You haven’t stepped in an English class since Freshman year, yet you’re the one Ms. Weston tracked down when we were missing that Friday morning. I’d been on a quest to flee town on the back of a dilapidated bus headed for Milwaukee, which had a plane heading for New York, which had a flight to Vienna, Austria. You were on a quest to catch up, confess your love, and get me to stay. Failing that, you’d just slit my throat. And your own. 

But of course that didn’t happen, because you were stopped in your tracks and so I was stopped in mine. You were cooed and fawned over for chasing a girl out of “love,” while I was ridiculed for being so “stupid and hard-headed” as to run away based on a Billy Joel song. They never found the razor blade in your backpack, despite it being so tightly pressed against the front pocket its outline was pushed out and imprinted in the cheap faux-leather. But they did find my dull pair of craft scissors and red hair dye, which I’d wanted to mask my identity. They confiscated them as weapons, which earned me a suspension. A teacher walked me out to the slate gates, asking why such a smart, demure girl could act out and draw so much unnecessary attention to herself. I didn’t respond, because I already had my earbuds in and my iPod tuned to full volume. 

Our town was a red brick labyrinth of cracked pavement, bumped, shattered roads, and sparse oaks dotting random square patches of dirt. Only three points existed: my home, school, and your home. Your house was on the edge of town—just outside the labyrinth—a white paneled colonial manor atop a hill, visible from my own home, and from school. Based on my compass, it faced the direction opposite where Vienna lay across the ocean, far off from you. It was my waypoint for which way I should be heading—or not heading, as was the case here. I was a mouse, meekly sneaking home from one landmark to another. You were a dark pattern, leading me astray. But I knew where Vienna lay. So long as I never eyed your manor, I was on my way. 

When I got home, my mother decried and derided me—over my messed up, shaggy hair, and the dark circles under my eyes, and my baggy clothes, and my lack of friends, and my obsession with a decade old iPod with only one song downloaded. My father was on a work trip, and he only called that evening to ask if I’d used his credit card recently, since he was seeing an unknown expense for a plane ticket out of the US. I lied and said I didn’t use it, and he pretended to believe me. When he hung up, you called immediately after. I didn’t even blink at how you somehow got my number. You probably sweet talked the secretary at the front desk while in detention for getting high in Biology. Either that, or my mother gave it to you for a coupon to the nice hair salon downtown. I answered your call, then left my cellphone on the bathroom sink while sneaking out the window into the night, a note left on a napkin taped to the sill. 

The labyrinth glowed at sunset. The treeline fenced in the far-off edge. I passed your ex-girlfriend’s place, a low-lying Edwardian house with a pretty poppy garden out front. I thought about a postcard I could send her—she was my ex-best friend too after all—when I arrived in the city. She’d always loved European architecture, the washed-out warm tones, the density and ornateness, the age. Once, when we were still friends, I told her of my dream to flee to Austria, fall in love with a pretty brunette who spoke three languages, share an apartment with her the size of a broom closet that came with three tabby cats. She giggled and asked where I could possibly find someone like that. I claimed I was looking right at her. She snorted. 

I wasn’t angry when she fell in love with you. But I was hollow when she stopped speaking to me for months on end, only reappearing with a dark welt under her eye and a split in her lip. The last thing I ever asked her was how she felt. The only thing she replied with was how you were. I gifted her a sketch of the Vienna skyline, a scented Band-Aid, and a tootsie-pop. You broke up with her later that day, and we haven’t spoken since. 

The stars twinkled and the great pines stood firm at the far edge of town. Turning back around, I couldn’t even see your manor through the brush. The bus stop was empty, rust-eaten, lined with cobwebs and teal moss. While waiting for the night bus, I took out a notebook and sketched my new life in the city. Evenings locked away in Baroque-era libraries. Beer on the balcony while the city hums. A Billy Joel concert—just one before I die young at twenty from all the cigars and alcohol and French pastries I’d have consumed. 

Once, after class, you found my journal, accidentally abandoned in my locker you’d already broken into. You saw each secret wish and confronted me, asked if you could join this secret new life I’d dreamed up. Or, even better, if I could give it all up and run away to yours, isolated on a hill. And I snapped and said I’d do you one better. How about we switch lives? Switch skins, like we’re switching clothes. Could I steal your black lipstick and black leather jacket? Chew nicotine gum in the hallways while skipping math class? Go to a house party and play beer pong? Down a spiked keg? Could I get a bloody, tear-splotched valentine in my locker? Could I get a girl to look at me—cry for me like I was her true love lost in war? Could I kill someone and be mourned while alive and remorseless? Could I be a pretty young tragedy? Could you be the cliff note? 

An administrator walked by when I was midway through my diatribe, and I was forced into weekly visits with my counselor. Never mind I only snapped because you broke into my locker and stole my journal and had the audacity to ask me to give up Vienna. Never mind they knew for months my problem with you—knew my slowly bubbling seething hatred toward you. Then they decried my dream as flighty, impulsive. Then they had the gall to ask me why—why’d I ever want to leave my glum, hum-dum life behind for a city a continent away. 

Well, once upon ten years ago, I found an iPod in my elementary school’s lost and found. And it only had a single song on it. And I couldn’t really understand the lyrics thanks to the garbled audio, but then in high school in my freshman year, I hummed the tune to myself in class. And you sat behind me, and you groaned that you hated that song. And I asked you what it was called. And you gave me its name and I finally searched for it online. And I finally heard it clearly. And I finally knew the lyrics. And they whistled in my ears every time you were chosen over me, fussed about over me, cared for over me. And I knew another world waited, another city called. I began learning German that summer. I was studying Austrian history by fall. 

When the bus arrives, I see you at the edge of my eye, moving through shadow to reach out and grab me, to claw me toward darkness like a hand out of hell. But I’ve already entered the soft yellow light when you slash at my oversized jacket. The clinical glow highlights your face jaundice, and the glass of the doors smothers your features in the opaque pane. The bus rolls off, away from the labyrinth, away from your manor. I pull out my iPod, plug in my earbuds. My sketchbook perched on my lap. My first flight left in three hours, my second in eight. A city on another continent laid in wait, knew my name. I’d exist on my own, and not as your extension. Life could restart, and I could finally try again.