Jailbreak

As usual, Sasha runs away before dawn.

She forces her eyes open at the sound of the vibrating alarm clutched under her stomach and stares hazily at the darkness of her room. The moon is still silhouetted in the sky outside as she slides to the edge of her bed, listening for any sound from her parents’ room.

Silence.

It is 3:45 when she slings her bag silently over her back, taking a hair tie out of the pack under her mattress and sliding it around her wrist, where it fits like a firm embrace; not too tight, but pressing just enough for her to know it’s there, under her baggy sweatshirt.

There’s nothing she can do for the sound of the car. She starts it up in slow motion, creeping backwards down the driveway in the chill June night, the defroster going full blast as she watches the dark windows of her house, stomach clenched, excuses on hand.

I was going to an early study group with James and Natalie. I know, I’m sorry, but I guess I was just getting so nervous about Yale.

But Sasha hasn’t needed her excuses thus far.

Six months prior:

Here is where the story almost ended.

Sasha is sitting in her room, listening to the sound of the kitchen radio pumping holiday songs through the floorboards. Her door is locked though she knows no one will try to come in; they are too busy with the presents, the pies, the last-minute guests. She has a bottle of pills in her hands and a glass full to the brim with water on the desk in front of her.

She has a choice, but it doesn’t seem like that anymore to her.

She expects that she should cry, or write a note at the very least, unchaining everything that’s been stuck inside her for so long. But she does neither, just faces the wall, eyes running over the pictures she’s tacked up over the years. Her Yale college acceptance letter is the latest addition, the bland white paper pinned jarringly over the collage of color photographs from old National Geographics, encouraging quotes and poetry that had spoken to her at one point, when life could still get under her skin.

With grades like these you have options, the guidance counselor had explained to her. What is it that you want to do?

She’d shrugged. My dad wants me to go into business.

The counselor had frowned. But what do you want to do? What are you passionate about?

She’d shrugged again, made her way through that talk with noncommittal mmhmms until she was allowed to go, leaving the guidance counselor peeved that she couldn’t be the savior she so clearly saw herself as.

Sasha clutches the bottle of pills tighter in her hand.

Okay. I’m ready. Okay.

She takes one pill. Swallows. Another, and then another. She doesn’t know if she’s imagining it, but she already feels sleepy.

Underneath where the Yale acceptance letter is tacked up, she can see the faint grey lines of old sketches, and out of nowhere she pictures a woman sitting in a cafe, music playing softly, lustrous brown hair falling around her as she draws.

At once she knows a few things about this woman.

One, she is an artist. Maybe she sells paintings and drawings in the lobby of an old hotel on cold nights.

Two, she is deliciously happy. She can’t see the source of the joy, exactly, but it’s falling off her in waves, fast as the steam from the cup she’s drinking out of.

Three, this woman is her.

Sasha bites her lip, looking down at the bottle of pills open in her hand. She slowly puts the cap back on.

The smallest ember has been lit in the pit of her stomach, a slow, fumbling hope.

All through the holidays, she plans it, disappearing behind her mask when relatives speak to her. She looks up cafes on her phone and tracks her parents’ schedules: when they wake, when they sleep. Forty minutes down the freeway there is a little place that feels promising to her. It opens at 4:30 am, real Starbucks-type hours, but she imagines it has a homier feel. When she goes to get the cooling Jell-o out of the garage on New Year’s Eve, she checks to make sure she knows where her mother keeps her car keys.

She knows it’s ridiculous, reckless even, and she’s never been the kind to do reckless things. She doesn’t even know why she has to do this specific thing, except for that she saw a cafe in her head and so that’s where she needs to go.

It feels imperative for survival.

She backs the car out for the first time two mornings later, hours before she is due at school. She’s so tired she can barely think, which ends up being good, because if she does, she might turn around.

But she finds the cafe, and she goes in the door and sees a rack full of notebooks by the counter. She picks out a small, black Moleskine and holds it to her chest like a child, bringing it to the cashier. With her heart pounding, she asks if she can also have a chai.

They have to do a price check on the Moleskine. There are no others like it on the rack, and they can’t even remember stocking it, so in the end they give it to her for free.

