Waiting for a Train

A Story by LizCorley

She waits for a train when she can do nothing else.

She stared blankly at the clock hanging on the wall, watching the second hand slowly tick its way around the face. She didn't register what the actual time was, though she knew she had been staring for hours. She had tried to go to bed at a reasonable time, even though she didn't feel tired at all. She didn't feel much of anything these days. She was trying, really, she was; trying to laugh at the things her friends said, trying to feel excited at the newest episode of what was supposed to be her favorite TV show, trying to enjoy each new theorem her teacher taught in her Advanced Calculus class. But she couldn't, she couldn't feel anything. And it hurt, or at least it was supposed to, but she couldn't even feel that.

Her phone went off, the sound blip of Monty Python signaling that she got a text.

“Hey, you up?” the text read from her boyfriend, Jeremy.

“Yeah. I couldn't sleep”, she replied.

“Huh. Anyway, you wanna come over? ;)”

“Sure, just let me get my things together. I'll be right over.”

“Alright. Text me when you get on the subway :)”

“Kay”

After gathering her school bag and some clothes and toiletries to take to his apartment, she wrote a note to her parents on the unlikely event that they would check her room saying where she was going, and climbed through her window and out onto the fire escape. She walked as quietly as she could down the eight stories worth flight of stairs, trying not wake any of the tenants living on the stairwell. Once she reached the ground, she walked the seven blocks to the subway station with keys in hand, holding them like dagger, if only for the familiarity rather than for actual protection.

There was almost no one in the station except for one or two homeless persons, gender half unidentifiable. She didn't have to wait very long for the train to come and sat down on the bench the moment she got on. Eight stops. That's how many she had to wait to get off so she could get to Jeremy's apartment in SoHo. In the corner seat was a man with a baseball cap pulled down over his face, a dark blue hoodie hiding his full form from view. After a few moments of staring at him, she turned and looked across the aisle at her reflection in the darkened glass.

The sound of the automated female's voice sounded over the loudspeaker startling her out of her reverie. Two more stops to go. After a few moments of staring at the speaker in the ceiling she remembered that she was supposed to text Jeremy when she had got on the Subway. Taking out her phone she typed out a short message and sent it to him. A movement out of her periphery made her glance up at the man in the baseball cap getting up from his seat and heading to the doors. She stared at hem for a few moments longer before looking down at her lap to the phone in her hand.

When the stain stopped and the man got off, she waited for a few minutes before getting up herself. The stop was coming up soon. As the train slowed, she stepped off when the doors opened and headed to the entrance of the station and headed up the stairs and towards the streets. Two blocks from the entrance to Jeremy's apartment complex, and then she could do what she wanted, which was usually what Jeremy wanted, and that usually involved beer and sex. In all the fogginess of her mind, the confusion of apathy, she felt a twinge of ire at the thought of more sex with him. She was tired of it all. It seemed as if that was the only thing they ever did anymore. But even though she felt that little ounce of anger, she couldn't put up enough effort to do anything about it. She knew that when she went over there, he would get drunk while she would barely be tipsy, he would start to get touchy with her, they would make their way to his bedroom, and then they would f**k. Rinse, repeat. The same boring cycle that would happen over and over again. A cycle she didn't want to put the effort to stopping, no matter how much the idea of it disgusted her.

Reaching the street, she took the steps and turns that she had memorized and not long after, she reached the complex. She headed into the alley beside the building and headed towards the fire escape. She climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor and tapped on the window. After a moment, Jeremy opened the window with a huge smile on his face.

“Hey, there you are, I was getting really worried.”

“Sorry, I guess I was walking more slowly than normal and didn't realize it,” she replied, climbing in through the window.

“I've got a six pack in the fridge, and since tomorrow is Friday, I think you can stand to get drunk and skip classes,” he smirked at her, leading her into the kitchen.

“That sounds like fun. But what about Dani and Mariah,” she asked, thinking that her friends would try and cause trouble when they found out about her sleeping with Jeremy; they didn't exactly like him.

“Just shoot them a text saying you don't feel good and that you won't be going to school tomorrow. God, Caroline, it's not that hard.”

“Alright let me just do that real quick, and then we don't have to worry about any interruptions,” she said, giving him a fake little smile, not that he would have noticed if it were real or not.

While Jeremy opened the fridge and got out beer, Caroline texted her friends to tell them she wasn't coming in to school tomorrow, though she didn't give a reason why. She went to the fridge and took out a beer for herself, and then headed into the living room. She rolled her eyes when he couldn't see them and sat down on the couch and turned on the TV to the football game that was always on the set.

They sat there for a couple hours, him drinking all the rest of the beers that were in the fridge. Jeremy was steadily becoming drunker and drunker, while she was still on her first beer. She never knew the reason of her extreme tolerance for anything alcoholic, all she knew was that hers was better than her boyfriend's. At around the last drink, he started to get closer to her and more grabby. Again, the same old cycle. As he got drunker, the more his hands roamed up and down her body. And again, she couldn't get the energy to stop him, even though everything about him disgusted her.

