The Safe House

The Safe House is the creative writing piece I submitted in a contest last month. I actually thought it was going to come in low because it's so out of my comfort zone, it's not a character loosely based on myself like so many other things I write.

I didn't even bother letting Matt read it.

But it placed second in my group and now some family and friends have asked me to post it online. I do feel very weird posting a piece of my writing here, even though I write about pretty personal stuff.

So I guess that made me decide to go ahead and put it online. So, eeeek! Here it is.

The genre was open, the setting had to be in a playground, and the words we had to use were "police tape." We had 48-hours to turn it in.

The Safe House

The playground closes at 9 p.m., but I don’t care.

It’s super easy to hide in the tube slide while the campus guard sniffs around and shuts off the lights. I like it when it gets dark and everything around me has that golden, nighttime glow you only find in Southern California.

Once, I brought my roommate out here, but she hates breaking rules and thought mosquitoes and cockroaches were attacking her, so she never came back. Not even in the daytime. I mean, the bugs are pretty big here, so she’s not officially one of the crazy ones.

The other girls in my dorm think I come out here to kiss the locals, but that only happened once. Anyway, Los Angeles boys are too pretty for me, I’m from Turlock, you know?

Sometimes – most of the time – I just can’t handle all this group stuff. Blah, blah, blah, your dad’s a drunk. Boo hoo hoo your mom was too wasted to make you breakfast. We get it. It’s unoriginal.

Here at the playground, I can just sit and be Leigh. My brain quiets and the memories our counselors try so hard to get out of us return to their rightful spot way in the back.

The counselors aren’t actually so bad. Even the one who brought me here didn’t make me answer a bunch of questions on the long ride over here. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time she’s had to escort a teen out from behind police tape.

It was their last chance to keep me around, but my parents blew it. Scratching your child’s face with a knife in a drunken rage is not the best way to keep Child Protective Services from coming over.

All the counselors want me to talk about it, but I don’t see the point. I get good grades, I don’t drink or smoke, and I have friends with the kinds of families you see in magazines.

So what if I get panic attacks? You wouldn’t believe how many fancy houses have medicine cabinets filled Xanax and Effexor and Paxil. Anxiety disorder is a pretty good side effect compared to those anorexic girls, or the cutters.

Suddenly, a voice coming from the bottom of the slide startles me out of my thoughts. A flashlight shines in my direction.

“Is someone up there?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Sorry, it’s just, my mom said she heard thumping back here and sent me out to check,” he says. “I’ll tell her it’s just a girl.”

Instead of walking away, he sits on a swing with the flashlight between his knees. I peek at him through the monkey bars. He’s probably 16, like me, and he’s wearing a skullcap. Natalie says they’re called yarmulkes.

Our safe house is hidden in an orthodox section of L.A., an area where our parents would never dream of looking. A neighborhood without a bar for miles. The orthodox families keep to themselves and mostly look away when we walk by, which is just fine.

I move over to the curvy slide, closer to the swings and watch him for a long while.

“Are you even allowed to talk to me?” I finally ask.

“No.”

“So why are you still here?”

“It’s quiet,” he says. “My house is so loud. Do you mind if I stay a while? Will I get you in trouble?”

I slide down and sit across from his swing to get a better look. He’s pretty. The flashlight shows he has dark hair and a spattering of freckles across his nose. He’s dressed in cords and red Chucks and looks nothing like the other teen boys we see on the street.

I tell him my name is Leigh and he says his is Dovi. I laugh.

“What?”

“I’ve just never heard a name like that,” I tell him.

“And there’s not many girls named Leigh where I come from.”

He tells me this was once his playground but the school kept getting tagged with terrible messages and they had to move to a more secure building. He would come swing after dinner for some time away from his six brothers and sisters. But since they turned the school into an all-girls home, he hasn’t had the nerve to come back.

“Are you, um, troubled?” he asks.

“Nah,” I say. “Most of us here are pretty normal. We just have troubled parents.”

He says he’s sorry and that his parents aren’t the sanest set on the block, not with seven kids.

He laughs when he says this and stares off toward his house.

I shouldn’t do this. I know from Natalie that he has rules that are way stricter than the ones we have here, but I reach out and grab his hand nonetheless.

Dovi jumps a bit, but doesn’t move it away.

“I’m not going to try to kiss you,” I say.

“Good,” he laughs.

He squeezes my hand tighter and I move to sit on the swing next to his. He turns off the flashlight and we sit, in the dark and the quiet, hand in hand.

I haven’t cried since I was 12-years-old, since the first time I was taken away.

I try to make it stop by thinking about funny things – the stinky Turlock cows, my mom’s too-tight yellow dress that I stole and brought with me - but that only makes me cry harder.

I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting here, crying and listening to the music of the squeaky swing chains, but eventually we hear his mother calling out for him, startling us into reality.

“You better get back,” I say.

“Yeah.”

Neither of us moves until we hear his name being called again. I get up from my swing, move my face close to his, but I don’t kiss him.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

And I finally let go.