SAT Runaway
Part 1 of 2
The Getaway
March 2010. The weather has been fickle. One day it feels like winter is gone, the good days are on their way. The next day there’s a chance of snow and the parka comes back out of the closet. Today Dylan wears her North Face, the high is 58. She blasts the heat in her mother’s car. The morning is cold and the daylight seems out of reach.
Part of Dylan regrets not hitting snooze. If she carpooled with her friend Kate she could have slept in longer. Her time anxiety and slow driving won’t allow her to leave that close to the start time, though. Plus she wants to be alone for the pre ritual she’s had planned for months. Play the CD she burned, eat her high energy snacks, go over some last minute notes, then visualize.
The CD slips into the player. Bulletproof plays. Start high energy, get confident. As she drives through her hometown she thinks of how ready she is to leave it. Today would be the first step. Get great scores and get out. But what if she blows it?
The pump up songs aren’t doing the trick. She needs inspiration. With embarrassment she skips to The Climb by Miley Cyrus. This was supposed to be her “approaching song” but instead she replays it three times. As she parks in the school lot, she shuts off the music all together.
Dylan observes the foreign high school, a lot nicer than hers. Her research proved to be true. She heard horror stories of people taking the test at schools with no A.C or heat. Kate first took it at an all-boys catholic school and there was literal shit on the floor of the bathroom. There definitely won’t be shit here.
It’s large and intimidating. Cold and void of life. She’s not in the mood to eat her snacks. So she presses her seat back and tries her visualization. Opening the test, knowing the answers - - “I should have done more tutoring” - - “why is there an essay now” - - “what if I run out of time…”
Dylan pulls the lift of her seat a little too hard and practically catapults, like the negative thoughts in her mind. She sees a car drive into the lot- another early bird. She roots around the console for gum, that random stress ball, anything to fidget with.
Dylan finds a CD from last year, when things seemed easier. Maybe she can channel that energy. She pops it in.
It starts to rain. What the fuck. Rain wasn't even in the forecast. Dylan’s not prepared. She doesn’t know how rain could possibly affect her performance but it’s not in the plan. Oh, of course the girl next to her exits with an umbrella. Dylan rests her forehead on the steering wheel and tries to take a deep breath.
Dog Days are Over plays. The doors open an hour before test time but Dylan stays put. Visualization comes without her realizing, but not the one she planned.
She’s running like the song says. Running far from this school. Crawling back into her bed. Avoiding the world. As the song picks up she looks back at her backpack- with hatred, then at the door- with fear, then at the raining sky- with curiosity.
Dylan puts the car in reverse. She drives. Drives past this other suburb, past her suburb, and toward the city.
Her blackberry pings and she’s taken out of her trance. She realizes she doesn’t know where she’s going and pulls over by a random park. Kate: “where are you?”
She breathes rapidly. “I can’t fucking do it I can’t handle it please I can’t I can’t.” She wants to scream but a lone kid at the park jumps in puddles. So she holds it back. Then the child starts crying and screaming, as if she teleported her emotions into him.
He’s whining that he’s too wet. His mom comforts him. They will go home and get him dry. But on their way out, he jumps in three more puddles. Because he knows he’s going back to safety. Because even though what he’s doing makes him uncomfortable, he’s having fun. It seems to Dylan that she has all of the discomfort and none of the fun, lately.
As she texts Kate “omg I’m so sick. I cannot believe this is happening today,” she feels ripples of shame. The car is suffocating, the blind spots are expanding. She prays the rain turns into a storm, and lightning strikes a power line at the school, and the test gets canceled.
Right on cue, the clouds start to part and the sun pokes through. The puddles are already drying up. She wants to jump in one herself before they disappear.
Dylan doesn’t know where she is, but she suddenly has an idea of where she’d like to go…
The Retreat
As she parks, she thinks about the time she ran away from home as a kid. She had gotten in a theatrical fight with her family, so she packed a suitcase and said her goodbyes. Dylan made it around the block before stopping and waiting to be saved.
She wishes someone could save her now, she thinks as she walks onto the beach. Or her dad could pick her up to jump over the waves like when she was small. It’s as if she doesn’t have the strength to fight the waves anymore. She’s stopped enjoying the things she once loved.
But she still showed up. Dylan had mastered the art of pretending she was there when really she had run away around the block.
Her feet stand firm in the cold sand- not sinking like they do in the summer. It was her favorite part of earth growing up. She never wanted to leave, she didn’t understand why vacation had to be temporary.
Sleepyhead plays on her iPod touch as she walks toward a row of houses that line the beach. Cozy but expensive places who’s back deck literally sits above the sand.
She climbs the ladder to a deck, like muscle memory, and steps over the roped “wall.” Dylan finds the hose and washes away the sand. She was never good at getting the backs of her legs but also never wanted to ask for help. So she was constantly tracking sand into the house.
The house appears empty through the big glass window. She was hoping her MomMom wouldn’t be in the living room- god forbid she give her another stroke- and had a chance to knock on the sliding doors before entering. But the sliding door is locked, which means her MomMom isn’t home. Where could she be on a Saturday?
