CHAPTER ONE ' The Escape

I've had to pee for 45 minutes. This February wind is vengeful ' I'm sure that my urine is on the verge of solidifying, turning my urethra into a cylindrical iceberg. Checking the darkened windows behind me, I reconsider the possibility of an inconspicuous tinkle and run.
Too cold to write, Dawn set the journal on the cracked curb beside her. The wind slapped against her ear and she cursed herself for not owning a scarf. It was unusual for the weather to dip below 50 degrees, except once a year when the heavens sneezed a few flurries and the entire city shut down for two days. Dawn had stolen her dad's flannel coat to protect her from the bullying blast. Now she wondered why, since it was his bullying that she was running away from.
Dawn's mind had aged prematurely beyond her eighteen years. Perhaps it was due to the fact that instead of being reared by her biological parents, she considered Ayn Rand, Walt Whitman, and Jack Kerouac her closest kin.
Sitting with her feet in the gutter, she felt like a homeless child directly outside the house she grew up in. Her hands were so numb, she was sure that her fingerprints were fading.
She was fading.
She had wanted a new identity anyway.
An imposing mechanical whine sliced through the bitterness. A ramshackle school bus staggered around the corner, instigating profane accusations from the Cocker Spaniel next door. As the bus approached her, it grumbled hungrily, gaining momentum. She hopped back onto the curb, narrowly avoiding the rusty side mirror.
The doors opened, revealing the driver who, like the chipped yellow paint, was mockingly cheerful. 'All aboard the magic school bus, toot toot!'�
Dawn's eyebrow furrowed. 'What the hell is this?'�
'I couldn't get my dad's car so I stole this bus instead.'� Eric tilted his head, proud of his achievement.
'You stole a bus? Where did you find a short bus in the middle of the night?'�
'My dad's a bus driver, remember? Hurry up, we gotta go get Shawn.'�
Dawn took an unsure step closer to the door.
'Don't forget your bag.'� Eric's slightly dulled teeth peeked through a crooked grin as he pointed behind her.
In the anxiousness to leave, Dawn had almost forgotten the threadbare suitcase she had stolen from her mom's junk closet. Her mom wouldn't need it, she didn't travel any farther than the hospital these days. She hoisted the bag into the bus ' it was heavy since it carried more books than clothes - while Madonna serenaded her with 'True Blue'� from a boom box at Eric's feet.
'Your coach has come to take you to the ball, Cinderella.'� His voice was soft and welcoming - like mulled wine, heavily spiced.
'This is still a pumpkin.'� Dawn leaned over the seat behind Eric, considered the mother of her friends since he was twenty-two, to peck him on a stubbled cheek. 'It'll be cool to go cross country in a big bus like in Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. We should paint it Day-Glo Orange.'�
'Acid test? I didn't bring any.'�
'No. It's a book'�Tom Wolfe'�you know, Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters'�acid heads'�San Francisco in the 60s?'�
'Sorry baby. I don't believe in reading.'�
Dawn forced a puff of air through her nostrils. 'You know Timothy Leary, right?'�
'Of course, he was the god of acid. Pretty hot, too.'�
'They were of the same era. Ken Kesey was'� '�
'Hey, isn't my new hair fab? Meghan did it while we tripped four hits of microdot yesterday.'� He fluffed his Shirley Temple ringlets with an alabaster hand, free of calluses or lines. Dawn felt stupid for rambling on about things no one else seemed to care about. She glanced down at her own hands, frowning at the snagged cuticles and ink-smudged fingertips.
'You look like Strawberry Shortcake's hot gay brother. Let's get out of here, I gotta pee.'�
Eric focused his strength on the long silver lever. The door hesitated, fighting not to close. He wrapped two hands around the rusty bar and with a whine from the door and a 'huuhh'� from Eric, it finally closed.
'It's so freakin' cold! I'm glad I haven't shaved my legs for six weeks.'�
'It works well with your whole butch feminist thing...'� The buttery waves of his voice trailed off as the bus lurched forward into the night, throwing Dawn hard against the seat.
Dawn looked at her frayed baggy jeans and faded flannel coat. Her eyebrows crunched together and her lower lip poked out, but Eric failed to notice this rare show of emotion.
Eric's gentle locks bobbed to the beat as he became lost again in one of the cheery 80's melodies on the soundtrack of his life. Even though the nineties had been in full force for six years, Eric dressed and lived as a tribute to the decade passed.
An aggressive wire poked through the worn seat into Dawn's lower back. She shifted to avoid the attack. Looking out the smudged window, she noticed that someone had misspelled 'Jorge suks'� in magenta lip gloss.
They neared the end of the block, passing the symmetrical row of houses that lined the street: the simple dwellings of lower middle-class America. She took one last peek at the gray brick house, the color of dirtied souls, with a sloppily trimmed yard and patches of yellow that had eaten away at the wilted Bermuda grass. A few years before, her dad had spent weekend afternoons tending to that yard, planting matching crepe myrtles and lining the flower beds with mahogany wood chips. But that was before the yellow fungus crept into the yard and the shadowed hallways had been painted with suicidal tendencies.
No one seemed to notice that the porch light had burned out the year before, burying the house in darkness. As the bus disappeared around the corner, the faint glow of the streetlight eased her fears ' no one was peering from behind the dusty blinds, no one had been disturbed by her liberation.
