Away
Once we stood out in the vacant field across from the supermarket and tried it: offered
ourselves to passing cars by way of our thumbs, angled our bodies almost all the way
over into oncoming traffic. We had watched a movie the night before where girls like us
did it just this way: their clothes torn and sagging, their hair all long and ratty, but still
they were beautiful in some freaky, ethereal way that didn’t seem quite possible anymore,
not in this world as we knew it. But in the movie, beautiful men stopped for the beautiful
girls, sang out, “where you goin’ baby?” and then took them away. Our mothers, best
friends too that would hang out as much as we did, that would drink and laugh and then
talk in low voices and sometimes cry in one room as Katy and I did the same in the next,
had walked by the TV and sighed—they remembered those days, they said. We were
beginning to understand we would never know the entirety of their stories, and they
would never know the entirety of ours.
That summer, the sixties were back, for neither the first nor last time: tie-dye shirts with
peace signs all over Walmart and Target, everyone wearing braids and beads and holey
jeans. We asked our mothers to dig up their old stuff for us so we could say the things we
had were authentic: a leather fringed purse, a paisley headband. Back then, we could say
the sixties were about fifty years ago—an integer neat like a half moon, a whole we could
only see a part of. It felt like it would always be that way: like the decade’s distance from
the present was a fixed thing, something that would always remain in the last place we
saw it. Like how we imagined our own distance from the future.
It was hot the day we tried to hitch. It was hot every day; every day was the same. Our
legs jut out from cutoffs with the frays hanging down our thighs; our flip-flopped feet
sank in the mud from yesterday’s rain. Yesterday then—now forever ago’s rain, ancient
history’s rain. Our shoulders took the brunt of the Texas sun. Our mothers were always
telling us to keep our skin covered, that the sun could hurt or even kill us, but it felt good,
its constant attention—its heat meant our skin was baking, frying its way to golden.
We wanted to be taken away. From what—from nothing much. Just everything. From the
summer and all its trapdoors to the in-between, so easy to fall beneath. From being too
young to drive, to graduate, to leave, but supposedly old enough to know better for
everything else. From 90 degrees before ten o’clock and tinny tap-water that tasted like
blood in our mouths. From eyeliner that never didn’t smear and the way our hair smelled
burnt all day after we straightened it and our mothers telling us to cover up even though
they dressed just like we did. How people told us we looked just like them, our mothers,
and we wanted to look like ourselves—but not ourselves as we actually were, but the
selves we imagined ourselves to be, told ourselves we would become. From sneaking out
at night and not getting caught but still having nowhere to go, just roaming the streets that
all went in a circle. From crying over boys in our class that we knew didn’t deserve to be
cried over, that were bland and boring and smelled like dust, but still they were our only
option at any semblance of romance, whatever that was exactly, other than the thing we
wanted most and felt furthest from. We wanted the shape of it, the weight of it,
something to pull us up and out.
Where we wanted to go was less clear. In Texas, when you look out in the distance, you
can see not quite forever but almost. You can see for a long, long time and the thing is, it
all looks the same, nothing changes. We wanted to be taken beyond that.
For the most part, the cars passed us by—it was a small town, times were already
different than they used to be. People knew better than to be seen picking up a couple of
teenage girls who didn’t know trouble when they stepped into it. Some didn’t even look
at us, kept their eyes straight on the road as if we weren’t there at all. But we could get
the truckers to blast their horns, the words BUY NOW PAY LATER painted across their
doors, the last thing we’d see as they’d disappear over the horizon. We dreamed of men
like the ones in the movie driving by: handsome hippies with long hair and long beards
and a lust for life, who looked just like they used to, were authentic like the things we
took from our mothers. But these men who picked us would be from our time, not
theirs—young enough to not be too old for us. Young enough to still be romantic.
We’d drive out West because that’s where you were supposed to go, the radio playing the
whole way. We’d all sing along; we’d know all the words like we’d written them
ourselves. We’d go follow a band or go be a band or just keep driving forever. Really,
I’m not sure we really wanted to get anywhere—getting somewhere would be an ending
as much as a beginning. Depending on how you looked at it, but you could flip it back
and forth forever like a coin, betting against yourself.
I don’t know how long we stood out there for. It probably wasn’t more than an hour.
Maybe two. Time was different then. We had too much of it. Nothing to spend it on. It
was easier to get lost inside of it, disappear almost completely. Our mothers used to say
that time would speed up as we got older. That there would be less of it. That we would
feel worse about wasting so much. But we didn’t know how anything could feel any other
way than it did to us then, time unwavering as the sun on our backs. It was always the
same day over and over again, reused and stretched thin, but somehow, we were still running out.
Finally, one car slowed in front of us. A beat-up Volvo whose insides you could just tell
reeked like old cigarettes, like the way bad habits still punish you even after you quit. The
window rolled down and a lady leaned out towards us. She was our mothers’ age: we
could tell by the soft lines on her face, grays bleached blonde, collared shirt beginning to
wrinkle at the end of the day. We couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but we
could imagine them: tired, already exasperated with us.
“Girls,” she called out, her voice exhausted. Her voice sliced through the white noise of
traffic, through that crunchy sound of cicadas. “You shouldn’t be out here. Come on,” she
said. On her wrist was a big silver watch that we could see ticking from where we stood;
we could see the second hand moving, counting down until we obeyed. “It’s getting dark.
Let me take you home.”
None of our fantasies went like this. We never imagined, never dreamed, a woman
stopping for us—or at least not one like her. Someone so familiar we could have already
known her; hardly even a stranger. We wanted to step out of our worlds, not be dragged
back into them. She wasn’t anyone who could take us away.
We looked at each other and then we started running, laughing. Across that field that
would be empty for a few more years before it got built up, paved over, covered in
parking lots and strip malls and rows of apartments no one seems to want to occupy.
But back then it was still nothing, it went nowhere, just into another field just like it. But
that’s where we ran to, our feet sliding in the grass, our arms pumping at the sides as
if we actually wanted to get there, as if that’s where we had been trying to go all along.
We’d make it look that way to her. When we were far enough away, we stole a glance
back, and saw she was still waiting, pulled over on the side of the road, like she
thought—like she knew—we’d be back.
—————
Nikki Barnhart's work has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Post Road, Juked, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, the AWP Intro Journals Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA from The Ohio State University in 2024 and is currently a PhD student at University of Cincinnati. Find her online at nikki-barnhart.net.