A/N: This follows in the footsteps of Pastel and Paisley, another prized short story of mine. While the tone is quite different, the characters are the same, and neither of them is directly related to the other, so it's fine if you read one and not the other.

March 21

Blank, blinding white winter scenery flashed before my eyes as the Malibu was forced to nearly seventy miles per hour. It was so bright, and yet so disgustingly bleary and grey; when I closed my eyes I could still see the blank landscape through my eyelids.

For some reason the stereo was turned nearly all the way down. The ghost of a familiar song drifted lightly from the speakers. While on one hand I longed to reach for the knob to turn up the volume, I did not want to risk detection by the driver. I felt similar to a baby who, if it closes its eyes and holds perfectly still, believes it disappears altogether.

I opened my eyes. I did not make eye contact with the driver. I did not make eye contact with anything. My pupils had been reduced to slits.

We were running away again, from all of our problems, seeking shadows that could somehow disguise us from the mess we’d left behind. How silly. Could we really get off that easily?

The move was not my idea, not mine at all. Once again, it was Molly’s, and it was against my wishes. This time I did not even bother voicing them, my wishes. I knew they held no significance to my mother, who would do as she pleased whatever my opinion.

I half-wondered, half-hoped this time would be the last time, that this trip would have some sense of finality. I hated leaving my home, hated leaving my dog and my boyfriend, who I was very much in love with. My mother knew Alex, knew how I felt about him, and knew how much he meant to me. Also, though, she didn’t care.

And so I hated leaving. But even more than that, I hated the prospect of going back. I know it might not seem to make sense, but to me it does, because going back would be like backtracking. I really hate backtracking. Once something is done, it is done, and I’d rather it were left that way. This didn’t mean that ultimately, one day, I wouldn’t escape the suffocating grasp of my “legal guardian” to be with Alex. I planned to. But I didn’t plan on going back to my house, back to my bedroom, to that school, to that life. It wasn’t my life anymore. That wasn’t my home anymore.

Molly continued on down the road as I thought to myself. I wasn’t sure where we were, some lowly populated farm region, not even worthy of a dot on the map. She was speeding like crazy, but the roads weren’t icy; they were smooth and straight as a grid. The tires were gluttonous, consuming mile after mile of endless pavement.

I turned my head slowly, staring out the window into the distance, still avoiding any sort of recognition from my mother. I did not want to go back. I wondered sadly how long we would be gone this time. I felt I already knew the answer. Until Molly felt too alone to remain independent; until she couldn’t stand the distance anymore, the distance between herself and her torment, the “love of her life.”

I made an unusual snorting sound as I tried to suppress a snicker at the memory, and Molly cast a confused glance at me out the corner of her tired grey eyes. I did not meet them. I scolded myself internally for getting myself noticed.

She barely let her eyes rest on me a second before turning them back to the road. She was thinking, I knew, because her eyeballs were glassy. She probably wasn’t navigating the vehicle at all, but rather letting her body slip into auto-pilot while her mind whirred silently. Not that it was all too difficult to navigate the car down a pin-straight road, anyway.

I was mildly curious as to what she was calculating, what was happening inside her brain. Her mind, I have decided, is nothing whatsoever like mine. I honestly believe she lets every potential thought sift through a series of structured, logical tests before deeming it worth considering. Her brain is a very efficient factory. My brain is an understaffed mental ward, brimming with retards and raving lunatics who talk to walls and eat paste.

I was still in the process of mulling over our predicament, wondering whether this was it, the final move, the last goodbye. I was remembering the time Molly made me want to gag, when I asked why we were going back to him, to my step-dad, to the man that constantly verbally and occasionally physically abused her. While I think my mother is very calm-under-pressure and is logical and all that fluff, I also think she is a complete idiot, sometimes. I think this because when I asked why we had to go back to him, her answer was, “I am madly in love with him.”

I can sympathize with the difficulty of leaving someone whom you have been attached to for such a very long time, but were I my mother, I think the way I was being treated would soon drown out the feeling of being madly in love.

