The city was only a bike ride away, and streets were peaceful at this time of night allowing her to create images in her brain before arranging them precisely on a blank wall. The bike ride was a crucial part of the process so she didn’t mind the 20 minute trek through the city streets. The breeze in her hair and quietness of the twilight fueled Ashley’s creativity as she avoided potholes to keep her spray paint cans from clinking together in her back pack.
To her, this wasn’t just art, or rebellion. It was an escape. It was in these moments, crouched beside old abandoned railroad cars, clinging to the ledge of buildings, climbing onto billboard signs, creating something beautiful, that she could forget everything. The grief. The shouting. The anger. The helplessness. The loneliness. All of this disappeared with every moment she held a spray paint can in her hand. When Ashley was roaming the dark city in her baggy black clothing, camouflaged into the night, she felt invincible.
Tonight was no different as she rode her reliable rusty old Schwinn down the empty streets of the city. Her head was full of ideas and adrenaline as she pictured the exact blank wall that she was about to make beautiful. She had been eyeing this spot for weeks, contemplating how she would make her way up the side of the old brick building. After circling the building one sunny afternoon, she noticed a small dumpster on wheels nearby a fire escape. Elated by the access to this envious blank wall, she ran off and began to sketch out her plan of attack in her secret black leather-bound notebook she had in her backpack at all times. Tonight was the night she turned that sketch into a work of art for the entire city to see.
When Ashley had finally reached the old brick building, she made swift precise movements to avoid calling attention to the white girl dressed in black, hiding her bike in the bushes. Already having surveyed the area for cameras, she knew there was no need to hide her face. As quietly as possible, Ashley used all of her strength and pushed the graffiti covered dumpster closer to the fire escape ladder. The process was exhausting, but she didn’t let her focus stray away from the final product. She climbed up onto the dumpster with ease and jumped to reach the first step of the fire escape ladder. The secrecy and anticipation of what she was about to do gave her upper body enough adrenaline to pull herself up the ladder and climb up onto the roof of the building. She took a moment to breathe when she reached the rooftop, staring in amazement at the beauty of the city below her.
Ashley was a very organized individual when it came to creating art. She had to set each can in a perfect line, organized by what order she would need them. She didn’t like to rush her work, but often in daring spots (such as on top of an old brick building on a main street) it was best to work quickly…or else risk getting caught. But this was the last thing on Ashley’s mind as she set her paint in order and shoved headphones into her ears. She was already slipping into her own world where all that mattered was the music in her ears, the art she was creating, and the memories.
It had become a ritual to her to reminisce on memories of her father. Her favorite memory was of the day her father had let her skip school and took her on a trip to the local art museum. He shared her love of art, and he had always told her that one day her paintings would be hanging in an art gallery. It was a month after the accident that Ashley traded her pretty paintings on canvas, to emotional expression on blank walls and subway cars. I wonder if Daddy would be proud…or ashamed? Ashley often thought to herself. However, she knew in the back of her mind that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t for him. This was to fill that void in her chest that appeared the day he was no longer there. This was her only way to deal with the agony of losing the only person who believed in her.
The accident happened a year ago. Ashley’s mother and father went out one night for a romantic evening together considering they hadn’t had much time alone since her mother had given birth to Ashley’s baby brother, Joey, about 7 months earlier. As they were heading home after a night of laughter and gentle touches, their car was hit on the driver’s side by a sad, drunk old man in a pick-up truck. Ashley’s father died instantly, while her mother suffered serious injuries including several broken bones, and a broken heart.
The day Ashley’s father died, her whole family died with him.
Her mother was prescribed pain pills for her severe injuries. The chronic physical pain, enhanced by the even worse psychological pain, made her vulnerable to any substance that would make her numb. The pain pills were her escape. She gave up being a mother, and spent most of her time chasing down too many pain pills with a bottle of vodka, and passing out on the couch. Due to the fact that Ashley’s mother was unable to function, she got fired from her job at a local bank, forcing the family to move out of their beautiful home in the suburbs, to a rundown, dirty, old apartment building on the edge of the city.
Ashley hated her mother for abandoning them, and often found herself wishing the accident had taken her mother instead of her father. She always felt guilty for these thoughts, but the truth was that her mother was already dead inside. There was nothing left but a shell of the woman she used to be.
But none of that mattered now. All that mattered was the work of art that she was creating for the world to see. Ashley wiped away a tear that threatened to fall from her eye as she began adding the final touches to her colorful masterpiece. She let the bad memories fade to blackness, and got lost in her work until she was pulled back to reality at the site of blue flickering lights.
