There is a narrow, rocky path ahead of us and we bump down it. The inside of the car is wreathed in smoke and littered with cans and candy bar wrappers. The plastic hula-girl on the dash is bouncing around like she has just, big-time fallen off the wagon at Dancerholics Anonymous.

There is a gun in the trunk.

We take the rutted switchback off to our right and she manoeuvres the car gingerly in that direction and then left. She has a cigarette gripped in her yellow-white teeth. it obscenely thrusts upwards from between her lips. She looks over the steering wheel; staring intensely through her red heart shaped shades.

The road is more like an extremely narrow dirt path and I suspect that it wasn’t really intended for cars, well at least not this type of car anyway. Large fern leaves wave and brush the passenger window saying hello.

She, by the way, is Kathy and Kathy is my girlfriend/ psycho-mad-crush, and I love her.

Kathy is slim, athletic and ferocious; a lithe peroxide blonde with odd shaped teeth, chipped red fingernails, and a sharp, but pretty face. She has the iciest blue eyes I have ever seen which she frames in smeared black mascara. I swear she can see right through me and anyways, I know she can, because she said she can, and I believe it.

In the sunlight she looks like some kind of dirty ghost. Not that she is an unclean person, but there is this kind of raw vibe to her that makes her seem grittier, dirtier and more real than any of the other people I have ever met. It could be the way she curls her lips before she talks, like she is constantly auditioning for the role of “angry girl” in a film or something. Or, it could be the way that she says whatever she wants, whenever she wants. Kathy says that women who exist only for men are two dimensional and unrealistic.

She swears – louder this time – as a violent scraping noise indicates that she has over steered and is grinding the paint work off of the car against the rocks rising up on the left. I don’t know why she is so mad, this isn’t even our car.

I should probably say, two days ago we skipped town with all the food we could steal from our kitchens, fifty dollars and a rucksack full of clothes.

Kathy said she knew a guy we could borrow a car from, but by knew a guy she meant, a dumbass who’s parked his car near her house, and by borrow she meant hotwire. She told me later as we were eating dinner, that she knew if she’d told me, I would pussy out or something; that was why she had decided that it was for the best to just to do it, and to hell with the consequences.

Kathy said I should lighten the fuck up and then she slapped me playfully round the face. I laughed and then she came in all close, smelling of alcohol, cigarettes and life. She kissed me and bit my lip, and then she just looked over her glasses at me in a way that makes me feel sick and dizzy and real all at the same time.

Anyways, I guess she was right, because even now I feel horrible about it. I also feel bad about stealing food and leaving home without so much as a note to my folks. Actually, I feel bad for everything that has happened since I met Kathy last week. But I guess I feel worst of all for enjoying every second of it.

Right now I feel sick; car sick, heart sick, life sick, because she hasn’t spoken to me today, because apparently I was being a pussy again.

This morning, we were sat in the back of the car, (an estate with wood panelling, because according to her it’s less conspicuous and apparently, cops don’t pull these types of cars over.) She was sprawled out opposite me, completely naked. She had her long, pale legs stretched across my lap and I was painting her toenails all the different colours we had stolen from a gas station. I was trying so hard not to stare at her awesome body. She told me she hates it when guys objectify her by doing that.

So anyways, she was there and she was naked and she asked me why I looked so moody and I tried to make out that I wasn’t being moody. But she saw right through that and said “fine, if you don’t want to talk about your problems, why don’t you just get a shitty job working in an office in some bullshit nowhere town and let your soul shrivel up until you are just another empty husk of a person who wants to die.”

Kathy said that she likes to go nuclear when we argue because she said it saves time with the inevitable escalation.

Anyways, so I told her that, okay, she was right and that I felt bad about running off without telling my folks and for stealing a car and pretty much everything we can get our hands on. And that yes, I felt bad for the woman that she had punched the week before for seemingly no reason at all.

Kathy got mad at that, because apparently I had been saving all my shit up just waiting for the opportunity to throw it back in her face. She said that I clearly hadn’t seen the shitty looks the woman was giving me, so I was obviously unqualified to comment on A) why she hit her, B) why she had taken off her shoes and ran down the street after her, and finally C) why she had returned, out of breath, sweaty, and clutching the woman’s handbag.

That was when she said that I was too much of a pussy for her liking and she got dressed; angrily muttering under her breath about how much sex we were about to have and how I had ruined that.

But I know that she will forgive me.

So anyways, here we are; taking a switchback down to single lane dirt track lined with pine trees that stretch out forever and ever, and we have a gun in the trunk.