Runaway
by anne georg
At the family Christmas Eve celebration in 1969, the carols had been sung around the decorated tree, the pile of presents for each family member had been opened and awed at, the thankyous and hugs doled out.
“Do you like your new pajamas” Mom asked.
“Of course,” I answered rubbing the soft flannel on my cheek, long resigned to the modest gifts my parents could afford.
The remains of roll mops and pumpernickel, the stollen and lebkuchen lay on the dining room table. Mom relaxed for a moment with coffee and cake, surrounded by the festive chaos.
Lissy—my older sister by 18 months—had drunk too much Sauterne wine, which is strange because our parents were teetotalers and they never had booze in the house, except maybe a half a case of beer that lasted Dad all summer. This was a rare purchase, or perhaps, a gift.
Drunken Lissy cried on the stairs. Mel, our well-meaning, newly minted brother-in-law—our eldest sister’s husband—sat with her, listening to her incoherent complaints. “You’ll see. Everything will get better,” he recited.
The wine tasted awful, so I didn’t get drunk. I scowled and said little—in foul humor for no reason other than being 14 years old, wanting to be anywhere but in the embrace of my loving family. I craved to race into the night with friends, stoned on acid, romping through snow drifts and pool halls, lurking around liquor stores till someone came along who’d bootleg a bottle, then on to crash pads filled with stoned kids, my people, a merry-go-round of friends and fun and parties.
I moped about on that confused Christmas Eve while my handsome feline-like boyfriend, Greg, was in Toronto scoping out a place where we could live together. My plan was to run away to join him. He was twenty years old, shining long black hair that he wore like a main, and twinkling brown eyes. We’d necked a lot, and he felt me up, said he respected me too much to have sex with me. I didn’t care one way or the other. I was dazzled by the idea of living with my dashing hippie boyfriend in Toronto; such a sophisticated city compared to uncool Edmonton, where I’d been born and had never left.
Dad always had a pile of magazines, and I’d read an article in Time about the epidemic of teen runaways. These were kids I admired, even though the story painted a desolate image: panhandling, sleeping on dirty mattresses in crash pads, getting arrested, being taken advantage of by bad people. It sounded romantic, dramatic, free—what I yearned for. I believed I was exceptional: nothing bad would happen to me.
§
It was a bitterly cold January after the desultory festive season. Over the course of a week, I moved what I owned of value out of the house. “Eileen needs to borrow my ski equipment for a trip she’s going on this weekend.” Mom didn’t suspect I was lying, though I’d been repeatedly caught at it, and I barely saw my best friend from elementary school anymore. Mom was too busy with the three youngest kids to pay much attention to me.
The skis I’d begged for, I sold to a boy I knew. The ski jacket to another kid. I smuggled my violin out of the house and sold it to a diligent musician in the high-school orchestra. The instrument had been foisted on me in Grade 7, part of Mom’s crusade to expose her many children to culture without spending money the family didn’t have. She’d enrolled me and Lissy in a program at the university in which, for a small registration fee, university music students taught us to play an instrument in an orchestra for junior high school students. Lissy and I were assigned the violin. Lissy was first violinist, a star. I was in the second string, seated behind her.
I despised that I played the violin. It had to be the all-time dorkiest of instruments rivalling the cello, which seemed sexual the way it sat between your legs; the bass violin was too clumsy; the viola, irrelevant. The entire string section was a violation of the cool person I aspired to be. I cringed whenever I had to carry the black violin case, an unseemly appendage, past the older kids hanging out at school; stylishly rebellious, smoking cigarettes, their status soaring in a stratosphere out of my bow-wielding reach. I would rush by, wishing to be invisible or that I played the flute, like Jethro Tull.
Sick of listening to my constant complaining for two years, one fall day in Grade 9, Dad succumbed. “If the kid doesn’t want to play the violin, Mother, we can’t force her.”
Mom shrugged and shook her head. “I guess so.”
“Lissy can quit too if she wants,” Dad said.
Mom shrugged again.
It was as if I had been in a fierce tug of war and the other side had suddenly let go, leaving me to drop splat on my bum. Inexplicably, I almost wished they’d kept forcing me to go. A tweak of regret. Guilt at disappointing Mom. Again.
