Run and Hide

Run and Hide

by

Alexis L. Plair

On August 25, 2013, I, Sydney Marie Collins, created a person.

Underneath me I could see no flooring tiles, only long black strips of bone-straight hair. Tears spread across the slopes of my cheeks and chin without direction as my scissors continued to separate me from her. I didn’t dare stop them.

I finished the job. The tan paper towel scratched my face as I wiped the tears from it, and I examined the ends of my hair, now hanging just above my shoulders. Before long I’d be on a long bus ride north, on my way to move in with Dr. Katherine Gomez. Before long, I would be Ana. When I raised my head and faced the mirror, a girl looked back at me and smiled, just a hint. She knew she was beautiful. I said aloud, “Ana, you are stunning.”

After sweeping the last of the hair from the floor, I grabbed my bags and hurried out of the bathroom. I hastily apologized to the line of three that accumulated behind the door while I was “changing.” The cashier, puffy, orange hair topping his freckled face, watched me with questioning eyes when he saw me exit. I looked back at him with my own, reddened eyes, and forced a weak smile.

“Nice hair,” he said.

“Thanks,” was all I said back.

I pulled the shortened ends of my hair, let the backs of my fingers move across my face where streaks of tears had dried, and started walking. My eyes watched pale concrete tiles pass below me until I had left the gas station
.
Destination: the bus stop two blocks down the street. Stepping outside, I inhaled as the weight of Sydney was lifted from my chest.

The light breeze in the air gave little relief from its stale warmth. Yet a burnt red leaf meandered downward in front of me, reminding me of why autumn was my favorite season. In autumn, all failures are forgotten, like a shedding in which one’s whole skin is lost, so newer, fresher skin can emerge. But unfortunately it was only summer. I would have to make a new skin on my own. I approached the wooden pole that wore the “bus stop” sign and dropped my bag.

I checked my watch, knowing the time didn’t really matter. I was leaving Georgia, Mom, Dad and Sydney behind and trading them in for Ana and her new life in North Carolina with Dr. Gomez. Ignoring the many thoughts of everything that could go wrong, I dedicated myself to making them go right. No time for weakness.

Sometime later, I stepped from the bus and onto the street, and allowed the driver to help me retrieve my luggage from the bus. As I situated my bags in my hands and on my shoulder, I heard the bus crank up in front of me. I lifted my eyes to see the white and blue swirls that lined its side swim away from me, each of the riders continuing on their routes without me.

The GPS on my phone showed me I could either walk one block north to take a look at my new school, or three blocks south and one west to reach the residence of Dr. Katherine Gomez. So I walked north, hugging myself tight in my hanging shirt and facing a brisk breeze. No one was around to see me, only an occasional car humming by. The breeze pulled my shirtsleeve off my shoulder and I let it stay there, focusing on making my feet carry me on to see the school that would bury Sydney Collins.

Without much time to anticipate the sighting, my chasing gaze found the pink bricks of a school building ahead. The building was tall and the windows thin. Its bricks waited in lengthy lines to greet barely visible glass windows. The empty football field to the right resembled an oversized lawn; the empty parking lot to the left housed nothing but litter. Finally reaching the school grounds I faced the wide steps that led to the front entrance.

“Rock Bridge High,” I read aloud, having noticed the school name across a wide brick sign in front. And seeing the school justified me. An emotional stew flushed my system, turning my skin red-warm.

I would be
that girl
there.

That girl
who everyone talks about but no one knows.
That girl
people wish they knew but don’t know why.
That girl
you’d never know is really screwed up inside. Seen, but never known:
that girl
, Ana Smith. A new breeze sent trash tumbling on the ground, ending the daydream I’d fallen into.

I turned back toward where I’d come from, toward Dr. Gomez’s house, and attempted to walk calmly. But that didn’t last. As if the anxiety I’d built up on the ride from Georgia couldn’t be contained any longer, my pace sped without me giving consent. The beige bag that hung from my right shoulder flopped and bounced while I ran, my black suitcase bumping each time it hopped over cracks in the concrete and pavement. My movement soon morphed into an awkward tumbling, somehow plunging on until I’d traveled that last block west and reached the subdivision entrance.

