Worship You

Chapter Fourteen - The Crowd Carries It Away

The night before New Year's eve, we left town at about ten o'clock. I think. I'm a little vague on all this.  

We'd been driving for an hour, with about five more to go, before we spoke a word. 

Cassie said, "You're bleeding."  

I asked her where, but she said, "Pay attention to driving. I'll handle this." She sounded a lot steadier than I felt. My muscles were thrumming like electric guitar strings. She reached into the back seat and rummaged through her bag. She brought out a little jar with some nasty-smelling grease in it and started dabbing it on my neck. It stung like bees and I said "Ouch!" 

"Don't touch it," she said. "It'll stop hurting in a minute." 

"What is it?" 

"It's for cuts and things. It'll heal this up fast." And she was right. By the time we got to New York the long deep scratch was closing up. She kept dabbing it on and in another eight hours, you could hardly see it. 

She noticed how I was still shaken up.  

"Hey. Relax," she said. 

She pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and took something out of it. 

"Give me your lip," she said. She took my lower lip, pulled it out and stuffed a wad of something in there that smelled like lawn grass clippings and rubbing alcohol. 

"Is this the stuff you gave me in the woods." 

She laughed. 

"No way. You have to drive the car. Don't swallow this. Just let it sit there." 

"What is it?" I asked. 

"It'll calm you down but it won't make you drowsy. I'll tell you when you can spit it out." 

She plugged in an old CD. She said, her mother had made it for her. The first song was Children of the Revolution by a band called T-Rex.  

"No, you won't fool the Children of the Revolution..." 

It was the first time I ever heard that song. I liked it. It didn't make me relax. But I started to drive a lot better. We rolled along the highway passing from one pool of light to the next, eating up miles. 

*** 

When you come up out of the Lincoln Tunnel, New York swallows you all at once. Gray walls of buildings and rows on rows of windows looking down like dead empty eyes.  

It was about five o'clock in the morning and we had no idea what we were doing. I was crashing and we decided to get a little sleep before we talked about what to do. We found a place to park the car way uptown on Riverside Drive. I pushed the front seat all the way back so we could stretch out. 

There was a park that ran for blocks all along the street and from where we stopped I could see a small building like a temple. I looked at it, wondering what it was - some kind of monument, but to what? - until I fell asleep. 

*** 

We only slept a couple of hours and I woke up cold and hungry. We left the car and walked over to the big main drag, Broadway. Not the theater Broadway up here but a long boulevard with grass malls in the middle. There were lots of stores and we found a diner that had a breakfast special and that's where we ate our first meal in New York. While we ate we studied a street map to see where we wanted to go. Just like a couple of tourists. I was having a hard time connecting the big city outside to this little map. But Cassie seemed to know what she was doing. 

After breakfast we walked downtown through crowds of people going about their morning just like nothing was strange or different. But we were runaways now and everything was different for us.