Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Of the estimated million teenagers who left home each year, as many as two hundred thousand did not turn around and return home, but kept on running, their wounds too deep, their worlds simply too fucked up to inhabit any longer. At least 60 percent of these cases, Lorraine learned, involved sexual abuse, assault, and other unholy acts that by all rights should have been run away from. Which was terrifying. The day before Newell had disappeared, if you had suggested that Newell had been abused, the idea would have been too ridiculous to consider. But Lorraine no longer knew what to think, what to believe.

She had to know more. Whether it was watching as many movie adaptations of Tom Sawyer as she could get her hands on, listening to an audio book of On the Road while driving, or spending hours at a time behind the locked door of her bedroom, running through the missing person's webpages of different sheriff 's departments, Lorraine searched for answers, for explanations. For anything she could grasp on to.

With regards to the high rate of abuse, experts uniformly agreed: flight from home most often was an act of self-preservation. A declaration of life. This was the bottom line, a reality that also extended to cases that did not necessarily involve abuse, where assignments of blame were not so cut and dried, flawed situations that the teenager's decisions had both contributed to and exacerbated; cases where revenge, anger, shame, fear, parents, teachers, lovers, crushes, and friends all gave way to what, in the end, had to be seen as a high-stakes game of self-discovery.

Thus, read Lorraine, there was no quote unquote point to running away. Or, if there was a point, then that point was, there was no point; flight from home was the inevitable choice, simply because a young man or woman could not run away from his or her own body.

Denial is the natural instinct, Lorraine read, turning the page in some stupid manual. No parent or guardian can be faulted for their disbelief. However, be advised that denial solves nothing. Acceptance of larger problems is the first and most necessary step in moving forward.

And then there were the first-person accounts. The tales from the front.

Indeed, Lorraine had a collection of them by now, duplicates that she'd taken home from the center. Inspirational letters, mostly, their happy endings providing Lorraine with strength, giving her tangible proof that her time was being well spent, her hope well placed. But there were others, too. A few of them. Undated. Unsigned. This one, Lorraine found amid the stacks: a loose sheet that had been placed inside a binder and then forgotten. She'd flattened it out, but its creases remained prominent, dividing the paper into sections reminiscent of a tic-tac-toe board.

She envisioned the page folded up inside the back pocket of a pair of grimy jeans, carried around for so long that its corrugations had become part of its structure. She stared at the frazzled stick letters, wild scratches that progressively had more trouble staying grounded within the notebook's light blue guidelines. She started reading and the words slapped her across the face, leaving her shocked, half-numb, and frightened, as if she suddenly had been granted access to the secret correspondence of the wartime enemy.

Still, she could not help but read. She could not help but add the document to her collection.

Dear Hot line fucks,

Until I trusted you and your treachorous hotline I was doing aces. I had me a job working a piercing gun in this tent on Venice Beach, and even arranged to move in with this rasta chick who works at the next tent braiding hair with beads and sea shells. The history with my dad is still there but I wanted him to know that after all the hell I been through, I'm doing okay and there's some light. Since calls to the house still get tracked I used the hotline. It was good too, until your helping hand cownseler checks on dad's name. Turns out pop left a message. Maybe it makes me a pussy that after hearing about my brother I wanted to go home, but I'll be that kind of pussy any day, and anyone who has a problem with it is going to get their ass handed to them. So the next thing I know, I am talking to the phone cownseler about that Greyhound thing. The operater keeps me on the line while he verifys my runway status with the police. Then he tells me he has to make sure I am going to go home to my legal gardean, it's the rules. I was real nervous but I held on and after a while there is a clicking sound. I have to admit it kind of got me to hear the old man's voice, and I could tell he was releived to here from me too. We arranged everything and I got off the phone. The rule is, I have to be at the bus station a hour early to get my ticket, so Mase and me hauled ass to his van. I gathered up my shit but was getting kind of nervous because nine months is a long time. It took a while to get to the station cuz the traffic was a big pile of ass. It is total BULLSHIT that the driver does not want to let me on — I wasn't doing nothing, and even showed him my ticket too. But that FUCKER radios and gets the COPS involved. I kepped screaming how I was trying to go home to my dad but they cuffed me anyways. Now I am in the Tonapah Juvenille Youth Detention Agency. Days we wear orange jumpsuits and go out to the middle of the desert and pickaxe rocks. They got this bigass chain around our legs and it is hot as shit. There aint no shade and we only get two water breaks, and this huge nigger keeps blowing kisses at me. I hate you do gooder bleeding heart phone bastards.You ruined my miserable fucking life.

5.3

People want to talk. They want to give you the combination to their hearts. That's where your smart motherfucker gets the advantage. Like with Jabba. The fat bastard's delivered his defense argument, what, a hundred times? Ponyboy listened to every one. The more familiar Pony-boy became with Jabba's main points, the more accustomed he became to Jabba's digressions, the more that number leapt out at him. Jabba would say one hundred and fifty-eight, and it was like one of them little triangle things from the marching band sounded. A hundred and fifty-eight concurrent state and federal charges, DING. Ponyboy got to thinking that the feds were firing a lot of ammunition. He began to recognize the prohibitive fear that oozed through Jabba's bravado. Your smart mother-fucker, that's what he waits for. What he lives for.

July's rolling around, mad patriot fever's everywhere, flags on lawns and in store windows, all the little civic groups got their homogay little fireworks stands outside the shopping centers. Ponyboy's in the office, stacking videotapes. The red pile. The blue pile. All the colors got their own piles. Jabba's busy with his phone calls, and Ponyboy gets to wondering: what's up with all the different colors? Ponyboy shoved his finger up his schnozz and made himself look especially bright. “Yo, Jabba. We should mix the red tapes with the blue ones. Get a little flag working. It'd be patriotic.”

Jabba covered the mouthpiece with his paw. “Don't fuck with my inventory.”

Well, now you know, when the fat bastard wasn't looking, Ponyboy had to pick up a red videotape. Check out the little peel-off label, the ink-jet printing:

AMATEUR FIRST TIME DEBUTANTES #25.

NOTICE: THE ENCLOSED CASSETTE IS RED. IF IT IS NOT RED, IT IS AN ILLEGAL, INFERIOR COPY. $500.00 REWARD FOR ARREST AND CONVICTION OF ANY COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. All models appearing in the visual depiction of actual sexual conduct displayed on this box or in this video are over 18 years. All records comply with government-mandated record keeping and labeling requirements and are kept in the office of the manufacturer/ distributor at the following location: