eeyore
tracy hangs out up against the fence some days, blond hair dangling down in strings toward her tattoos, dirty hoodie sticking through the chain-link holes in little bunches, her weight curving the wire till it looks like it might stay that way. Tuesdays and Fridays, after pre-algebra and lab science, she’s always there: the days my backpack is the heaviest and it takes me forever to get through the parking lot and by the time I finally get to the buses I’m practically panting from trying to rush through fast enough to not get stopped by Jenny Kirchner and Julia Birmingham who corner me between the cars, throw my stuff on the pavement and call me whore. I know what Tracy’s name is; I heard some seniors say it once and after that I said it over in my head so I’d remember.
Two years ago Lynnbrook Middle closed down. Sixth grade went back to elementary and they stuck seventh and eighth in with Canyon High. I cried when they sent the letter home that said my sixth-grade class was staying back. I tried not to show it but one of the tears fell down on the paper and made it rattle with this thick kind of splat so then my stepmom Linda wanted to discuss my feelings for like an hour and a half. I kept my mouth shut till she was done discussing. At the end of it she put her hand on my wrist like she was satisfied we’d had some deep communion and then I went downstairs and tried to figure out how I could get a lock and put it on my door without her noticing.
Without a car or knowing anyone who had one, I couldn’t really do it. Brian turned fifteen and got his learner’s right when I started sixth grade but I wasn’t about to ask him. I wasn’t about to even talk to him, not after he started coming in at night, creaking on the stupid beige carpet from his room next door, breathing his nasty breath on me. Sometimes I’d watch him across the table when we all sat down for dinner Linda brought home from Whole Foods, though. He’d glance up quick and look away but I kept my eyes on him and after a while he’d start to sweat into his pesto-feta pasta. Sometimes his cheeks turned red to match his zits, and for a minute I could make him feel things instead of the other way around. Dad and Linda never noticed but I’m still waiting for the day when they ask Brian what the matter is. I’m curious to see what he’d come up with.
The whole year of sixth grade they never asked. When Dad and Linda weren’t there Brian was never nervous and he made my insides twist around like butterflies in my stomach, except their wings beat so hard I was always about to throw up.
Most of the time I just closed my eyes and kept it down by imagining things. I tried to think of places to go inside my head. I didn’t believe in other lands anymore: I got sick of the unicorn stuff by the time fourth grade ended, and by sixth I was done with making Barbie living rooms, even ones with graffiti on the walls and the Barbies all in cut-up clothes and bald. So basically by then what was left to picture in my mind was seventh grade and Canyon High.
After a few months of imagining, it started seeming cooler: in my mind the lockers loomed up tall like trees making a corridor that led to an entrance to something I could never see and was always inching closer to. Once I walked through that invisible entrance I’d have a new name and face and nobody could touch me then. Maybe there’d even be kids who’d give me cigarettes behind the auditorium.
Two weeks into seventh grade, I realize that’s a bunch of bullshit. There are kids who smoke on the hill behind the auditorium, but they’re all a foot taller than me and never look when I walk by. I thought the whole point of being a misfit was you’re always looking for the other people like you. Loneliness is like a vacuum: it’s supposed to suck the other lonely people in like dust till finally it fills up and you’re not lonely anymore. I try walking across the hill super slow to give them lots of chances, let them notice that I’m like them, but they never do.
The only difference between here and Lynnbrook, besides the SUVs always almost hitting you in the parking lot, is I’m that much nearer to my fucking stepbrother.
Oh, plus lockers. The whole first two weeks I never used mine because I was afraid I wouldn’t know how. But after I give up on the hill behind the auditorium I start wanting someplace to go between classes so I’m not always the first one alone in the room with the teacher, and it takes a couple days to get my guts up before I finally try. I spend like five minutes trying to unlock it. I can’t remember if you’re supposed to go left first or right and how many times you’re supposed to pass the first number on the way to the second. I try like thirty times till there’s actual sweat on my forehead and it feels like everyone’s staring and by the time I finally get it open the bell rings so I can’t even remember which way I turned the lock. The hallway between me and English class gets emptier and it doesn’t lead to anywhere besides another classroom with yellow walls and buzzing lights and posters tacked up beside the blackboard and the flag.
