Free Chasing Storm by Teagan Kade

table. “Where have you been, Alice? We’ve been worried sick.”
    “I’m not a teenager any more, Mom. I don’t have to be in bed by eight, you know.”
    “Were you at Dan’s?”
    I make the mistake of drawing eye contact with her. She’s impossible to lie to. “No, Mom. I was not at Dan’s.”
    I see just a hint of disappointment there. No doubt she’s mapped out our entire lives right down to the lime booties she’s going to knit our babies. “We just worry, that’s all.”
    “Don’t worry, Mom, seriously. I can handle myself.”
    She nods, it’s enough, and totters off.
    Dad’s watching football in the den. He switches it off as soon as I come in, but he isn’t quick enough. The ghost of him still lingers on the blackness of the screen.
    “Sorry, baby, I didn’t know you were home.”
    “It’s fine, Dad. I can’t avoid him my whole life.”
    “If he were here, I’d-”
    “You’d what, Dad? Knock him out with kindness?”
    “You know I’d do anything to protect you.”
    I take a seat on the sofa with him, a little alarmed at the way it instantly morphs to my ass. “I know, Dad. You’re just looking out for me, but like I just told Mom, I can handle myself.”
    He holds my shoulder, looking me right in the feels. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.
    *
    Jemma arrives in her cockroach of a car just after morning tea. “Get in.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Wait and see.”
    “Why does everyone keep saying that to me?”
    “We like surprises around here, Alice. It’s pretty boring otherwise.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t call it boring at all.”
    We pull up at the old skate bowl we used to haunt as semi-alternate teenagers. We’d come out here to the outskirts of town and sit on top of the bowl, watching the clouds and odd boy that wandered down with deck in hand.
    The place hasn’t fared well. Dust coats everything. The playground next door is more jungle than metal.
    We sit together just like we used to right on the edge and dangle our feet down. In the bottom of the bowl a pool of water has collected that could well hold new lifeforms.
    I lift my feet slightly. “Ew.”
    Jemma laughs. “Yeah, not exactly the cool hangout spot I remember, but hey. I still come here, you know.”
    “You do?”
    “To think. It helps.”
    I’ve been so caught up in my own drama I haven’t even stopped to ask Jemma about her life. She does have one, after all. “You want to talk about it?”
    “I envy you,” she says, kicking her heels against a line of graffiti that reads Cocksuck Idaho! .
    “Why in god’s good name would you envy me ?”
    “Your life is exciting. You moved away to the city, all Miss Super Writer and crap. I’d see you in the papers and magazines, and be like ‘wow, she has made it’.”
    “That’s the thing about the media. It’s all a lie.”
    “You weren’t happy?”
    “At first. It was crazy, you know? I’d just come out of college and here was this big famous footballer buying me drinks at the bar. We dated. He was fun. It was exciting. Every door was open. It’s how I got the writing gig in the first place.”
    I take a deep breath before I continue. “When I started piecing it together – the other girls, the drugs – it started to fall apart. It was just one lie after another, and when I called him on it…”
    “Say it,” Jemma pushes.
    “He hit me.”
    “Say it louder.”
    “He hit me okay! He fucking hit me and it hurt like hell.” My nose runs. I wipe it with the back of my hand, snot and salty tears and everything mixing together on my face. Fuck I’m a mess.
    Jemma pulls me close. “But you got away. That’s the main thing. You’re here and you’re safe.”
    “Am I? Every time I see Storm it feels like I’m stepping off a cliff again.”
    “That’s a good thing.”
    “Is it? We all know what happens. You fall and then, bam, Humpty Dumpty.”
    I sniffle, choking back sobs and trying to erase the image of that fist hurtling