Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [64]
In May, Tess asked me to help her run away from home. It wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Tess was like a professional runaway, always disappearing from home for a night or two. She’d only go as far as the tree house on Farm Street or the little island in the middle of Harris Pond or maybe the sand pits, but it would still send her parents into fits. Her mom would show up at my house, telling my parents that Tess had run off again, and I’d end up sitting in the back of Mr. Bryson’s pickup, taking them to all our regular spots. Eventually we’d find her with a box of Ritz crackers and a blanket and her parents would take her home. She never told me why she ran away so much, and I don’t think I ever asked. It was just Tess’s thing. Some kids play guitar. Some kids go fishing every Saturday. Tess liked to run away. She’d been doing it for years.
But in May she asked me for help. It was the first time she even talked about running away ahead of time, at least to me. She wanted to go to her aunt’s house in North Carolina, and she needed some help with maps and planning. Since we were learning almost nothing by then, except for fucking Blondie songs, Tess and I would sit in the back of the classroom with atlases and maps from the AAA and plot her course. My family was always taking car trips around the country, to Florida, New Hampshire, Chicago … all over. Mom hated to fly. So the station wagon’s glove compartment was stuffed with old maps. I found one for New England and one for the southern United States, starting around Maryland I think, and we filled in the rest of the trip, New York and New Jersey mostly, with an atlas from the library. Today we’d just use MapQuest and have our route in seconds, but back then, things were harder.
At the time, it was exciting to think about Tess running away to a place as far as North Carolina, even if it was just Chisholm, a tiny little town that no one had ever heard of. God, I still remember the town’s name after all these years. Chisholm. I can still picture where it is on the map. But I never thought that Tess would really do it. I guess I figured that she’d eventually end up in the tree house or the sand pits or under the bridge near Getchell’s Stream. Not hundreds of miles away.
Not that she ever made it that far.
We spent about three weeks planning her trip, writing down directions, calculating how far she might be able to walk each day, and finding roads off the beaten path. We knew that she wouldn’t be able to walk down I-95 without being picked up, so we found back roads and good spots to pitch her tent for the night. Campgrounds. State parks. Not bad for a couple of thirteen-year-olds with no Internet.
The night before she left, she was over my house for dinner, and before she went home, she asked me if I could loan her any money. I gave her forty dollars. Almost all of my savings at the time. I know that makes it sound like I knew that she was really going, but in my heart, I never really believed it. I figured that Tess would be back in a day or two, the money would make it back to my piggy bank, and Tess would be grounded like always. But before she left my house that night, she took my hands and made me promise not to tell anyone where she was going, no matter what. She was so serious, standing there in the moonlight in front of my house, more serious than I thought possible from a thirteen-year-old, and she wouldn’t let go of my hands until