Lissy quit too, even though she didn’t want to. She was mad at me, but it’s not as if I’d had forced her to quit. Still, I felt even guiltier.
Now in Grade 10, I converted the violin—imbued with loathing, guilt and regret—and my other possessions into cash. A whole 100 bucks. I’d never had that much money. I could run away.
Greg and I spoke on the phone. In one conversation he assured me that he had a lead on an apartment; the next conversation that one had fallen through, he had a lead on another one.
“It’s hard to find anything out here. But I’m trying. I’ll find us a good pad. I love you, chic.”
It’s not true that absence makes the heart grow fonder; my infatuation with Greg waned to nonexistent within three weeks. But I still wanted to run away.
Lissy would run away with me, and we hatched a plan to run away to Vancouver—a hippie mecca according to the Weekend Magazine that came with the daily newspaper. We recruited a bunch of our mismatched friends: Sheila, a pregnant sixteen-year old we knew from school, and Gary, her creepily unattractive 26-year-old boyfriend she’d met at the crash pad we hung out at downtown; Jack, a lean indigenous guy whose frequent smile exposed large, misshapen front teeth, and his voluptuous girlfriend, Gypsy, whom we also knew from the crash pad.
John Denver’s “Oh Babe I Hate to Go” became the soundtrack of my planned flight, feeding the drama I sought. I was turning 15 in a month, ready to take on the world.
§
On a grey mid-January day, our gang rode the Greyhound bus to Vancouver. We gathered our scant wealth. I had the most money and footed a large part of the collective bill for tickets and Old Dutch potato chips, hot dogs and Coca Cola. I pictured my parents on the curved orange couch in the living room. Mom knitting, Dad reading a magazine, becoming more worried as our curfew passed. I smothered my empathy and guilt, reminding myself that my parents were my jailers. To be free, I needed to break my attachment to them.
In Vancouver, we headed directly to the famed Last Chance Saloon, a coffee shop on Fourth Street near Burrard, the heart of Vancouver’s hippie mecca, attracting young people from across Canada and the States. We smelled the patchouli oil and weed clinging to the long-haired kids hanging around outside, smoking. Inside, tobacco, hash and weed smoke hung like diaphanous drapes in the small dark space, crammed with tables and people milling about. Posters announcing poetry happenings and bands hung on black walls.
Jack and Gypsy went their own way; Sandra and Gary drifted off. Lissy and I ordered coffee and sat beside four guys at a long wooden table, etched with smiley faces and slogans like ‘Flower Power’. The boys looked like everyone else in the place: long shaggy hair, wearing blue jeans and flannel shirts. They were cute and funny—from Squamish, they said, not far up the coast. Would we like to smoke hash with them?
“Sure.” I covered my mouth and giggled, a habit from when I was younger and my teeth seemed shamefully huge. We passed around a small metal pipe. I didn’t get high. Usually, only acid got me off.
“Where are you guys from?”
“Edmonton.”
“You runaways?” Lissy and I exchanged glances. Lissy nodded.
“Yes.” I giggled, covering my mouth. It felt good to be noticed. To no longer be the villager in the chorus for my elementary school’s operettas. No longer the middle child of seven. No longer the second-string violinist. No longer the gawky girl wanting to be hip. These guys recognized me as someone special—wild even.
“Do you need a place to crash?”
Lissy and I looked at each other, at them.
“We’re good people. We’re not going to do anything to you. We have a pad just a couple of blocks away. Do you want to stay with us?”
Lissy nodded. “Sure. Thanks.” We hadn’t even realized we’d need a place to sleep. Or at least I hadn’t. We followed the boys to their shabby apartment in a rambling house on a tree-lined avenue, dark and lush in the drizzle—so different from the bright clarity of Edmonton in January.
True to their word, the boys didn’t do anything to Lissy and I. Except for Max, who ventured a grope of my breast. He was nice and I liked how his jeans fit him. I would have gone further.
After a few days Lissy left with some of the guys to go to Squamish. She wanted me to come, too. I wanted her to stay.
“I don’t like Vancouver,” Lissy said. “Let’s check out Squamish. Maybe we can find work and live there.” When I insisted I wanted to stay in Vancouver, Lissy accepted my decision. “I’ll be back for you,” she assured me. She left me her phone number and address. Just in case.
