We lived together in complete peace, away from our past on videotape. Then one day the other no one said, “I’m going back to a place I can’t forgive, but I have to go back on videotape.”
__________
“Where do you think you’re going?” I whispered.
Alicia spun around surprised with little Jason in her arms. She didn’t see me behind her. “Stephanie! Don’t scare me like that, I could have dropped Jason.” Dried tears streaked her cheeks.
Jason’s little hands reached out to me, wanting to be held. “Aunt Steph, Aunt Steph!” he mumbled.
I just stood there looking at Alicia. I could see guilt in her eyes. The sounds of people talking all around us became louder and the sounds of the trains moving quickly from all around us deafened me. Every noise in this train station held a memory. Sad or happy, the memories flooded my brain.
She avoided my eyes completely. She couldn’t look me in the eyes. “Why are you doing this, Alicia? You don’t have to go back to that world. We could stay here forever, Alicia! Just like Logan said, this is our home now. We never have to go back. Never-” Before I could finish, tears rushed from my eyes and my words jumbled into nothing. My throat felt dry and my legs trembled.
“Stephanie,” Alicia dropped the suitcase in her other hand and held me up to keep me from falling . “Stephanie, get ahold of yourself you idiot. If you cry, I might cry too.”
I looked up and could see Jason, my best friend’s beautiful little boy, clinging to his mother with tears bubbling in his eyes. I had to control myself, if not for me, then for Jason.
“I’m sorry Alicia, but please, just please, tell me why. Why are you going back?” I looked her in her eyes no matter how much she tried to escape from mine. She tugged her hand away and grabbed her suitcase again. “Alicia-”
“Stephanie! Can’t you see we can’t live in this fantasy world forever?”
I knelt there, stunned. “Fantasy? Alicia, that fantasy is our home!”
“No, it’s not. One day you’ll realize that it's hard world out there in the real world and you can’t just sit around on your butt all day, getting high, and expect everything to just come to you on a silver platter. Stephanie, just because you might have had a hard beginning doesn’t mean that it’s just picking daisies from here on out. That’s not how it works in the real world, babe.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Alicia and I had always been on the same page. What was happening to my best friend?
“What are you talking about Alicia? That doesn’t explain why you’re going back. You and Jason were fine here and will still be fine if you stay.”
A train pulled into the station at that moment. Alicia didn’t say a thing, but I could see the anger and fear in her eyes. I grabbed on to Alicia’s leg frantically, not wanting her to go.
“Stephanie, this place isn’t real! It’s just limbo and right now, I’m going back to hell to see if I can make it to heaven. When you realize that staying here was the biggest mistake of your life, call me. I’d like to hear all about it, but for now I have to make it out there, in the real world.” She said as she kicked me off her leg. I fell backwards tasting the blood in my mouth. “Maybe one day you’ll see it, Stephanie, when you have a little Jason of your own to take care of. Life isn’t about you anymore and those videotapes will never disappear.” She sighed, and got on the train.
I scrambled up on my feet and ran for the train, but the door closed shut in front of me. “No, Alicia come back, please!”
“Hey, get away from there! Stand behind the yellow line, young lady!” A man in uniform came up from behind me, pulling me away from the slowly moving train. I couldn’t let go of the only best friend I’d ever had. Alicia was my other half, my big sister, the one I could always look up to.
The man pulled and pulled, but I kept on fighting. I couldn’t let go! I didn’t want to let go! This wasn’t the end of Alicia and me or, at least, that’s what I wanted to believe.
“Alicia!”
__________
“Oh, whoa, what happened to you, sweetie?” Logan asked, worried, as he opened the rusty door. His long, shaggy hair brushed across his dazed face in the evening breeze. His goatee had remnants of whatever he’d just eaten in its hairs. He looked as raggedy as ever.
“Nothing,” I answered showing no emotion. I shoved past him and into the dorm’s long hallways. The cracked lights overhead flickered and dust kicked up from the old rugs that covered the floor.
“Yeah, and I’m supposed to believe that nothing happened, especially from a girl who comes home with blood on her lip and a black eye.” He joked. I kept on walking toward the stairs, paying no attention to him. Logan didn’t give up. Instead he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and walked with me to the stairs. “Come on, baby, talk to me. What happened, and where’s Alicia and Jay?”
“They’re gone.” I said blankly. I could barely comprehend what I’d just said.
“What?” Logan brushed it off, but when he saw my lifeless expression, his own face went pale. “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute here. What do you mean they’re gone?” he looked earnestly concerned.
“I mean what I said, Logan. Now get out of my face.” I elbowed him in the stomach and he instantly backed off. I could suddenly feel tears approaching, and I didn’t need Logan seeing me cry. I bolted for the stairs and ran up them as fast as I could, holding back the tears.
“Wait, Steph!” I heard him call from the bottom of the steps, but I just kept running as fast as I could. I finally reached the fourth floor when I ran out of breathe.
This isn’t happening, I thought, this cannot be happening! Before I knew what was going on, I was crying, crying my eyes out on top of the stairs of the fourth floor.
“Just one more floor,” I cried. “Just one more floor.”