“New customer bonus,” the girl at the counter says with a smile, and then asks for her name to write on her cup. When her drink is ready, she calls her over. “Feel free to stay and sit, Sasha,” she says.

The sound of her name on the stranger’s tongue is electrifying, like waking up after severely oversleeping. She takes a seat in the corner nearest the window and opens the little black mystery notebook. She’s gone through two pages of sketches before she notices more customers have entered, sitting chattering around her. It’s almost time for her to leave when she realizes she’s been smiling the entire time.

Mornings at the Sunrise Café become a routine for the next several months.

Her mother never notices the mileage on her car, or the fact that her makeup is being used at a more aggressive pace. She is not an observant person. Neither of Sasha’s parents are, which is part of the problem. In their minds, she has turned around, really started to prosper since the day they never talk about.

Today, like most others, Sasha’s chai is already ready for her when she reaches the counter. She thanks Katelyn, the same girl who rang her up that very first day, and goes to her usual table.

One more day, she thinks. After that, school is out and she’s officially college-bound. Thinking about it, she feels the dread mounting. Sure, maybe in the summer she can continue to make it out here, but once she goes to Yale, to a city and community that her father may as well own, with people she can never get close to, what will she do then? How will she cope?

She feels tired thinking of it. Tired and afraid. No one gets through life living like this.

Stop. It’s time to draw.

Sasha looks down at the notebook open in front of her and flips to one of the last clean pages, struggling to keep her mind on the precious time she has left. Draw something that makes it worth it, she thinks. Something worthwhile. Her eyes drift to the picture she started the day before, of the apartments across the street, and then out the window at the real thing.

The Magnolia Apartments are brick-fronted and cozy-looking, five hundred square feet apiece, according to the sign advertising openings out front. One of the apartments in particular catches her eye every day- or its tenant does, anyway.

He looks young, maybe only a couple of years her senior. She isn’t sure if he goes to college or attends work, but he leaves for somewhere almost every weekday. Before he does, he always pokes his dark head out of the top floor window and carefully waters the bright white flowers hanging there. Sometimes after he’s done, he’ll run his hands over the tops of them for a moment, like a man having an intimate conversation with his plants.

Tomas. She only knows because he’s come into the Sunrise a handful of times while she was at her usual place, and she’s listened in on his friendly banter with the baristas. Tomas has a slight accent and a disarming laugh. His hair is fixed in thick curls that are either a tiresome process or a gift of nature.

One time he’d stopped at her table; it had taken her a moment to notice the presence of another person so close, and when she did, she jumped, feeling heat mounting her cheeks.

“Sorry,” he said. “Do you come here every day?”

She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth with some effort.

“Almost.”

Up close he was shorter than she’d expected, shorter than her. She wondered if that would bother him on a date and then wondered why she was wondering that. She felt herself blush more.

Tomas put one, delicate slim fingered brown hand on his chin and surveyed the black notebook in front of her.

“Your drawings are really good,” he said. He pointed to one of the sketches. “The old lady who always sits by the restrooms.”

She laughed, surprised.

“Yeah, that’s her.”

“You’re really good at people. Like, mad good.”

“Thanks.”

“Look I’ve got to go, but it was nice meeting you…?”

“Sasha.”

“Sasha.” He smiled, and something in her did a weird little flip. “See you around,” he’d said, and just like that he’d left her with a scent of some subtle cologne she couldn’t place and an inability to focus for the rest of the morning.

That was recent, maybe a week ago. She and Tomas haven’t crossed paths since then, but she’s started to fixate more on the apartments across the street, wondering what it would be like to live there, to wake up there each morning with the sunrise and head over here to sketch. What it would be like to move around in what she imagines are quaint little kitchens and modest living rooms. What it would be like to- maybe- not live alone.

Her friends would say she’s obsessed. They wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

“When are you going to date?” James had asked her once, Natalie nodding enthusiastically at his side and offering to set her up. She guesses she can’t blame them: it is kind of unusual, maybe, not to have gone on a single date at eighteen.

But even her friends don’t get it, not really. It’s not like she hasn’t had crushes.

