Well, dang. We actually gosh darn did it.
Three nights before Greg's arrival, I left the boat for good. After a week of seemingly never-ending hell from Victoria and torturous misery aboard the boat, I packed my bags and escaped in the middle of the night to hold up at my safehouse in Manhattan, Chloe's apartment, where I spent the rest of the week gratefully on her sofa.
There I spent my days writing and laughing, getting drunk and watching Broad City til the wee hours on Chloe's palette bed and eating takeout sushi.
The night before Greg arrived, Chloe and I made our own t-shirts and laughed through the Polaroids of the party of the weekend before, then put on 'The Runaways' as I sat on a chair in the middle of her kitchen with bottle of vodka in hand and she cut all my hair off.
Snip snip snip, the hair I'd had long for my entire life fell away and passed through my fingers as nothing.
Snip snip snip, the hair I'd had long for my entire life fell away and passed through my fingers as nothing.
Later, the red lipstick was on and my cropped hair was bleached, and we danced until dawn, celebrating being free and alive and young and in the greatest city in the world, before watching the sunrise with some complete strangers from the 30th floor rooftop of an NYU faculty building we'd blagged our way into.
From there, still drunk and high on life, we took the subway to Port Authority to pick up the young British boy who'd escaped corporate hell as a rollercoaster operator in the hot, humid nothingness of rural Virginia.
I threw my arms around him in an excited welcome.
We were both runaways, now.
That afternoon, we lugged our stuff across town, and moved into our new apartment in Brooklyn.
And well... it couldn't really be more perfect, huh.
After years of struggle in a school I hated, months of exhaustion working to save the money to escape, weeks of suffering under the hand of that boat-owning tyrant...
Finally, the dream had become ours.
