Runaway

VIII. Out of Nothing

We somehow made it all the way to Texas without bringing Iowa up again. We were back to normal, as normal ever got—Charlie was driving again and he had two mini pretzel sticks stuck under his top lip, making him look like a walrus, and every time he started talking casually I lost it, laughing so hard my eyes started to tear. It took the simplest things. He was joining me, slowly losing his calm, nothing-is-funny composure the more and more I laughed.

We found ourselves on the edge of Austin, so, naturally, we stopped at Subway.

“So . . . hungry,” Charlie moaned as he slumped out of the car, rubbing his stomach. “Vending machine pretzels cannot keep me alive . . . I need . . . Meatball Marinara.”

I rolled my eyes.

It could have been a lot more normal, but we were doing all we could—it was hard, pretending that nothing was going on, but we had been doing it for so often lately that it seemed like nothing really was wrong some of the times. It was easy to forget just how easily Charlie could slip off of the handle sometimes, when he forgot to take medicine two years old and so many doses too little. It gave him headaches and he hated it but they helped control his erratic bipolar behavior, and for that I was grateful. I wasn’t afraid of Charlie, but I was definitely afraid of what he could be capable of.

It was hot in Texas this time of year. I had never been to this state, although I had been born in Arizona and had lived out my early years of infancy there. I paused just outside of the car for a moment, pushing up the sleeves of my hoodie as I gazed up at the sun bearing down on us, but that wasn’t the main source of the heat, not really. I had lived in Florida with enough humidity to drive a person to insanity, and this heat was different.

It was dry. There was no moisture at all. It really was just a dry heat.

It was over a hundred degrees outside, but it didn’t really feel like it. Weirdly enough, I liked it better than I liked the heat in Florida.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Charlie asked me, making me jump. I gave him an innocent look and he smirked, knowing that he had just read my mind. Again. “I wouldn’t mind this heat.”

“I can’t say that I would either.”

He offered me his hand to take and I hesitated only a second before I took it, letting him pull me across the parking lot and into the Subway. Despite liking the heat more than humidity, my shoulders automatically relaxed in the cool air conditioning. Charlie ran into the line like a child, sniffing the store exaggeratingly in an effort to get a smile out of me, which he indeed managed. He winked at me out of the corner of his eye, and my heart hurt.

All I could think of was what was waiting for us back home.

It hurt, and I didn’t want to, but I was negative and a realist, and this wasn’t a fairy tale. It was as simple as that. I couldn’t always end up with the knight in shining armor, ready to kill mythical creatures for my hand. This was reality, and the world was taking any opportunity it could to rip us apart.

And I couldn’t blame it. Not when I sat up at night, counting my scars again and again, wondering when he was going to admit he had a problem.

Charlie ordered a Meatball Marinara for him and a Philly Cheese Steak for me, not to mention a cookie and two drinks, and he paid for it, giving me a look when I offered to pay for my half. I rolled my eyes at him but took the offered plastic cups, going to fill his with a Mountain Dew while I went for the Pepsi. We met back at a small table for two in the small sitting area, next to a woman sitting on her own picking at half of a sub. A girl about our age was sitting alone at the window, browsing something on her phone and picking at a salad.