Runaway A

Here's a short story I have been continuously working on for 2 quarters. I have to turn in an edited version (this version) as part of my fiction writing portfolio tomorrow. Unfortunately, I'd love to turn in a more finished version, but this has come leaps and bounds from where it started. I used to to hate this story, and when I realized I had to go back and work with it some more, I wanted to throw it away and just write something new. Maybe that would have been a good idea, but being the lazy person I'm so good at being, I decided to try to spiffy this up for the sake of my final. And I have to say, even if I'm not 100% pleased with where it is now, I'm definitely pleased with where it's going.

On a Thursday morning in early February, Braden woke up with a secret. His mother hadn’t come in to tell him to get ready yet; instead, his anticipation had woken him early. As he crept from his bed, the chill air of his bedroom raised goose bumps along the bare skin of his gangly arms and legs. The sun had barely risen and was just beginning to peep through the edges of the blinds that covered his window, turning the room a cool blue.
At breakfast his mother noticed his strange mood.
“Stop rapping your fingers,” she said sternly, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she stood at the stove frying eggs. “You’ll bug your father. He’s working.”
Why does she always say that? He wondered silently.
She placed the eggs and toast before him, analyzing his face as he devoured the food. He didn’t think he’d be hungry today, but the combination of excitement and terror amplified his appetite rather than squandered it. She didn’t say anything else to him that morning, and he tapped his foot impatiently as she gathered his jacket, his backpack, and his mittens before leading him out the door. Once he had detangled himself from the grip of her morning hug, he bolted from the front porch and sprinted to school along the frosty sidewalks. In his hurry, he forgot to dodge the drops of water that plunged from the treetops onto his hair instead of his hood, which hung wrinkled and forgotten on his shoulders.
Back at the house, his father Jim sat in his study smoking as he stared out the window at nothing. A large manuscript sat on the desk in front of him which he looked at for a second as he ground his cigarette into an ash tray. He shook his head in defeat before lighting up another cigarette and stuffing the manuscript into his briefcase. On his way out of the house, he stopped at the kitchen leaning on the archway.
“I’m heading to work,” he said, hoping his wife would look up from the dishes she was scrubbing at the sink.
“Have a good one,” was all she said. He watched her reach under the sink to get more dish soap, but she didn’t turn around.
“We can make this work,” was the only thing he wanted to say to her, but the words wouldn’t pass his lips. “No,” he kept thinking. “She can make it work. I can’t. I have too much on my plate.” Once in the car, he tried to justify his marital problems.
“Work is a pain in my ass, and Debbie just gets too upset about it. Really, what does she expect when I’m the only one making money? For life to be easy? For me to have time to pay the bills and be romantic at the same time? I’m not Superman, god damn it. God fucking damn it!” When he arrived at the editing firm that he worked at, he was so stressed out about his job and his wife that he forgot to worry about his son.
Braden got to school early and sat before the set of double doors leading into the front hallway, biting his lip in frustration. The other kids were cherishing their moments on the playground, swinging from monkey bars and swirling on tire swings while he sat alone, his cold hands shoved into his coat pockets as he stared fervently at the clock he could see through a classroom window.
Five more minutes.
Two more minutes.
Just one minute!
5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
The bell situated above his head blared across the playground summoning the bodies toward the red brick building. Braden stood up hastily, brushed dust and rocks from his pants, and followed the playground monitor in through the doors surrounded by a buzzing hum of chatter. But his excruciating wait wasn’t over. Mrs. Sanders took her sweet time handing out the math assignment, scheduling the silent reading hour, and letting the fourth grade class work on their map project. Braden not only had to wait through first recess, but then lunch, and again through the second playground excursion. He had to suffer through fitness class and music class and through Mrs. Sanders’ explanation of how a light bulb works. While the other students experimented with Double A batteries and neon colored wires, he sat tracing his finger along the lines that students had carved into the piss-colored desk years before him. In the top right hand corner, scrawled in bad handwriting and black ink, the phrase, “Hilary sucks,” stared back at him. He saw this message every day, and every time it took him back to the first week of fourth grade on the playground. A group of ten students had surrounded him and his only friend Kyle in the corner by the basketball hoops.
They chanted, “Braden sucks! Braden sucks! Braden sucks!” over and over while they stomped on his collection of baseball cards. He didn’t notice Kyle laughing with them until the playground monitor sent the group away and Kyle went with them.
A week later, as he lay in bed with the covers up to his nose, he could hear the familiar sound of rushing water as his mother finished cleaning the kitchen. His eyes were beginning to droop when her voice brought him back to attention.
