Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel Read online

  Away From Here

  Christopher Harlan

  Contents

  Foreword

  Synopsis

  Prologue

  Note

  Quotes

  Part I

  Two Flowers

  1. Where I tell you all about that beautiful Peruvian goddess who rescued my soul.

  Interlude

  2. Where I realize that even when thrown by my best friend with the noblest of intentions, a french fry in the face is still really annoying.

  Interlude

  3. Where I encounter two potential serial killers, nearly freeze to death while sitting on some rocks, and learn the complexities of the word potato.

  4. Where I tell you some sad stuff about the night It happened.

  5. Where I watch a film of us in my head.

  6. Where I learn that food and Annalise just didn’t get along, and where she struggles to pronounce types of steak correctly.

  Part II

  Quotes

  Interlude

  7. Where I learn that love can’t be accurately ranked on a scale of 1-10.

  8. Where I ask Anna to accompany me to nerd Heaven.

  9. Where two nerds escort their girlfriends to nerd Heaven.

  Interlude

  10. Where I tell you about our fights, both real and fake, and where Petty Crocker makes his triumphant return to the narrative.

  11. Where I can’t stop the momentum of her loss.

  12. Where I have lunch with my best friend one more time.

  Epilogue

  Five things I (re) discovered while writing Away From Here that I wanted to share with you.

  Author’s Note

  Connect with Christopher Harlan

  Away From Here

  By Christopher Harlan

  Cover design, Formatting, and teaser designs by Jessica Hildreth

  Edited by Jessica Kempker

  This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to anyone who did not purchase the book. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, otherwise) without the written permission of the above author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. All people, places, and events contained herein are a product of the author’s imagination and are completely fictitious.

  Foreword

  The relationship between our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses has always been something that interested me, probably because the most formative experiences of my life have surrounded witnessing the complexity of that relationship. Like our main character, Logan, I was a nerdy, mixed up mixed kid who grew up in a house haunted by mental illness. But in that same household I witnessed the kind of strength, toughness, and resilience that made me the man I am today. The contrast between those two forces was the inspiration for this book. I wanted to explore the complexity of flawed and powerful women through the eyes of the teenaged boy who’s been influenced by them, and one who’s experiencing the overwhelming power of his first love.

  This isn’t strictly autobiographical. To fictionalize the exact experiences of my adolescence would have been interesting, but ultimately confining. There was no Annalise for me when I was that lonely kid. There were comics, to be sure, and a best friend for the ages, but alas, no actual girl. I hope that in reading Logan and Annalise’s story that you’ll discover (or rediscover) elements that harken to experiences in your own life, and that through Logan’s eyes you’ll remember the particular intensity of being a teenager that we oftentimes forget as adults.

  I never knew Annalise, she’s an invention of my mind, but my nerdy, teenaged boy self would have given away every number 1 Marvel Comic I owned (no small collection btw) to have had a girl like her in my life at the time. So enjoy the story. When you meet Logan, tell him I said what’s up, and that I’ll return his Uncanny X-men graphic novel shortly. And when you run into Our Girl, remind her that she’s anything but ordinary.

  ---Christopher, 2018

  Synopsis

  When I was seventeen years old there were only three things that I knew for certain: I was a mixed up mixed kid, with weird hair and an unhealthy love of comics; I wanted to forget I’d ever heard the words depression and anxiety; and I was hopelessly in love with a girl named Annalise who was, in every way that you can be, a goddess. What can I say about Anna? She wasn’t the prom queen or the perfect girl from the movies, she was my weird, funny, messed up goddess. The girl of my dreams. The reason I’m writing these words.

  I’d loved Anna from a distance, afraid to actually talk to her, but then one day during lunch my best friend threw a french fry at my face and changed everything. The rest, as they say, is history. Our History. Our Story. Annalise helped make me the man I am today, and loving her saved my teenaged soul from drowning in the depths of a terrible Bleh, the worst kind of sadness that there is, a concept Anna taught me about a long time ago, when we were younger than young.

  So flip the book over, open up the cover and let me tell you Our Story, which is like Annalise, herself: complicated, beautiful, funny, and guaranteed to teach you something by the time you’re through. Maybe it’ll teach you the complexity of the word potato, something I never understood until the very last page.

  Dedication

  To all the girls who could have been Annalise – remember that hope isn’t just for suckers, and that you’re anything but ordinary.

  To the honorary members of the Kids of Sick Parents Club—I know you’re out there—just hold on tight until you can see the horizon, it comes eventually, I promise you. Share your stories with anyone who’ll listen.