“Ugh, shit!” Molly cried out suddenly, breaking me away from my random tangent of thought. Both our eyes averted to the dashboard, where the low fuel light was now blinking red. I peered out my window, this time focusing my attention on the snow-covered fields that flew past. We were definitely in the middle of nowhere, the only car on a never-ending stretch of road in this disgusting, lifeless winter that had long since worn out its welcome.

That’s the thing about Michigan winters, though, isn’t it? The past few years they have seemed off kilter, the winters coming later, lasting long into what would be—what should be—spring. This year the trend continued.

I showed little to no reaction to our dilemma. I knew we were fucked, but what could I do about it? Nothing, really. Nothing at all. So I sat there, searing in the relentless friction that had grown like a fungus between us. Molly, on the other hand, was having an utter conniption.

For one thing, she looked as though she were about to combust. Like I said, there was nothing I could do about the situation, but it wasn’t my burden to bear. Unfortunately for Molly, my well-being was tacked onto her list of responsibilities, though I wasn’t sure how high up on the list I ranked. She was hardly much of a mother lately.

The car slowed to sixty miles an hour, fifty, forty, until finally we were parked on the side of the road, Molly cursing under her breath.

If I may be frank, I was somewhat bemused by her reaction. If you knew Molly like I know Molly, you would know she has never been the best at conveying her emotions. Whether she has them or not (I’m still not entirely sure she does), she rarely, if ever, lets them shine through. She has always been so apathetic about things, or if she let them get to her she’d never let it show.

This is just one point on a list of points proving that Molly and I are polar opposites. It is also the explanation for the utter shock I felt as I heard Molly begin to whimper.

No longer concerned with being noticed, I whipped my head to face her. She was facing away from me, out the window. Her body trembled slightly and I heard her sniffle softly; she was undoubtedly—and yet unbelievably—crying.

I turned my head again to gaze out the windshield. I was no longer tickled by the fact that she indeed possessed emotions. Rather, I was overcome by emotions of my own. I was furious, confused, and afraid. As much as I despised it, Molly was my mother. If she had abandoned all hope, what did I have left to hold onto?

So we sat in the car, cramped by the belongings we couldn’t cram into the trunk; the backseat overflowed with boxes and blankets and pillows and bags of things we couldn’t bear to leave behind us. The radio was still faintly humming, and I wondered if Molly was itching to crank up the volume as badly as I was. Anything to break that sickly tangible silence.

We each stared out of our respective side windows, off into the distance, never-ending and blindingly bright. I wondered how the snow managed to sparkle when the sun was absolutely nowhere to be seen. And I was furious that the damn white fluff wouldn’t just melt already—it had been clinging to existence for weeks. It wasn’t even that cold outside, maybe about forty degrees, a nice shift from the biting winds of former weeks.

Other than the quiet song playing, the car was completely silent. Molly had turned it off and ripped the key out of the ignition in a brief frenzy. The Malibu allowed the radio to continue playing until Molly chose to open her driver’s side door, which didn’t appear to be anytime soon. The car had long since ceased to emit the heat that had been keeping my toes warm and toasty.

I glanced at the clock; the computed red numbers read 2:24. We had been parked since 2:02. We didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Coming to this conclusion, I heaved my purse from the sea of trash that littered my side of the floor and pushed open the door. As I stepped out, Molly stared at me as though I were an idiot and demanded to know, “Where are you going?”

These were the first words she had offered me in hours, and they were delivered with a nasty edge, as though this entire predicament were somehow my fault. I did not dignify her with an answer. Instead, I merely shrugged and trudged off into the distance, leaving my car door open wide. As I waded into the crunchy snow, I heard her slam it shut behind me.

I longed to be miles and miles away from that seemingly inescapable tension. It felt as though the pressure between us had built up to maximum capacity, and I was sure if I hadn’t made my escape at just that moment, the car would have combusted, carrying Molly and I away forever in separate raging streams of madness that had been all too long pent up. I wished to be free of her peripheral stare; I was sure she was sizing me up somehow without even looking my way, and I hated it. I hated that feeling, that I was being thought of in such a negative fashion that I could literally feel it in my being, a sickening churning in my soul. I had to get away.

