Being alone—without the drone of midwestern accents, without the rustle of hair braiding or the slap of shower shoes—was so delicious. I decided to skip my waterskiing class and write letters and nap. And anyway, what was the point? I never even got a real turn. There were too many of us in the class, so mostly we just shivered on the dock in our life jackets, listening to Claire B. cry because her father was turning ninety.
But the few times I did get on skis, I found the experience otherworldly: I flew. Sometimes for mere seconds, but once it was minutes. Three at least. The world sped by: boats and houses and what looked like sketches of pine trees. Until I hit a choppy patch and, inexperienced as I was, wiped out hard. Skis flew, I did splits that weren’t natural to me, and I hit the surface ass first, nostrils second.
I woke up at sunset, hot and itchy, to the sound of my bunkmates returning home high on victory. “We smoked ’em!” Madeleine shouted, hurling her dirty socks into my lower bunk.
“They were slow and faaat,” Emily squealed, stripping down to her sports bra.
“Sooo suu-pair coo-elll,” Phillipine added in broken English, her dumb French face demented with pride.
At bonfire the waterskiing counselor asked me where I’d been. “Everyone else was on the field trip. You would have had the whole hour all to yourself.”
Can you imagine what my life would be like now if that had happened?
A GUIDE TO RUNNING AWAY FOR NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRLS
You want to run away. You want to run away for a lot of reasons, but let’s start with the most immediate: you are mad. At your father, because he’s not taking you seriously when you say you think you’ll lose your mind if you have to spend another night in your bedroom alone, staring at the moon. He thinks you’re having kid problems. He thinks kids have to “get through” their kid problems. He says, “just try and understand that it won’t get worse. The worst that will happen is it will stay the same.” This doesn’t comfort you. Because he doesn’t know there’s something in you—big, explosive, ready to surprise the world in a bad way if you’re not handled right, but ready to be beautiful if someone will just listen.
You are mad at your mother because sometimes she doesn’t pay attention and she says yes to a question that needs a different kind of answer. She is distracted. When she holds your hand it’s too loose and you have to show her how to do it right, how to make a little hammock for your fingers. You are mad at your mother because she’s sitting on the porch in her capri pants, talking on the telephone, telling someone else that you’re having a good summer.
You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can’t get a word in edgewise. But here in the country, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices.
Your godparents, also city people, live a mile down the road. She has red hair and cat’s-eye glasses; he is bald and does one voice to impersonate all four Beatles. One day your godfather and you get on your cordless phones and leave the house and see if you can make it to each other before they go static. You see him crest the hill, waving, just as his voice crackles and disintegrates.
Last week your parents had a party. Everyone drove up from the city. Artists, writers, boyfriends, girlfriends, a woman with purple eyebrows, and they parked their cars all across your lawn. Gregory’s brother made wine out of lilacs, and you took three sips, then pretended to be drunk, making a big show out of being unable to walk a straight line, like a drunk person on I Love Lucy. Around ten your parents sent you up to your room and you listened to the party burn down like a cigarette, your little sister breathing beside you, a trusty machine.
The day of the party had been the worst one of the summer. Your parents asked you to do chores that didn’t seem fair, didn’t seem like your problem, so you went to the attic and you threw raw eggs down at the front walk. Your father didn’t even seem angry, just put you to work scrubbing the stone with a kitchen sponge.
The day after the party it was all about cleaning up. And the day after that it was all about doing work. And the day after that was just another day and everyone’s making you sleep in your bed.
So now it’s time to run away.
First, you have to pack a bag. It’s probably best to use a mini backpack, so as not to weigh yourself down. You need to be able to move. You can use the baby-blue one you bought so you could feel more like Cher Horowitz in Clueless. But then you insisted on wearing it during dodgeball on the first day of school, and you became the fourth grade’s most hunted target. Nice one, weirdo.