Escape From Norriswood

PART ONE: CHAPTER ONE

Rosalyn felt Tara stir from the passenger seat in the stolen Volkswagen Rabbit. From the driver's seat, Rosalyn glanced away from the road looming ahead. She took in the way Tara's cheek pressed into the seat, the beads of sweat glistening on her arms, even in sleep. The way her eyes fluttered beneath her eyelids. Dreaming, thought Rosalyn. But dreaming of what? For days now Rosalyn had kept her foot pressed evenly on the gas, pacing the car on 10, 11, 12-hour drives. Her calves, quadriceps, lower back, all cramped, and knotted.

Tara had needed to escape, to get out of Norriswood, so she had stolen her father's old, mustard yellow Rabbit when he went to work down at the paper mill. Ebbed the car out of the garage, and into the driveway. She would have escaped by her self, taken the car on the highway, except for the fact that Tara couldn't drive.

So after an initial text that took Rosalyn's mind away from the scattered doodles lacing her physics homework, Rosalyn had walked the couple of clicks over to Tara's house, hopped in the driver's seat of the Rabbit, and took off.

It was the kind of thing Rosalyn would have done for Tara, help her getaway with little explanation about why Tara needed to leave Norriswood in the first place. After a whole year spent bumming around Norriswood without Tara, a whole year that Tara had spent meeting her boyfriend, Bobby, at the university, Rosalyn had been eager to be around her friend. So when Tara texted her and said she wasn't going back to university next week, and instead needed her to drive her as far away as possible from Norriswood, Rosalyn thought it sounded like an adventure. 

But now, the third day of Rosalyn's prodding forward in the stolen car, that sense of adventure was beginning to falter. Why had Tara wanted to leave so badly in the first place? And why had it been so hard to get a straight answer out of her?

Even that first night, parked in the parking lot of Burlington's Wal-Mart, Rosalyn had turned to Tara and asked if they would be going back to Norriswood, tomorrow. Tara's only response had been the sound of her eating. The seat was reclined so that Rosalyn had to turn about 60 degrees to the right just to see her face, but that didn't matter anyway because Tara kept her eyes tucked down, plastered to the cheeseburger in her firsts.

"I just can't go back, Rosalyn," Tara had said. She'd gulped down a bite of her burger then. "Not tonight, not ever."

Rosalyn had just struck her hand out, and stolen a French fry from the nest of wax paper on Tara's lap. She'd sighed, cranked her seat back, and pressed her ball cap down over her eyes. She'd slept.

Now Tara snorted in her seat, a deep sound that seemed to cut through phlegm and awoke, gasping. Rosalyn pushed the gearshift up to neutral, and let the Rabbit drift forward a couple hundred meters. She titled the steering wheel to the right, and ebbed the old car off the road.

Tara rolled down her window. "How long was I asleep," she said.

Rosalyn stared out towards where the road ended on the right, and a meadow peered out flat and quiet into the horizon. "I'm not sure, Tara. An hour? Two hours?"

"Where are we?"

"I have no idea." It was the truth, too. Rosalyn had broken the border of Ontario that morning, and was now much farther east than she'd ever been. Rosalyn imagined they must still be in Ontario, but she wasn't sure where, or how close they were to the Quebec boarder. The realization of how far they'd come dawned on her then, and the weight of it crashed into her chest. Like she was stricken with a baseball she'd let her eye off. The radio in the Rabbit had been off for a couple of days now, and Rosalyn wondered if there had been a search warrant out for them, if either of their parents had filed a missing person's report.

From around them came the sudden buzzing of a chainsaw. The sound climbed up toward a high octave of pitch, before meeting whatever it was it was cutting into, a log, a body, the whine of it muted briefly, and then free again, the pitch high and clear, and piercing, until silence.