Dylan supposes she should go to the front to ring the doorbell, but the lounge chairs call to her. She lays back in one and looks out onto the shore.
A boat sailing, someone walking their dog, bursts of sand flying through the air when the wind picks up. Like static on a television, like her emotions these past few months. She can’t grasp them, she can’t quite make them out, and they hurt when she attempts to walk through them.
The SAT’s are about to be done. It’s time to make the dreaded phone call. She can’t do it sitting still so she climbs down the ladder to the beach. Sometimes when there is a bad storm, the ocean reaches the house. She’s witnessed the ladder being swept away a couple of times. Can the ocean come sweep her away now?
She treks through the beach, to the old wooden steps that connect to the street, around the corner to the shore house driveway. Let the ringing continue. Let her be connected to her mother through a voicemail. Because saying it out loud to another human makes it more real.
Voicemail. “Hi. Sorry I couldn’t call before. I’m okay. I’ll get the car back to you soon. There was an issue with my testing thing. I think I signed up wrong I don’t know. But I was so pissed off that I just like went for a drive. I’m calling the testing center now. I’ll figure it out. Be back soon.”
It amazes her how skilled she’s gotten at lying. Although her mom will see through the “going for a drive.” Driving never relaxed her. She should have said she went to a friends. Shit. She buries down the stress and looks at the front door of her MomMom’s home.
“Home is where the beach is.” Maybe, Dylan thinks. She’s been having this nagging, ruminating thought at night that pleads “I want to go home.” But she is literally home when it happens, so she doesn’t understand what it means.
Her Home Away from… her Other House
A car pulls into the driveway and before her MomMom can be helped out, Dylan can hear her screaming: “Oh my god!” Her MomMom has always had a flare for dramatics. She ignores her Aid’s assistance and steps out.
“My Dylan. What is this? What a surprise. Oh my god. Ava do you see this? My granddaughter’s here!” Dylan embraces her MomMom who smells like oriental perfume, the salty air, and an expensive purse.
A “pocketbook” her MomMom would call it. Forever asking one of her nine grandkids to “fetch her pocketbook” so she could give them money to get a treat.
As they hug, Dylan feels her phone ring in her pocket. She pulls back and see’s it’s her mother. Her face flushes and she looks to her MomMom, who reaches out her hand for support to step up to the door. Dylan swallows back tears.
“I’m okay, sweetie. I’m so much better- right Ava? I only use the cane once in a while.” And Dylan smiles because MomMom would think she was crying over her. Her smile turns into a laugh when mid sentence, MomMom feigns a cough and pretends to forget Dylan’s name. Her fucked up and self-deprecating sense of humor certainly passed onto to the entire family.
When they enter the shore house, Dylan exhales. They walk up the few steps. The whole place feels alive yet soft. With classic beach house accents: a seashell lamp, a watercolor of an ocean scene, whites and blues and yellows. Nautical, eccentric, chic, and warm.
The living room where they rarely sat as children- too busy playing outside. The kitchen, constantly stocked with their favorite snacks. The dining room table, where they had family dinners from whatever takeout the kids begged for that night. And everywhere she looks, pictures of herself and the other grandchildren through the years.
MomMom discusses her morning. Down Beach Deli then shopping, which Ava brings in now. Dylan listens and ambles to the vast, ocean-view window, where there is a cushioned bench for her to sit.
The pair of vintage yellow binoculars hang as decor. She looks through them, out of the window, and see’s there are now multiple ships gliding through the Atlantic.
From here she can see adventure, a whole world of possibility. From the desk in that high school, she would only see four white walls and a ticking clock. She tells herself this, but the reminder of her decision causes her to emit a heavy sigh.
Her MomMom sits and calls her over. Dylan sinks into the couch beside her.
“Are you still going with that guy? Oh he was so wonderful when we met.”
She said this about all the grandkids’ boyfriends and friends over the years. Dylan didn’t want to talk about him. Nothing was wrong , she was just bored with him and everyone else around her.
“So what’s going on then?”
For some reason Dylan never lied to her MomMom. She never felt judged for telling the truth. So she does.
“Well, I think you should phone your mother. But forget about that test right now. Stay here for as long as you need. Let me send Ava home.”
Dylan lets out a breath. On the coffee table sits the bowl of M&Ms. It was the only time Dylan ate M&Ms and she found herself absentmindedly eating them now - the first thing she’s eaten all day. When she was a kid her MomMom would sometimes pick a color “only green ones today.”
She wanted someone to limit her decisions now. A presence that would hand her only one color of M&M each day. A chance to try them all out. In the end, they all led to the same taste. There was something both comforting and scary about that. She pops a blue one into her mouth.
The Unexpected
Her palms tingle as she sends a text to her mom. She isn’t ready to call. A text from Kate pops up: “I feel like it was a super easy one you should def take them here.”
The regret grows from her stomach to her chest. The ocean has come up to the house but drowns her rather than sweeping her away.
Stuck and spinning, like when she caught a rough wave on the boogie board and at the end of the run struggled to get a hold of herself. Tumbling under the surface with her ankle attached to the board. Now she was attached to the weight of responsibility.
So she free’s her ankle to get to the surface. Turns off her phone to avoid the tumbling.