That night Linda starts asking how Canyon is and after that she won’t stop. She wants to know my teachers’ names and if I’m making friends and do I enjoy the “curriculum.” Plus she starts dropping these weird phrases in, like New Experiences, or Special Feelings, which I know mean, Are there boys I like. One time I almost tell her she should ask her stupid son about his Special Feelings and try leaving me alone, but before I can say it a sick feeling comes from my stomach up into my throat and I have to bite my tongue to keep it down. A little piece of tongue comes off between my back teeth. It tastes like blood and when I go downstairs to brush my teeth it stings like crazy.
A month after school gets going Tracy starts showing up outside the fence. I know right away she doesn’t go to Canyon: her clothes are way too dirty, she has these weird tattoos that look like stick drawings a little kid would make, and hardly anyone ever talks to her. If she went to school here Jenny Kirchner and Julia Birmingham would be on her all the time, not to mention their jocko boyfriends and probably even kids lower down the totem pole than that. Tracy’s weirder than even the geeks and the retarded kids, with patched-together clothes that are all either black or this kind of brown that looks like it used to be white about eight years ago, her tank top worn so thin you can see her ribs through it. Her hair hangs all stringy in her eyes, and not like she put Molding Mud in to look like Jennifer Aniston at the Oscars when I was eight but like she never washes it, and bleached so yellow that it’s almost green. If she went to Canyon she’d be getting her ass kicked every day, backpack torn off her shoulders and thrown into her face and fuck it if the books are so heavy they bruise her. But she’s just alone. A couple times goth kids with black mesh shirts and wallet chains hanging from their weird huge pants go up to her, and one time this junior guy who Brian knows from soccer starts talking to her and then stops when a bunch of seniors walk by. Besides that she just leans back against the chain-link, her back to the blacktop, and watches everyone. When teachers come out to their cars she stands up straight and goes near other kids, trying to look like she’s part of their after-school clumps; once the grown-ups are gone she just glares at the kids and goes back to the fence.
Dad and Linda are proud of our house. It’s up in Beachwood Canyon, tucked behind Hollywood, and the streets snap around the sides of the hills and everything is green. When we first moved in five years ago my dad taught me the names of almost all the flowers in the neighborhood, jasmine and agave and bougainvillea; we would hike up the hills, me on my little legs, and I’d point them out, repeat back what he taught me. When we got to the top the city spread out below us big as a whole country, lavender smog cloaking the whole thing like a blanket you could see through.
I was seven then and it was me and Dad plus Linda; Brian still lived in San Diego with his real dad and I’d only ever met him at the wedding. He moved in two years later, though, when something happened to him down in San Diego that Dad and Linda only talked about in halves of sentences or else in the other room behind a door. Once on my way to the kitchen I heard Linda say it was her fault for leaving him in that environment. Someone did something bad to him, I think. I wanted to know what. But you could tell they didn’t want me to know.
My dad got a full-time job then, at Paramount in the accounts department, because there’d be four of us now; he didn’t have time to take me to the top of the hill to look down at the canyon anymore. Linda still was hardly ever home from work but when she was she always tried to talk to me about my feelings. Brian came in with a big navy canvas bag and took the room next to mine in the basement. After he moved in I remember more about my ceiling than I do about the aloe plants and birds of paradise in the yard beside our street.
Week five of school is when “Tits” starts. I don’t know why they had to pick me: a couple other girls in my grade have boobs too, plus they wear Ashlee-Paris-Lindsay shit that shows them off, and I’m in my hoodie every day, men’s XL from Foot Locker. When they first started coming in for real, in like May last year, I was only eleven. It was weird enough even having them but then they also sort of pointed outward like the opposite of cross-eyed, and the left was freakishly bigger than the right one: I measured. Immediately all T-shirts went in the trash except my Blue Valley Camp ones. “Eleanor,” my dad said which he only calls me when he thinks he knows more about something than I do, “you can’t just throw out all your clothes. It’s wasteful.” Whenever I don’t agree with him about something he always makes me describe what he calls my Reasoning. He started doing it at the end of sixth grade, all official like it was some kind of special grown-up thing but I wasn’t about to tell him my “reasoning” for throwing out my T-shirts so I just said “Fuck you,” but too soft for him to hear. Linda came in from the hallway and stood in the door and gave my dad this smirk I wasn’t supposed to see, like she knew the magic answer and it was a secret, and then my dad turned red and Linda took me on a special trip to the mall the next day. She wanted to take me to Nordstrom and talk about outfits. Instead we went to Foot Locker and I bought four hoodies, size XL, red, navy, black, and gray, and then we had Sbarro, and then we went home.