“Braden’s principal called today.”
“Hmm?” his father asked.
“She wants us to go in for a conference concerning bullying. When can you take time off work? She said she could do a weekend if she had to.”
“Can’t you just go?” There was silence. Braden’s lip stung as he realized he was biting it, so he pulled his teddy bear, the one he continuously claimed to be too old for, out of its hiding place between his bed and the wall, chomping down on its arm instead.
“I’m not going alone, Jim,” his mother finally said. Braden could hear her turning off the sink.
“Debby, you know I don’t have time. Why don’t you go and talk to the lady, and if it’s something serious then I can see when I’m available. But it just sounds like some overly-concerned principal with too much time on her hands has got her panties in bunch over some annoying little kids that she can’t control. She wants us to come and listen to her rant about how parents these days aren’t doing enough to raise their kids correctly.” After he had said it, Jim immediately regretted his words.
“Did I really just say she had her panties in a bunch?” he wondered silently. “Debby’s gonna flip a bitch.” But he kept his face set so she wouldn’t know he was sorry. He was too stubborn to give her any victories.
“It’s obvious some parents don’t know how to raise a child,” she said coldly. Braden heard her footsteps move from the kitchen to the bedroom and then the sound of a chair scraping against the linoleum followed by his father’s footsteps going into the study. Tears slipped from Braden’s eyes as he turned onto his side and buried his face into Teddy’s neck.
At 2:50, Braden realized he hadn’t been paying attention to anything in the classroom. He now watched as Mrs. Sanders walked over to her desk and pulled out a stack of official looking papers. The smart girls that sat behind Braden giggled and a few people groaned, but Braden jolted up in his seat and gripped the edges of his desk, his knuckles shining like ice sculptures while Mrs. Sanders handed the papers out one by one in alphabetical order.
She finally made it to his desk as the bell sounded, and the students began clambering into the hallways, some downcast, some bubbling, and some unaffected by what they had just received. The teacher looked down at Braden as she handed him the report card.
“I’m really proud of you,” she said, her voice soft with pleasure.
Braden unfolded the document to see a column of A’s staring back at him. Without a word or a smile for his teacher, he jumped from his seat and rushed from the classroom, nearly forgetting his backpack, and began running towards home. The cement squares of the sidewalk passed beneath his feet in a blur until he was one block from home, and then his pace slowed to a reluctant walk as his stomach began to swirl. Once standing in front of his front door, he took a deep breath, placed his hand on the chilled doorknob, and entered the house.
He walked past the kitchen where his mother was stationed; the smells of her homemade pies perfumed the hallway that led to his father’s office, and he gripped his wrinkled report card with shaky hands as he approached the door. Standing outside the room for several heart-pounding moments, his heart seemed to stick to his throat as he forgot to breathe. When he did finally rap on the door, the knocks were light, and he prayed that they would go unheard, but the gruff voice of his father responded immediately.
“What is it?” The words dripped with frustration and impatience.
Regret washing over him, Braden opened the door and tentatively stepped into the dark study. Thick red curtains were draped across the windows, and a gold cord of rope tied them tightly shut. A lamp with a gold metallic base threw dim hues over the desk, its cream shade muffling rather than illuminating the room. The carpets stretched out clean and white, vacuumed nightly by Braden’s mother, and he looked down at his feet, relieved he had removed his soggy boots in the mudroom. The desk, a looming fortress of mahogany wood, sat against the far wall of the room, and his father’s solid slate of a back stood in greeting as he scribbled upon a desk calendar that was surrounded by a frothy sea of white, discarded papers.
“What do you need,” Jim asked sternly, still facing the desk and not the intruder.
Braden approached slowly, shuffling his feet that now felt like lead, and laid the slip of paper upon the desk. The page now looked petty and miniscule next to the towers of manuscripts and layers of sticky notes. Jim slid his reading glasses down his nose to turn and look at Braden with a piercing glare before picking up the paper. He unfolded it with an excruciating precision that made Braden’s stomach lurch. Once the report card was completely unfurled, Jim stared blankly at the line of A’s.
“Your mom will be happy. Tell her to put it on the fridge.”
“Are you – are you happy, Dad?” Braden watched as his father’s head bob up and down in a nod.