“Shit!” Ashley exclaimed in a panicked whisper.
Her heart began to race and she broke out in a heavy sweat as the blue lights pulled up to the old brick building. She crouched in the darkness, contemplating her next move. For a split second, she considered jumping head first off the building. The building was only a few stories high but she figured an impact head first was enough to kill her, or at least turn her into a numb-to-emotion vegetable. In that second, she wanted to embrace death and reunite with her father. But that second passed as quickly as it came, and instead she scurried quietly down the fire escape, jumped to the pavement behind the brick building, and took off as soon as her torn up Converse hit the ground.
She could see flashlights shining behind her, and deep voices shouting into the night. But she didn’t look back, not even for a moment. Ashley kept running until her legs were numb and her mind was blank. She ran until her lungs began to ache in her chest, sending sharp painful messages to her brain to stop running before she collapsed. Finally, Ashley ducked into a dark alleyway and sunk to the pavement, panting heavily as she tried to catch her breath.
She sat there for a while until she was sure there were no blue lights or angry shouts following her. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and clutched her now empty back pack as she rose slowly to her feet. Exhausted and light-headed, she began walking in the direction of her apartment, cursing herself for leaving her beloved Schwinn in the bushes for any common criminal to steal. She vowed to herself she would return first thing tomorrow morning to reclaim her bike, and examine her masterpiece in the light of the morning sun. She smiled to herself as she though back to the wall, covered in painted pieces of who she was.
Ashley was lost in her thoughts when a car pulled up beside her. At first she paid little attention, and simply began to walk faster, until the blue lights flashed in her peripherals. Ashley stopped dead in her tracks, and turned to face the cop car beside her.
“Hey! You!” a young looking cop shouting from his window. “What are you doing out here?”
Ashley stood motionless and silent, frozen in fear at the idea of being caught.
“Are you deaf? I said what are you doing?”
“I’m…uh…I…um…” she stuttered back, searching for words that she could not form in that moment. Her thin legs began to shake, threatening to collapse beneath her.
“Come here,” the officer demanded.
Ashley slowly made her way closer to the window. Her eyes squinted as the police officer shined a bright light in her face. Suddenly, the officer’s whole demeanor changed. He was suddenly less angry, and more concerned as he realized he was interrogating a young girl. He quickly turned off his flashlight and apologized.
“Get in; I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Oh…no…I…I like walking…” Ashley mumbled, her legs still shaking violently beneath her.
“I don’t think so. Get in the car,” he replied sternly.
Her heart pounding against her ribcage, Ashley began to slowly open the door to the back seat, and crawled inside. The car smelt of body odor and dirty socks, and she wondered if that’s what all cop cars smelt like. Is this the smell of criminals? She touched the cold bars on the window as the cop pulled away from the curb. And this what it feels like to be a criminal. I wonder if the guy who killed my father felt this afraid…Ashley shuddered at the thought and begin picking flecks of paint off the sleeves of her black sweatshirt, anxious to erase any evidence.
“So, where do you live?” the officer asked Ashley in a gentle tone.
She looked up from picking at her sleeves to keep from seeming suspicious. “Oh…um…the Queen Anne Apartment complex….just on the edge of the city…”
“I know where that is. What are you doing way out here? At 2 in the morning?”
“I…I don’t know. I needed to…I needed…fresh air…” Ashley stuttered. Her nerves were making it impossible for her to form convincing lies.
“I see. You know it’s not safe for a girl your age to just roam the streets at this time of night. There are a lot of crazies out there. How old are you anyway?”
“Fourteen.”
Ashley could see the officer shake his head in the front seat. Petrified that he was on to her, she began franticly picking the dried paint off her sleeves again until there was nothing left. He can’t prove a damn thing…
“It’s a dangerous world out there; you can’t just go walking the streets alone like that. You could’ve got yourself killed. I’m just glad you’re okay…uh…uh…I don’t think I caught your name?”
“Ashley…” she muttered.
“Ashley…what’s your last name, Ashley?”
Realizing he would not be satisfied knowing her on a first name basis only, she gave in and quietly muttered her last name. “Graysen. Ashley Graysen.”
The air in the car turned thick with her words. It suddenly felt hard to breathe as tension filled the tiny spaces between each metal bar in the cop’s car. Ashley knew what was coming next, but she also knew there was no way to prepare herself for the pain it would provoke.