  To all the women whose strength, vulnerability, and self-sacrifice remains a thing of wonder to me – I’ll never cease to be amazed by you.

  This is for you all.

  Prologue

  I remember a time before you cried every night, a time before you shook every morning.

  I remember a lot of things, even though I’m only seventeen years old. I guess I’m like those people who were alive when the Internet was first invented. I’m like them because I also saw the shift, the turning point, the world before and after. I remember the night when Dad finally decided he’d had enough of all this and walked out the door, never to return again. I think deep down you blamed yourself for his leaving, but fathers and husbands leave sometimes, Mom, no matter how much you want them to stay. I guess they get to do what sons and daughters don’t. They get to make a choice as to whether or not they want to deal with nights like tonight; nights when I can hear you sobbing through both of our closed doors.

  It frightens me that I’m so used to it.

  I don’t ask what’s wrong because I know what’s wrong. Everything’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s on nights like these that I go to the window in our bathroom and pray to a God I don’t even know if I believe in. I don’t know why I do it, but even though I’m not religious, I clasp my hands and pray. I pray for a lot of things: for you to be better, for me to be able to have a life outside of these walls, and for the chance to meet her.

  I don’t know who or where she is, but I pray that one day she’ll come to take me away from Here.

  Note

  The occasional and Seemingly Random Capitalization of Some words in the Story is intentional, and Not Random at all, so don’t Worry.

  “Yeah, I know just what you’re sayin’

  And I regret ever complainin’

  About this heart and all its breakin’

  It was beauty we were
making”

  ---Sam Smith, Palace

  “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

  “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber. . .Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”

  ---Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  Part One

  Where I finally speak to the girl of my dreams, I learn the complexities of the word potato, and I begin a whole new chapter in what was, at that point, a sad, miserable excuse for an adolescent boy’s life. . . . so, yeah. . . Bleh.

  Two flowers on your forearm, one smaller and one larger.

  Two flowers to cover the bad things you did to yourself that time you forgot that you're the only reason the sun rises each morning. Scars are storytellers, aren't they? They're like that wise, old dude in the park who you know has some good stories to tell, if only someone would ask him about those days when he wasn't yet an old dude. But no one ever does. Scars are like that. They're the old guy in the park no one talks to. But yours are adorned with flowers.

  New life.

  Renewal.

  Rejuvenation.

  Your scars are painted with new skin and pretty colors of your own choosing.

  Your scars will heal.

  And one day, if anyone ever asks about them, you won't even remember how they got there.

  One

  Where I tell you all about that beautiful Peruvian goddess who rescued my soul.

  According to the Council of They, those unnamed shadow experts who we cite whenever we start a sentence with they say (come on, you know you do it all the time), the opening line of any book might be the most important, so here goes mine: in the fall of my senior year of high school, I fell madly in love with a girl name Annalise, who saved my miserable teenaged soul from a fate most foul. That sounded dramatic, right? Exaggeration 101? No embellishment, just the truth, so help me. That’s the first time I’ve mentioned her by name, isn’t it? Annalise. Our Girl.

  I was going through some serious stuff at the start of senior year, and I was about as mixed up as a mixed kid gets. I know, hardly groundbreaking news, right? No need to alert the church elders when a teenager is a little screwed up. Normal. Typical. Ordinary. I get it, but listen, my life at the time was anything but ordinary, trust me. I mean, yeah, there was all the normal stuff you’d expect: college loomed on the horizon like an invading army, teachers were getting more annoying with each passing class, and I was struggling to keep my grades up where they needed to be. I was typical in those ways.

  But in my case there was much more than that going on behind the scenes. At the time Our Story begins, my sad teenaged soul was drowning in the depths of a terrible Bleh, a concept Annalise first introduced me to, and one I'll elaborate on in a little bit. But for right now, think of it as representing the darkest recesses of the human experience, encompassing a range of negative emotions from your run-of-the mill crappy day, all the way to the deepest abyss of human darkness.

  So why was I in that state? Well, a few years before I met Anna, my parents finally decided to euthanize a rapidly devolving marriage. In the packing of my father’s suitcase that followed the screaming and hateful words, my life became collateral damage, that poor bastard who’s standing next to the terrorist right before the drone strike hits.

  After Dad decided he'd had enough of us, mom's neurotransmitters got up to their old tricks and gave the middle finger to Serotonin, and the daily routine of uncontrollable tremors and crying began. Her days, which became my days, went something like this: crying and trembling in the morning before getting Xanax down the hatch; depressed catatonia around lunchtime, sometimes accompanied by a nap, sometimes without; a little more crying in the evening, and finally a trip to bed to retire for the night after watching a little too much mindless TV. Now imagine what I just said, if you can, and multiply that experience by days, weeks, months, years. You get the idea. So between the rapid descent of my home into some kind of madness never before seen by the eyes of man, and my natural tendency towards all things weird and dark, it was a less than ideal way to start my last year of high school.

