No Turning Back
By Kim Flowers
Chapter One Running Away
Ash wondered what kind of punishment a
seventh-grade dropout runaway would get.
She’d been on the run for two days, walking
through woods and fields. Her feet and
muscles ached; she told herself to stay strong and ignore the pain. She didn’t feel like a juvenile delinquent,
but according to her probation officer she was.
Oh well. She just wouldn’t get
caught this time.
The morning was much warmer than the night
had been, and she stuffed her jacket into her huge gym bag. After hours of scrambling over fallen logs
and pushing through thick foliage, she reached the end of the trees she’d been
walking through. Cornfields lined with
tiny plants bordered both sides of a two-lane highway. Buildings and houses stood in the distance.
Ash looked at her watch. It was 3:30, so other kids would be out of
school, and she needed to get a few more supplies. Her shoes squished in the damp dirt as she
walked through a field toward the road.
Her heart beat faster as she approached the
town. She hoped that passing cars would
think her blue bag was full of homework or something. She slunk into the first convenient store she
saw for toothpaste and toilet paper, avoiding eye contact with the
cashier. On the way outside she glanced
at a newspaper stand to see if she was really in the town she should be. She smiled at the huge print that read
“Clerksville Times”. Right on schedule.
When she jogged across a busy intersection
and turned down a side street, the rumble of traffic was replaced by the drone
of lawnmowers. Somewhere an ice cream
truck chimed. She lowered her head so that
her light-brown hair covered her face as little kids zoomed past on skateboards
and bikes. Ash couldn’t imagine what it
would be like to have one of their happy lives.
After an hour of walking through side streets
and alleys, she decided to risk walking down a main road. She needed to ditch this town. A supermarket loomed ahead with a large group
of trees behind it and Ash quickened her pace, knowing she’d found her way out.
As she
walked down a row of cars in the parking lot, a beat-up, tan Ford Escort rolled
up beside her. The engine sputtered.
“Hey, do you need a lift?”
Ash looked out of the corner of her eye. A man with sandy hair and wrinkled clothes
drove the car. His hands rested loosely
on the steering wheel and looked like they were smudged with grease or ink,
especially his fingernails.
“No,” she said, as her chest tightened. She walked faster, staring straight ahead.
“Come on, get in. I’ll let you drive,” he said.
“I’m not even that old,” Ash said without
meaning to. She clamped her mouth shut.
“You’re tall for your age, huh?” the man
asked. “I bet that means you’re more mature, too.”
Ash rolled her eyes. She sauntered a few rows over to her right,
ignoring the cars and people surrounding her, and headed to the store entrance. Going inside to get this man to leave her
alone would probably be worth wasting a few minutes of time.
But then the car was in front of her, turning
diagonally in the parking lane until the man stared her in the face with
narrowed eyes. Ash froze.
“It’ll
be a lot easier for you if you just get in the car,” he said. “No one will believe you when I throw you in
the back and say you’re my runaway daughter, Freckles.”
A jolt of fear coursed through her for the
first time. She squeezed between two
vans and sprinted past the remaining rows of vehicles, gripping her bag with
both hands. She circled the building and ran past dumpsters and through a
smaller parking lot in back. The woods
were just a few steps away.
Then she heard the man curse and she was on
the ground, her cheek skidding across pavement, caught by her left ankle. Her bag flew into the grass; she clawed at it
desperately, but the man gripped her like a vise. With a grunt, Ash flipped
onto her side and kicked him in the face with her other foot. The man jerked back, pulling off her shoe, as
blood gushed from his nose. Ash lunged
for her bag and darted into the trees.
She could hear the man yelling, but he didn’t seem to be chasing
her. She ran until his cursing faded,
crunching painfully on rocks and sticks with every other step. When she’d gone far enough, she sat beneath
an oak tree with shaking hands.
“Calm down,” she muttered, breathing heavily. She took out her only other pair of shoes,
shoving the unmatched one in her bag. No
matter how many times she told herself to expect to meet freaks on the run, it
never prepared her for when one showed up.
But Ash couldn’t sit around forever; she had
to get going. She edged around trees,
ducked under branches, and shoved her way through bushes and weeds. Her face was sticky with sweat. The scent of flowers filled the air as she
toiled in silence.
When the sun went down Ash still walked,
using her wind-up flashlight to show the way.
She looked at her atlas; if she kept walking south, she shouldn’t reach
another town for quite a while, and that was fine by her. Finally, as her steps turned into staggers
and stumbles, she collapsed in a clearing.
Wrapped in a blanket and using her bag for a pillow, she curled up on
the ground to sleep.
****
Ash woke up way too late—around nine a.m.—and
ate a granola bar. She put the empty
wrapper back in her bag and took a few sips of water. She had to conserve supplies, but also knew
that not eating or drinking enough would be dangerous. Ash walked through fields all morning, and
saw nothing else around except a few houses and groups of trees in the
distance. She felt like she was walking
in the middle of nowhere, but knew there was a road in the distance because
once in a while a car would drive from one end of the flat horizon to the
other. She headed to the nearest group
of trees for cover when she got close enough that the people in the cars might
notice her.