During an attempt to slow my pace, my shoulder bag swung in-between and around my legs, sending me sprawling into grass and dirt. Letting a moan escape from me, I positioned myself on all fours, breathing deeply and clutching the earth between my fingers. Directly in front of me, beyond the entrance, were houses … endless, infinitely large houses. Too much like the ones where Sydney lived in Georgia.

A sickness shot through my body. Nausea erupted from my gut and left me lightheaded. Anxiety crept in. Without meaning to, I stood on my feet and edged backward. Suddenly the only direction that it made sense to follow was the direction from which I came. Dr. Gomez didn’t even know me, and I didn’t know her. She would never just let me into her house.

Without another thought, I turned and ran. No destination, no plan, and no home.

I had no one.

Were there any possible benefits of this solitude, though? If I never told a soul, and remained unseen, was I ever even there? Passing the same trees just as I’d passed them before, I figured not.

Getting farther from Rock Bridge High, farther from Dr. Gomez’s neighborhood, the Greensboro scenery increasingly lost appeal. Clean brick homes turned into rusted, panel-and-wood ones. Grocery stores and banks turned into rundown gas stations and pawnshops. I started to see other people on the streets and sidewalks, age-seasoned clothing painted in sweat covering their wrinkled skins, each watching me and my bags trudge on as if we belonged. In fear of being bothered, robbed, or even spoken to, I turned right down a street where there were fewer people, then almost none.

During my many extra shifts at Checkers last summer, not only did I get breaks from thinking about Mom, and from being forced to sit at home with Dad, but I also earned enough to have $400 left in my account as I hopelessly roamed these Greensboro roads. It was probably enough to afford a motel room for a few nights, but definitely not enough to bribe someone into renting a room to a sixteen-year-old girl. So I walked on, hoping for some solution.

Eighteen blocks from Dr. Gomez’s neighborhood, twenty-one blocks from the school, a tattered brown shack stood to the right of the sidewalk. Long untended weeds and unkempt grass covered the ground that lay between it and me, with only a narrow path of crumbling concrete leading to the front door.

Despite its appearance, this place seemed … safe wasn’t the word. Empty. Alone, just like I was. I walked down the path that led to the shack’s door, and I pushed it open.

At once an overwhelming smell of
old
and
stale
swarmed into my nostrils. The entire place was built with wood, sometime many years ago with no renovations since. There was no walling inside, no drywall or paneling, just wood. I tiptoed in, just a step, careful not to touch its rotting walls.

Meek sunlight streamed in from the windows to expose cobwebs and spiders, mostly dead, but a few alive and starving. Rats must have been around somewhere but I didn’t see any—just bugs. In the corner of the room was a set of ancient kitchen appliances: refrigerator, stove, sink, cabinets. Each appliance sat buried in dust, grime, and rust.

“Gross.” The only word that fit.

Another cautious step into the shack: two wood doors with cobwebbed corners lined the wall to my right. I opened the first of them, discovering what I assumed used to be a bedroom, minus the furniture, resembling a bland, empty crate. I went back out to find out what the second door would reveal.

Swinging the second door open, I was careful to avoid touching its overwhelming dust and cobwebs. It was a bathroom, tiny, barely allowing room to fit the small shower, commode, sink and medicine cabinet it harbored. I found no indication of anyone having sat on that toilet for years. “So …
gross
.” I stepped inside to examine the dirt-stained glass above the sink, finding my still-new reflection between its cracks.

Watching Ana pose, thoughts of the way things were before this North Carolina trip infected my mind.

Life in Georgia was normal. I lived with a mom, a dad. I had a routine. My father was my rock, and so my mother was my pillow. Money didn’t trouble us. Our big house required a lawn service to tend the oversized yard. Mom and Dad supported me, too, always and whole-heartedly. We were forever close and forever happy. But even forever couldn’t be forever.

Mom, Dad, and Sydney were useless now, and Ana would be the only one to survive.

Her hair—precisely as planned—lay in several dark layers of rust-brown. Each of the hairs stacked on top of the others in an effortless arrangement, and though it felt odd on Sydney, it definitely suited Ana.

