Chapter Text
The idea to run away started as most unrealistic ones tend to when you’re a teenager - a joke.
Jamie had convinced Dani to skip school one day during Sophomore year to go see a movie. Dani was worried about missing class at first, but Jamie assured her that it would be fine. It was May, after all, and most of the major assignments for the year had already been completed. With only a few weeks until Summer break, there wasn’t much to be missed.
What Dani did not tell Jamie was that she was also worried what her then-boyfriend Edmund would say when he found out she ditched school without telling him.
As soon as they got to the movie theater, however, all of Dani’s worries about skipping school melted away. They picked the earliest showing of a coming-of-age movie Dani had never heard of, but Jamie said she read about in a magazine and insisted she would love it. The theater was completely empty, being that people don’t normally go to see movies at 11 AM on a Thursday. The two of them shared a bucket of popcorn, and, taking advantage of the fact that they were the only ones there, talked through practically the entire movie.
Toward the end of the film, the teenage protagonist left her house in the middle of the night and walked 4 miles to a train station. She bought a ticket for the next train leaving town, got on it, and never looked back. Jamie leaned over and whispered to Dani, “that could be us, you know.” Dani’s heart swelled at the thought of leaving everything behind and running away with Jamie, but the idea was quickly shot down in her mind when she realized that she could never leave her mother or Edmund.
Edmund, who called her as soon as he got home and immediately questioned her absence from school that day.
Edmund, who, days later, yelled at her for what seemed like hours when he heard through the grapevine that she had gone to a movie with Jamie, rather than having been sick at home like she told him on the phone, knowing that he would react like this if she told him the truth.
Edmund, who insisted on make-up sex after the fight. Who hovered over her while she lay on her back on his mattress and tried not to cry. Whose weight on top of her made her feel like she was suffocating.
Edmund, who, when he was finished, flopped down beside her and whispered, “I’m sorry Danielle,” in a tone that suggested that he wasn’t actually sorry for yelling at her as much as he just wanted her to act normal again, and she wondered if she would always feel this empty.
Dani spent the night staring at his bedroom ceiling, too afraid to leave, too anxious to sleep, wondering how she had gotten here.
She told Jamie about the fight, how he was angry at her for not telling him she wouldn’t be at school, and how he told her that she made him look like an idiot for not knowing where his own girlfriend was. Jamie, ever compassionate and always willing to listen to anything Dani said, sat beside her as she trembled, recalling the way he shouted at her and paced his room.
Jamie assured her that none of it was her fault, that Edmund was not entitled to knowing her whereabouts at every given moment. She then, as an attempt to get Dani to smile, told her that they could skip town whenever they wanted to, just like the girl in the film.
And the two of them held onto that notion for months. They would sit on Dani’s bed together and imagine where they would go, what they would do. No matter how much they talked about it, though, it never seemed like it was something they would ever go through with.
It isn’t until 8 months later that the idea of leaving the town behind and running away becomes less of an abstract daydream used to keep the girls afloat while they survive high school, and more of a viable option.
*
Dani sits down across from Jamie at their usual table in the cafeteria, swinging her backpack from her shoulder onto the bench. In doing so, the sleeve of her lilac-colored sweater rolls up to reveal a cut about 2 inches long on her right arm. Just as quickly as the sleeve rolled up, she tugs it back down, but not before Jamie sees her injury. Dani silently hopes that the other girl will choose not to say anything. The cut is the product of an accident, after all. She prefers not to make a big deal out of it. However, she knows that if Jamie had seen, it isn’t something she is going to let go. The girls have only known each other for two years, but Dani knows that there is no one else in the world who cares about her more than Jamie does. And if you were to ask her, Jamie would say the exact same thing about Dani.
“Dani…” Jamie says softly, looking up to meet her eyes.
“Don’t.” Dani whispers. She wants to lie to her friend about where the cut came from but knows that there’s no point.
The solemnity in Dani’s voice alone is enough to make her angry. “Dani, I swear to God if she did that to you, I’m driving over to your house right now and having a word with her.”
The “she” in question is Dani’s mother. If she’s being honest, Jamie hates most people. But there aren’t many people she hates more than Karen Clayton. She has only met the woman a few times, but she hears enough stories from Dani to make up for that.