After all was done, and everything was finished, Jeremy passed out in a drunken haze, spent from the alcohol in combination with the sex, while Caroline laid under the sheets, her nude body pressed against his. She still could not sleep. After what should have been an exhausting day, after the drinking and what seemed like hours of sex, she should have passed out with him. But still, she lays awake with only her thoughts. She thinks about her parents, and how that even though she left a note on her bed for them to read, she knew that they wouldn't find it. They wouldn't look. They would be off in their own high, passed out from all the alcohol that they had drank. Their personal favorite was a cocktail of jack and beer; their favorite activity while they were in their beginning stage of being drunk, before they knocked themselves out into a drunken stupor, was beating the crap out of her, almost as much as they liked f*****g each other. She always made sure to not be in the apartment when they did end up trying to remove what brain cells they have left by killing their synapses. It was one of the reasons that she was actually with Jeremy, even though he was an a*****e and always put her down, calling her horrible names, and degrading every action she seems to make. The other was that he was over twenty one and always had booze in his fridge that he was more than willing to share with her, as long as she gave him his release.

However, she couldn't care less what her parents did to her or to each other. Even though they had been good parents to her growing up, always making sure she did her homework, always making sure she ate good, things changed the moment they moved to NYC for her mothers job. Her dad had to quit his, but couldn't manage to find another, so he took up drinking as a professional hobby. She also didn't care about Jeremy being an absolute douchbag to her anymore. She didn't see the point to anything anymore. She didn't want to go to school anymore, but went if only to abate her friends, to keep them from questioning her too much about her apathy, and about her home life. She payed attention in class if only to sate her teachers and to keep them from questioning her recent lack of participation. She couldn't figure out a specific reason to why she was so tired of feeling, no trigger that suddenly caused her to stop. She supposed that it was everything all at once, over such a long time that she finally shut down and stopped feeling. She knew that she should feel angry and sad that she had been driven to this point. That they could make her life into such a hell that she would feel the need to shut herself down into a shell of what she once was.

She knew that she used to be full of life, full of happiness that not even her failure of parents could ever take away from her. She was so at peace with herself and everyone around her that she didn't once think that she could have been suffering secretly inside, that she could even hide her pain so well that she hid it from herself. That is, until she finally snapped and broke. She could only bend so much, she supposed, until she breaks. But this didn't feel like breaking. This just felt like slipping away into a sleep so deep that she would never wake. She supposed that was what she wanted. To never wake up again. To just go to sleep and be in a dream forever and never have to face pain again, to never have to face her parents again. To never have to have unfulfilling sex with her a*s of a boyfriend ever again. To actually be treated as a human being and not a means to an end that she didn't want. For once, she wanted to be in control of her life instead of everyone else controlling it.

Caroline didn't realize that she had fallen asleep until she felt Jeremy shaking her awake and telling her to get a shower so that they could go get some food. She rolled out of bed and grabbed the pants and long sleeved shirt and underwear that she had grabbed out of her closet the night before and headed into the bathroom to take her shower. It barely lasted five minutes because of Jeremy's incessant pounding on the door.

“Come on, hurry up in there. I'm hungry.”

“I'm almost done, just give me five more minutes to get dressed,” she replied, rinsing the last of the suds from her body.

“Fine. Just hurry up,” Jeremy growled.

Caroline turned off the shower and stepped out of it. She dressed and used her toiletries to ready herself to go eat.

Exiting the bathroom, she grabbed her purse and put on her shoes and joined her impatient boyfriend at the door. They headed downstairs and out to the street where they walked the two blocks to the subway station to head to the restaurant they always went too: Ale's. Well, really it was a pub that sold food on the side, but it was the only place Jeremy could afford while drinking beer. When they got onto the subway they sat down, and she immediately noticed baseball cap guy from the night before. He was in the same position as he was before, staring blankly at his lap, never looking up even though he could probably feel her gaze upon him. She looked away from him and instead focused on looking at the poster in front of her. Some motivational poster about loving yourself with graffiti written across it saying “I will love myself when the world stops hating itself”. She stared at that writing for what felt like forever, and she knew what she had to do.

When the automated voice signaled that they were coming to their stop, she stood up with Jeremy to get off. When she got off, she let herself slow to a stop and let Jeremy stalk forward, leaving her behind without him realizing it. She faded back into the crowd and assured herself that he wouldn't come looking for her. She headed to the end of the station where the trains arrived from and waited. She didn't have to wait long. She heard the whooshing noise that sounded it was coming. She heard the wheels scratch on the tracks.

Right as it was about to pass, she stepped off the platform and into the path of the oncoming train.