Sneaking Out

It was beyond easy to sneak out when I was sixteen. As simple as waiting for dark and stepping outside the small camp trailer my sister and I lived in. You can picture the camper, it was a color you might call formerly white and had a big red shwoopditty along it and had some sort of fish on the side. It was the tiny kind where you turn the dining table/booth into a second bed (that’s where my sister slept.) and the couch becomes the main bed (that’s where I slept)  Grandpa had set up an extension cord between us and the house so we had electricity but when it rained you had to avoid touching anything plugged in if you were already touching any of the aluminum trim or you would receive a jolt of electricity. I don‘t know how much of a buzz; enough that you had time to feel it coursing through you and realize you couldn‘t make yourself let go.

Getting back in the trailer come dawn was far more difficult because by that time the dogs would be out and insist on greeting me as though we’d never met. But I didn’t have to think about that for hours. I didn’t have to think at all. I loved that about being sixteen. Everything  seemingly being written in pencil and no shortage of pink pearl ahead. Even as you were trying to write over the gray smudges your parents were making all over the page you were confident your marks would be edgier or more lasting or mattered at all. 

It was cold, a couple months into Autumn and there were leaves blowing about when I walked all the way into town. A whispered “Don’t tell anyone I left.” warning to my sister and the door swinging open silent into the night. I would walk out slow, measuring my steps down the driveway and then up the dark country road. There were no streetlamps and I had to try and avoid allowing myself to imagine what horrifying countrified creatures were plundering about in the ditch and pastures alongside me. Now and then a horse would make that snarfling snort noise horses make and I would nearly piss my pants.

 I risked smoking a cigarette. Mom pretty much knew I was smoking but having already grounded me for the rest of my life had little ammunition left. She said “if I catch you I’ll make you sit and smoke an entire carton.” but my face must have betrayed my eager reaction because she never followed through on the threat.  The biggest danger in smoking as I walked down the dark road was the fact that anyone who drove by would  likely pull over and offer me a ride whether I even knew them or not. Didn’t matter, they knew my grandma or an uncle or an aunt. It would be their pleasure to escort me home and then confirm to my grandma that I was indeed her “little lost girl.” But at sixteen I didn’t feel lost at all. Everyone around me was lost and I had to walk away from that traffic jam to get where I wanted to go; anywhere but there.

*********

September 16, 2009