One in particular sticks with her, a boy she used to tutor in math sophomore year. He was a year older than her and he’d even had the little scruff of a beard coming in, which she couldn’t stop looking at as she attempted to explain the value of x.

He had looked at her too.

Did he like what he saw? Did she want him to? What would it mean if she did? What had begun as excitement had turned to panic at the possible intimacy, the soul-baring that she couldn’t even manage with her friends.

She didn’t do anything, and when the sessions had ended, she was relieved not to have to bear the awkward silences anymore, the palpable and mutual attraction between them. Later she’d convinced herself she would have only embarrassed herself, that she had imagined it. That was, until she’d gone back over her notes and a folded post-it had fallen out, a number scrawled across it in messy boy-writing.

He had a girlfriend by then, who she caught giving her judgy looks in the hall sometimes, like she had the upper hand. She pretended it didn’t hurt to see them together, walking the hallways entwined, stopping for attention-seeking PDA in the stairwell, the sway of the girl’s hip screaming Look At Everything You Can’t Have.

The door to the cafe tinkles again and Sasha looks up as a man enters the shop, the first customer of the day other than herself. He orders a small coffee at the counter and sits down across from Sasha, on the opposite side of the room. It’s too good a vantage point to pass up, and with the remainder of her time, she begins to sketch him in detail. The lines on his face, which could be anywhere from forty to sixty years old, his salt and pepper hair. He sits tapping his fingers on the table restlessly, downing his coffee in quick, urgent slurps that must burn going down. There is one awkward moment when he looks up and their eyes meet, his a cold, clear blue. He glares at her, and she bends to sketch his jacket, the brown plaid patterning on it.

You’re really good at people, Tomas had said to her, and she likes to think part of it is because of how she makes up stories about them as she draws. This man, for instance, is single, an absolute bastard, divorced. He goes hunting on the weekends. He has some sort of secret vice, and she’s in the midst of trying to decide what it is when her alarm buzzes in her pocket. Out of time.

The man across the room from her is already getting up too, in a hurry to get somewhere. He beats her out the door, walking quickly to a red truck. Sasha bets she’s right about the hunting.

“Today, I want you to draw your life in ten years,” Sasha’s art teacher says later that afternoon, eyes lighting up like a child who’s just won the biggest prize at the fair. “Get creative with it. This is the final project of the term and will act in place of your final exam.”

The room fills with the sounds of chairs pushing back, people shifting around as they grab for their supplies, and Mr. Po’s voice fades to the background as he reminds them that all mediums are acceptable, to not let themselves be reined in by the status quo. True art is freedom. True art is flight. And so on.

Sasha stares into the empty page in front of her like a milky void, suddenly weirdly nervous. When she looks up, she catches Mr. Po’s eye by accident. He smiles, quirking his eyebrows up, and she looks down again so fast she feels dizzy.

Don’t come over. Don’t come over.

You are very talented, Mr. Po had written the other day in Sasha’s yearbook. Do not ever feel afraid to share your voice and your vision with the world.

Ever since, though she knew it was ridiculous, she has felt a little like he’s hunting her, his gun of truth aimed for the kill.

It really shouldn’t be so hard, she tells herself, looking at the paper. Just make something up. Anything.

She’s just started to draw when a couple of kids at the next table over start hooting about a jailbreak, waving their phones around.

“It’s that guy from Wisconsin. They’re putting out a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for whoever finds him!”

“Is this the guy who murdered his family?”

“Wasn’t he on death row?”

Sasha isn’t particularly interested in the ensuing speculations, the retellings of the news on tv. Wisconsin is a far cry from New York, but drama for the sake of drama was enough for some people.

“Really makes you lose faith in the prison system,” her tablemate Amy says, shaking her head. “I heard there are thousands of jailbreaks a year.”

Sasha doesn’t comment; she’s just glad Mr. Po has been distracted by the news and stopped coming her way. The word jailbreak absurdly makes her remember an old gym-class game, basically a glorified form of dodgeball. If you got hit with a ball, you had to go to ‘jail’ and the only way you could get out again was to catch one of the balls your team threw. Sasha had never been good at the game; people snatched the air balls before she could get to them. After a while, she’d stopped trying.

