Now that she’s gone to bed, I can’t stop wondering:
What in the world happened to her?
What “rough time” did her journal help her through?
And what became of it?
Where is that journal now?
Friday afternoon
When I went to use the bathroom this morning, I found a book outside my door.
Meg’s journal.
There was a little Post-it on it that said: “Please read. Love, Meg.”
So I did.
It is absolutely heartbreaking. She was engaged to a man named Randy who was in the air force. His plane was shot down over enemy territory, but his body was never recovered. For years she didn’t know if he was dead or alive, a prisoner of war being tortured or just bones decaying in the earth.
The journal covers about six years, then just stops. There’s no conclusion, no wrap-up, no happy ending.
It just stops.
When I was done reading it, I darted around the apartment until I found her. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, staring out the window.
“Meg?” I said, and when she looked at me, I threw my arms around her and said, “I’m so sorry!”
She smiled at me, but I could tell she’d been crying.
“Did they ever find him?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That was the hardest part. The not knowing.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
After a quiet minute she sighed and said, “What I don’t think I wrote in there was how much we wanted children. Randy came from a big family and wanted a dozen children.”
“A dozen!?”
She laughed, and it was a real laugh. “I told him, ‘Four at the most!’ and he said, ‘Can’t we have five?’ He thought we had the genetics to produce an outstanding basketball team.”
I laughed. “A basketball team?”
She nodded, then took a deep breath and sighed. “I was crazy in love with him.”
I put my head on her shoulder. “I could tell.”
We were quiet for a long time, and finally she said, “Do you understand why your coming to stay with us has been such a blessing?”
I sat up and looked at her. “I’m not exactly a basketball team….”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “I don’t need a basketball team, Holly. Not anymore.”
Sunday, November 28th
scraps of love
torn and tattered
faded, scattered
trashed
threads of hope
frayed and tangled
broken, mangled
dashed
backing, buttons
yarn and batting
quilted tenderly
wrapped up in
this warm repair
my patchwork family
Wednesday, December 1st
For days I thought about it, and finally I did it:
I let Meg read this journal.
I understood her so much better after I’d read hers, and since it looks like I am going to be staying here, I want her to understand me, too.
I was really nervous when I gave it to her. My heart was pounding! She asked me, “Are you sure?” so I could have snatched it back. But I just winced and said, “Just promise you won’t kick me out once you read it, okay?”
She laughed and said, “Of course I won’t,” but I still worried. The whole time she had it, I worried. I couldn’t really remember a lot of what I’d written, but I knew it was brutally honest. Scary honest. Would she think I was an awful person?
And other parts…would she think they were stupid? Catty? Crude? Embarrassing?
And the poems…oh no, the poems! Were they completely lame?
I kept wondering what was taking her so long.
What was she thinking?
When she finally brought it back to me, she sat beside me on the couch for what felt like an eternity, saying nothing. Her eyes were a little watery, and she didn’t seem to want to look at me.
Inside I started to panic. Why had I ever let her read my journal? It said in black and white how great I was at lying and deceiving and stealing…why would she want me to live with her?
But then she looked at me and whispered, “I am so proud to know you.”
It wasn’t what I was expecting. “Proud?”
She nodded. “And I am so sorry for all you’ve been through.”
After that we just talked. She asked me a few questions about things in the journal, but she didn’t quiz me up about it or anything. We actually talked more about the future. About the good things ahead.
In the middle of all that talking, though, she gave me some advice that, at the time, I thought was crazy. But it’s stuck with me, and now I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.
She thinks I should send you a copy of this journal, Ms. Leone.
She thinks you’d really want to know.
What happened to me.
What I’ve been through.
Why it was so hard for me to talk to you.
Everything.
She also thinks I need to thank you for giving me the journal.
For getting me writing.
And…she seems to think you’ll like my poems.
I don’t know about that, but I do think she has a point. And what’s interesting to me is that I’d forgotten it was you I was talking to in this journal. I’m not sure when the switch happened, but somewhere along the line I stopped venting at you and started writing to…some imagined friend? Myself? I don’t know, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that this journal made me feel less alone. Like I had someone to talk to.
I remember saying (quite a few pages ago) that I felt like I’d solved something inside me, even though I didn’t really understand what the puzzle was. Now I see that it was this book, this journal, that helped me feel that way. It helped me sort through a lot of the hurt and anger. Maybe it didn’t solve anything, but somehow it gave me strength. It gave me hope. And the truth is, I don’t know if I could have survived this journey without it.
While I’m at it, let me confess that there is something to the whole poetry thing you pushed on us. I hate to admit it, but I’ve grown to like it. I think in stanzas sometimes. I play with phrases in my mind. It’s not the sissy stuff I used to think it was. It’s the raw heart of the matter.
So after mulling it over for a long time, I’ve decided to take Meg’s advice.
I want you to know that I’m okay.
I want you to know that you helped me.
And I want to say thank you.
Thank you for helping me turn the page.
Author’s Note
The idea for Runaway was sparked by my friend and teaching colleague Greg Sarkisian. When Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy came out in 1999, he read it and, after telling me how great it was (see, what a friend!), he mentioned that he would love to know more about the homeless girl that Sammy rescues in the story.
