Easier to Run (12 page)

Cassie

After the looks Chuck gave us, I doubted my decision long before we reached Ben's apartment. Being inside the apartment made it even worse. I left most of my things in the car to be unpacked later—maybe—and just brought up a small bag of clothes and my meds.

The apartment was so much different than being in Ben's truck. This was like stepping into someone else's life. I wasn’t sure why it felt so much more intrusive since he spent more time in his truck than here, but maybe that was the problem—this felt more like his private life.

“Kitchen's probably empty,” Ben said. “But welcome to my place.”

The kitchen and living room were open with beige walls and carpeting that I figured was the standard for the building. Along with an entertainment center that covered one wall with DVDs and games, a blue couch sat in the middle of the living room catty-corner to a red armchair that didn’t match at all. Not even the tall wooden chairs that lined the breakfast bar matched.

“Middle door's the bathroom,” Ben said, pointing to the three white doors that lined the back wall. “My rooms on the left, you can put your stuff in there. And I'll... round up some clean sheets.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Are you sure—”

“You're here,” he said, taking me by the shoulders and pressing his forehead to mine. “You're not going anywhere.”

Someone pounded on the front door and I jumped away, my heart lodging in my throat.

Ben peeked through the peephole then threw his arms in the air. “She's a fucking stalker,” he whispered. “You might want to disappear for a few, and... don't mind the impending fight.”

“I'll charge my phone and put in my headphones,” I said.

I dropped my bag inside the bedroom door and closed it, leaning back and sliding down the solid wood to the floor. My body tingled with the excess tension and anxiety I'd built up again. It'd been two days since I had taken my anxiety meds, but they knocked me out almost instantly and left me numb to the world.

Most of the time, they also kept away the dreams though, so it was worth it.

I dug through my bag, pulled out my phone and power cord again and found an outlet to sit next to. Once my phone booted up, I popped the ear buds in my ears and turned up the volume just enough to turn the conversation on the other side of the door into muddled mush.

Gone were the football posters and music posters that used to adorn Ben’s walls. This room was sparse, less lived-in. Ben’s life was on the road now. His truck had more elements of home than these four walls. But a silver picture frame on the dresser stood out, and I stood to investigate. The last football game that Ben played in—the state championship. They’d lost by three points, but a few dozen college football teams came calling for our running back.

He said no to all of them.

He already knew what he wanted to do. Sometimes, I thought he was crazy for it. But I assumed there was a lot more to his decision that he didn’t want to talk about. He loved football, but I don’t think he ever wanted to live it.

Instead, he choose what really made him happy. No one else had to understand.

In the picture, I was wrapped around Ben’s arm. He was covered in mud, grass, and sweat, and I was bundled up in the only high school sports sweater I ever owned with streaks of school colors in my hair. His girlfriend was somewhere around too, she was some track star, who went off to college the following year on a sports scholarship.

Ben started driving. A year later, my sister got married, and a month after that, my parents died. Ben and his family were there with us through it all—like extended members of our family. Sometimes those memories made how I always felt about him seem even more wrong.

I traced the smooth silver frame.

I’d kept all those feelings to myself—apparently not so successfully. But his friendship meant more to me than anything else. Knowing that he was always there and always had my back.

But then, in the back of his truck, less than twenty-four hours ago, he kissed me.

I’d asked for it, in my crazy state of not-really-thinking, but
he kissed me
. And it had been more than a kiss. It shattered walls in my body and sent my blood rushing and my head spinning. For so long, I had thought I knew where I fit into his world. I felt safe and secure there.

My grandparents had taken the iron-handed approach to everything. No phone, no internet, and definitely no contact with Ben. In their minds, he was the cause of my problems anyway. I needed friends my age.

Right, because they were so understanding
.

Ben was the only person who ever fully understood me—and I think that was mostly because he didn’t really try to understand me or work me out, he just let me be. He let me be the wild babbling girl on his arm after the big game because that’s what I needed to be then. He let me come on the road with him because that’s where I needed to be.

All my life, I’d thought of him as my hero for putting up with me. For helping me become more confident, but he only did that by letting me be myself.

And what on earth did he ever get out of it?

My phone buzzed, and I was so lost in thoughts I opened the message without thinking. One side effect of having my phone charged and turned on to listen to music was that it was once again receiving messages.

Whoever had taught my grandma to text had done the world a major disservice. She knew I never answered the phone, and half the time I didn’t listen to my voice mails, but when the texts appeared, I read more than I intended to.

GMA:
We’re going to report you to the police if you don’t call and tell us where you are
.

The police. Even at twenty-one I was supposed to report every movement. It wasn’t because they wanted to help. They just wanted control over everything. They didn’t think I was capable of functioning on my own.

I’m fine
, I typed. Then, I dragged my bag closer and sat against the side of Ben’s bed.

GMA:
You can’t just take off and disappear without a word. It has been a month.

My body shook like I’d just grabbed ahold of an electric fence and couldn’t let go.

GMA:
You need to grow up
.

