The girl unrelentingly craved escape. Her thoughts were always somewhere else, at someplace else she would rather be. She wanted to be far from the fields and flats she had seen all her life. Far from the small, once-white farmhouse, that now looked more a stain of yellow; with siding that sagged and splintered from years of neglect.

It took two long and dusty miles of gravel before you reached it. Situated between rotations of corn and cotton, there weren’t neighbors in either direction for miles. The girl had no friends to spend her time with here. She had the outdoor cats that would mew at her feet in hopes of a scrap or two. She used to have a dog named Champ, that she would throw sticks to and he would bring him back. Until one day he didn’t show back up. He probably got tired of being here too, she thought. 

The main company she kept now was the kind she tried to mostly avoid. A despondent mother, that was too exhausted from work and despair to notice her daughter needing more. And an angry Tom, too full of meanness and bitter to be bothered with noticing the girl at all.  

The only change the girl saw in the monotony of her life was by the season. And how she tired of them all. The dust that blew in the dry season. The muddy mess that came with the wet. The strange smells from chemical sprays during growing season. And the lonely feelings that came with the barren landscapes of winter.

The girl was 11 now, and craved the finer things of life. She dreamed of big cities, and music, and dancing, and parties, and fashions. She wished for things that were only fantasies of her mind. But her imagination was a form of escape. When she was younger she would act out these fantasies with her dolls, spending hours in another world that she created. Where everything was perfect, just as she imagined. But she was too mature for the dolls she used to play with.

Now she had an app for that.

Escape had been her ambition for many years now. And her virtual world offered her every fantasy, able to be customized and suited to her own design. She could act out the life she wished for herself, and even if it was just on a screen, it felt better than what was right in front of her face. She could create a world where she could look any way she wanted and dress in the latest fashions. Her real closet held Wal-Mart and Goodwill; but on her screen she had a virtual closet full of beautiful dresses and shoes of every color, by every designer.  She had built her fantastic walk-in closet just as she had built her fantastic virtual home… with every comfort and frill imaginable. She could build a home where she had more than a pull out couch for a bed. Where there wasn’t one bathroom always being used by someone else when you needed it. Her limits were few in her virtual world, and very unlike the real world she continually escaped from.

The girl’s favorite place to get away was outside the cramped confines of the house. It felt crowded on a good day. But that day, Mom and Tom were fighting again. And on those days the house felt like it could suffocate you. Tom was mom’s boyfriend who she had “fallen in love with” two cotton seasons ago, and who had been living with them practically as long. The girl didn’t like the way Tom talked to her. She didn’t like how he stalked around the house, always seeming on the edge of angry. He was someone that was best to be avoided, and the girl learned early on her absence wasn’t missed. Tom didn’t want to be her dad. Even her dad didn’t want to be her dad.

When she was littler, two of three cotton crops ago, she would have her dolls play family. The mom was home and made dinners every night for the kids. And the dad would come home from work and be so happy to see everyone. And they would play games together, and go on vacations, and tell each other goodnight and I love you.

But the girl was too old for such thoughts now. The thoughts drifted through her, like sand through a hole, and she let the pieces scatter and blow...to become seeds of things she couldn’t yet comprehend. To grow into ideas of life and love that would shape her forever. But the girl couldn’t know this. All she knew was she had to find a way out of the house, as the voices went from tense-low tones, to louder and angrier volumes.

She learned the smaller she made herself, the easier it was to disappear unnoticed. The girl learned how to be quiet. To keep her head down. To wait until the right moment to go out the backdoor, and out to the tree row at the edge of the house property. And it was there the girl would spend every opportunity chatting with her “friends”, and interacting with their avatars in the worlds they created. In the real world she had no friends she saw outside of school. No one wanted to come see her out in the middle of nowhere. And nobody invited her to come see them out there in somewhere. But here, she had 264 friends. And they were good friends that would say her avatar looked beautiful today, and go for walks in the cyber park together, and meet up to go shopping at the virtual stores. And show up for the party the girl sent invitations for. 

The girl had taken a particularly large amount of time to create something special for them to virtually gather at. She built the perfect house, to host a perfect party that she had designed down to the band and snack table. The girl had tried to make everything perfect. Because if it could be perfect, why not make it so?

She was especially excited because the avatar with the username TuffBoy13 was going to be there. They had been private chatting for a couple of months, and even though she had never met him before, she had never felt more understood by someone. He liked the way she built her worlds. He said they were beautiful and showed she had a lot of class. He used to have a dog too... but he had been run over earlier that year. He had talked to her about how sad that made him. He had opened up and told her so many things. He had troubles at home too, and a stepdad who liked to hit him when he drank too much. TuffBoy13, who said his real name was Nick, had spent many hours talking with the girl about different types of escape. What started out with making virtual getaways to new worlds and landscapes, ended in talks about meeting each other in person, for real.

And for the first time in a long time, the girl wanted what was real far more than the fantasies she had crafted on a screen. 

She had decided that today at the party she would tell TuffBoy13 that they should meet up. That he could meet her after school. He didn’t go to her school, but he said he had an older friend with a car that could come by to get her. All she had to do was walk around the corner instead of getting on the bus, and he would be there waiting.

It was all so romantic.

As the girl heard something break from the house, and more yelling, she longed with anticipation for something that was better than this aching she didn’t have a word for. The loneliness that was eating a hole through her that needed filled with something. And TuffBoy13 was the first kindness she had felt in a long time, even if it was just through texts on a screen. Perhaps he would be the escape she had been looking for.

As she wrapped her avatar in it’s best dress and fixed the hair and accessories to match, she wondered what it would be like to meet him in reality. And as she put finishing touches on her virtual self and party, she fantasized about this reality, until she had made it just as fantastic and perfect as the world on her screen.