If Shyann could have planned better, she wouldn’t have gone in winter. New Jersey in late January was full of frigid gusts of wind, the kind that swept up your pant legs, and strung out tears from your eyes. Snow in the city limits quickly turned gray; maybe it even came down from the sky that color. It could be that it was only white in other towns and in storybooks, and in the cotton-candy fluff they pumped out for holiday movies. Here, there were gray patches on the sidewalks, the ice making the pavement so slick someone could slip and fall if she tried to run.
If it had been warmer—if Shyann could have held on through the winter, kept her head down, didn’t let herself care so much what they all said about her—she would have gone in spring, when the city warmed but before the humidity got the whole area in its clutches. There were ragged plots of land behind some of the row houses in her neighborhood, and if a person didn’t have the money to hop a train and leave, a person could survive there without being detected. If she were smart about it.
The brush was thickly grown over the fences, and the trees gave shade. No one in their right mind went back there—no one besides dealers, who went in there to hide stashes, or bums, who went in there to sleep—but she could see herself in one of those vacant lots, building a tree house out of vines and old plywood, tires and netting, completely concealed from anyone down on the ground.
Maybe sometimes a couple from the neighborhood would slip in past the fences to hook up, but they’d get it done and be out fast enough. Cops didn’t go back there. Feral dogs did, and scruffy cats without collars, but she’d just kick them down when they climbed her tree.
She’d descend from her perch in the branches only at night, to scrounge for food. When she slept, in her tree house hidden in the middle of her city, she’d
open her eyes to see a blanket of stars.
No one could take that view from her.
Out there was an entire universe, proof that there was life outside this one, and every night she’d have a reminder.
She would have gone in spring, if she could have waited.
She couldn’t wait.
Shyann did have her reasons, and they weren’t secret. She’d left her parents a note:
CANNOT take
this anymore!
What is it going
to take to make
u listen!
I am NOT
going back to
that school!
But the note wasn’t found for four and a half days, because her little brother balled it up inside his toy dump truck. It wasn’t until the toy tipped over, spilling its contents, that Shyann’s mother recognized her handwriting and unballed the note to finally see what her daughter had said.
Truth was, Shyann watched her family’s windows for hours before she left the confines of the backyard. Out there, where the trash cans were stored, there was a shed that the superintendent never used. Shyann spent her first night inside this shed. She bundled up, keeping a hole uncovered for her two eyes and nothing more, and every once in a while she’d stand and peek outside the shed to her parents’ second-floor windows. They had no idea she was so close. Her mom could have called her name out the window and she would have been startled enough to bolt up and say, “Yes, ma’am?”
Her
second
night
away,
she
abandoned the shed. It was too close, and now that she’d stayed out a whole night, she was getting anxious about the consequences of coming back. Part of her did want to go home, but when she stepped nearer to the trash cans, she heard voices she recognized, from those kids who lived on her block. She imagined what they’d throw at her, like the bottle that one time. Like trash in the street. Like brightly colored pellets of candy,
small
and
rock-hard
as
hailstones. When held in hot, grimy fists they sweated off some of their coating, so you could see the impact of them on her clothes as if she’d been out playing paintball. Orange, brown, blue, green, red; the darkest spots where she was hardest hit.
She was about to come out, but she heard those voices. And she knew that if she left her hiding place, if she went home and returned to school, she’d get worse things thrown at her. Far worse.
And then she’d topple. They could dump all they wanted on her, the contents of whole trash cans even, and she’d just lie there, and let herself be buried, and that would be the end of Shyann.