Unfortunately, the landscape offered little protection from her neighboring presence with only a few naked trees scattered unsystematically amongst the snow. I sought shelter behind a lone green pine, which unfortunately for my desire to be hidden, stuck out conspicuously in the middle of the snow covered field. I plopped down into the stubbornly cold three inches of snow, soaking the butt of my jeans. At least she could no longer see me. Maybe, if I was lucky, she wouldn’t even know where I went off to. I knew this was a stupid thought, as she had probably just watched me charge off behind the giant tree, but it was a nice illusion to distract my mind from the inevitable helplessness I was feeling.

I shoved my purse down between my knees and began scavenging through it. The thing about my purse is that it’s hardly a purse at all, really. Satchel would be a more suitable word, as the great black monstrosity was undoubtedly large enough to discreetly smuggle a toddler, though why anyone would choose to use it for such a purpose is beyond me.

My hand clasped something small and rounded. I pulled my arm out of the abyss and found I was holding my cell phone. In the corner, there showed the symbol for no signal, which, although I’d been expecting it, pierced my heart like a knife. Some part of me had been secretly hoping that I could call my boyfriend, that Alex could somehow sweep in out of nowhere and rescue me from my heartless captor.

As cold encased me, I closed my eyes and dreamt of being cradled in his embrace, warmed by the heat of his body as he laid familiar soft kisses down the nape of my neck. My eyes opened to grim reality, and hot tears spilled down my cheeks. Why are we here, I wondered feebly. How did we get here?

At this point, I began to think of Richard. Richard, my step-father.

It would be unfair of me to paint an evil picture of Richard, because he is not evil. He is, at times, extremely cruel, harsh, fowl. He has bouts in which he has little or no regard for the feelings of others, especially while under the influence of alcohol.

Though, the more I thought about it, I realized it was not always Richard who had been drinking. More often than not, it had been Molly.

I clamped my eyes shut, trying to will myself away from this place, this horrible, dreadful nowhere-place. My hands clenched into fists, nearly squashing my small silver phone. I hate her, raged my small inner voice. I hate this.

Suddenly a gust of wind abruptly brushed past the pine beneath which I had taken shelter, ripping a void in the cold winter calm. But the gust was not cold; it was lukewarm and humid, heavy with moisture. I opened my eyes and gazed upward, noticing for the first time the swarm of smoky grey clouds that had accumulated overhead, blocking out the blinding white-grey sky. In fact, I noticed the whole sky had darkened.

I stared with wonder at the dark churning haze, allowing my pupils to dilate for what felt like the first time in hours.

And then—suddenly, beautifully, wonderfully, magically—suddenly, the sky dripped rain. It was chilling and thick, the raindrops driving down, fat and hard.

With the rain came a hampering reality; I realized I wasn’t going to win this one.

At that moment I was stranded, and yes, I hated Molly, yes, I hated my whole miserable teenage life—but at that moment, winter was over, a new, fresh season taking its place.

Suddenly it didn’t matter anymore, this whole damned thing. I would have to go back to the car, back to that thick, uncomfortable tension with Molly. I would have to follow her to whatever destination she deemed fit, and I would have to stay there with her as long as she pleased, because she was my mother, and because I didn’t have a choice.

I knew that this move wouldn’t last, that within days we would be back at our half-empty old home, back to Richard, back to Alex, back to backtracking. And I knew that, sooner or later, Molly and Richard would be back to normal, bickering as often as they kissed, fighting and then making up because the two of them were disgusting and pathetic and one could simply not live life without the other.

I knew that this would absolutely drive me ridiculously (and possibly incurably) crazy, and that worse, I would have no choice but to experience all of it, slowly and painfully, day by day by day.

But…

I also knew that one day I would turn eighteen. One day I would graduate high school, graduate with honors, that I would pack up my things and only my things, and that I would leave. I would leave Molly, and Richard, and probably even Alex. I knew that I would grow up, get a job, a home, a life—and then, then—I would make it on my own.

One day.

As nature emptied its bladder, clarity dripped from the heavens.

I shivered, chilled to the bone by the cold, falling rain. With a sigh, I stood and headed back toward the car, leaving my pride to melt with the snow.