The haircut meant hiding my past, improving my present, and changing my future all in one. It made me new, mysterious. More like
Ana
. And so for the first time, that day I was immune. I was free.

I took another look at the cobwebs and wood that surrounded me and shrugged. In the hell I was living in, this shack was the best haven I had found in months.

It was already eight p.m. The shack was very much gross, but I could hide there for a night or so. I would. It had a roof and a floor. No rent. No intervention. No worries. My cowering earlier was precisely why I needed to be permanently rid of Sydney. I wasn’t giving Ana up.

There was no furniture, so I’d have to improvise. Outside, the sunlight was beginning to fade, so I scanned the main room for light switches. There were two along the wall to the left of the front door, but nothing happened when I flicked them both upward. I checked the bathroom and bedroom, and none of the switches in the shack even made a spark. I’d be without light until morning.

I’d be without electricity.

There must be moments like this in every man and woman’s life, in which the whole world is picked up, flipped over, shaken, and put back down sideways: hopefully for the better. For me, the first time was that February day, my freshman year of high school, when my parents brought me into the family room and instructed me to sit down. They told me Mom had breast cancer, severe, and the prognosis said a boatload of bullshit that walked around the fact she could very possibly die. The second time was when she died. I became weak and pitiful, and just as I lost my pillow, to complete my demise, my rock crumbled. Dad quit his job. He stopped caring, not noticing my high A’s turning into low B’s. He stepped aside when I most needed him to step up.

The third time was right then, standing in that brown, beaten shack, knowing whatever the hell I just chugged down, I would pay for it in the morning. But I was there, and it was better than being stuck in Georgia with Dad. Looking around at the big wooden crate of a place it was, I couldn’t ignore my obvious irrationality. But I knew for sure, I wasn’t leaving.

* * *

When I reached for my phone it was 6:45 a.m. Weary, I looked up and around the room, deciding to stay motionless in my makeshift bed. “School starts tomorrow.” I’m not sure whom I was telling. “I’m actually going to be Ana Smith.”

The paperwork I sent to the school listed Dr. Katherine Gomez as my guardian.

She had never met me, but she was the only hope I had for sanity again. It all happened after Mom died, when I began to wish I’d gotten to know my mother more. I was exhausted living with Dad’s breathing corpse, and I wished we had some extended family who could come and throw Dad into a mental institution, be my escape. We didn’t know any of my mom’s family, because her mom gave her up for adoption and Mom grew up in foster care until college. So I went to the Internet.

I must have Googled Mom’s maiden name, Sophia Gómez, fifty times, each time looking at a few more links to see if I saw anything I’d missed the time before. Usually nothing sprang up but a list of Sophia Gómezes that were not my mom, and tons of other Gómezes that showed no hint of being related to her. Until one day I found myself browsing the website of a clinic in North Carolina. One doctor on that clinic’s list shared my mother’s last name: Dr. Katherine Gómez.

Her bio wasn’t much more than average credentials, background, and doctor stuff. But then I read that she was born in Pasto, Columbia. Where my mother was born. I read her one-paragraph bio over and over and convinced myself this woman was connected to my mother. I convinced myself that she was my mother’s sister. I wondered how she’d feel about me, and if she’d want to talk to me and tell me about my mother’s family. I decided she should know I existed.

And that brought me to North Carolina.

If things went according to plan when I tried to visit her, I could have told her my story, found out she was in fact my aunt, and moved into her home where I could start my new life as Ana.

But it didn’t go that way. I freaked out. And now I had to scheme and worry, lying on a blanket in the middle of a hidden shack with no electricity or running water.

I’d given her address to the school, too. How would I get mail before it went to her house? I was pretty sure it was illegal to take mail from someone’s mailbox. Plus if I tried, someone might see, get suspicious, and call the cops. I even gave them Dr. Gomez’s work phone number, the one listed on her clinic’s site. Dad expected to hear her voice when I called him, too. My entire plan revolved around convincing Dr. Gomez to let me live with her.

For a minute that became two, I wondered if the charade was actually worth it. Even if it wasn’t a home, I had a house in Georgia I could run back to.