I spent my days hanging around the Last Chance Saloon smoking weed; or panhandling at the corner of the Hudson’s Bay; coming home to warm up and sleep. As I was leaving one day, I made my way down the shabby hallway, saying hello to Shinti, the Indian woman who managed the place.
“Hello,” Shinti boomed back and shuffled in my direction. I kept going. I had nothing to do with her, and it was creepy the way she lurked in the hallway. “Do you want to make some money, girl?” she yelled at my back.
I turned. “How?”
“I have an excellent proposition for you.” Shinti grinned, foxlike. “You could marry an Indian man so he can become a Canadian citizen. Very good for him. Very good money for you.”
“I’m only 14.”
“No problem. I can arrange the fake ID. Canadian girls your age do it all the time.”
“It sounds illegal.”
“Such worries. It’s only bending the law a little. Why would you care, a girl like you?” Shinti’s big face leaned into mine, her long, black hair falling across her shoulders onto a shapeless grey house dress, releasing the smell of sour sweat, sweet curry and spicey incense that clung to her.
What kind of a girl did she think I was? I never asked. She had a point. I could be an outlaw. And get the money.
“And what if I don’t like the guy?”
“No problem. You only have to meet him at the wedding ceremony and then never see him again.”
“What if I ever want to get married for real?” Not that I ever would.
“No problem. You will be divorced as soon as it is legally allowed. Too many questions. I will pay you 125 dollars. That’s good pay for an hour’s work for a girl like you.”
Fingering my last couple of dollar bills and change in my pocket, I said sure. Maybe I was that kind of girl. And 125 dollars sounded like a fortune.
Shinti slipped me a piece of torn paper with her phone number on it. “Tell your friends. We have great demand right now.”
I went downtown to panhandle outside the Bay—also my hangout in Edmonton—where runaways accumulated like patches on frayed jeans. The echoes of “Spare change” and the occasional “Thank you” and “Do your parents know you’re here?” interrupted the collective aimlessness.
I walked the length of the department store sidewalk, greeting the kids I knew from the few days I’d been coming to the Bay, telling the girls about Shinti’s offer. I wore the ratty fur coat I’d bought for a couple of bucks at the Sally Ann, way less than the 10 dollars from the sale of my down jacket. And way less warm. Vancouver was cold; drizzle dribbled from the low grey sky. My coat felt damp and smelled of moth balls and must. My skinny body shivered under its weight.
“Have you seen this girl?”
It was a frequent query at the Bay; desperate parents looking for runaway kids. Spoken from behind, it had a familiar resonance. I pivoted.
Dad! My father stood in a wool coat and suit—his everyday work clothes—holding my school photo. Seeing me sputter and reel, he broke into a bellow of joviality at the success of his ambush.
“Surprised?” His laughter subsided to a chuckle. “You can’t hide from your old man, kid. Let’s go. You’re coming home with me. Your mother’s waiting.”
Circling my shoulder with his arm, he ushered me—stunned, weak, and maybe grateful— to the waiting burgundy Ford Acadia.
“Lissy’s not with you?”
“No.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“Of course not.” I was repelled by the question, appalled that my father would even contemplate that condition in relation to me. Not that I was a virgin.
“Not ‘of course not’. Why else would you run away? You’ve got a good home. Your mother is worried sick about you.”
Poor Mom. But I had to live my life.
“I’m hungry. I’ve been driving all night. Let’s have lunch somewhere.”
“How did you find me?”
“One of the people you met here—Gord—had the good sense to call and tell us where you would be.”
Gord. We’d gone to his place one night. He’d given us acid and tried to have sex with Lissy. I didn’t tell Dad that.
Dad found a diner, walked through the door to a jingling bell and the spanky tang of the all-day coffeepot. Condensation dripped from grease-streaked windows. I ordered a burger and fries and a strawberry milkshake. Dad had liver and onions with mashed potatoes and coffee. He kept looking at me and shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand how dangerous it is for you to be here on your own. You’re still a child. There are people who will take advantage of you.”
I thought of Shinti. I would have done it. I would have married an Indian guy and never seen him again for 125 dollars.
“Where’s your sister?”
Too off balance to lie, I betrayed her.
“Finish up. We’ll pick up your stuff from where you’re staying and then let’s get her. I want to bring both of you back home to your mother.”