Sasha is at home, in bed mindlessly scrolling through her phone, trying to lull herself into an early sleep, when she does a casual Google search for the escaped prisoner.

What she finds makes it impossible to sleep.

Two years ago:

Here is where the almost-ending of the story began.

Sasha’s mother had dropped her off at the mall earlier to pick up a present for her father, a pair of gold cufflinks. You can spend the extra on anything you want, she’d said before pulling away with a promise to be back in a few minutes.

Now she stands in front of the mirror in her bedroom staring at her reflection in awe. Her backpack is open at her feet and she’s wearing the skirt she bought. It’s a light pink color with a sheer texture to it, like silk. She twirls from side to side, loving the way the light plays over the fabric. Like in a dream.

She feels in a dream, as she reaches down to uncap the lipstick she got to go with it, a soft pink. She’s just finished carefully applying it to her lips when she hears the door downstairs, her father’s footsteps going to the kitchen where her mother has begun to make dinner. The smell of pasta drifts up to her with the sounds of their voices. Her heart starts to beat hard against her ribcage in an uncontrollable rat-a-tat-tat. She can do this. She has to do this.

And so she starts down the stairs slowly, taking them one at a time. She turns robotically at the bottom and heads for the kitchen.

It happens in slow motion. Her father is in the process of turning to say something to her mother when he sees her there in the doorway. His face darkens like the sky before a tornado.

“Adam,” he says, the name filled to the brim with danger, and she knows she has made a mistake.

She curls up on her bed that night, holding one hand to her cheek, running it down to her shoulder. All aching, all painful to her pressing touch. Sasha’s father has never hurt her before, but the bruises have begun to stand out just as clearly as the memory of her mother’s silence.

She closes her eyes at the words replaying now in her mind, and squeezes her hand into a fist, hard, around the gold cufflinks that are all that remain of her shopping trip. Harder, harder, harder. She doesn’t stop until she draws blood.

A year passes. Sasha applies herself to her grades with a wooden dedication. when she does well, small things slip through. She is able to grow her hair out long enough to put back; she uses a reference picture of Johnny Depp to plead her case. She paints her room a pastel blue and puts up a string of lights.

They never talk about that time. The first time she tried telling the truth and the first time she began to understand her parents’ love was limited, full of terms and conditions she’d never seen.

Another long year passes. She knows something has to give, and the night she finds herself sitting in her room with a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills, she thinks, it’s going to be me.

Sasha barely hears the buzzing of her alarm. Even though it’s the last day of school, she thinks about rolling over and going back to sleep. She presses snooze once, twice.

That’s when she remembers.

The thought is electric, like caffeine.

She’s out of the door and onto the highway in seconds, forcing the van up to ninety and praying she won’t get pulled over. She exits and rolls up to the Sunrise Cafe, slamming the car into park. Sasha starts undoing her seatbelt and then pauses.

He’s here today. Right in front of her looms the bright red truck she remembers from the other day. She takes out her iPhone and her notebook and dials quickly, hands shaking. Sasha hears her words as through a fog when she speaks, staring down the whole time at the page she’s turned to, the sketchy, hard eyes of the man she drew the day before.

The moments after calling and before the cops arrive seem to last forever. Sasha keeps switching her eyes from the back of the truck in front of her to the door of the cafe. She fumbles for a pencil and writes down the license plate. She keeps her phone within arm’s reach, just in case. Then she takes a single, calming breath and retrieves her mother’s makeup from the glove box. A lipstick has been deposited there since the morning before, a light pink color that makes a knot form unbidden in her throat. She’s just finishing its application when she sees the fleet of black cars pull up in her rearview.

Sasha hears a knock on the window by her face and spins around, expecting an officer in uniform. Instead, she finds herself staring directly into the eyes of her mother.

The predictable sinking in her chest is mixed with a small bud of relief. You got me, the game’s up. Sasha lowers her window and her mother’s words, no longer angry muffles on the other side of the glass, wash over her.

“-can’t even begin to explain what it was like to realize-

-how long you’ve been doing this I don’t want to-

running right past me in the kitchen this morning-

-speeding god knows where, your father and I could barely catch up, and now…now…”

She waits benevolently as her mother gestures at her face, her mouth open in an almost comical expression of distress. An air of great benevolence falls over Sasha, like she’s currently floating miles away and nothing matters.

