I can hear the glass bottles clanking against one another softly in my backpack as I tiptoe down the stairs after my parents have already gone to sleep. I silently curse myself for not wrapping them up in my clothes before putting them in, but it’s too late now. Making sure to skip over the step that always creaks, I make my way to the bottom of the stairs. Carefully turning the knob on the front door, I open it just enough to slip out and then shut it as quietly as I can behind me. Standing on my front porch, I breathe out a sigh of relief. I’m free.

I walk to the end of my street where Alex is waiting, parked in her shitty old car and listening to Arcade Fire in the CD player. She had gotten their album as a gift from her dad after he got drunk and puked on her new shoes, and it was all we listened to this summer. There was this one song, on disc 2, that we both screamed along with whenever it came on. “It’s never over!” We would yell at the top of our lungs as we drove, probably giving everyone we passed by a heart attack.
“I wanna do something wild tonight,” is the first thing she says when I sit down in the passenger seat.
“I just snuck out of my house to go to a party, isn’t that wild?”
“Maddie, that’s kindergarten stuff. I want to do something new. Something reckless.”
Alex gets in these moods sometimes, ever since I’ve known her. Something about tonight seems different, though. She seems more out of it than usual. I wonder if her dad did something. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but I’ve known her long enough to know that he is the cause of most of her “moods”. I’m always more than willing to go along with her whenever she’s in a mood, though. I wish my life was as interesting as hers, but it’s as mundane as it gets. But being with Alex is like being with adventure personified.
*
We’re at the party for a total of five minutes when Alex decides –
“This is lame. We should leave.”
“Okay,” I say, because I’ve learned to go along with what she says. The best things always happen when I do. “Where are we going?”
“Away,” she says, turning around and walking out the door.
I follow her, wondering if I should be worried. “Away from what?”
“Here.”
I’m don’t know what to say to that.
I don’t know how long we drive for, but I do know that I have no clue where we are. I wonder if Alex does. I really hope so.
When she finally pulls over, the clock on the car reads 11:53 pm. I can vaguely make out a field in front of us in the headlights, but that’s pretty much the only thing I can conclude about our location. Beyond the field, I can see the lights from what I assume is our town. It’s calm here. I wonder if Alex has been here before. I turn to look at her but she just keeps staring at the lights, like she’s lost in a trance or something.
“Alex?” I whisper, breaking the silence.
She turns her head sharply towards me, almost as if I slapped her.
“Yeah?”
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
She looks back at the field, not saying anything for a long while, until –
“It’s so weird, being back here. I always thought about the going away part, but I never thought about the coming back. I think I hate summer more than the school year now.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, because I did.
“It’s so weird,” she says again. “When you’re young, it’s better to be older. Everyone can’t wait to grow up. But when you’re old, it’s better to be young. I just wonder, like, at what point does it change? Is it when you look back, and realize you wasted your entire youth wishing to be old?”
I stay silent.
“I spent my whole life wanting to get away from this town. Away from my family. Away from my pathetic excuse for a dad,” she laughs, hollowly. “Then once I left, I realized I wasn’t really gone. Things didn’t just get magically better. I’m still the same person I was. Everybody used to say, don’t worry, things will get better, it’ll all be over soon. But it never ends.”
“It’s never over,” I say, thinking back to the song.
“It’s never over,” she repeats.
We both stare at the lights, like they hold the answer to everything.
“I wanna do something wild,” Alex says, after a while.
I nod, and she backs out of the field, driving away from the lights.