After a small lunch, she spent the next
couple hours hiking through the woods. In
mid-afternoon she reached a clearing but hovered at the edge, unsure if she
should go further.
The clearing was actually a yard, and a
two-story gray house with blue shutters stood in the middle. The paint was faded, and one window had a
piece of cardboard duct-taped over it. A
driveway coiled south, but Ash couldn’t see the road. She wondered if the place was abandoned. This would be a good spot to take a break,
and there might be something useful inside.
After several minutes of hesitation, she
walked across the overgrown yard and peeked into a dirty pane of glass. She could see a brown couch and an old
TV. The next room was a kitchen with a table
and two chairs. Ash walked to the back of the house and gasped; a rope ladder
swung in the breeze, hanging from a second floor window.
Ash just had to climb that ladder. She could reach the bottom rungs without a
problem, but couldn’t pull herself up because her bag was too heavy. Unwilling to abandon her supplies for a
moment, she dragged a small log over from a woodpile beside the back door and
used it as a stepping stool. As she
climbed, the bag cut into her shoulder and made balance wobbly. She launched herself inside, falling to the
hardwood floor with a thump.
Two dressers, a desk, and a toy box were
stacked in front of a door to her right.
Two beds stood ahead; one of them had an old stuffed animal on it. The
heads of both beds rested against the east wall, across from the barricaded
door. At the far end of the room was
another window that overlooked the south end of the house. There was also a bathroom. When Ash looked inside, she saw a chair
shoved up against yet another door.
Something felt very wrong. Ash turned to go back out the way she’d come
in, but then grit her teeth and dove under one of the beds.
The top of the rope ladder was scooting
across the window sill.
Ash watched in indignation as a small boy dove
into the room. A girl followed,
stumbling because the entire rope ladder was now wrapped around her leg. The kids wore old clothes and carried school
bags. The girl’s waist-length, tangled
hair was dark brown; the boy’s was reddish-blonde and shot out all over his
head. They both had bruises on their
arms.
Ash slid out from under the bed and strode
towards them.
“Get out,” she demanded. “This is my spot.”
The kids froze. “Who are you?” the girl asked.
“This is my hideout, I found it first.” Ash
said.
The
boy giggled. “We live here.”
“Oh.”
Ash felt her face grow hot. That
made more sense than that somehow every runaway in Indiana was migrating to the
same creepy house.
“I’m
Kevin Webster, and this is my sister, Dayna,” the boy said.
“What
are you doing here?” Dayna asked, unraveling herself from the ladder.
“Leaving.”
Ash said.
“You can’t.” Kevin stretched his arms. “They’ll be back any minute.”
Ash sighed and walked closer, ready to push
them out of the way and tell them to mind their own business. But the girl, Dayna, stepped in front of the
window and stared up at her. Ash stopped a few steps away. There was something about Dayna’s dark brown eyes
that seemed both wise and melancholy. As
Ash gazed into them she felt like she was falling and didn’t know why. She shook her head, breaking the trance. These kids obviously had it rough, but that
wasn’t her problem.
“Did you run away from home, or what?” Dayna
asked.
“Of course she did,” Kevin said. “Your parents are bad, aren’t they?”
“No.”
Even that was too much. Ash’s
chest constricted. “If you live here,
why do climb in and out through the window?”
Her face burned. She shouldn’t be
asking questions.
“We weren’t supposed to leave today,” Dayna
said, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. “But we’ve been stuck at home for a week; we
didn’t want to stay here and clean everything again.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ash said. “Where did you go?”
Dayna and Kevin looked at each other with
raised eyebrows.
“School,” Dayna said, as if there were no
other possible answer.
Ash smirked.
These kids were even younger than she’d thought. “I have to get out of here.”
“Wait,” Dayna said. “At least let me get you something to
eat.”
Dayna walked into the bathroom, and Ash could
hear the chair that blocked the other door scraping across the floor.
Kevin sidled over to Ash. “I have some cars and dinosaurs. Do you want to play a game?”
She shook her head and looked at her
watch.
He stepped closer. “So . . . you ran away from home?”
She looked at him out of the corner of her
eye and edged toward the rope ladder.
Surely he wasn’t thinking of turning her in.
“Do you think we could go with you?” Kevin
asked.
Ash laughed; she hadn’t expected that question
at all. “No.”
An engine rumbled outside and Kevin rushed to
the south window.
“Oh, great. Mom and Dad are back,” he
said. “We got home before they did, though,
so we shouldn’t be in trouble.”
A door
slammed downstairs, and a man started yelling.
Kevin ran to the bathroom. “This isn’t good,” he said. “I have to go help Dayna.”
“Uh, okay,” Ash said, backing up further.
“Why didn’t you do your chores?” the man
demanded.
Dayna screamed.
Ash reached the other end of the room. This was too much. She threw the rope ladder out the window.
Kevin hurried over and grabbed her arm.
“Wait, don’t leave. I’ll be right back.”
“I have to go,” she said, peeling his fingers
from her skin.
As Ash climbed down the rope ladder and ran
away, she heard Kevin shouting curses behind her.
