Runaway Train
By J.T. Marie
Published by Queerteen Press at Smashwords
An imprint of JMS Books LLC
Visit queerteen-press.com for more information.
Copyright 2011 J.T. Marie
ISBN 9781611521887
For more titles by J.T. Marie at Smashwords visit https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jtmarie
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Cover Photo Credit: Rikke Breiting
Used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.
Cover Design: J.T. Marie
All Rights Reserved
WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America. Queerteen Press is an imprint of JMS Books LLC.
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Runaway Train
By J.T. Marie
At 21, you’ve already lost touch with all your friends. Most of them you never really liked all that much anyway, and when they wrote to you at college, you threw away their letters without even reading them. Soon they stopped writing.
Your roommate couldn’t understand this—she had more friends than God. But you never were a social butterfly, were you?
You did have one or two close friends, though, ones you actually wanted, but since you went to a college so far away, letters couldn’t keep you all together. Things happen you don’t know about, things that won’t fit into words on a page and wedge in between you, and when you come home, it’s easier not to call than to catch up on everything. After awhile you don’t even know if you want to get caught up, not any more. You don’t think there’s anything you could possibly be missing.
When you make it home to Colonial Heights for the holidays or summer break, you don’t run into anyone you graduated with. It seems as if, even though you go to a college over two hundred miles away, you’re the only one who keeps coming back, and when you’re home, everyone else is at sunny places with exotic names, places you dream about going to but can’t see yourself at. Though you don’t like D.C. all that much, with its bitter weather and terrible drivers, you don’t want to be stuck in Colonial Heights forever. Any town whose night life centers on a shopping mall isn’t a place you want to live.
Yet you’ve lived here so long, you don’t think you can ever go anywhere else. That’s partly why you went to Mason, to prove to yourself you could get out, could be on your own in a place that was only yours, and still every May you take the interstate south without even thinking about where else you could be going.
Your summers are spent working, and no one you work with ever strikes a deep enough resonance to be remembered past fall midterms. The more you come home, the more you realize you don’t know the town anymore, you don’t know the people, and you really don’t want to. After you graduate, you don’t know where you’re going but you’re pretty sure it won’t be here.
Last summer you worked at a record store in the mall—this year you aren’t so lucky. Of course the one job you apply for and don’t want is the only job you can get. But you guess there are worse things to be than a night-cook at a deli, though when you’re cleaning the grill and the charcoal brick flips up, scraping open your wrist, you can’t really remember what they might be. Still, at least it’s money, and at five dollars an hour, it’s 75¢ more than what you made at that record store. Also, the deli’s in Ettrick, just a mile from your parents’ house in Colonial Heights, and no one you know ever goes there. No one but your dad, and he was the one who told you about the job.
Mostly you work three to close, which means nine but you never seem to leave before quarter after. There’s only one other person you work with and that’s Sherry, the “night manager.” The title’s a joke, since you really can’t take her seriously. She’s twenty-eight and barely made it out of high school. Her boyfriend’s your age and works at a restaurant in Colonial Heights owned by Kevin’s father, Kevin being your boss.