§
We drove the winding winter road to Squamish in silence until Dad spoke, “I went to the apartment on 95th street, you know the ‘crash pad’ where I dropped you and Lissy off a couple of times before you ran away. When I showed the guys your picture, they said they’d never seen or heard of you. I knew they were lying.”
“Oh?” Lissy and I had been hanging around there for months.
“You know that butcher shop downstairs from the apartment?”
“Ya.”
“I broke into it. I smashed a window, grabbed a couple of garlic sausage rings and crawled out. Then I called the police from a phone booth and reported that I’d witnessed a theft. I told them I suspected the drug dealers who lived upstairs.”
“Dad!” I gasped. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“No way.” He laughed. “No one crosses me, kid. You should know that.” I contemplated the depth of my father’s revenge and obediently navigated him to the address Lissy had given me scrunched up in a well worked piece of paper. Soon we rolled up to a clapboard shack.
“I won’t be long.” Dad got out of the car. I waited, watching him stride across the dirt yard. He took all three rickety wooden steps in one hop, stopped on the landing and knocked on the flimsy screen door. Lissy answered. She and Dad spoke in pantomime, Lissy inside of the screen, he outside.
The door shut. Lissy disappeared. Dad plodded back to the car. He got in, shut the door, sat unmoving, not turning the key in the ignition. He just stared out the windshield.
“Are we waiting for Lissy?”
His voice was flat, his eyes staring ahead. “She doesn’t want to come home. She’s 16. I can’t force her.”
We continued to sit, saying nothing. I heard Dad’s breath catch. I glanced sideways. A stream of tears escaped each of his eyes and flowed down his cheeks. I’d never seen Dad cry. He was a man who was more suited to raucous laughter and flashing anger than tenderness and sentiment. I felt like crying, too, but that would just be weird.
I didn’t run away because my parents were bad or neglectful or beat me. They did the best they could, given I was fourth of seven children. I ran away because I couldn’t be free, sexy and high with a nine o’clock curfew. Still, I was relieved to be going home, strangely pleased my father had come to find me, bereaved without Lissy beside me.
§
Mom sobbed and held me when she saw me. We went to my bedroom I shared with Lissy. It shocked me to see our single beds stripped to the mattress, like a hotel room vacated by strangers. Cold. Strange. Transitory.
“We didn’t know if you’d ever come back,” Mom said, clocking my discomfort. She picked up fresh white sheets and threw one across the length of my bed. Together we tucked in the corners. “Why did you run away?”
“Dad said he cared more about what the neighbors said than about me.” A practiced liar, I miscalculated the poison of my accusation. Dad reveled in his rebelliousness, gleefully, insistently, flaunting convention, mocking the neighbors as conformists.
He was passing by outside the bedroom door as I spoke. He rushed into the room. “Say that again and you won’t have to run away. I’ll beat you so bad that Welfare will take you.” He leaned toward me, his breath harsh and fast, bristling into my face. The colors of his eyes —one blue, one green—intensified, drilling his diamond-hard outrage into my cowering being. I knew the vengeance he could wreak.
He turned; stalked out of the room, a squall spiraling away, leaving me devastated in its wake.
Mom, stunned to silence, recovered. “That doesn’t sound like something your father would say. You must be mistaken. Or most likely it was a joke—you’re shaking. Let’s get you to bed.”
When I came down for breakfast the next morning, Dad handed me 50 bucks. “Get rid of those jeans. Buy yourself some new clothes. I want you to be the best-dressed girl in school. And be sure to tell your sister when you write her.”
I bought a woolen suit of soft cream-colored flared pants and a red V-neck thigh-length cardigan with two big red buttons and cream trim. I draped myself in this newfound elegance and the carefully distributed indulgences of my parents. Dad allowed me to smoke cigarettes, much to Mom’s disapproval; and they extended my curfew to 11 o’clock on weekends.
I wore my new suit when I met Greg. He’d come back from Toronto after I called to say I was running away to Vancouver and wouldn’t be joining him.
“You steered me wrong, chic.” He scowled, accenting his overbite. “I respected you. I found a place for you and me. What kind of a Jezebel are you?” I felt bad. But what did he expect? We’d only been going around together for a month before he took off for Toronto. Greg found another girlfriend right away. She was pregnant within a few months.