The pounding of Logan’s feet running up the stairs surprised me. When he turned the corner of the stairs and saw me curled up on the top step crying, he stopped. “Stephanie,”
“They’re gone, Logan, don’t you get it? They left us for that cold world, Alicia left us for a street corner.” I yelled at him. He seemed to turn to stone. His pale face was still.
“But,” he stuttered. “But why, why would they leave? You better not be playing with me Stephanie, because this isn’t funny!” He stepped closer and reached out his hand, but I flinched back. I didn’t need his help, especially if he wasn’t going to believe me.
“Do I look like I’m kidding with you? Tell me, is this the face of someone who’s just playing?” I roared. My voice echoed through the dark halls and sounds of stumbling came from behind the doors around us.
The door closest to Logan and I opened. A young girl came out from behind the door. “What’s going on out here, Logan?” she asked, pushing her matted hair from out of her eyes. Her face was covered in dirt stains and her teeth were already turning yellow. But innocence still glowed from her face, even if she was right off the streets.
“Nothing Darla Candy, now go back into your dorm and finish unpacking, okay?” Logan said caringly. Seeing Logan acting like this reminded me so much of when I first came to the run-away house. His fatherly face and gentle approach, it was the reason Alicia and I stayed. Logan was the reason we were both still alive.
Darla Candy was obviously that little girl’s stage name. Her tiny face just looked at Logan with concern, but she inched back into her room slowly. When she was gone, Logan sighed and dragged himself to the top step. He drooped down next to me and planted his face in his palms.
“Poor girl.” He whispered.
“What?” I said almost angry that he’d appeared to have forgotten what we’d just been talking about.
“That girl,” He said raising his head from his hands.
I took a breath. I was upset, but I needed to calm down. “What about that girl?” I pouted.
“She’s just like you Stephanie.” I looked at Logan, his face was sincere, but the pain from his life left wrinkles. Twenty-five year olds shouldn’t have wrinkles. “Her name’s Darlene. She’s from Delaware too. She came all the way here because she heard the rumors of a run-away house for girls like herself. Stephanie, she knocked on the door, said she wanted to stay, and told me she was three hundred for an hour.”
My eyes must have widened because Logan just laughed when he say my face. I shook the surprise from my expression and put on serious façade. Why was Logan even telling me this? “Logan a lot of girls and boys come to this house because they heard of a safe haven. That’s kind of the point of why they come.”
I stood up, my legs still trembling and started up the next flight of stairs. “Then tell me Steph, why would they want to leave?”
I stopped in my tracks. I didn’t know. I would never know why someone would want to leave this place. This place was home. It was heaven. I didn’t stay there for long, I ran up the stairs and through the far hallways until I found my dorm.
__________
The one in the far corner. This one. Yup, that’s the one. Wow, it’s huge! I thought you guys would like this one. It’s the biggest one other than mine. Seriously? That’s so cool. That’s so cool. That’s so cool.
“Get these stupid memories out of my head!” I woke up in cold sweat. There was darkness all around me as I looked around the room. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Oh, it was just a dream.” I said reaching for the lamp at my bed side. “Sorry if I woke you up Alicia-” But when the lamp flickered on, Alicia wasn’t there. I panicked for only a moment, but slowly slipped back into reality.
I sat up in my bed shivering. The bed next to me was empty and so was the crib in the far corner. The sheets were neatly made and the side of the room Alicia claimed as her own slice of heaven was empty. Nothing remained of her heaven.
The window was open and the moonlight shone through. I got up, out of my blankets to close the windows that were letting in the icy fall winds. The floor was cold as I stepped down on the floor. Everything in the room felt cold. So cold. It was if Alicia took all the warmth and homeliness with her and I was left feeling like a stranger in a freezing room.
From the window I could see the other ghettos around me. The tall dormitory’s where students once lived, but were now the homes to filthy refugees, the people running from a life they didn’t choose to be thrown into or brought upon themselves. Run-aways, druggies, and child prostitutes like me. The people who ran for their lives without looking back, just hoping there’d be a place they could call home. The sluts, addicts, and unwanted children, they all ran from a life, a life they couldn’t balance on their shoulders.
I couldn’t handle that life. A life on a street corner waiting for your next lover to come take you away. A life where you’d just hope not to be strangled to death that night by the man who just kissed your emotionless lips. A life where your own mother sold you to the highest bidder. A life where your virginity made you enough money to put you on a train and take you away to a place only God knows about.
Tap, tap.
A knock on the door snapped me out of my stupor. It was probably Logan worried about my scream. “Come in.” I called, closing the window and pulling back the curtains. I could hear the door creaked open. “Logan, will you just come in, you know that door’s whine gives me the creeps . . .”
But I trailed off noticing that it wasn’t Logan at my door. Instead it was a young girl with matted brown hair and tragic-glazed eyes. Her face was dirty and pale, but her innocence once again shined through.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but you’re Stephanie Gates, right?” she whispered, her voice crackly.
I stood there dumbfounded. Now what would little Darla Candy want me for?
Spoiler
I'm not finishing this. I just want to see what you think. Chapter Three of The Reason for Rain will be out soon. Thank you for your patience.
