925 miles | z.m. au

xiv.

“If being wrong’s a crime, I’m serving forever

If being strong’s your kind, then I need help here with this feather

If being afraid is a crime, we hang side by side”

—Lorde

...

Mary waits until it is dark. Outside her window, the sky is heavy black velvet shielding the earth from the harsh light of the stars, the moon. Everything is dark and she hopes and prays that it will hide her discrepancies; the dirty fingerprints and bruised brain tissue she’s been hiding since she first left home. Everything is a mess and she wants a clean escape and she still refuses to accept that the world does not work that way—that bleeding hearts do not always sew themselves back together and sinking ships do not always reach a glorious end at the bottom of the ocean.

Mary has always been a bit of a dreamer.

So, once she feels safe and cowardly, she wraps herself in the velvet of the sky and makes her escape. She slips her bony arms into the sleeves of Zayn’s jacket and packs her life into the black bag she’s been carrying for miles. It’s heavy on her shoulders and her spine shifts to accommodate the increasingly heavy weight of loneliness and scraped knees.

And she’d like to pretend she isn’t running away. Really, she would, but occasionally she decides not to be a liar and she can never cover up her footprints on the soft carpet the way she can in the desert. She counts the steps from her bedroom on the third floor to the staircase and prays they do not creak. The last thing she wants is to be caught wearing flimsy armour and a lousy, silent apology.

As Mary takes her chances on the old, rickety staircase, she tries to ignore the aching in her ribcage that is begging her to staystaystay. It’s difficult to explain to her heart that there’s a difference between having friends and being a parasite and that she is the latter. Sure, she could stay with Eleanor and Louis and Cindy and pretend that she’s a proper homebody who wants a family, but she just isn’t. The idea of lounging around, leaching off of people who have been so positively lovely to her makes her sick. Her grandma told her to never become the cause of her illness.

Mary makes it all the way to the first floor without a single mishap and thanks God or The Universe for giving her break, regardless of whether or not she deserves it. She blindly navigates the layout of the house; about thirty steps to the kitchen, twenty steps from the kitchen to the back door. She tries her hand at being stealthy—walking with precision and pressing her toes into the hardwood before the weight of her body and her bag and her life. She thinks maybe she’s doing a good job but it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t—not that she’s particularly proud or conceited, but that she’s a proper expert on being a pathetic, cowardly fuck.

And, once she’s reached the corner to the kitchen, she’s a second away from breathing for the first time in ten minutes. Her lungs expand and shrink all in the same moment as she takes the next step and the floor finally creaks. She winces and eyes the door with uncertainly, hoping that Cindy is a heavy sleeper since her bedroom is the closest.

Get on with it then, she tells herself, watching her escape route as if it might disappear—as if she’s important enough for the house to rearrange itself solely to keep her inside. And she’s nearly there, so achingly close, when she hears a voice asking where she’s going, exactly.

Mary jumps and gasps and freezes all in the same moment and wonders how she ever forgot how easy she is to scare. Her eyes wander to the counter next to the refrigerator where, in the dim stream of the porch light through the window, sits Louis, looking tanned and blue-eyed and not at all sleepy or surprised.