Free The Runaway by Aritri Gupta Page B

to stay away from me? That I’m good for a night’s fuck and that’s i t. That I’m off limits for the good neighbourhood people.”
    Wow. Brutal.
    He forgot to retort. He just pretty much forgot to speak after her little speech. She had started running again. He followed her, dazed at what he just heard. After a while, he grinned, “A night’s fuck?”
    “Rick. Enjoy your stay in Applecross.”
    And he knew he was dismissed. At least for today. He stopped and watched her run deeper into the woods. He thought of following her to her home, but then, now he knew she lived nearby and it would materialise somehow. The address to her home. He walked back to Martha’s. The sun had risen completely over the horizon. The mist over the hills had cleared, making way for the dazzling sun to light up the meadows and the crisp pine trees.

    Brooke took the longest route to reach her home. She was flustered and her legs were aching from vigorously running for more than a couple of hours. The garden needed tending - that would help forgetting the morning encounter. She couldn’t shake a strange heady feeling whenever Rick or whoever it was, was near her. As if there was a connection somewhere. Unfathomable. She didn’t linger on it long enough – when you have caused a horde of young girls to die, you tend to learn to move on from pretty much anything in life. Otherwise you get stuck. On that instant of truth when the already fragmented world came crashing down. The man was annoying. Not to mention pushy. Men here were normally content with sleeping with her and forgetting the very next day – it was convenient to them, given her reputation in the neighbourhood. And she didn’t look for anything further too.
    For so many months, it had been almost impossible to feel anything anymore – the dark night had seemed to stretch on forever. It was almost strangling her from inside – the screams of the girls, and their parents’ bitter tears replaying in her head every time she dared to sleep. Or it would be her father, and that sly grin closing in on her. Or her mother cursing her and spitting at her for having stolen away her life from her. She was scared to even recall those days and the amount of fruitless therapy that Wattson had made her undergo. It had taken so much of painful efforts to try and forget those memories – or to stash them in an inaccessible corner of her heart, where they could harmlessly throb dully in the background but not actively destroy her life. But they had already taken a toll on her – she was withdrawn, inert and insensitive. What can make you care for any damn thing once you have been the former reason of a massacre of innocent human lives? Everything stops mattering after something like that.
    She locked the doors and the windows in and busied herself in preparing a lavish brunch, with the speakers blasting in their highest capacity. Alone and noisy. She liked it best. When the haunting silence inside her was filled with artificial worldly sounds – yet she kept herself aloof. Just enough to never be involved personally in the noise, and be a spectator. As she sliced up the onions, her mind kept flashing back to the cold two storeyed home in Australia, her mother’s room that smelled like a hospital. She would tiptoe into the room and watch her mother sleep. And slowly curl up beside her to sleep. She made sure that she woke up before her mother did to run back to her room. Her mother hated having her around. She could never really understand it back then- now she does. She stopped slicing to wipe her overflowing eyes. Damned onions! She washed her eyes carefully. And her mind was fast forwarding to the day when she died, and yet she wouldn’t even look at her. Brooke had cried and thrown tantrums to be with her. No one in school noticed her bloodshot eyes. No one noticed her anyway. Did the cops know that? Did they find out? They knew of the false death certificate claiming Anne Scott died