Love is a Car Chase

Sometimes I would pray for the dark. In the dark, I wasn’t anything. It was just bliss, sometimes sweet dreams but more often nightmares, although somehow even those I didn’t mind. Life was a nightmare sometimes, and at least in my dreams, I could either defeat them, or they vanished into smoke when I opened my eyes. Reality was often harsh and cold, and nothing could make it go away. Nothing that I was willing to do, anyways. You sucked it up, you toughed it out and you moved on because that was all that there was. There were no escape routes, no shortcuts in life. Sometimes the only thing that kept me going was knowing that it couldn’t be like this forever. That, and my friends. They were more family than anybody else had ever been. They don’t think that I’m unforgivable, that I’m a terrible person. No, we’re all terrible people, they say. Not one of us is worse than the rest, and together we’re a family. It’s the first real place I’ve ever belonged.

Some days the dark didn’t come, and I lay awake in bed wondering what it would feel like to be somebody’s everything. Tyler says I’m his everything, but I don’t know if I believe him or not. Tyler and I, we’re not like normal people think of romance. We don’t get along sometimes, we have loud fights that wake up the neighbours. He’s never hit me, but sometimes he looks at me like he’d like to. We say things we don’t mean to each other all the time. Like when I tell him I think he’s scum and I want him to fall off the edge of the earth so I never have to see his stupid face again, or when he yells that I’m not good for anything and should get out of his life. We don’t mean these things. I don’t, anyways. Sometimes I think he does because he looks so serious when he tells me to get out. And then, twenty minutes later, he’s forgotten about the whole thing and wants me to come with him to bed. Like I said, not the fairtytale romance you read about in books. Does that even exist? Not to anybody I’ve ever met.

When I wake up, the sun is shining in through our window. Our window is so covered in fingerprints that the sun leaves little dapples on the ground, and on Tyler. I guess I could have washed all our fingerprints off the window, but I thought it looked cool with the mid morning sun shone in. The mattress creaked as I rolled off of it, laying the remainder of my blankets on top of Ty. He was snoring, so loud that I thought maybe the people next door’s china was rattling. I thought for a moment about covering his mouth so that he would shut up…but then he would be all grouchy, and we had things to accomplish today. Important things. The dirt on the floor stuck to my feet as I walked into the other room-- that’s right, our apartment had a grand total of four rooms. Two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living space with the kitchen. It wasn’t much-- hell, it wasn’t really anything at all, but it was good enough.

I pulled open the fridge, pulling out a carton of orange juice and drinking straight from the carton. The door to Candice and Ridley’s room was still shut, so they must still be asleep. That’s okay-- I was rather enjoying the quiet of the morning before we had to get down to seriousness. I sat at the card table, setting the carton of orange juice in the middle of the table.

Even though it was dirty and old, I loved this apartment beyond words. It held a lot for me-- freedom and friendship and money. I guess this is the most I’ve ever had. Even if the cupboards didn’t shut right, and the floor could never be scrubbed clean, and the doors creaked, and the windows didn’t fasten right, it was home.

Tyler’s voice interrupted my train of thought. “We got stuff to do today, doll.”

When I turned around he was leaning on the doorway to our bedroom, shirtless. His hair was still a mess and he had that little quirky smile on his face. “Stuff for Red. Should be fun.”

Stuff for Red was always fun. Nobody knows what her real name is, not even Tyler and he’s known her a lot longer than me. We don’t know what her name is, but we do what she tells us to. She pays for the apartment, and we all get paid off at the end-- I guess you could say she’s the big boss. A lot of people don’t know she’s a woman, but I’ve met her, seen her. Maybe that’s part of the mystery, she leads us all because we’re so blind. Today’s mission was one we had all done before, Tyler and Ridley and Candice and I. Tyler can hotwire like nobody’s business and I’ve been told that I’m quicker than anyone. She wanted us to steal a car. Grand theft auto-- there were rumors that she had people robbing banks, running money laundering operations. That was all kept hush hush. We knew about what we were told to do and that was it. Anybody who squealed would be lucky to live long enough to get out the whole story. Besides, who was going to believe they stole a car or robbed a bank because some woman named Red told them to?

The thought of disobeying Red had never crossed our minds. Well-- maybe we’d thought, once or twice, about what it would be like to be normal. But we wouldn’t ever be normal, not after this. Not after this life. So we did what we were told, and we got ready to steal a car.