The Runaways

Danae let her school backpack drop to the floor with a thud in the small kitchen, a worn room with chipped paint in a faded green shade. The cabinet doors were broken. One hung halfway off its hinges. The four-seater dining table, covered with plastic torn at the corners, was stippled with crumbles of food and brown stains of who knew what.

The racket in the adjoining living room drifted in. Men laughing boisterously. Danae mourned the last day of school, not pining for the holidays with her mother. She was eleven and a half (and the half was very important), with long, straight black hair that nearly touched her bum and almond-shaped eyes of the same colour. Her face retained a roundish form, despite her being on the thin side. Her lips were plump, her skin the colour of lightly browned butter.

Her mother’s cackle came from the next room while Danae surveyed the kitchen for scraps of whatever she and the other two men with her had eaten. There were none. She opened the sticky fridge door and looked in there. Nope. Nothing but sour milk that had gone off three days ago. Better give the cabinets a pass. Something moved in there the last time she tried them.

She puffed out a disappointed breath, lifted her bag before someone tripped over it again, and gathered her courage to pass by the party to her bedroom.

The living room held nothing more than some grimy couches, an old box TV set, a cheap wood coffee table, and a carpet sprinkled with cigarette buds. There she found her mother with her red lips and blonde hair laughing devotedly at something the guy with the big belly and the shirt full of holes had said.

The other one snorted something off the coffee table. Danae, or Dany as was her nickname, didn’t know what. Her mother had started seeing other men—many other men—after her father died in a car accident. She wasn’t sure how it happened. She hadn’t known him very well because he worked a lot. It was only a few months ago, but her mother moved on surprisingly quickly. She considered it her duty to look for another man who could provide for them, she’d said.

“Mom, there’s no food in the house,” Dany complained.

She didn’t like being so close to the men her mother brought home. They looked at her funny and weren’t always nice to her. “It’s because you look native,” her mother had said. Dany didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t look much like her father or her mother. More like her grandfather, who came to America from Alaska. Dany still wore diapers when he died, but she’d seen a few photos of him.

Before her father died, she remembered hearing him tell her mother late one night that her uncle had moved to Alaska. She couldn’t remember him clearly. She’d just learned how to walk when he came to visit once. She recalled stomping toward him. Remembered him picking her up and lifting her into the air. They looked the same, native, even if he was raised in America with her mom. She didn’t speak about him often, so Dany held on to the little titbits of information her mom revealed during her tantrums and monologues. She wished she knew why he never came to visit again.

“Oh,” her mother said, “but I thought—” That’s as far as she got before the man next to her whispered something in her ear, making her crow with laughter again. She waved Dany off.

“Scram, kid!” The man who snorted the white powder said, taking a bottle of beer amongst the many, many empty bottles on the coffee table and knocking it back.

Dany visibly dropped her shoulders, scowled, and retreated into her bedroom. It was small and painted an eggshell colour. The red and blue triangles on the old curtains were faded now. Her modest bed had a frame made of wood and a delightfully squeaky mattress with blankets in a mishmash of colours, but she liked them that way. A mirror that was crowded with stickers once upon a time hung above her pine dresser. Only dirty glue that refused to succumb to any cleaning Dany tried clung to it now. The vinyl floors lifted on some of the edges. Her small bathroom housed a toilet, a sink, a stool to stand on in front of the sink, and a shower. The walls and floors were royal blue, and the toilet was an avocado green. Dany snickered every time she saw it.

They’d moved into this new house so her mom had a better chance of snagging a new husband, who’d feel sorry for them. That’s how she explained it, but Dany still didn’t understand how that was supposed to work.

She dropped her backpack and dug out three books she borrowed from the library. Dany loved to read, and her teachers claimed she was a whole level above her peers. Fantasy, mystery, and contemporary books held her heart, and she’d chosen one of each genre to keep her busy. She even managed to find The Hobbit while her mother and her many men occupied the television with movies that made strange moaning sounds. Dany doubted they were horror movies. There should’ve been monsters growling and creepy piano music.

Listening to the movies wasn’t so bad. Not until they started making the funny moaning sounds. Then the loud music of Dany’s mp3 player drowned them out while she read, sometimes deep into the middle of the night. Throwing the books on her bed, an idea sparked. Dany peered around the doorframe into the living room. Only a small corridor of six paces separated her room from the living space. The adults were occupied. Her eyes fell on the TV. She shut them, horrified at the sight of naked people. Eew!

