Ruby Red Marionette

fifteen | sister

It was night time again.

That always happened. Nothing else was ever certain in my life. I didn’t know what would ever happen to me in the next moment. I didn’t know who I would meet in the next five minutes or who I would take advantage of in the next five days or who I would be in the next five years. But somehow, every day the sun slowly dawdled away from me and was replaced by not just a moon, but by a bleak insinuation of sins and relapse that - while a hostile, unnerving, environment - made me feel most at home. It was the only guarantee I ever had.

We’d done it three times.

After Alice and Matthew, it was a college girl named Heather and a freshly-divorced twenty-something-year-old guy named Ren. Then it was Jennifer, a girl who was about to quit her job and thought that our relationship with her was going to be long-term, and an old schoolteacher who just finished serving a thirty-year sentence in jail for having sex with one of his students.

Altogether, we had a little over six-hundred dollars. Money wasn’t hard to accumulate when dealing with misguided girls and lusty men, both desperate and emotionally scarred. Every few minutes, when sitting in the backseat of some of the men’s cars or walking away from a hotel, I caught Devin getting lost in his own silence. He would look away from me, letting something else catch his attention, and soon he wasn’t really paying attention to anything at all. He was pondering. I could tell every time I snapped my fingers in his face and he returned to our reality; he was, even for a few moments, being remorseful. He was thinking about what we’d just done and how it would affect the people we’d just met instead of forgetting about it like he should.

I wouldn’t tell him about it. It wasn’t my job, anyway. I had no place to teach him; everything I knew, I learned from life. He probably wouldn’t agree with everything I had to say now, anyway. He wouldn’t agree to completely turn himself into stone for his own benefit. That was the hardest part - seeing that it was for your own benefit.

So I stayed silent as we made our trek. His watch read nine o’clock, but the sky looked like it was about seven. We sat in a diner for the past hour, drinking bad coffee and talking about the cheesy soap opera on the television. Our intention wasn’t to stay there; our original plan was to find somewhere to sleep for the night immediately after leaving the hotel, but we could have sworn that we saw Ren a couple blocks away, and in case he was running after us, we went indoors.

Now that we’d established it was safe to leave, and that neither of us knew anyone’s home at which we could sleep, I decided we had to do things my way.

I led him away from the city. The bright lights and half-drunk cliques faded away from earshot soon, and the only sounds were crickets and the stream of water that led us all the way up to the lake.

It rained again while we were in the diner, so the soil underneath the grass on the lake bank was soft and mushy. Devin took off his shoes once we emerged from the trees, moving all the way to the edge of the bank and dipping his feet into the lake. I stood a few feet back, watching the moon’s reflection on the water ripple every time he moved. The crickets’ chirping bothered me more now that we weren’t walking, now that it was the only sound we could hear (the stream was too far back to still be heard). But eventually, the chirping mixed into the environment and added to the serenity. Nothing was a disturbance anymore. I almost fell asleep.

“So this is it, huh?” Devin asked, waking me from my trance. I sat down next to him, keeping my feet crossed. “This is doing things your way?”

I shrugged. “If you’re referring to us coming to a lake, then no. Doing things my way is us coming to a place that’s not too shitty to inhabit while giving us privacy. Doing things my way is to keep moving, to find a place to squat for however long life allows, and then to keep going.”