Runaway

It was a rare opportunity. Sure, the conditions weren't favorable, but the moment begged for seizing.  If it was to be done, I had to make that decision now.  With my heart pounding in my temples, I quickly went to work.  In my room, I laid all of my best clothes into a laundry basket and topped it off with my comforter and pillow.  Those would prove to be vital, as this escape was happening in December.  I hesitated only for a moment as I let my thoughts take over.  Krin would be upset.  She had asked me not to go a month earlier after my last escape attempt had been foiled by my roommate.  For weeks, I had been slowly smuggling the majority of my belongings into the trunk of my car, and was waiting for the right moment to vanish when my foster brother, whose disdain towards me was mutually reflected, exposed my plan.  He had been going through my things, and as usual, he snitched me out.  That day didn't end well for me. 

Krin was the closest friend I ever had.  I trusted and confided in her.  She was the only person I looked forward to seeing when I came home everyday.  It's hard to say whether there were romantic feelings involved, because I did have a crush on her early on.  When I first came to live at her mom's foster/group home, I was twelve.  Being only a year younger than me, we were the closest in age in the household, and we walked to school together everyday, until we no longer were allowed to.  For six years, we lived, struggled, and fought together.  We were close friends one year, and bitter enemies another.  We developed feelings and crushes on our classmates, and teased each other about them.  I remember punking one of her admirers everyday, as he tried to tag along with us on our walks to school.  For six years together, we suffered. 

Although she wasn't a product of parental abandonment like the rest of us, she had her own battle against her mom.  If we were the servants to a tyrannical dictator, she was the princess trapped in fear and self loathing. Her mother, Rose treated us as if we were the plague of society.  To her we were criminals who had to be dealt with (and some of us were criminals) by the warden whose hard leadership and tough love could bring us salvation.  Towards her daughter, she was the strict Mother Superior, whose verbal lashings and contempt were meant to stave her on the path of her own demented view of righteousness.  If Krin stayed out an hour later than she was supposed to, say 9pm on a Saturday night, she would be called a whore, a slut who was going out and offering herself as the town bicycle.  If she developed a crush on a boy at her high school, Rose would scream about what a useless piece of shit Krin was and how she has such a bad daughter who would rather waste her time and energy chasing boys instead of helping around the house.  And our walks to school together had to stop.  There was no way that a girl of a higher upbringing like her should be getting close to a boy like me, parentless, low-class and apparently destined to amount to nothing.  If this sounds horrible, hearing it in Vietnamese makes it somehow worse.  Every time I witnessed these verbal lashings, I appreciated my almost-orphan status a little more.  Physical lashings heal much faster, and I would rather have no parents at all than to have one like Rose. 

I knew that if I left first, Krin may never forgive me.  I would be abandoning her to her mother.  Though as much as I cared for her, I knew I couldn't stay any longer.  Legally, I was already emancipated three months prior, and could leave without having to worry about cops bringing me back.  Logistically, it was difficult to leave because of the double-sided locks on all the doors.  Even my bedroom, which I shared with two others, needed a key to unlock.  Once we were locked in, we had to knock and wake up a counselor, who slept in the hallway with a set of keys, to let us out.  One of the guys kept a two liter bottle with him every night, because he needed to piss often, and it wasn't always a sure thing getting our guard to wake up and let us out.  On the day of December 1st, a Friday, at around 8pm, the counselor forgot to lock the front door.  I also happened to have my car keys and $200 in my possession, which, like all things we owned, including any money we made, were normally turned in upon our inspections.  (Anytime one of us foster kids left or returned to the home, we were told to strip down to our boxers and searched for contraband, and removed of our possessions like car keys and cash.)  I pushed my thoughts of Krin out of my head, grabbed my full laundry basket, and stealthily crept out of the front door. 

Once the door was closed, I smelled the air differently.  There was a sense of freedom and inspiration, and certainly a tone of urgency, as the mission wan't quite complete yet.  I ran as fast as I could to my car, threw what was left of my belongings in, and peeled away.  It wasn't out of the question for Rose to use physical force to bring me back.  Not that she would do it herself.  She had her lackeys to do the dirty work for her.   It wasn't until I was on the freeway that I stopped staring in my rearview mirror.  I was going 90 in a 65, and I didn't even realize it.  The song No More by Ruff Endz was playing on the radio, and though the lyrics actually describe a girl cheating and how this man wasn't going to give her "no more" of the finer things, to me, I just heard, no more.  In my head, it must have sounded more like this:


No more beatings, no more fear.
No more of your evil here.
No more running to school to avoid the pain,
No more daydreaming to keep me sane.
No more of your lies to hold me down,
I may be alone, but at least I start on my own solid ground. 

And no more roof over my head either.  With only my car, some clothes, a good blanket, and $200, I was homeless and sleeping out of my car.  And I was happy. 

The 1989 Acura Legend that would be home to me for three months.