And yet. Matt Ditkus and Marco Rollo start it in second-period English the first Tuesday in October with some shit they drew on graph paper: this girl with hair down to her chin like mine and a double-pierced ear which I also have, except her body is all bikini-looking like a Maxim cover and she’s about to fall over from her boobs being so big. But it says “Elly” on the bottom so I know it’s supposed to be me. Matt Ditkus throws a wad of paper at my back halfway through the period and when I turn around he holds the drawing up. Which of course everybody sees.
After that you can hear like five of them back there the rest of the period cracking up and when the bell rings my new nickname is Tits.
Brian heard my nickname in the halls, I guess, because he tries calling me it at home the next night. I wish I had a pencil I could stab him in the eye with so it’d spurt blood and make him blind forever, but instead I just keep watching Total Request Live. He laughs and then calls me it again before he goes downstairs. I can’t go down there after that so I try to stay upstairs on the couch till I fall asleep and it works for a while, through back-to-back TRLs and Road Rules and some thing with Seann William Scott. My eyes are starting to droop half the time and I know if I can get through one more hour of videos I’ll be home free, upstairs for the night in the living room with no doors for Brian to close behind us.
But then of course Linda comes home, thinking she can just breeze in after working till practically midnight and start rearranging everybody. My dad went to bed like four hours ago for a morning meeting; even if I never get to see him, he at least lets me sleep where I want. But Linda wiggles my shoulder saying “Baby, wake up, you won’t get a good night’s sleep on the couch,” and I want to tell her I was getting a perfectly good night’s sleep before she fucking woke me up, but instead I just sort of mumble and try to sound as asleep as I possibly can, hoping she’ll give up.
There is nothing more annoying than the exact sound of Linda’s voice when she is saying my name to try and wake me up. And of course she keeps doing it so eventually it becomes so incredibly irritating that I am forced to open my eyes. “Yeah?” I say, making my voice all bleary.
“Come on, sweetie, time to go downstairs,” she says, and there is no way to explain that the idea of going downstairs makes me feel the kind of panicked dirty that happens when you go without a shower for so many days that the grease on your face starts making you itch so I just say “Okay,” and take the steps as slowly as I can.
The Ashlee girls love Matt and Marco and their JV friends; they all hang around the double doors at lunch looking like some Abercrombie ad and start giggling like little screechy birds when the guys come out from the cafeteria. The week after Matt Ditkus dubs me Tits I’m sitting on the sidewalk across from the double doors eating Tater Tots when Marco sneaks up to the cluster of girls from behind. He puts one arm around Jenny Kirchner’s neck and feels her up with the other hand. She makes this weird noise, sort of halfway between a scream and a laugh except both. The other girls keep bird-giggling, but louder like a swarm. Jenny’s smiling when she throws her head backward onto Marco’s shoulder, except she doesn’t really look like she’s breathing. Her stomach is sucked in so much you can see the lines of the muscles like a magazine girl, and her hair falls off her thrown-back neck like she’s waiting for Dracula. She is perfect: every part of her fits together just the way it is supposed to and even though my chest feels weirdly tight I just want to watch her forever. I wish I could be invisible and frozen, just so I could stay here looking. Then Matt Ditkus turns around and sees me. “Tits!” he yells and my stomach fills up with spastic butterflies and my face gets so hot it starts sweating and I know it’s red. I hate him. There’s nothing to say though and I’m done with my Tater Tots so I just look down at the asphalt like it’s the ceiling and memorize it till he turns his back on me again.
