaves and wet mud up the sides of my jeans but I barely registered it.

“Did you see who they shot?”

Aysel panted something and I couldn’t hear her.

We stopped and I was seeing sparks in front of my eyes and my heart was pounding like a fucked clock or whatever and it hit me in an instant that Chad was like, probably really dead, and the way my life was together wasn’t a thing that was actually together, it was just stuck haphazardly into a shape and the shape had just broken. I looked at Aysel and she looked like this fucking kid, suddenly, like she always looked young but suddenly she was looking at me like I was her mom and I wasn’t her fucking mom and her real mom was looking for her and I wasn’t anyone, I was this nobody loser asshole who had taken her to the movies like I was some kind of predatory lesbian from a pulp novel and then taken her to a weird political meeting that had gotten busted by cops and she was just in it all and knee deep in her own excitement and I’d fucked her over and now we were covered in mud in some parking lot. Her hair was matted and I thought about how she wasn’t even fucking out probably, she hadn’t even had her first lesbian haircut. I knew she wanted one, I knew from just like seeing her that she wanted short hair.

I hugged her thinking about how I was a fucked up person and she needed someone better and I needed someone grown up. I felt tears streaming down my face and I felt Aysel crying against me all burning and little. I felt her hands against my back and suddenly realized she was holding me tightly, like I was something stable. I ripped myself away from her and tore over to the chain link fence separating the parking lot from the road. I wanted to hurl myself onto the asphalt so the passing cars could crush my skull. If Dad had shown up with his rifle I would have taken it from his hands and hyperextended my arms backwards and shot myself in the throat with it. I felt more scared than I ever had in my whole life and I felt my body like electricity in a bathtub. I punched the fence over and over with my hands barely in fists, just tearing the skin on my knuckles open against the rusted metal. I have never had a tetanus shot and I thought about the diamonds in my mother’s drawer when I was a kid and how if I died nobody was going to put diamond earrings on me when they buried me. I wasn’t going to even die in a ditch in Kansas or on the railroad tracks or in a hospital, I was going to die in a gutter or on the street like roadkill. My hands were bloody and the blood was on the fence. I screamed at the cars and grabbed the fence with two hands and shook and kicked the fence with my boots until I slipped against the gravel at the edge of the pavement and stumbled and almost fell over.

“Do you want a donut?” she asked me.

There was this donut shop she was pointing to in the strip mall parking lot. I didn’t want to be seen but it was worse just sitting there and so we went in and I let her buy me a donut, feeling like pond scum. I felt the holes in my mouth with my tongue and bit down against my own teeth, grinding until I could feel the cavity that was slowly burrowing down towards my jaw.

I told Aysel that her friend was probably okay. I had no fucking idea where her friend was.

#long text #out of salem #text #elaine #long post