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“D’you ever think about running away?”
“What?” Josie asks with more bite than she intends.
She sits up halfway, propped on her elbows, warm grass tickling her forearms. The hot Louisiana sun beats down, striking like a knife through the humid air and soaking into her skin.
Besides Josie lies Annabelle Parker, sprawled on the hill with her limbs out like a sacrifice, roped in half-finished (abandoned) flower crowns to an altar of dirt. She’s looking up at the sky, eyes wide and far, far away, somewhere Josie can’t see, even if she leaned over and plucked the wireframe glasses off of her friend’s face. Overhead, clouds are probably gathering, gray against summer’s blue ceiling, deep and damp and dark—Josie couldn’t know if August rain was brewing, not with her gaze stuck fast to Annabelle.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Annabelle closes her eyes when a slight breeze ripples past. “Just—leaving. Going somewhere new, somewhere different. Away from the ranches and the town and the people.” A wanderlust creeps into her voice. “Imagine going to a city, a real proper city, with fancy cars, not just those police autos, and big universities.”
“It’s not so easy, that.” Josie says after a moment, voice low and quiet like a word too loud will tear open the aether. The for me is left unsaid. (And it’s not that there’s something wrong about this life, the way they live, not on paper—she knows Annabelle loves her father, she knows the townsfolk are alright enough, she knows she could spend the rest of her life here. But is it really living?) Annabelle opens her eyes and turns her head towards Josie.
“I know, Josie, I only—it’s just—“ she sits up, too, all the way. “It was just an stupid thought.” A scowl comes over her face, that endearing childishness to her anger that reminds Josie they’re only seventeen no matter how much it feels like the whole world is commanding them to grow up, to fill someone’s shoes, to be something worthy of this town, this body.
“It’s not stupid.” Josie amends after a lengthy beat of observing strands of Annabelle’s long hair whip about her face—the breeze has graduated to a gust, sharper against the muggy heat, and the boughs of the tree behind them begin to sway, loud enough that she can hear the leaves rustling over her pounding heart.
“It’s got to be better.” Annabelle carries on. “I mean, somewhere else, it’s got to be better. In a city, or another county, it doesn't matter. There has to be somewhere that doesn't feel like it’s choking me alive.” She breaks off. “Don’t you know what I mean?”
Josie feels it, the tightening crescendo, the spiral, everything she wants to say, everything she wants to feel, to not be suffocating in the quicksand of a world too small, a body too wrong. Freedom, simple and vague and idealistic, and everything she could ever want. She wants it in the fields when she races Annabelle on her horse, hearing that crystal laugh drowning the pulse of hooves against the soft earth; she wants it in the town when they walk past the shops together like actors, like wire bent out of shape; she wants it in the careful, eggshell dance she performs every other night for Mr. Parker to earn his daughter’s company, with that simmering suspicion that one day he’ll figure her out and she’ll have hell to pay; she wants, she wants, she wants.
“Yeah,” Josie croaks out. “I know what you mean.”
There’s a pause, so weighted that rain might burst forth from it if it’s left any longer—Josie pushes to her feet, shaking her head like she’s loosening cobwebs from her ears, and holds out a hand, determined and empty, for Annabelle to clasp.
Annabelle watches her another moment longer, eyes searching, hesitating. It feels unfinished. They always feel so unfinished. She should say more—she should say more—Annabelle seizes her hand and leverages herself up.
Josie exhales shakily, then grins. “Come on.” She jerks her head towards the bottom of the hill, where the rolling grass gives way to the cypress-tupelo swamp below, and in the distance, the faint sparkle of the town. “Let’s go.”
It’s not running away. It’s not running anywhere, really. Tomorrow morning, they’ll still be in the same houses, the same homes, the same bodies, the same town. They’ll still struggle through Mass with bones like peeling river birch bark, they’ll still talk in circles like eastern diamondbacks have bitten their words, and they’ll still watch the sun set over the marshland like a glittering dream down the throat of the unspoken. But it is running, and for now, somehow, that will have to be enough.
Annabelle’s fingers tighten around Josie’s, a promise, a tug, pulling her forward in a step and then into a sprint, down the slippery hill, through the air like the wind itself, so quick and absolute that the clouds quiver back and the potential of rain dissipates, eaten by the sun, the always-hungry roaming sun.
They fly.