“Wait. Was Jonathen Graysen your father?”
Ashley felt the hot tears begin to blur my vision as she mumbled a helpless “Yes.”
“I am so sorry, hun. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It must be hard…”
You have no idea. Ashley sat silently, refusing to let the tears escape from her eyes. Of course the cop knew, everyone knew. When the accident had happened, it had been all over the papers for weeks. Jonathen Graysen had been a local firefighter, and everyone grieved over a fallen local hero. Everyone grieved, but no one offered any help to her family. They were left to rot in the shadow of her father’s death. Suddenly she couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. They streamed down her face in silent rivers of overwhelming grief. Why did you have to take him? Of all the people in the world, why him??
They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride to the apartment. Ashley grieved silently in the back seat with the cop’s loud radio hiding the sound of her sniffling. When they reached Ashley’s apartment building, she wiped her raw eyes on her sweatshirt and waited for the cop to let her out. When he opened the door, Ashley stepped out into the light of the parking lot cautiously. She stared at the pavement to avoid eye contact with the young cop; afraid he’d see right through her and arrest her on the spot.
“My name is Officer Conroy, by the way,” he extended his hand and Ashley hesitantly shook it. “I’m not going to come up to your apartment and get you in trouble with your mother this time, but if I catch you out this late again, I’m going to have to do something about it.”
Ashley nodded. “Thank you.”
“It’s going to be okay, Ashley. Stay strong,” Officer Conroy said with a hopeful smile as he gently touched Ashley’s shoulder.
She flinched at his touch, and pulled away immediately as she responded, “Yea...thanks. I’m gonna…go now. It’s getting late. Thank you for the ride, officer. It won’t happen again.”
As soon as Ashley made it to the 3rd floor in her building, her heart sank at the muffled sound of her brother crying. She quietly unlocked the door to the apartment and stepped inside the dark living room. The crying was louder now, as Joey screamed for his mother. His mother, however, lay still on the torn old couch, with various pain pills and alcohol coursing through her blood stream. Dead to the world. Ashley suddenly felt nothing but rage at the sight of her unresponsive mother. More than anything, she wanted to smash the empty bottle of vodka against her mother’s forehead.
That would wake her the fuck up.
Instead, Ashley walked over to her mother’s motionless body and slapped her across the face. The palm on cheek contact immediately startled her mother from her substance-induced sleep and she began to moan in pain.
“Whattin tha fahk didjou do dat for?” she slurred, trying desperately to keep her eyes from rolling into the back of her skull.
“That’s from Dad,” Ashley shouted, as angry hot tears streamed down her face. “For fucking abandoning your children! You’re not the only one who wants this pain to stop, you know? You’re not the only one who lost somebody!”
Ashley’s mother stared up at her, confused, still fighting to stay conscious.
“Ashley…whatta yew talkin bout?” She began to sway, closing her eyes tight as she clutched her ears to block out Joey’s crying. “Yer fahkin’ brofer won’t shattup…I can’t fahkin shleep…”
Realizing her mother was too gone to comprehend reality, Ashley gave up trying to talk. She grabbed the pills off the coffee table and walked to the kitchen. With one quick motion she dumped the pills into the garbage disposal, and flicked the switch. The loud grinding muffled the cries of her mother as she cursed Ashley from the couch.
“Yew bitch…I needs those….I FAHKIN NEED THOSE! Whattin da fahk is yer fahkin problem?”
Ignoring her mother’s angry, incoherent shouts, Ashley walked to her brother’s room. She picked up young, innocent Joey, and held him close to her chest as she walked to her room. Joey had stopped crying, but his body was tense with the shouts of his mother coming from the living room.
“It’s okay, Joey. I’ve got you,” Ashley whispered as she locked the door behind her.
She gently tucked Joey into her twin sized bed, and crawled in beside him. Joey began to whimper again, as their mother’s shouts grew louder. Ashley suddenly remembered the nights when she was young, and couldn’t sleep after a horrible nightmare. Her father would always tuck her into bed, and place headphones attached to a CD player on her night stand over her ears. He would kiss her forehead and press play. Light sounds of beautiful classical music would fill her ears, and without a thought to the monster under her bed, she’d always drift into a restful sleep.
Ashley pulled out her MP3 player and placed the headphones over Joey’s ears. She kissed his forehead lightly and pressed play, and immediately his body relaxed. Ashley drifted into a heavy sleep to the light sound of classical music, escaping from Joey’s ears.