“Mhm,” was all he said, and without a second glance he set the paper on the edge of his desk and began to tap his foot. Feeling the wetness brimming in his eyes and the redness creeping into his cheeks, Braden snatched the artifact and darted from the room in a panic. He sprinted past the kitchen where his mother still stood guard over dinner and dessert and up the stairs to his cold bedroom. The blinds were still drawn and the winter sun was laying its head to rest early, leaving a gloom to rest around and within Braden. Without thinking, he grabbed his backpack, ripping out the school supplies and replacing them with a change of clothes, the box of granola bars he kept on his desk, a water bottle, and a small blanket. Creeping back down the stairs, his movements were now much slower, and he obsessed over every creak and thump that his footsteps summoned from the floorboards. He snuck his way into the mudroom where he donned his coat and hat as silently as a ghost slipping through a graveyard.
Braden passed through the freezing night air as darkness rapidly enveloped him like a heavy blanket falling to the earth. He moved through the streets unconsciously, unconcerned with time and place, wandering with no plans: he only intended to escape. Finding a cold nook in a ditch hidden beneath the skeleton of a frozen Weeping Willow, he buried himself in his blanket and ate a granola bar, shivering as he began to think about what he was doing.
“I wish I could really run away. It doesn’t matter how much they hate me; I have to go back.” Tears began to fall cold on his cheeks, and his eyelashes stiffened into pinprick icicles.
“I’ve never been good enough,” was the last thought that slipped through his mind before dreams immersed him in a sweet forgetfulness.
The damp night shook him throughout his dreams, and hard blocks of mud began to cling to his jacket. He awoke to the humming of an engine as one firm arm curled beneath his knees and another held him beneath the shoulders, cradling him into a warm chest. He felt himself being slipped onto the smooth leather seats in the back of a car, and he opened his eyes to see the cream suede roof of his mother’s Subaru Outback above him. The car ride home was gentle, and the voices of his parents were hushed to whispers that he couldn’t comprehend, that he didn’t want to comprehend. Lulled into a half-sleep by the gentle murmur of the car and the persistent stream of hot air from the vent above, he was barely aware of being lifted from the car and carried into his room, but when he felt his father’s calloused hand smooth the cold air from his forehead, Braden snapped out of the fuzzy reality and into clear consciousness.
“You found me,” he said in a whisper, incredulous that his parents had even noticed he had gone.
“What can I get you?” Jim asked, ignoring his son’s simple epiphany. Braden’s mother stood in the doorway, her silhouette a dark shadow against the light in the hall, and Braden could see her wringing her hands and swaying from heel-to-toe in a nervous fever.
“Are you hungry?” his father persisted. Braden merely nodded, forgetting the angry thoughts and the overwhelming sadness that had swamped him hours earlier. Jim rose from the edge of the bed and kissed his wife’s cheek in the doorway.
“It’ll be alright, Debs. He’s back now. You should go get some sleep too.” She stayed in the doorway with him for several moments holding onto his arm with both hands and looking up into his eyes before he added, “I’ll come to bed tonight.”
When Jim got back to Braden’s room, he brought with him the scent of apple pie, and in his hand he held an old leather book. He propped Braden’s pillows up and adjusted him into a sitting position against the headboards, then handed him the plate of dessert before opening the volume of Aesop’s Fables, which had once been Braden’s favorite.
The bedtime stories were read in such a deep and soothing voice that the pie was left half eaten on the bedside table as drowsiness washed over Braden like the tides. Jim laid the book down beside the discarded plate and leaned forward to do something he hadn’t done in years: he kissed his son’s forehead. Watching Braden’s eyes begin to close, he felt a pang in his chest.
How had he forgotten his son had existed? For months now, he had thought of his son as a pest, something in the way, always beneath his feet, tripping him. Or had it been years? Jim squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he tried to push the guilt away.
“How could I forget?” he wondered. “How could I not have tried to love him more? But I do love him. I just forgot. I do love him, I just didn’t show it.” He looked at Braden’s face again and stroked the hair off of the smooth forehead.
“I love you so much,” he said to his sleeping son. “If I can promise you anything, it’s that I love you.” He stood up and began to leave the room, when he saw a crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Picking it up and smoothing out the wrinkles, he turned off the lights and walked down to his study where he pinned the report card in the middle of his cluttered cork board. Going to the bookshelf on the other side of the room, he found an old picture of Debbie pushing a 2-year-old Braden in a swing and moved it to his desk. As he was leaving the study, he noticed his pillow on the leather. Picking it up, he sighed, wishing he could change so much of his life.
“No better time than now,” he said, turning off the light with his pillow in hand and going to join his wife in their bedroom.