Sunbound

☀ On the Line

C H A P T E R   14: On the Line

☀ ☀ ☀

There was a war in Skylar Glass. Bad weather with the prediction of a hurricane. A monsoon on the horizon, and a swarm of sharks in the water. There were no horns or trumpets. There was only the presence of a thick fog and flashes of lightening. For fuck's sake, he could not recall a time when he had not felt absolutely waterlogged, soaked in poisons or drowning in his despondency, and he hated Michigan, and he hated that field, and he wanted, for once in his sorry life, to not think about them for a night.

He spared a glance at Scout, who was dead-still in the middle of his rented bed, painted paler by the moonlight that flooded the room from the picture window. Her eyes were slightly trembling behind her golden eyelids, and he thought of how she was surveying the scenery of a dream. Her breathing was slow and easy. She had found her solace in sleep. Skylar could only to wish to be that fortunate.

He sat there on the floor, in the corner of his motel room, and he thought that he could watch Scout sleep for a lifetime. The thought, however, wasn't like some romanticized bullshit that spewed from a drunken poet in an anthology decades before Skylar was conceived. It had nothing to do with being in love, or how beautiful she was. It was that she was fixable. Whatever she was going through, whether it involved Antonio or not, there was a solution. She could come back from it, and Skylar envied that. He had felt so despondent for so long that he was thoroughly convinced that there was no coming back for him. And then he thought that maybe, out of the two of them, Scout wasn't the one with the metaphorical gunshot wound. She had her bruises, and she had her cuts, some still raw and trickling, but she was fixable.

The war inside of him wasn't only about Michigan, then. It was a war between staying there, confined in that dark little corner of room number five, or leaving. He wanted to make sure Scout was okay; she was his responsibility after all. But he felt the urge to run all of a sudden; to hear his soles smashing the sandy roads into oblivion, and breaking out into a sweat until his chest ached and he couldn't breathe. But more than anything, he wanted to run, to leave that room because he didn't want anyone around. The notion that Scout could wake up at any moment and really see what Skylar looked like when he was down terrified a part of him. He thought that she had had her fill of misery for the night, and seeing Skylar the way he was then was a really sad place to be. He wanted to be elsewhere.

So, he ran.

Skylar crept out of room number five, shutting the door behind him with a gentle click that left Scout still nestled deeply in her sleep, and then he took off down the road. Those old Chuck Taylor's that he found in a dumpster back in California propelled him down the warm, Arizona roads like they were brand new, fresh out of the box from some overpriced store in one of L.A.'s mega-malls. The street lights passed him in sequences of white, blurry orbs above his head. He could almost hear the "zoom" he imagined each painted line on the road making as he raced over them down the streets, taking corners at random without a care as to where he ended up. The beads of sweat on his marred skin raced across him about as fast as he raced through Santan Valley. His lungs burned. There was an uncomfortable tightness in his calves, like his muscles threatening to split from the bone. The pains were welcomed, much-needed distractions.

Skylar stopped in the middle of the road, one leg perched over each side of the white, dashed line that divided the opposite-going lanes of traffic. He was doubled over, his hands on his knees and his eyes drinking in the sight of the pebbles haphazardly strewn across the road. He was gulping in air like he had never really breathed before this moment. He thought he must have ran about six or seven miles from the motel. He didn't really recognize anything. His mind was more than a little preoccupied on his tours through Santan Valley with Scott and Scout, and so he only remembered the general two-mile radius surrounding the motel. Within that radius were the only things he really needed: The auto shop, Santan Single-Stop, Georgia's house, the diner, and the motel.