From what she knows, Karen has been drunk for more than half of Dani’s life. Shouting at her daughter seems to be her favorite pastime, and she has the tendency to throw things when she is angry, which is often. Jamie can’t count the number of times she has been on the phone with Dani only to hear a crash or the shattering of glass in the background. When that happens, Dani usually scrambles to end the call so she can clean up whatever her mother broke that time.
If Karen was the cause of the cut on Dani’s arm, Jamie isn’t sure she will be able to stop herself from going over there and giving her a piece of her mind.
“She didn’t know what she was doing Jamie. She wasn’t trying to hurt me she was just… confused,” Dani says as she nervously runs a hand through her blonde hair.
“What is it that she did exactly?”
“She… I was standing in the doorway to the living room and she threw a vase. Obviously it broke and one of the pieces flew at my arm. I tried to get out of the way but I wasn’t quick enough. And then…” she gestures at her right arm.
“She threw a vase at you?”
“Well, technically she threw it near me.” Jamie rolls her eyes at that. “I just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Dani continues, “but really it wasn’t her fault, she’s just confused. I don’t think she knew where she was.”
“If it wasn’t her fault, whose was it then? Yours? You can’t keep making excuses for her. I’m sorry Dani, but you can’t. She’s your mother. She’s supposed to take care of you, not throw shit at you like you’re a fuckin’ raccoon.”
“I know, I know. But I don’t think she knew it was me. She kept yelling things that didn’t make sense, calling me by my dad’s name. She thought I was him.”
Jamie scoffs. “And that’s supposed to make it better? She’s so drunk she can’t even recognize her own daughter.”
Dani is silent for a minute, unable to look Jamie in the eye. She knows that everything she’s saying is true, but has always wanted to give her mother the benefit of the doubt. Though she knew better, a part of her wanted to believe that Karen still cared about her, despite her not having been a mother to her in almost a decade.
“I know you want to believe that she isn’t a shite person,” Jamie continued, “but you gotta admit, that’s fucked up.”
“Yeah… I- I know, you’re right.”
The two girls don’t speak for a while. Dani eats her lunch while Jamie sketches a plant in the corner of a study guide for a chemistry test. The silence is comfortable, just as it always has been in a way neither girl has ever felt with anyone else. It’s nice. It’s… safe.
“We could leave, you know,” Jamie says out of the blue, and Dani laughs softly. But Jamie shakes her head, and when Dani looks up at her, she sees that she isn’t smiling.
“I’m serious. We can pack our bags and get on the first train out of this godforsaken town. ‘S not like anyone would miss us if we were gone.” When Dani finally looks up at her, she’s unable to read the look in her eye, so she adds, “no offense to you of course it’s just-”
“No, no you’re right about that. You’ve always been my only real friend here. I mean as much as I hate to admit it, I doubt my mother would notice if I didn’t come home from school one day,” she says, and she is only half joking.
“So, what do you say? We’ll make a plan and get the fuck out of here.”
“Jamie,” Jamie’s face falls at the disappointed tone, “I can’t just pick up everything and leave. I’m not like you. I’m too attached to this place, as twisted as that sounds. Plus I have commitments. What about all the kids I babysit?”
“Then the parents’ll find another babysitter, Poppins. Sure, they won’t find another bored teenager lookin’ for a buck who’s as good with kids as you, but they’ll manage. I know you have responsibilities and all, but it’s not your job to constantly be taking care of other people’s problems.” Dani ponders that for a moment, as if she has never entertained the idea that she doesn’t have to be around to pick up slack for everyone.
“You can’t stay here,” Jamie continues. “You can’t keep living with her. It’s not safe and you know it. I’m not forcing you to do anything, you know I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t be suggesting this if I wasn’t 90% sure that it’s what’s best for the both of us and that we could pull it off. All I’m asking is that you consider your options here. We could leave this all behind.”
“I-... I’ll think about it, okay? I promise I’ll consider it, as long as I get to pick where we go if we do this,” she adds with a wink.
Jamie grins. “Deal.”
*
The two of them don’t have any classes together for the rest of the day, so they go their separate ways when lunch ends. Jamie hopes that Dani decides that she wants to do this. She doesn’t want to push, of course, doesn’t want Dani doing anything that makes her uncomfortable just because she thinks it will please Jamie. But she thinks, no, she knows that this is something they both need. They’ve been through a lot in the last two years. Jamie, navigating her foster parents and this town that is not even remotely similar to Northern England, and Dani, dealing with her alcoholic mother and her slightly-possessive now ex-boyfriend. She thinks a break will be just what the both of them need.
