The school looked menacing at nighttime, like a sophisticated modern megalith that seemed to be sleeping. As she walked to the edge of its grounds, Aria felt as if the building itself might wake, like a guard dog. Though it was spring, the grass under her feet had not been graced by the impulse of the season. It seemed dead, or dormant at least, and colorless. Making sure to draw no attention to herself, she found her familiar place underneath the bleachers. She was used to them during the daytime, when the sun had warmed them so deeply that they were soothing to the touch. This was different. At nighttime, the metal was like silver ice. She felt judged by them. And just as she’d been afraid of, a few minutes after she crouched down, the stillness and silence set in. The unfamiliar nature of this well-known place made her begin to doubt herself.
Clifford was unsettled by the stillness too. As soon as her body settled, the cat began squirming. He tried to jump up and out of the collar of her coat. “No,” she said, “stay here.” Trying to keep his movements hushed but to no avail, eventually she resorted to using one hand to untie the worn laces of one of her high-top sneakers and pull it out. She tied the shoelace to Clifford’s collar, like a leash, and watched, saying nothing, as he contended with it for a few minutes before lying down in the dust in a state of defeat. His tail was swishing. His ears were half pinned back. He had a look on his face of so much chagrin; Aria thought to herself that he almost looked human. She felt guilty, but, in her own state of distress, could conjure nothing within herself to remedy it.
Aria’s mind tried to distract her by running frantically through every possible scenario for how things could play out. She thought about going back home. She thought about being captured by the police. She thought about hitchhiking to another part of the country. She thought about running into the wilderness and creating a life for herself in nature. For a second, she decided to go back home, but then, as if snapping out of a daze, she remembered the conversation she had overheard between Mr and Mrs Johnson. They had already made up their mind to hand her back over to the state. If she went back home, she wouldn’t get there until dawn had already broken. Having them find out that she’d spent the night out of the house was like putting the signature on her eviction notice from their lives. It wasn’t an option.
That realization no longer was just a mental one. Her expendability hit her chest and stomach with the force of a semi truck. She unzipped her backpack to find her blankie. Holding it, she pulled Clifford close to her, as if the closer she held them both, the higher the chance was that the agony would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, that despair eventually lulled her into a cold, restless, dreamless sleep.
Panic woke her after just a few hours, panic that robbed the peaceful transition between sleeping and awake; panic that reminded her of the reality of her life in that moment before her eyes had even opened. The light that was slowly brightening before the sun had risen issued a warning. A warning of being found out.
Aria collected Clifford under her coat again, pulled her backpack over her shoulders and snuck away from the school grounds. Walking away, she turned back and realized that she was leaving her life behind in layers. First, the place she was supposed to belong with a family, called home. Second, the place she was supposed to learn to belong in society, called school. She was conscious that this meant she was dropping out. As much pain as there was in making the choice to leave it all behind, it was scary how easy it was. It took no effort. The fact that she could just slip away like this meant that there was nothing holding her there in the first place. That anything she thought was there to hold her wasn’t real. Grieving the loss of the illusion of that external security, she boarded a city bus.
Sitting in the very back of the bus, she kept her eye on the driver. Careful to conceal Clifford, she moved her body as much as was necessary to keep him placid and to not look suspicious. When she’d stayed on the bus for so long that her continued presence there began to create a palpable tension, she got off. She was in a part of town near the museum. To Aria, it felt like she had stepped away from one flavor of sadness straight into another. The path of devastation seemed to have led her in a circle against her will.
As she watched a conflux of school children gather in factions on the concrete steps of the museum, Aria remembered her real mother bringing her here during one of her manic episodes all those years ago. She could almost see herself, like a hallucination overlaying the current scene, walking up those steps, small enough at that age that she had to focus on climbing them. She remembered knowing that her mother’s drug-induced enthusiasm and her desire to both connect and be a mother would be short-lived. But Aria didn’t care. She had decided to soak up those up-days for as long as they lasted so they could carry her through the desolation of all the other days.
She recalled them almost running from exhibit to exhibit. On that day, even though she asked for nothing more than to be with her mother, there was nothing Lucy wouldn’t give her. Lucy bought the tickets to the museum and ice-cream cones and toys from the gift shop as if there was no limit to abundance in their world. She thrust them into Aria’s little arms as if to say that the world could be her oyster. Aria had laughed because it was an experience she had always wanted to have.
She’d wondered for a second if her mother knew something that she didn’t. Maybe something wonderful had happened and they didn’t have to struggle anymore. But she knew deep inside that underneath that laughter and that hope, they couldn’t afford any of it. That feeling reminded her that her mother was not fully there. Lucy was interacting with the world as if through the veil of some alternate reality that was better than this one. Still, Aria tried to keep up with that unattuned alternate reality, and, for the day, she had managed to feel closer to her mother than she had in years.
It was one of those times in her life where she came closest to the vision in her head of what it might be like to really have a mother who loved her and who showed her the wonders of the world. Aria felt nostalgic about that day, as tainted as it may have been. It was a good day.
But then, standing there, staring at the museum, Aria thought to herself, I had two mothers – one who took me to the museum and bought me everything I could ever want. And another who woke up the next day and panicked about the new toys she saw in my room and then returned them. It just so happened that these two mothers Aria remembered were both Lucy.
Aria spent the day in a state of shock. She figured that hanging around a public place like this would keep the people looking for her (assuming there were any) off of her trail. Her hope was that people would mistake her for a high school student on a field trip. And to her surprise, no one ever did suspect a thing.
On a few occasions, she let Clifford out onto the sidewalk. People would come by to pet him and remark at the cuteness of such a docile cat, which was behaving more like a dog on the end of her makeshift leash. She was able to sneak Clifford into a public restroom in the subway station adjacent to the museum, where she created a puddle for him to drink from in an indentation in the tile floor. Aria waited for the brief seconds in between people coming and going to stop pretending to wash her hands and instead drink from the faucet. They both went without food that day. And as the night set in, Aria realized, not having thought of it before leaving, that she had no idea how she was going to get food for either of them.