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Home Is the Place You Escape

June 5, 1998

Owen was nervous. Good nervous, mostly. Seeing friends, going camping—escaping home for the weekend—it was a lot for him. Because anything that was anything was a lot to Owen. Going anywhere, doing anything, seeing anyone? A test, a trip, a meal, too much homework, not enough sleep: It all felt like the crushing depth of being underwater, an emotional case of the bends.

And it tended to put his brain in these loops, right? Did you do this, did you bring that, did you say something stupid once that people will remember, do people even want to see you at all, are you late, are you early, what the fuck is wrong with you? Sometimes the loop was one thought, one question, whirling around itself, a tree choking itself with its own growth.

So that was him today. The day he needed to escape home to go camping. Problem was, the loops in his brain rattled him enough that he often—unconsciously—started biting his nails. Sometimes until they bled (and on rare occasion got infected). He wasn’t going to do that today. He didn’t want anyone to see. To judge him. Not Lauren, of course, but also Nick. Nick had a way of finding that thing you didn’t want him to see and just digging in, like a drill bit.

But Owen had other ways of expressing nerves. Little ways of destroying himself to ease the anxiety. Biting the inside of his cheek. Chewing his lip. Digging his nails into his palms, should he have nails that weren’t yet bitten down below the tips of his fingers. Plucking hairs from places when people weren’t looking, like an eyebrow, or the top of his arm, even from inside his nose. Picking scabs, if he had any. Picking skin. Scraping the cap off a blackhead. Chewing the sides of his tongue. Peeling calluses. The body was an endless expanse of opportunities to pick and pluck and bite and peel . It made him feel better. It made him feel worse. He did it anyway because he couldn’t help it.

He looked down at his nails. They looked good today.

He chewed the inside of his cheek. Not to bleeding. There were vents there—skin flaps—from the frequent chewing. He thrust his tongue into them, as if they were gills he could tickle.

Deep breath. Saw himself in the mirror. He looked as good as he was going to.

Let’s go, he thought, and forced himself to smile at himself.

—

Camping was supposed to be an easy escape. The way forward should’ve been clear. It was Friday afternoon. Mom was at the store. Dad was still at work. Plenty enough time to throw clothes and snacks into a backpack, hop into Matty’s car, and speed off to a weekend in the woods with his friends. He could get drunk with Hamish. Play Magic with Matty. Get his balls busted by Nick, probably. And maybe he and Lauren would finally get some face time to talk about…well, everything. College, their game, and their future. But when he stepped out of his room, he found his father there in the living room. Sitting forward in the dusty old recliner. A beer in his hand.

“You’re home,” Owen said, trying to keep the shock and disappointment out of his voice. He put a thumb in his mouth, biting at the nail.

His father, a bent stick of a man, sniffed. “Where you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

And it was here Owen knew: His father wasn’t going to let him go anywhere. His plans, crumbling. The dreams of a weekend with friends, fucked.

“With the crew,” he said, in a small voice.

“Nngh,” his father grunted. “Go on, then.”

Owen’s heart lifted—the fog cleared, the path was lit. Almost free . “Thanks. I’ll—I’ll be back on Sunday morning, I think—”

“I don’t care, Owen.” The man leaned farther forward, the can on his knee, and he stared out at his son with dark, hateful eyes. “I don’t care if you go, don’t care if you come back. I’m done giving a shit about you. Never seems to pay off, does it? My friends at the jobsite, they all got kids they’re so proud of, and they ask me about you, and what can I tell them? What do I got to show for it? Mopey, soft kid, soft like his mother, scared of his own shadow, can’t dig a ditch or hammer a nail, probably a drug addict for all I know. So I don’t say anything.”

Owen felt tears hot at the edges of his eyes.

“Dad—”

“Go on, get out,” he said. Not loud. But firm. Angry. Acid.

Owen hurried past his father, out the door. Trying not to think about how there was something worse than a father who hated you—one who didn’t care about you at all.

Still. An escape was an escape. And it was easy, this time, at least. If not precisely uncomplicated.

—

Lauren was thinking about Matty again.

She stood there primping in the mirror, which was a thing she did not do. Not ever. Not for some stupid boy. And Matty was just a stupid boy, she told herself, even though she knew he damn well was not. And then there was Owen. Owen liked her. She knew it. How could she not? And it wasn’t that she didn’t like him—they’d made out a few times, and it was good, even great. But like, they were friends. Best friends. Making out was fine, but anything more than that felt fucked up, like incest or something. Besides, they wanted to go to college together, they wanted to work together and write stories and make games and—

She didn’t need him to be more than that to her.

Matty, on the other hand…

Matty was fun. Hot. Smart.

A friend, too, obviously—long a part of the crew, their Golden Boy. God, I want to climb him like the rope in gym class .

But it was more than that—he was driven . He got shit done. Matty had ambitions—he wanted to be a doctor, he said, or maybe a lawyer, and to meet someone who could even think of being those things was amazing. Like it proved something to her, that you were allowed to have ambitions. That you could be more than what you were now. A future You, better than shitty current You.

I want to be ambitious, too, she thought whenever she was with Matty.

Nick saw her and Matty Frenching outside of school a month ago, and he told her, “You need to pick a lane, Laur. Owen’s fragile.” And she told him, “I didn’t even think you liked Owen that much,” and he said to her:

“The Covenant.”

That phrase. The Covenant. The promise that bound them all. The thing that made them more than just friends—that made them a real, true crew. Bonafide. Nick wasn’t using it cavalierly. He was trying to drive something home.

And it did. It drove into her gut like a fist.

Okay, fine, Nick, I’m picking a lane .

So she was picking Matty.

And meanwhile, she’d get out of this empty house. Her mother was away again—this time, a trip to the Poconos to one of those trash-ass resorts with the big tubs that looked like cocktail glasses. Off with, who was it this time? Brett? Brad? Some B-name d-bag. Boyfriend Number Thirty-Seven. Mom was never home, which meant Lauren came home from school every day to an empty house, had to make her own microwaved dinners half the time, had to clean up, feed the cat, empty the litter box, take out the trash. All this stupid adult shit. Always doing it alone. Alone, alone, alone.

Well, not this weekend. This weekend, it was the woods, it was the good drugs, it was getting away from this home and going to her real home, which was wherever the crew was hanging out. That was home to her.

Time to not be alone, she thought. Time to go home .