The Runaway
by Arial Hart
Duke University
Arial Hart is a Senior at Duke University, double majoring in English and Political Science with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She graduates in May 2022, and looks forward to volunteering with AmeriCorps the following year.
There were no sirens. Just blue and red lights fading back and forth, the colors undulating through the blinds onto the wall behind us. I think you noticed first, always more astute between the two of us, but we broke off conversation at the same time. Our heads turned like tides to the unseen spectacle on the other side of the glass. Horror and thrill swooped low in my gut. What was this so late at night, so late that only you or I ever saw the time on the clock go by?
No sirens, just color and shadow and color and quiet. Blue, red; blue, red; blue…
Cold linoleum under my feet, no socks. We crept together towards the window, as if the people out there would care. As if the police had business worrying about what teenage girls two floors up were doing.
A second car pulled up, then a third. An ambulance. We whispered each new arrival, announcing them to ourselves as if putting words to them made them easier to understand, like we knew what was happening. A burst of people. A collection of uniforms. Policeman, EMT, administrator. All the adults in the world arguing just underneath our window, worlds away.
Tomorrow, we get rumors in bits and chunks. A girl ran away. Everyone agrees a girl ran away, but no one agrees which girl.
“Was she in your figure-drawing class?” “No, no, I heard she was in Laurie’s psych elective.”
“She’s got an aunt in the city-” “Aunt! I heard it’s a boyfriend-” “It has to be her boyfriend, come on, you don’t need to sneak out in the middle of the night to see your aunt.”
“I heard it was her parents, they’re back in town and she wanted to avoid them.” “Oh Jesus, my parents would put me under house arrest if I tried to pull something like that.” “She can’t be that stupid.” “I mean, someone has to be.”
“She was gone for three days- no, a WEEK before the school caught on.”
“I heard that she’s trying to leave the country.”
“She was just spending the weekend at a friend’s place.”
“They found her this morning.”
“They’ll never find her again- I'm sure of it.”
One night without sirens, and someone I’ll never meet turns into a myth. She becomes almost unreal. She’s girl-shaped in my mind, this runaway, but hazy around the edges. She’s permanently blurred into abstraction. The school kicked her out just after they found her. She never gets to set the story straight. The rumors about her dwindle, then die.
This silence, though, might make a better ending than what she could have told us. Maybe she just wanted to go, wanted her bed empty for a night. Maybe she wanted to follow the yellow street lights. Maybe she wanted to follow their reflections on the asphalt. Maybe she wasn’t going anywhere, meeting anyone. Maybe she just left.
But right now, before anyone says anything about her, before we know anything except the cars and lights and uniforms we count under our window, we hold our breath. Your hand is above my wrist, and I’m not sure if it’s because of your excitement or the way my breath hitches as another car pulls into the lot. More lights- blue, red; blue, red; blue- to add to the scene before us. Someone yells. We don’t hear it, just see it in his face.
Your fingers tighten around my arm.