The instant he said it I knew this book was in my future. The idea just gripped me. How do you become homeless at twelve? How long could you survive on your own? How did Holly wind up in a refrigerator box on the banks of a dried-up riverbed? I had the basic story of her life when I wrote Sisters of Mercy, but the details? The details would be hard to face. Hard to live with for the year or more it would take me to write it.
When I write a book, I become immersed in the story. I live it. Breathe it. Think about it day and night. People have told me I’m prolific, but what I really am is obsessive. I just can’t seem to let things rest. Ever since Greg made that original comment, Holly’s been haunting me. She’s been there in the back of my mind, waiting for me to face her one on one. Waiting for the time when I would finally tell her story.
I wanted Holly to have her own unique voice, and for her book to have a distinct style. The idea of a journal came to mind, which led me to the thought of journaling as a classroom tool, and then to mu
sing over the myriad ways teachers try to get kids to keep communications open; to let kids know that they’re there for them and they believe in them.
When plotting a book, I often spend time lying on the couch sort of story-dreaming—I let one cognitive thread lead to the next, then to the next. Sometimes it gets me absolutely nowhere. Sometimes it helps me make connections or devise wickedly wonderful twists of plot. In the case of Runaway, it brought me to the idea that Holly’s teacher would be the one to give Holly a journal and encourage her to write. And Holly’s reaction would, of course, be just as you found it on page one. But still, Holly has no one. Not a soul in the world whom she feels she can trust. So she talks to Ms. Leone through the journal, and long before she’s even aware of it, the journal becomes her lifeline, and eventually her most prized possession.
In my own life, I also came to writing from a place of anger. Life seemed devastating and cruel and completely unfair, and I started lashing out about it on paper. Now when I do school visits, I often share my adopted philosophy on dealing with hard times: Don’t take your anger out on yourself (through drugs or alcohol or whatever), don’t take it out on other people (by being negative or aggressive or just plain mean), take it out on paper. Getting your anger or sadness or frustration out of your system and onto paper is very cheap and very real therapy. Of course that’s a simplistic view of dealing with anger, but in my case, writing saved me from the despair I was feeling, and over time it has evolved into an amazing, joyful career. So I’m a believer, man. A big believer in the power of words!
Anyway, for over a year I’ve been living in Holly’s world, learning about everything from horse trailers to the Los Angeles River, interviewing people, sneaking inside the cargo hold of a Greyhound bus, and yes, spending time at homeless shelters. A lot of this research was sobering, but not unfamiliar. My husband and I lived the first years of our marriage in a run-down four-hundred-square-foot rental house in a bad part of town. Gang activity, domestic violence, drug deals, and homelessness were all present in our neighborhood. We got two big dogs and shut the blinds, but we were never blind to what was going on around us. This was the environment that spawned the character of Holly in the first place.
Ridiculous as it sounds, it was facing poetry that actually scared me the most. I’m an embarrassingly emotional person, and getting down to the “raw heart of the matter” was terrifying to me. I was not a poet—how could I write poems? Even through the voice of Holly, what made me think I could pull this off?
But I had this ideaaaa, and anyone who knows me, knows that when I have an ideaaaa, there’s trouble brewin’. I’m like a dog with a bone. I chew on it and chew on it and just won’t let it go. So I chewed on poetry. I studied it, I practiced it, and eventually I got almost comfortable with it. And I’m glad I faced my fears. The poems express Holly’s emotions in a way that her narration alone couldn’t. There are no walls in her poems, no posturing; just Holly as she really is: vulnerable, scared, and alone.
As always when creating a book, there were people who gave invaluable insight, information, and support. Top of the list is my intelligent, compassionate, versatile, and astute editor, Nancy Siscoe. (Hey, gushing’s allowed—this woman pulled me out of the slush pile.) Right beside her is my rock of a husband, fellow writer, and partner in everything, Mark Parsons. Then there’s Ginger Knowlton at Curtis Brown, Ltd., who’s a lot more than an agent, and my new and very sharp manuscript readers, Colton and Connor. On the research end of things, there’s Steve Rodarte at the San Luis Obispo Greyhound Station, plus the actual driver who busted me but didn’t have me arrested (and instead showed me how you could escape the cargo hold), Nancy Herzog-Johnson, a friend and longtime volunteer at the Prado Lane homeless shelter, and Whitney, the girl at the shelter who told me her story while I was “under cover.”
Those people have my sincere thanks, but the dedication of this book goes to a group that doesn’t hear thank you enough—teachers. Teachers like Ms. Leone. The ones who are determined to reach the kid who seems unreachable. The ones who put their heart and soul into their profession and often don’t know the outcome of their efforts. The ones who care enough to make a difference, even if they’re never thanked.
This book I dedicate to them.
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Published by Laurel-Leaf an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons
All rights reserved.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, New York, in 2006. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers.
Laurel-Leaf and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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eISBN: 978-0-375-84912-1
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Wendelin Van Draanen, Runaway
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