The Queen Of Spades

Chapter 6, Continued, Again

When I took the shirt off the back of my head, it was completely stained with blood. I had taken some small pieces of glass out of my head on my way to the train car, but I hadn't thought that the cut was that bad. Maybe if I saw how bad it was, I would've gone back to the Hudson's house instead of the boxcar but I doubted it. I'd never been one to admit defeat, and didn't plan on starting now. What I was planning on doing was playing the violin.

Let me tell you the first rule of running away. You never come back on the first day. If you come back on the first day, you're going to be in trouble. Stay at a friend's house for a few days, then, when you know that your parents are scared to death, come back. Your parents will be so happy that you're okay, you won't be in trouble. If you want to be even more extra, get yourself beat up a little bit. Ask someone to punch you in the face, cut yourself, make room for some sympathy from your parents. That's what I was planning on doing, except for the getting beat up part. If I beat myself up before I came back Oliver would think I was kidnapped again and I would never be allowed to go anywhere.

It was starting to get dark when I took my arm off and ate a granola bar from my go bag for dinner. Now, if only I had something to do. Sleeping is kind of an option, since I'm at the boxcar and I can always sleep well at the boxcar but there's also a chance that I dream again. Violin, if I have three days to do nothing but hideout, why not try to fix what those pieces of German scum ruined. Just as I went to pick up my violin though, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. Oliver, of course, I let it go to voicemail and then powered my phone down to make sure he couldn't track me.

The door to the boxcar was open, and the air was refreshing as it carried the sound of my violin into the clouds. Of course, it was a hassle to put my arm back on first, but completely worth it. My shaky hand made it sound haltering but for the first time in almost four months, I played the violin and I felt like myself again. Like I found a piece of me that was just floating around. I didn't stop playing until my fingers bled from the strings and I had to clean my violin and bow of blood so it didn't ruin. As I was putting my freshly cleaned violin and bow in my case, I felt someone staring at me. I gripped my violin bow in my hand and whipped around to see who it was.
"What are you planning on doing with that?" The kid from last week asked, "I just came to say that you sounded really good."
"You'd be surprised how sharp these can be. Why are you at the train graveyard so late?" I asked him.
"I could ask you the same thing. Why are you here instead of off killing someone?" He said, obviously remembering me.
"I asked you first."
"I'm looking for a place to play a game tomorrow night. Thought about this place. What did you call it, a "train graveyard"?"
"I didn't come up with it for one, and for two, go play your “game” somewhere else."
"Why?"
I looked at the shaggy kid, he just wasn't getting it, "Because I'm going to be here tomorrow and I don't want to have to listen to whatever idiotic shenanigans you have planned."
"Why are you gonna be here tomorrow?"
I took a deep breath and tried not to punch him, "I'm going to explain this very carefully so that your peabrain can understand it. I'm trying to piss off my uncle, and when he tracks my phone and finds me, there are going to be words exchanged, and probably fighting. So, if you don't want to get blood on your clothes when I break his nose, go somewhere else."
"Your family is weird, man."
"You don't know the half of it."
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
I did. I really did. Somebody needed to know the truth. I knew I couldn't, but at that moment I didn't even care. He was probably okay to talk about it with, right? "You won't tell anyone else what I say?" I asked.
"Nah, what you say will probably go in one ear and out the other anyway since I'm higher than a friggin kite right now."
"Well that explains it. Come on inside." We sat in the boxcar as I told him everything and I found out that his name was Zeke and that he was in foster care too because his mom killed his little brother. When I asked him why his mom killed his brother, he fell silent and looked like he was going to leave. He didn't though, and talked some more instead. After about an hour I was getting antsy and ached to do something active so I looked for an excuse to make him leave. Finally, I convinced him to leave by saying that cops usually did their rounds about now and he would be in trouble if he got caught high. Once he was gone, I changed into an outfit I had longed to wear for months but was forbidden to by Oliver and Nada, shorts and a tank top. The wind felt amazing on my bare skin and I opened the door to do pull ups on the metal frame. I stopped at about a hundred and kept going from exercise to exercise until about 3 in the morning.
When I was too tired to keep working out, I laid down in the boxcar and slept until the sun woke me the next morning. There was a chill in the air and I put my hoodie and a pair of sweatpants on, along with my arm. I ate an MRE from my go bag and then turned on my phone to listen to music. There were forty missed calls and over two hundred text messages from Oliver, Nada, and the Hudson family. Instead of opening them, I swiped them off of my screen and climbed a tree that was close to the train graveyard. It was a tall, sturdy tree and I was able to climb about seventy five feet up before the branches were too thin and weak for me to put weight on them. The next couple of days, I was going to do the same thing but I didn't wake up after I went to sleep that night. I slept the next two days away, unable to stay awake any longer.