ALL NOVEL Chapter 1: Leaving
“I’m leaving.”
Olli stood there looking at the door, her hand wrapped around its knob as she waited to hear anything in response. The door loomed as a portal to freedom and yet her hand was shaking as she held the doorknob. Suddenly her backpack with all her packed essentials felt like a boulder. Her parents were sitting there watching their game. She knew without looking they were not even glancing over at her. She had threatened to run away before, and had always come back. But still she hesitated. Some part of her wanted them to say something. Anything. Just something to note she was there.
Behind her was only the rumble of a cheering crowd from the television.
Taking a deep breath she turned the knob and opened the door to the front lawn. She took a single step and heard a soft chuckle over the commentary from the television.
“We’ll see you in an hour then, Olivia.”
She slammed the door shut behind her. Her scuffed up sneakers with their worn soles slapped against the concrete that winded from her house to the sidewalk proper. She would show them.
The spur of spiteful energy put a bit more speed in her step as she walked past rows of squat similar looking houses all partially shrouded by the cover of night. Cookie-cutter suburban housing with the same lawns, with old yellowing street-lights leaving circles of dull lighting on her path. The air still had the wet smell of rain that clogged the nose and she glanced up to the cloudy sky and frowned.
At least she ‘borrowed’ an umbrella, safely tucked into her backpack for now.
The street was empty except for the wind-blown leaves and styrofoam cups that raced ahead of her. The road by the sidewalk was wide and on the other side were more rows of similar looking houses. On both sides the lights in the windows made her feel like she was being watched by the houses themselves and with a shiver going up her spine she walked even faster.
The sidewalk wrapped around into a large park that was dotted with a few trees and dominated by a large playground with metal slides, swings that creaked lightly in the wind, a jungle gym shaped into a massive dome that Olli had never seen anyone climb to the top of, and a ruined looking plastic playhouse. Olli had been coming to the park for all of her nine years and had not a single memory of enjoying the place. The metal slide burned skin in the summer, the swings chains bit fingers, the playhouse always smelled like burning plastic, and the jungle gym had allegedly sent no less than fifteen kids to the hospital.
But it was empty.
So she sat down at the bottom of the largest metal slide and finally began to think.
“Where am I gonna go now?” She asked herself. When she had been forming her newest run-away plan, she had decided she would go all the way to the convenience store and then decide what to do from there. But she had been planning to leave earlier too. Now it was so dark that she was not quite sure how to get through the confusing maze of housing and roads. It looked easy enough when she was on the school bus getting ferried to and from school, but now as she looked past the trees and to the rows of yellow-eyed housing and roads she started questioning her plan.
Like many children with thoughts of running away, Olli’s planning did not extend much farther than her door even if she was not willing to admit this to herself. Also like many children, she had packed only what she considered essential.
She unzipped her backpack to reach inside and pulled out one of her seven chocolate granola bars, eating it idly as she gazed out into nothing in particular. If she went down Beech street, she knew she would eventually reach a backroad that probably looped out towards the strip mall with the boba place. The plan was forming quickly in her mind, if somewhat incoherent. Once she finished her granola bar she put the wrapper back in her bag and stood up. She had to go, somewhere, anywhere, to the boba place or the corner store or somewhere else, but she knew she had to go.