• Steph •
Mom shakes me awake at 4:00 a.m. and says it’s time to get out of Thief River Falls.
I don’t argue. I can see how scared
she is, and we’ve done this enough times that I know arguing won’t work,
anyway. Within an hour, everything we own is loaded into Mom’s van.
I’m in the passenger seat, my laptop and tote
bag of books
next to my feet, my pillow in my lap.
School here started two weeks
ago. Two weeks—that’s not even long enough
to have a transcript. I prop my pillow against the window, lean against it, and close
my eyes. We’re going to be on the
road for a while, and it’s still dark out. I might as well get some sleep.
When we move, the
new town always has to be at least 250 miles from the last place we lived. Often Mom goes farther, but it’s always at least 250 miles. Then we get of the interstate
high- way and start driving into the country, because our new town also has to be least twenty miles from the interstate. Once we’ve found a town that’s far enough out of the way, Mom starts looking for places we might be able to rent.
We’re running from my father. Mom told me this in ninth grade, after years of pretending she just liked moving. My scary, dangerous, violent father,
who burned down our house (though they couldn’t prove it) and spent two years in prison for stalking when I was little.
I still don’t know what actually sets of the moves. I don’t think she’s seen him. I don’t know if she moves when she sees somebody who looks like him or if she just gets a feeling like he’s getting close. I don’t know how she thinks he finds us. If we’re running because she has a real reason to think he’s getting close.
Mom doesn’t say where we’re heading. When I wake up from my nap, we’re getting onto I-94, and I watch to see if we’re heading west, toward North Dakota, or east,
toward Wisconsin. East. So Wisconsin is probably going to be our next state.
The last time I lived in Wisconsin was in seventh grade, I’m pretty sure. We were there for two months in a town called Rewey. The main thing I remember about Rewey is that my bus ride to school was really long, and there
was this thing where all the other girls wore plaid leggings and wouldn’t talk to you if you wore anything else. Also, it wasn’t just plaid but these very specific patterns that were acceptable—like the red-and-black- check type plaid was good, and also for some reason there was a blue one that was okay. I didn’t have any plaid leggings—I mean, they weren’t something
I’d ever felt like I needed in any other town—but while I was there,
another outcast
girl got a pair of plaid leggings that had green stripes as part of the plaid, and those were just completely unacceptable. For reasons.
I still don’t have plaid leggings, and I know it’s ridiculous that I’m worrying about plaid leggings being a Wisconsin thing that’ll come up again. At least I should quit worrying about this until I know that we’re actually staying in Wisconsin, and not turning abruptly south when we get to I-35 and heading to Iowa instead. But instead I remember the feeling of sitting in my seventh grade math class, staring at the leggings of the girl in the chair next to me and wondering whether I might be able to convince my mother that I really needed plaid leggings.
Copyright © 2019 by Naomi
Kritzer
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