But I Love Him Read Online Free PDF

pain, keeling over, gripping his shin. Shadows dance under the streetlight as they spar.
    I crawl to the stop sign beside me and use it to drag myself off the street.
    And then I run. I turn away from them both, away from the sounds. My feet pound on the concrete. There is no air in my lungs to run like this, but my legs don’t want to stop. My years of cross country and track have developed muscles that yearn to race like they once did, so I don’t stop. Connor’s jacket flies out behind me like a cape, the zipper rattling in the wind.
    I don’t go back to our apartment. I run straight past it and keep going, away from town, toward the country roads. I run past the elementary school and its swing sets and slides. I run alongside ditches filled with trash and cattails.
    I run until I collapse in front of my mom’s house.
    But I haven’t outrun anything. It will catch me. There is no escaping who I am now.
    I sit on the front lawn, my legs crossed, staring at the dark house. My mom’s bedroom window faces this lawn, but I know she’s not awake. It’s well past midnight, now. I must have run for over an hour.
    I wonder what she would think if she knew I was here. If she could see how broken I am inside. If she could see the faded bruises on my shoulders where he grabbed me last. If she knew the haunted world I live in, she would lock me away and never let me see him again, even if that meant I hated her forever.
    That house is not home anymore, but I ache for it anyway. I want to open the door and ascend the stairs and fall into a bed where nothing can get me, where I will sleep for hours and not dream. My chest throbs with the desire to do it—to cross the lawn and pick up the hidden key and slip inside the door and lock it behind me, and never answer it again.
    I want to wake up and eat pancakes and talk about going to the mall and my next cross-country meet. I want my mom to tell me the last crazy thing Grandma said, and I want to laugh at it.
    I want to sit in her kitchen and bathe in the light. I want to help her plant flowers in the spring and bulbs in the fall. I want to watch one of her horrible black and white movies and whine the whole time about how boring it is until she hands me the remote and I make her watch America’s Next Top Model instead.
    I want my dad to come back and make everything okay again, like he did when I was little. He’d swoop in and fix my Barbies and my flat bicycle tires. He could fix anything.
    I wonder if he could fix this.
    The shadows of the trees dance in a breeze. I try to remember who I was the last time I was in that house, but I can’t. I can remember the things, but I can’t remember me. I don’t know the old me anymore. She was smiley and bubbly and outgoing. She had everything; the world was at her feet.
    I wish I could have it both ways. I wish I could be there for him and help him and be the one he needs me to be, and still be that other person, too. But I can’t, and I can’t live without him, either.
    And he would drown in himself if I left him.
    I know he’s waiting. I know that his face is probably swollen, and that he will need me. I know I will have to call in sick for him tomorrow and help him ice his new black eye, and we will have to come up with a way of explaining it.
    I don’t know when it stopped being what it was, when it became something else. When it became this. It wasn’t this way in the beginning. It was beautiful and passionate and filled with things I’ve never felt before. Things I want back so desperately I can taste it.
    I don’t want this anymore; I don’t want this horrible whirlpool of constant emotion, churning and bubbling at every turn. And yet I feel as if I don’t know any other life—like the other seventeen years never existed. I feel like I was born into this.
    I get up and walk away from the house. It is too big for me; it stands over me, leaving me in the shadows, and I can’t sit here anymore.
    I turn toward the