Cas:
I’m trying
.

Every time I talked to my grandparents, the thoughts came back full swing. Reminding me of all my failures. A speeding train of doubt and regret. The things I couldn’t change, the things I held onto in the light because they made me who I was and simultaneously hid away in the dark because they scared me to the core. My hand sifted through my bag, spurred on by a mind of its own, and closed around the pill bottle.

In fifteen minutes, the train could be reduced to a dull roar. I’d be free from the cages everyone tried to shove me into. Free from the ones I stuffed myself into.

GMA: Cassie Ann Bryant
.

Oh, even in text form it had the same effect.

GMA: You think running off like a child is going to solve anything
…

Nothing I ever did was right. I squeezed the phone in my hand. I didn’t know which would give out first, the plastic shell or my skin and bone.

It buzzed again. I couldn’t see through the tears, but this message was an image. Not thinking I clicked to open it, then deleted it just as quickly.

Fucking perverts.
As soon as I blocked five numbers ten more started in.

“Decent girls….”
My grandmother’s voice began in my head. Decent girls don’t do this. Decent girls don’t do that. Decent girls don’t go on trips in a semi with grown men.

But I was a grown woman. No less indecent in my grandparents eyes though.

They didn’t know about the videos. Thank goodness. That’d only prove everything they’d ever said.

I was incapable of making my own decisions. Adult decisions. But, damn it, I wasn’t really incapable. I never had been. Why did people get it in their stupid heads that just because I didn’t talk like someone straight out of a Harvard classroom, I must not be able to think for myself either?

I didn’t need the world dumbed down. I needed it smartened up.

Hell, on most days the only way I dealt with the world was dumbing down my brain—slowing it down to a snail’s pace when everything became tolerable again. It was a last resort, usually saved for panic attacks or when my brain decided to go on a thought murdering spree right before bed.

I wrapped my arms around myself and moved to the bed, my cord barely reaching. With the music blasting in my ears, I couldn’t tell if Ben and his ex were still going at it, but I had to assume they were since he hadn’t come to get me. Bit by bit, I struggled to pull myself back together.
Breathe. Focus.

“You should have known better.”

My brain screamed with my grandmother’s voice. My hand fisted around the pill bottle.

“Your mother would never listen either. How do you think she ended up married and pregnant by nineteen?”

I doubled over, pressing my forehead to my knees. They acted like our life had been so bad. Then again, anything that didn’t go along with their narrow view of reality was horrible. As long as I was with them, I went to class, took my meds, and came home to “study”. As if I needed to study after being sent back two grades. I could do most of the work in my sleep—but I never really bothered with any of it.

The more I rebelled, the more they cracked down. The less I could breathe. The more anxious I got. Until one day I literally curled up in the corner of my room and refused to get up. I stopped functioning. Stopped feeling anything except the relentless onslaught of thoughts in my head. Voices screaming, telling me I wasn’t good enough.

Telling me I had nothing left.

I had nowhere to go.

I’d thrown it all away.

It was my fault!

All my fault that my parents were gone. That my sister was dead. That I’d lost my best friend.

I stopped talking.

Stopped trying.

Stopped living.

I didn’t think I’d ever dig myself back out of that hole. My school counselor forced my grandparents to get me into therapy. They handed me drugs. I took whatever they gave me because at least it calmed the raging of my brain.

I didn’t care.

They wanted to talk. Wanted me to express my feelings. But I had nothing left.

I had meetings twice a week with the school counselor, once a week with a child psychologist. Of the two, my counselor was more tolerable. Sometimes that felt like the only place I could go where accusations didn’t fly around. Not that my psychologist ever accused me of anything. He just made me uncomfortable. Coaxing me into telling him the things Mitchel had done. The thoughts of it made me feel dirty all over again. Speaking them revolted me, filling my mouth with venomous bile. Nothing could make the taste go away.

I was so numb I tuned it all out. They all sat around me talking all the time like I wasn’t there. And really, I wasn’t.

I was trapped so deep inside myself.

How do you escape when your own body and mind create your prison?

My playlist ended and I suddenly snapped back to the present like a breaking tension wire. The shock was so extreme my chest hurt. I twisted free the lid from the pill bottle and dropped the tiny white pill in my hand. So tiny, you wouldn’t imagine it could do anything. But it held the power to set me free. To stop the buzzing in every cell that threatened to rip me apart, and the colliding thoughts in my head that sought my destruction.

I swallowed it down, closed my eyes, and turned on a new song.

Three songs in and I was ready for a nap. I curled up in Ben’s bed and surrounded by his smell, I relaxed even more.

Ben

“You been sitting outside waiting on me or something?” How she always kept tabs on me was a mystery, but once the words spilled out of my mouth I desperately hoped it wasn't true—then she'd already know about Cassie. Wouldn't that make for an even more perfect spat? She cocked her head and invited herself right in to take a seat on the couch.

Just make yourself at home
. “You don't want to talk. You call me to tell me you're having an abortion, then you go to my parents?”