Dawn was not surprised she has escaped successfully; she was accustomed to slipping through a tear in the fabric of existence. Even though she had maintained one of the highest averages in her advanced placement classes, she had never really been seen by her teachers or the other 'smart'� students. Sometimes when the teacher rattled on about differential equations, she pretended she was a specter, melting into the empty air around her.
She turned her focus back to Eric's floppy curls. 'What took you so long?'�
'I had to wait for the sperm donor to pass out before I could gank his keys.'�
'You should've slipped some roofies into his Natty Lite.'�
'I'm not trying to rape him. And besides, I put a 'lude in his Wild Turkey'�that old man's got some tolerance, it took two and a half hours to kick in.'� Eric's speech was slow and deliberate like a voice-over for a relaxation tape.
'Damn, what was he doing?'�
'Watching Attack of the Killer Lesbian Barbie Twins. Something like that.'�
The previous summer Dawn had walked in on his father, a sticky stream of drool trickling down his unshaven chin, sitting in his worn green easy chair with one hand in his pants and one stroking a bottle of five dollar whiskey. She shuddered.
Dawn placed her ear to the cracked window. The steady din of crickets and occasional dog pleading for companionship was eerily peaceful and depressing.
She thought how she should feel something: apprehension, relief, excitement. All she had was a sort of bloated acid reflux feeling in her stomach.
Something fuzzy crawled between her ankles. It was a longhaired Persian cat with a sad face and distressed eyes. 'You brought Sahara.'�
'Well I couldn't leave my baby behind, she'd get suicidal. After that time she had that real bad trip,'� his blueberry locks danced as he shook his head, 'she hasn't been the same.'�
'Who would've thought that five people petting her while frying balls could get her so messed up?'�
'It comes out through your pores, baby. Cory used to lick people when they were tripping just to get a contact high.'�
Dawn placed the cat in her lap and played with her bushy tail, even though she hated cats.
'You got a cigarette?'� Eric batted his curly dark eyelashes at her in the greasy mirror above his head.
'You know I quit.'�
'And I turned hetero. Give me a cigarette.'�
A twinkling light danced across the stud in his tongue as he continued to croon. The baby blue tee proclaiming 'Boys Lie'� stretched tightly over his broad shoulders accentuated his bulky chest. Tangled among the short blonde fuzz of his wrist was a pink and yellow beaded bracelet that Dawn had given him two years before. His fierce amber eyes were intensified by the sparkly silver powder he'd dusted across the lids. But it was the glitter in his eye - like a splinter - and the way his smile curled up only on one end that betrayed the secret that this guy wasn't quite right.
'Damn, Eric, you do your make-up better than me.'� She pulled two Marlboro Lights out of the backpack.
'I should've been a girl.'�
'And I should have been a man. Instead, we're just superstars.'� She handed him a lit cigarette and sucked on the one she'd placed between her own chapped lips. She found her lemon-flavored Chapstick and continued with the cigarette, which now tasted a bit like burnt lemonade.
'Where's Shawn?'�
'He's still at Terrence's. I told him to be ready at midnight.'�
Dawn sighed and picked at the cracked seat in front of her. 'How's he doing?'�
'I haven't talked to him for a few days. I think he'll deal better with the whole thing once we get out of this town.'�
'We just have to be supportive. He's been through a lot. You know that he...'�
'True blue, baby I love you'�'� Eric continued to bob his head to the music. 'I should've been a back up singer.'�
Dawn looked back up at the mirror and stared at her reflection. Her deep red strands, the color of dried blood, made her incredibly fair skin look even whiter.
Dead.
A recent fifteen pound weight loss caused her cheeks to jut out like boulders propping up the purple circles under her eyes. A few pimples broke the usual placid landscape of her sallow skin. Her pupils were wide and angry; the blue had been swallowed up by the encroaching blackness.
Eric continued to sing along to a song without any words.
Dawn opened her backpack and found her black journal with the unlined white pages. She fished for a pen and instead pulled out a tampon, a pencil with a broken eraser, a burnt out flashlight, a dried up green highlighter, Chapstick'�and finally the University of Texas pen she'd been given at a college fair ' the only thing she would write with. Even though no one had ever told her she could go to college, she wandered over to the brightly decorated tables in the school lunch room to marvel at the brochures. High school had been so painful'that's why she worked so hard to graduate a year early. But she couldn't fight this gnawing suspicion that college might be different. People went there to learn, right?
But none of that matter. She would only have herself to worry about now. No more trips to the hospital for chemo treatments. No more trips to the grocery store, armed with detailed instructions on how to select ripe fruit or milk with the appropriate sell-by date. No more conversations that began, 'I know mom, but he really does love you,'� or 'It's not your fault he changed,'� or 'You just have to get better and then you can find a friend.'�
She opened to a clean page, which wasn't necessarily in any certain order. She was usually stoned or tripping when she wrote so she didn't follow any logical rules of penmanship. Her life seemed to follow the same pattern.
She began writing furiously, in a hand that was barely decipherable. She didn't try to be witty or grasp for big words to impress herself. She didn't expect to reread anything she wrote, and usually didn't.
Most people will think I'm cruel and heartless, and I agree. I have stopped feeling guilty about wishing that God, that great being I was taught to fear, would let the cancer consume her. I hope she goes quickly without suffering. But I can't bear the pain for her anymore. I have so much of my own to carry.

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