The Cusp of 30 (Working Title)

Chapter 2: "Try And Not Chain Smoke So Much."

(11 minute read)

Running hadn't always been my escape. I really didn't even start until I was about sixteen—when my mother's at-the-time boyfriend got me a job at the Dunkin' Donuts across town. I couldn't believe that a guy who my mother was involved with had actually done something nice for me. He even had a car, and he told me that if we worked the same shifts, he'd give me a lift. On my first day, he threatened the other workers not to give "his girl" a hard time. It made me feel really special. 

That feeling didn't last for long, though. It started with a kiss on the cheek on his way out the store—no biggie. Then it turned into a kiss on the cheek with a hand on my lower back. Then a kiss on the lips and a squeeze of my ass. Talk about a girl's first kiss.

Luckily, our manager Kelly had seen it. She was about twenty five and in college, and she waited to ask me about it until we were alone one night cleaning up in the back. When I told her that it was okay, that I didn't want trouble, that he was just my mother's boyfriend, she waited for the first reason he gave her to fire him and pulled the trigger. He was late a lot, so there was no awkwardness at home about why he'd actually gotten let go.

This didn't mean my mother still wasn't pissed about him losing his job, though. Their relationship basically ended the first time he got a little stingy with his cigarettes, reminding my mother that they were expensive and to try and not chain smoke so much. She'd sent him packing quickly after that. It wasn't like her daughter didn't have money coming in now that she could use for cigarettes anyway, right? 

Regardless, I had still been relieved. After he'd kissed me, I basically confined myself to my room every time he was over, which was all of the time. I was grateful that everything had gone back to normal, that the only person making me feel uncomfortable in my home was once again my mother. The downside was that I no longer had a ride to work, and where the bus dropped me off, I couldn't get there in time for my scheduled shift. This reality didn't hit me until the first time I took the bus, however, and although I knew Kelly wasn't looking for a reason to fire me, I still didn't want to be late, and so I ran about a half a mile as quickly as I could, making it just in time for my shift—a little out of breath, but just in time.

By week two, my run no longer felt like a sprint, and by week four, it was basically just a jog. It had become so easy that I'd even run to the bus stop after my shift had ended, despite there never being any rush to get home. And then one day I decided to pass that first bus stop and run to the next, and then the next, and then the next, until I realized that I could run all of the way home and save my bus money. And with that saved bus money, I bought nice running shoes—the first thing I had ever bought myself with my own money, and they weren't from a thrift store or hand-me-downs from my Aunt Maureen, they were my actual size and my very own. And this was the first time I realized that really crappy things—like being sexually harassed by your mother's boyfriend—sometimes happened for a reason. Later, I realized that sometimes they did not.

After the EMTs arrived last night, my mother woke up and assured them she was fine. She declined the ambulance, telling them that they wouldn't suck her dry. She called my dad and asked for a ride to the hospital. He arrived at the house within ten minutes, despite living fifteen away, and took her. I said I had to stay home and shower, which I did for what seemed like forever, and when the water turned cold, I stayed in anyway because there was nowhere else to be. Mom was fine. They gave her head about four stitches, two less than what they used to close up the skin around my eye when I had fallen on the same glass table.

I normally saved my runs for the evening on days that I worked. I tried a couple of times to bring the dog, but it was basically a lost cause. He would distract me, want to go into the street, bark at every squirrel he saw climbing up a tree, etc. I needed my runs as my alone time, where I could just move my body and think. And after last night's bullshit, I woke up at 6 a.m. with an itch to move, and so I got up, got dressed, and headed outside.

The trailer park wasn't the worst place to run. Some residents even planted flowers outside—well, one resident; and it was only a few pots, but it was better than nothing. What I enjoyed the most about morning runs was that no one was up except for, like, really old people who'd be sitting outside with their coffee. Sometimes they'd shout little cheers at me. I liked it. It made me focus on my posture.

There was one trailer that I wanted to burn. It had a broken window with cardboard tapped over it, and no matter what time you walked by it, it smelled like pot. Her name was Antonella Carluccio or Carpaccio or some shit like that. She made sure that everyone knew her and her two brothers were from the big city, as if that would make us like them, and she always wore jogger pants with a hoodie, even when it was hot as fuck, and also this Adidas headband that I bet she never ran through the washer despite constantly sweating outside. She'd become popular in the community quickly for fixing cars real cheap, but unpopular in our trailerhood for often blocking the street with the cars she was fixing up. What I disliked most about her, though, was that she catcalled me on my evening runs while her brothers laughed in the background, and so I had become accustomed to speeding up when I saw their trailer in the distance.

Even though they weren't outside this morning, I still picked up my pace. I told myself not to look over, that I didn't need more stress in my already fucked up life, that their ugly trailer with cardboard for a window, and their old rusted desk chair that sat smack-dab in the center of their twelve square-feet of lawn, didn't represent the type of community I lived in, that not everyone who lived here was like them—but I turned my head to the side and looked at it, and that's when I felt something beneath my feet, and I put my hands up to catch myself, and I heard the sound of my glasses fall and smack onto the concrete.

I took a moment to breathe and dust off the dirt from now-also-bloody hands before even attempting to get up. I was able to find my shattered glasses within reach, and the hard reality of knowing it would take at least four days to get a new pair made my chest feel tight. At first I wasn't sure what the hell it was I had tripped over, but when I got closer to it and bent down, I could see the steel lug wrench that was left in the middle of the fucking street by fucking assholes. My first instinct was to throw it through their last remaining glass window, but if you're bold enough to make a move like that around here, you also better have your shotgun by your side, and I typically didn't bring mine with me on my runs. Perhaps that would change.

I tried to look straight and keep going, but the thing about my eyes is that, without my glasses, I get extremely dizzy unless I keep one eye shut, and what's more shitty is that, despite practicing my entire life to do the opposite, I can only wink with my right eye while keeping the left open, and my left eye is the practically blind eye, so I have to really concentrate to see what's in front of me. It's possible, but it takes effort.

It was then that I heard the slamming of a screen door coming from their trailer, and with my bad eye, I looked over only to see, like, a shadow of someone who looked like they were coming toward me, and with the strongest desire to not start a scene at 6 a.m. where the police would inevitably get involved, to not be the stereotype, and to not add another fight to my record, I took off, using my hand to keep my bad eye shut so that I could see through my good one and get back home.