But I knew what I needed, and Georgia wasn’t it. I needed to, and was going to control my own life.

* * *

“Back-to-school shopping huh?” The Walgreens cashier wore a thin white blouse under her blue vest and a nametag that read “Candice.”

“Uh. Yep,” I managed, and she glanced up at me as I stuttered, “
Mhm
.”

“Rock Bridge?” she asked, and I nodded. “I just graduated last year, I’m heading to UNC in a few weeks.”

“Oh, nice. Great school.” I smiled and held my elbows.

“What year are you?”

“I’ll be a junior, starting tomorrow.”

“Hmm, wonder why I never saw you around. What’s your name?”

“Um, Ana.” It came out like a question.

“Well hi, Ana, nice to meet you.”

I should have answered with the polite response, “Nice to meet you too,” but I couldn’t seem to shake my vocal cords awake.

“That’ll be twenty-five thirty-nine,” she said, requesting an eighth of my entire savings with a smile.

With a clenched jaw I swiped my card through the magstripe reader and grabbed my bags.
Four paper folders, a calculator, two binders, two packs of paper, a box of granola bars, a bottled water, and a flashlight filled the two plastic bags in each of my hands. My new life.

Through the glass doors that led outside, sunlight shone in much brighter now than when I arrived. I pulled out my phone to GPS my way back to the shack, but the battery was low.

“Candice?” I was glad she wore a nametag.

“Yep?”

“Is there somewhere I can charge my phone?”

She showed me to a corner that housed an open outlet. I thanked her eagerly, but she seemed to think it no big deal, almost confused as to why I was so thankful. Watching her walk back to her checkout lane, the only person I had spoken to since I came to Greensboro, I wished she hadn’t already graduated.

My bags dropped to the floor beside the outlet and I left them there, pulled my charger from my purse, plugged it in, attached it to the phone, and plopped my butt down alongside my bags. An aisle of bright colors and plastic packaging made up my scenery as I leaned my head back against the wall.
What am I doing here?

The phone vibrated.

“Dad” blinked in bright white letters on the screen. The letters blinked and the phone vibrated a few times over, and I watched the screen until they didn’t anymore. What was I supposed to tell him? It’s not as if I wanted to hear his voice, either. The break from Dad, even though it had only been a day by then, was already refreshing me. Here people, normal people who didn’t know a thing about me or my dead mother or my depressed father, walked by and smiled at me as if to say, “Welcome to freedom.” Soon I would go back to Dr. Gomez’ house, and I would tell her that we were family, and she would call my dad with me, and I’d never have to live with Zombie Dad again. But until then, I’d be charging my phone in Walgreens and sleeping on a blanket in an abandoned shack.

Eventually my phone’s battery icon was completely green, so I unplugged the phone and loaded the GPS.

“Thanks again,” I called to Candice on the way out, and she smiled that innocent, refreshing smile that had no idea my life wasn’t under control.

After a decent-length walk, I was in the shack again. All day long I had managed to stay calm, but night approached. With Dr. Gomez having no idea of my existence still, the wood box would be “home” until I could think up a plan of action. School started the next day. All the shopping I would do was done, and the light falling in through the window would run out soon. With nothing but time to get nervous, I pulled out the papers I printed from the Rock Bridge High website. My schedule seemed all right, and the school map easy enough to follow. Feeling confident I could find my way to my classes, I packed the papers into my book bag and tossed the clothes in my suitcase around until I picked out an outfit. Something cute, but not overdoing it. I added the new supplies from Walgreens to my book bag, too, and re-zipped it before I set it in the corner. Lessening light in the bedroom cautioned that night was starting to settle in.

I lay on the thin blankets atop the flat wood floor, thinking if only I was a little stronger, smarter, I might just be in a guest bedroom in whichever one of those huge houses Dr. Gomez lived in. If not there, at least in some boarding school somewhere, or a runaway home, with air conditioning, maybe.

I wasn’t in any of those places, though, and I was scared. But things were okay for the moment. Wherever I was, I was glad not to be stuck in the black-hole home with Dad back in Georgia. Back where every inhale, every look around the room, shot pain through my spine.