  But wait, we haven’t been properly introduced yet, have we? My name is Logan Santiago, Logan Rosario Santiago to be exact. How Hispanic do I sound, Jesus! It’s a mutt’s name, like your narrator himself, the fulfilment of immigrant dreams from Southern Europe and the Caribbean, all of which found each other in the same place all immigrant dreams met up in Twentieth century America – Queens, New York. So, anyway, I’m Logan, and I'll be your fake Spanish narrator. I’ve called myself fake Spanish my whole life because the truth is, although my mom spoke it as her first language, I didn’t learn a word outside of a few phrases that no rational person would call fluency. No matter if my name made it sound like I was straight outta San Juan, within the community, if you can’t speak the language you might as well call yourself Bob Smith from Duluth, Minnesota. Fake Spanish all the way.

  So what did I do? How did I handle this next level stress and anxiety I was feeling 24/7? I started a club. I know, I couldn't sound more nerdy if I tried, unless I showed you my variant Spider-Man Todd McFarlane covers one at a time, all professionally rated and everything. I mean, what self-respecting seventeen year old starts a damn club? That's some little kid stuff, right? True, and my only saving grace was that I started it when I was still fifteen, which is a little more acceptable.

  The Kids of Sick Parents Club (KSPC if you wanna sound cool) was started by me right after my mom's breakdown. It was then that I realized, among a lot of other realizations that would come later, that the kids like me, the ones being raised by parents who were less than themselves because of some ailment—whether it was mental illness, or alcoholism, or a medical sickness—we all had a few things in common. I wrote them down in my charter (that’s right, there was also a charter).

  1: We grew up too damn fast, mostly because we had no choice in the matter of how long we got to hold onto our innocence.

  2: We saw and heard things no kid should have to ever see or hear, usually in our own homes, where no one else saw or heard those things but us.

  3: We were tough in ways that could never be replicated with any other life experience, a kind of shell that you only get by going through the things we went through.

  4: We were sad as hell, but the last thing we wanted was your pity, your ‘awws’, or your attempt at understanding something you couldn’t understand. Mostly we just wanted a break.

  So I was the founding member of my club. Really, I was the only member, though I know a lot of you out there are honorary members, even though we never met and I never gave you an official card (I made them, they looked awesome). I knew that I wasn't the only one like me, but I was the only one I knew at the time, at least until I met Annalise, and then the Kids of Sick Parents Club became an organization two strong. We're still growing. As you can tell, I was a little bit of an oddball, but I wore that like a badge. I have no shame in saying that I was an eccentric, artistic, angry, punk rock kid who was a little too into comics for his own good. Maybe that’s why Annalise and I found each other, we were fated by the Gods of Weirdness and Dysfunction to meet one day.

  Annalise.

  Okay, let’s pause for a disclaimer: this is the part where I give you the warning to brace yourselves if you want to read any further, buckle your seatbelt, and prepare for some minor turbulence. Some love stories make no sense at all. That’s just the way it goes in real life. A lot of things make no sense, if you were to stop and consider their peculiarities, and love most of all. Those strange aspects of love don't make it any less real or impactful, but if you grew up on a steady diet of corny romantic comedies and contrived TV shows, then I can understand your resistance to a lack of convention. We weren't raised to be unconventional, we were raised to believe pop songs should be playing in the background of all our most intimate moments, and that love stories should end with people in love. But that's some movie shit, a diet of f
alsehoods fed to us like we were animals in a feedlot. Real love is different, it’s messy. This is a real love story, so read at your own risk.

  Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to do my narrator thing and figure out how to encompass Anna’s particular flavor of Goddessness in a way that’ll make you understand the feeling I had when I looked into her eyes. Well, she wasn’t that girl your mom always told you you'd meet one day. If you're a guy you know what I’m talking about, that mythological female your mom had a need to create in her head as your future wife. Maybe she was the daughter of a close family friend, or just some invention of the maternal mind, who knows. That nonexistent, theoretical girl who’d love you unconditionally, make your happiness a priority, give you plenty of attractive babies, that sort of thing. But reality isn't a mother's best wishes, however pure they might be. Reality is an illogical, random series of events guaranteed to mess up all of mom’s best laid schemes something awful. Annalise wasn't the ideal girl; she wasn't part of the plan, but she was still perfect to me.