Free About a Girl by Sarah McCarry Page B

bug. He’d find out soon enough, from Raoul or from Henri, that I was gone, and teary goodbyes were for babies, and anyway I had nothing to say to him, or if I did I didn’t want to think about what it might be. I was a scientist, and scientists didn’t have feelings, and that was what was important, because I did not like feelings, which had thus far only inconvenienced me to no end. I stole an old knapsack of Raoul’s out of the hall closet after he and Henri had gone to bed and filled it with a few T-shirts and a couple of pairs of shorts, socks and underwear and a pair of jeans and my favorite old sweatshirt. Running shoes, just in case. I had spent most of my life largely indifferent to the garments with which I garbed myself, and I did not imagine anyone in the country would care much what I dressed like anyway. If Jack wanted to see me in a nice dress he would have to buy me one himself. I looked longingly at my telescope but it was unwieldy, and I didn’t know anything about Jack’s house— Where the hell are you going to stay, Tally, you idiot —but my thoughts went fuzzy again, and the voice subsided. “I’ll find somewhere,” I said aloud. “A hotel.” I’d told Jenn and Molly that I needed a week off from the bookstore because my cousin had died; it was an appalling lie, but if I said anything else I risked them telling my parents. I packed a pair of binoculars instead of the telescope, and my observation journal, and then I was done. I felt like an intrepid explorer.
    I took one last walk through the apartment, as if to memorize it— Just how long do you think you’re going for, Tally —tangly houseplants and well-worn old furniture, battered rag rugs, dried flowers in the windowsills, piles of books in every corner. An apartment, I thought, that looked like what it was: a home where people lived who loved each other. I stopped last in Aunt Beast’s room, drifts of Dorian Gray’s fur moving in scattered flurries across the floorboards—his fur accumulated like nothing else if we didn’t sweep every day—and looked around at her faded quilt, her bookshelf, her dresser-top with its scatter of objects. A sudden wave of preemptive homesickness swept over me, and I snatched the nearest bit of altar detritus—a folding knife, old and scarred, with a long strand of somebody’s bleach-blond hair caught in its hinge—and stuffed it in my pocket. It would cheer me to have something of hers, and I’d be back before she came home; she’d never even know it was gone.
    Back in my room, Dorian Gray writhing in ecstasy as I rubbed his belly with my toes, I wrote Henri and Raoul a note. Brevity, in this case, seemed the best option, but even so I struggled with what to say. I was eighteen, and legally entitled to take charge of my own destiny, but that did not seem the most tactful approach. Please don’t worry about me, I wrote finally, I found out where Jack lives and I’m going to see him—I’ll come back soon and I’ll call as soon as I can. Don’t kill me. I love you.
    There was nothing else to do but go to bed. I dreamed strange, restless dreams—the forest again, big black birds flitting through the trees; something howling, lonely and disconsolate, this time safely in the distance; looking for the dark-haired girl, knowing that she was moving farther and farther away from me, that I was losing all hope of keeping up. The night lasted for a long time, and I was almost grateful for the hot insistent blast of sun pushing through my curtains the next morning, because it meant I could give up pretending and get up, drink coffee, bleary eyed, with Raoul and Henri at the kitchen table, kiss their cheeks in a quick goodbye as they left the apartment to begin their days— Hold on to this, who knows how long it’ll have to last me— shoulder my backpack, think about the sauna-hot stink of the train platform and why was the Q always late and should I eat something now when I wasn’t hungry or