Meanwhile, Dani sits in the back of her Geometry class making a list of the pros and cons to leaving. The cons seem to outweigh the pros so far, the majority of them being related to prior commitments she has - she needs to be on-call in case any families need her to watch their kids for a night, any school she misses could be detrimental to her grade (though she has already applied to a few colleges, so she doubts that will change anything now), and then there’s her mother. It’s not that Karen wants her there, or even really needs her there. But she doesn’t want to leave her mother alone for too long. She feels that she always has to be there to pick up the pieces.
That topic falls under the pros list as well. Does she really want to spend the rest of her teenage years cleaning up after her mother and making sure she doesn’t injure herself in her nearly-constant inebriated state?
Another pro, of course, being the opportunity to spend more time with Jamie. Yes, she sees her almost every day at school and on the weekends. But it doesn’t feel like enough. A small part of her wants to be with Jamie somewhere no one else knows them, somewhere free of the judgement of this town. And what better way to do that than to run away together?
She would also love to see more of the world. As far as she can remember, she has only been out of this town once when she was very young, and has never been out of the state of Iowa. When she really thinks about it, she realizes how lonely that sounds.
The world is so big, and Dani knows this. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in this deadbeat town, where the biggest news was when she and Edmund broke up. Dani was the center of the town gossip for months after that. She couldn’t really blame them, the two of them had been a couple since middle school, had been friends for longer, and it seemed like the entire town was rooting for them to get together since the day they met when they were 6 years old. The breakup had been an unexpected one to everyone else, but truth be told, she had been thinking about it since the second year she and Edmund were a couple.
Unfortunately, when she finishes the pros and cons list, she is no closer to making a decision than she was before
*
Dani meets Jamie by her locker at the end of the school day so they can walk out together.
“So, hypothetically, if we were to leave, where would we go?”
They start walking, Jamie a few feet in front of Dani, walking backward so she can face her when she says, “we could go anywhere, Poppins. Well, not anywhere, I suppose, but anywhere you can take the train to.”
They stop outside of a classroom where a map of America is taped to the wall. They stare at it for a minute or two. Dani hums in thought before she asks, “how does Chicago sound?”
Jamie gives her a look that seems to say you’re coming around, then?, then smiles and says, “Chicago sounds nice. Could be a good start. We can always go to other cities from there if you’re up for it.” Dani looks a little nervous, so she adds, “hypothetically, I mean.”
“I’m still not sure about this. The whole dropping everything and leaving seems pretty daunting.”
“Well, you don’t have to make a decision now. Think it over. Take as much time as you need.”
*
When Dani goes home that night, she finds the house eerily quiet without her mother’s drunken complaining. The absence makes her incredibly nervous.
There’s a broken wine bottle on the floor next to the sofa, and a big red stain on the beige carpet. She doesn’t want to be there when her mother realizes the damage done to the carpet. It’s probable that Karen will somehow find a way to blame her even though she was nowhere near when it happened.
She hesitantly wanders into her mother’s bedroom and finds her lying in the middle of the floor, just in front of the bed. Dani freezes, somehow both shocked and not surprised in the slightest.
Luckily, her mother seems to be breathing, her back rises and falls every few seconds.
She knows that she should do something about this, any good daughter would, right? But she’s tired of having to take care of her mother when it should be the other way around. She knows that it could take her 15 minutes just to try to move the unconscious woman from the floor onto the bed. Even if she does try, she risks her mother waking up in a confused state and possibly punching Dani in the face (it has happened before, more times than she can count). She knows that she should move her mother to the bed and drape a blanket over her, not just leave her on the floor like an animal.
She knows this, but she is tired, and she is angry. She is angry because of how irresponsible her mother is. She is angry because of how her mother retracted from her after her father died almost a decade ago. She is angry because of how scared and alone she felt as a kid, and how most of that could have been avoided had her mother just been there for her. She is angry because her mother has never really been a mother to her at all.
And she is angry because she feels this way. Because she knows her mother is hurting but she can't bring herself to care anymore.
Jamie's words from earlier in the day flash through her mind. It's not your job to constantly be taking care of other people's problems.
So she makes a decision. She turns around and walks out of the bedroom, leaving her mother on the floor. She goes into the kitchen, picks up the phone, and dials Jamie's number. Jamie picks up after three rings.
Before the other girl can even say hello, Dani blurts out, "so, when do we leave?"