She shuts her phone and looks up at this new house, a house bought for the low, low price of Everything She’d Ever Known to Be True. “Glass and concrete and stone,” she whispers, the chorus of one of her favorite songs. She smiles, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, and finishes the lyric. “It is just a house, not a home.”
Bursting through the front door, Our Heroine takes the steps three at a time. She ignores the new-house smell—a strange combination of sanitizer, tacos, and pigheaded denial—and sprints to her bedroom. Here, she repacks her trusty JanSport backpack with overnight provisions, a bottle of water, toiletries, extra clothes, meds, war paint, makeup remover, and a bag of potato chips. She dashes into her father and stepmother’s bedroom and drops to her knees in front of the feminine dresser. Our Heroine reaches behind a neatly folded stack of Spanx in the bottom drawer and retrieves a coffee can labeled HILLS BROS. ORIGINAL BLEND. Popping the cap, she removes a thick wad of bills and counts by Andrew Jacksons to eight hundred eighty dollars. (Her evil stepmother had overestimated the secrecy of this hiding spot, for Our Heroine sees all.)
Adding the can of cash to her backpack, she bolts from her house-not-a-home, jogs a half mile to the bus stop, and catches a metro line to the Jackson Greyhound terminal. She’s known the where for a while now: Cleveland, Ohio, 947 miles away. But until today, she wasn’t sure of the how or when.
The how: a bus. The when: pronto, posthaste, lickety-split.
And . . . scene.
But you’re a true Malone, and as such, this won’t be enough for you. You’ll need more than just wheres, whens, and hows—you’ll need whys. You’ll think Why wouldn’t Our Heroine just (insert brilliant solution here)? The truth is, reasons are hard. I’m standing on a whole stack of them right now, with barely a notion of how I got up here.
So maybe that’s what this will be, Iz: my Book of Reasons. I’ll explain the whys behind my whats, and you can see for yourself how my Reasons stack up. Consider that little clandestine convo between Dad, Kathy, and Schwartz Reason #1. It’s a long way to Cleveland, so I’ll try and space the rest out, but for now, know this: my Reasons may be hard, but my Objectives are quite simple.
Get to Cleveland, get to Mom.
I salute myself.
I accept my mission.
Signing off,
Mary Iris Malone,
Mother-effing Mother-Saver
RETRACING THE STICK FIGURE on the front of this journal makes little difference. Stick figures are eternally anemic.
I pull my dark hair across one shoulder, slump my forehead against the window, and marvel at the outside world. Before Mississippi had her devilish way, my marvelings were wondrously unique. Recently they’ve become I-don’t-know-what . . . middling. Tragically mediocre. To top it off, a rain of biblical proportions is absolutely punishing the earth right now, and I can’t help feeling it deserves it. Stuffing my journal in my backpack, I grab my bottle of Abilitol. Tip, swallow, repeat daily: this is the habit, and habit is king, so says Dad. I swallow the pill, then shove the bottle back in my bag with attitude. Also part of the habit. So says I.
“Th’hell you doing in here, missy?”
I see the tuft first, a tall poke of hair towering over the front two seats. It’s dripping wet, and crooked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The man—a Greyhound employee named Carl, according to the damp patch on his button-down—is huge. Lumbering, even. Still eyeballing me, he pulls a burrito out of nowhere, unwraps it, digs in.
Enchanté, Carl.
“This is the bus to Cleveland, right?” I rummage around in my bag. “I have a ticket.”
“Missy,” he says, his mouth full, “you could have Wonky’s golden fuckin’ ticket for all I care. We ain’t started boarding yet.”
In my head, a thousand tiny Mims shoot flaming arrows at Carl, burning his hair to the ground in a glorious blaze of tuft. Before one of these metaphysical Mims gets me into trouble, I hear my mother’s voice in my ear, echoing a toll, the chime of my childhood: Kill him with kindness, Mary. Absolutely murder him with it. I throw on a girlish smile and my mother’s British accent. “Blimey, that’s a lovely uniform, chap. Really accentuates your pectorals.”
The Leaning Tower of Tuft calmly chews his burrito, turns, points to the open door. I throw on my backpack and ease down the aisle. “Seriously, old chap. Just dynamite pecs.”
I’m out the door and into the squall before he can respond. I don’t suppose that’s what Mom would have meant by murdering with kindness, but honestly, just then, that was the only me I could be.
Flipping my hoodie over my head, I cross the station lot toward an awning, hopping a half-dozen rising puddles. Underneath the canopy, seven or eight people stand shoulder to shoulder, glancing at watches, rereading papers, anything to avoid acknowledging the uncomfortable nearness of strangers. I squeeze in next to a middle-aged man in a poncho and watch the water pour over the edge of the awning like a paper-thin waterfall.
“Is that you?” says Poncho Man, inches away.
Please don’t let him be talking to me, please don’t let him be talking to me.