“Just look at you!” Her mother finally explodes, rallying. “Your father and I thought we’d put this foolishness behind us, but here you are out on the streets, in public, looking like a…like some kind of freak!”

“Where is Father, anyway?”

She blinks twice, in rapid succession, like her eyes are firing blanks.

“He’s waiting a block down, and if you don’t get out of that car right now, I’ll-” She gestures to her phone.

“There’s an arrest happening here,” Sasha says calmly. “We probably shouldn’t crowd them.”

A cop comes jogging out of the cafe and over to Sasha’s passenger side window. Feeling vaguely ridiculous, she opens that one as well.

“Sorry to interrupt but we need to get a statement,” the cop says.

Sasha’s mother cracks.

“Get out of the car, Adam!” she screams.

Sasha gets out of the car. She can’t remember the last time she’s stood this close up to her mother; she’s surprised to find they stand exactly eye-to-eye now.

“My name,” she says, “is Sasha.”

She steps around the front of the car and instead of getting in the passenger’s seat, addresses the cop on the other side.

“Could we maybe talk inside?” she asks. “I could really use a chai.”

“You doing okay?”

Sasha looks up from her notebook to find Tomas scrutinizing her, his dark brows pushed up in that way she finds strangely irresistible.

They are on their way back from her parents’ house, where she’d collected her belongings, stuffing them into the back of Tomas’s little red Camry. Her mother was home, but they hadn’t spoken; every time she tried, her mother’s back would stiffen, and she’d move away, going on to another part of her spontaneous cleaning.

Tomas had offered to go in with her. He’d told her about his past, how his given name had been Maria, how, for the first time last Christmas, he’d spoken with his mother and grandmother on the phone.

Sometimes it takes time, he’d told her. For the spaces between people to thaw.

What if they never do? she’d asked.

Maybe, he’d answered, you’ll find that’s for the best.

“I think I am,” she answers him now. “Just…a little overwhelmed, I guess. Do you think the Sunrise Cafe will take me on?”

“Why wouldn’t they? You’re a celebrity now.”

“Oh, so now I know why you like me.”

He laughs. “Not true. You have no idea how many times I wanted to go in there and talk to you again but chickened out. I did watch you a lot from my window.”

“What? You watched me?”

“Hey, I was discreet about it. I usually did it while I watered my flowers. I think I might’ve overdone that, by the way. Drowned the poor things.”

There’s a brief pause in which Sasha only stares at him. Then the dam breaks. She starts laughing, the sound coming roaring up out of her, loud and so long her stomach starts to hurt. Tears slide down her face, freed finally from where they’ve been clinging at the corners of her eyes the past twenty minutes.

The last few days have been a blur. She’s sent in her notice to Yale, telling them she won’t be attending. She hopes whatever waitlisted kid gets her spot is ecstatic, that the acceptance was the answer to their dreams.

Maybe someday she will consider college, art school most likely, but for now her funds are limited to twenty-thousand miraculous dollars, and she is using them wisely. First, to rent an apartment: a modest one-bedroom in Magnolia Gardens. This makes Tomas and her neighbors; she feels like they might be something more too, but that can wait.

She feels for once like she has all the time in the world.

“Damn!” Tomas exclaims suddenly, swerving quickly to avoid a pothole. “Sorry. Hope I didn’t mess you up.”

“It adds character,” she assures him.

He keeps one hand on the wheel as he turns to her again.

“Oh wow, is that what I think it is?”

“It is.”

Mr. Po had contacted her and let her know that he was allowing an extra week after the end of school for her to hand her final assignment in.

“The last page of the famous black book,” Tomas says, letting out a low whistle. “Well, you better make it good!”

They are traveling the back roads to what is now home, a route she doesn’t know. Longer by a bit, but so much more scenic. She observes the outlines of some old barns sagging in the mist, a group of deer feasting on a garden, then turns her eyes to the road right in front of them, the fog rolling out from last night’s rain partially obscuring the view.

“I think,” she says, “it will be.”