She slipped into her mother’s bedroom, strewn with dirty underwear and those things big ladies wore over their chests. Danny approached the vanity and slowly, silently pulled open the drawer to find her mother’s wallet. She never noticed a dollar or two missing. Dany took a few notes and stuffed them into her pockets.

And realized she hadn’t thought this through, because now she had to go back out through the living room. She slapped the sides of her head in frustration. “Ugh! Stupid.”

Maybe she could use the phone in the hallway to order pizza? Nope, they’d inhale it before she even had a crumb. And five bucks wouldn’t even buy her a small one.

Dany sighed at her thin options. She was going to zip through the living room, she decided, standing at the very end of the hallway and bouncing to get ready, limbering up the feet, blowing out breath like a wrestler getting ready for a fight. Then she ran, blasting past the adults at lightning speed.

“The heck?” Gevin glanced over his shoulder, stupefied, while his hand fondled Helen’s breast. The kitchen door slammed.

“Oh, must be the wind.” She waved a dismissive hand and popped a red cherry in her mouth.

“Hm. I’d like to get my hands on your cherry.”

Outside, Dany unchained her third-hand shit-brown bike and rode off to Tony’s Grocer with a huge grin on her face. She passed some kids in her class on the way who scowled at her. She lacked friends because everyone called her mom a… a bad name. Not that she cared. She didn’t need them. But sometimes it would’ve been nice to have someone to talk to and play with.

Dany parked and chained her bike, strutted inside the shop, and bought Pepsi, peanut butter cups, candy bars, and a toasted cheese sarmie. She saved some money, knowing she couldn’t buy too much stuff that would spoil. She couldn’t use the fridge. Her mother’s men would grab the food before she got to it. Anything edible stayed in her bedroom.

That evening, when the men had finally left and she watched cartoons, her mother tidied up the kitchen. Eleven o’clock ticked by, but Dany had no bedtime curfew.

Her mother came in with a baffled frown, pausing on the step in the archway. Dany raised a brow and pouted her mouth, wondering what this was about.

“Did I feed you today?” Helen scratched her head with a dagger-like pink fingernail.

Dany kicked her legs forward and backward as they dangled from the couch. Sometimes she wanted to cry. Really, she did. But she felt like they just drifted farther and farther apart when she gave in to emotions. Her mom didn’t know how to handle Dany crying. Where was she going to buy food at this time of night, anyway? On the odd occasion, she remembered to buy a box of Fruit Loop cereal and milk for Dany, while Helen filled up on the scraps at the diner where she waitressed.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.”

She nodded, the vertical lines deepening in her forehead. If she kept that up, her face would look like that of a pufferfish from the firming injections one of these days, Dany thought. “Oh, I have to tell you that you should pack… stuff. We’re flying to Anchorage tomorrow to meet a nice fellow. Rich guy.” Helen’s eyes drifted dreamily to the stained ceiling. “He has friends too. I met him on an online dating site. He liked my profile and said I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on!” She batted her lashes, patted a hand to her bosom.

Dany looked at her blankly. Half the time, she had no idea what her mother was talking about. Dating? Profiles?

She settled on asking, “Where’s Ancho-rage?”

“In Alaska of all places! It’s so cold there. Maybe I can convince the bloke to move here to the living world. You should pack a warm jacket. You have one, right?”

She didn’t—none warm enough for Alaska. But she’d pack what she had and what she could fit in her carry-on. A thought crossed her mind. “Where in Alaska does your brother live again? Is it close to An... to An... Anchor?”

Helen scrunched up her face at the mention of her pathetic brother. “Stephanie was right to leave him for Michael Fletcher, that handsome real estate agent from Maine. Matthias is so quiet and dull. He used to be a lawyer while they lived in New York. I have no idea what the hell he does with his life these days. Don’t know, don’t care.”

She patted her curly hair. “When I asked him to lend me money years ago, he blatantly refused to give me a cent. Denied his own sister, his own flesh and blood. What did you...? Oh yes, he lives in Harlem. End of the earth. It’s where he belongs, if you ask me.” With that, she retreated back into the kitchen, case closed.

Harlem, Harlem, Harlem Dany repeated over and over to herself to burn the word into her mind.

“Be ready at seven!” Her mother called out from the kitchen. “And feed that damn cat!”

“Paw went to heaven six weeks ago, Mom. I buried him in the backyard.” Dany rolled her eyes and took a half-melted chocolate bar out of her pocket to chew on while she watched Tom chase Jerry.