I turned 15 in February and began to emerge from the confusion of a thrill-seeking teenybopper. I discarded my oversized grey turtleneck sweater and my beloved too-long bell bottoms frayed at the heel, on which I’d embroidered colorful butterflies. Through the spring semester my marks rose. My teachers were encouraged. Mom and Dad were relieved.
§
The lilacs were out, and the front yard smelled like a perfumery. Mom and Dad had gone to a movie and dinner. I was babysitting my younger siblings who were asleep. Jesus and Speed, an incongruous duo with whom I hung around at the Teen Centre downtown, came over to keep me company—and to smoke weed. Jesus was short, blue-eyed, wore a longish blond bowl cut, a fringed buckskin jacket and sparkled with the wholesomeness of a child. Speed was big, mystical and dark, always disheveled , wore a permanent five o’clock shadow, blue-jean cut-offs—even in twenty-below weather —and a misshapen red T-shirt.
Jesus, always restless, began rifling through the records. “Hey, look what I found?” Joint hanging from his mouth, he held up Lissy’s Leonard Cohen album. He pulled the record from its black and white cover. “I love this album.”
“No. I won’t play that album. And be careful with it. You might scratch it.” I was dismayed, peeved at how he handled Lissy’s treasured disc, waving it in the air, acting like it was any old album. I lunged to grab it.
“What do you mean? Why not?” He held the record out of my reach.
“It’s Lissy’s. My sister. You don’t know her. I miss her so much. It’ll make me sad to listen to it.”
“Of course we’re playing the album,” Speed interceded, his voice resonant with gravitas uncommon for a boy his age. “Don’t worry. It’ll be a good thing. You’ll see.”
I was torn between the need to suffer Lissy’s absence and the desire to please my friends and hear Leonard Cohen. “Okay. But I’m doing it.”
Jesus handed me the album. I blew on it, lovingly checked the grooved surface to ensure it was clear of dust and scratches; prayerfully laid it on the turntable, pausing to think of Lissy as the record rotated. Ceremoniously, I placed the needle onto the album’s smooth edge and waited the couple of seconds till the frizzled static ended. Then, for the first time since Lissy and I had crooned the words together, so many months ago, I heard Lissy’s favorite song: “Suzanne lays you down…”
A knock at the door. Speed butted the joint in an ashtray. Jesus stashed the nickel bag in his pants. We flapped our arms in the air to rid the room of smoke. I turned on the porchlight and opened the door a crack so the smoke wouldn’t escape.
Lissy stood grinning under the porchlight—my sister Lissy. “I’m back!”
“You’re home!” I hurled myself at her and hugged her. “Mom and Dad are going to be so happy to see you!”
“I hope so.” Lissy paused. “Leonard Cohen! I’ve missed my album so much! This is so great.”
“Right on cue,” Speed said, grinning at me.
After Jesus and Speed had gone, Lissy and I lay on opposite ends of the curved couch, smoking a joint, gossiping and playing Leonard Cohen over and over while we waited to surprise Mom and Dad. A couple of hours later the door opened.
First to walk into the living room was Dad. “Lissy!” he shouted. “My girl! I knew you’d come home.” He held open his arms and Lissy walked into his embrace. Dad held her. “Mother. Look who’s here! Our prodigal daughter has returned.”
“Yes. I see.” Mom cried and hugged Lissy.
Lissy cried too.
So did I.
Dad beamed, his smile wobbling. He turned and strode into the kitchen, clearing his throat.
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Anne Georg lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her journalism has appeared in various media. In 2016 Anne self-published a graphic non-fiction, The Remarkable Story of the Grizzly and the Goats, with illustrator Jaye Hilchey. Anne’s published fiction includes: ‘Unchoreographed’, Flash Fiction Magazine, March 3, 2025; and ‘Best Friends’ and ‘Tantrum’ (micro fiction),Friday Flash Fiction, July 2024; ‘Gina’ (novelette),confetti, November 1, 2025; ‘A Boy and his Rooster’, Consequence Forum, November 15, 2025; and ‘Paradise Beach’, CafeLit, December 3, 2025. Anne volunteers as a judge for the Alberta Magazine Awards. She finds her literary community at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society and the Writer’s Guild of Alberta.