The next time I see Jenny Kirchner after that, in B hall before lab science, she makes this gross-out face, then leans in to the other Ashlees and starts whispering at exactly the amount of loudness that I can tell it’s about me but exactly the amount of quietness that I can’t hear what it is. For I don’t know what reason the feeling I get makes me think of Brian and the spastic butterflies start again. It’s retarded that I’m embarrassed by the Ashlees whispering when I don’t even know what they’re saying; usually I just hate them, but somehow Matt Ditkus seeing me see Jenny made the whole thing different, not to mention that he and Marco have now taken to calling me Lesbo in addition to Tits. When the bell rings Jenny goes “So we’ll see you after seventh period, right? Bye!!” like she’s inviting me to the mall with them but I know that isn’t what she’s doing.
If they were just going to throw my stuff on the ground again I don’t know why she’d make such a thing about it. They’ve got some kind of other idea I’m sure and all through lab science I watch the clock, willing the seconds to stretch out like rubber bands, each one pulled out three times its length and so, so skinny. Eventually they hit their limit and the bell rings, making my face sting like a thousand rubber bands snapped back all at once, and I almost cry.
In the parking lot, Jenny Kirchner has a plan. She and Julia and the Ashlees are standing halfway to the buses in a cluster; they’re watching the doors when I come out, and I can tell they’ve been waiting. I stalled in the girls’ bathroom for fifteen minutes after last bell, hoping I would miss them. Everyone else is loaded on the bus, doors closed, but they’re still here. The weird thing is no backpacks. They’ve got their hands free and I wonder where their stuff went till I see the JV guys off to the side, laughing in their baggy shirts and shoving each other, the girls’ matching backpacks piled at their feet. It’s the guys’ job to stand near them because the girls all have another job; I know it even though I don’t know what it is.
There’s no other option but to walk right toward them. If I walked back into the building it would mark me for life. It’s one of those face-off things, like West Side Story or some cowboy movie. You can’t turn around; they’d just shoot you in the back anyway. So I keep going, even though the sweat from my armpits is cutting cold trails all the way down to the waist of my jeans and my ears are burning up. I figure I’ll just watch the asphalt till they’re done calling me whatever names and then they’ll let me go.
When I’m ten feet away, Julia Birmingham starts walking toward me. She looks like Brian when he’s playing soccer, eyes fixed on me like I’m the ball and the team’ll lose if she doesn’t kick me hard enough. Behind her is this curly red-haired girl whose name I don’t know; she’s stocky like me but stronger and I wonder why she’s there with Julia like some bodyguard. Then Julia makes a run and before I can even look up she’s got the bottom of my hoodie in her fists and she’s pulling up, so hard I have to lift my arms or it feels like they’d break, and then some other girl’s unbuckling my belt and I almost need to pee. I wiggle around like a goldfish spilled from a Baggie but it’s just as pointless as the fish because then they’re all on top of me, ripping at my clothes from ten directions and I try to keep my eyes on the asphalt but there’s just no way because their hands are in my face every five seconds. I think they’re all about to hit me but they don’t, they just keep tearing at my clothes till all that’s left on top is my ugly fucking grandma bra, and that’s half gone too; my jeans are down around my ankles and the rest of my clothes torn up. I can see out the corner of my eye that Jenny Kirchner is just standing there with her arms crossed, untouched and smiling, like she’s the fucking queen of everything and didn’t even break a nail. I feel a hundred pairs of eyes on me as I hear the buses shift into gear to leave.
I try to bend over, grab my waist and curl around it, not caring that they might jump on me again; but Julia and the redhead grab my wrists and stand me up, hold my arms behind my back so hard it feels like my shoulder blades overlap, and they turn me toward Mike and Marco and the guys. The guys are laughing, hitting each other and staring at me; I can’t even tell what they’re yelling. About a thousand different things. The snot is salty in my mouth, my neck and chin sticky with tears. I feel like a dog pinned to the ground by a pack of bigger ones, my stomach fat and naked, like all they’d have to do is dig in and I’d be dead.
But then the fingernails pull out of my skin and the knuckles loosen around my wrists and the laughing gets quieter, like a car stereo driving away, and I crumple down to the ground and no one stops me. When I open my eyes the girls are all clustered up by the guys, picking up their backpacks, backs to me. I wait to look at them till I can tell from the corners of my eyes that they’re headed somewhere else, and I wait to pull my clothes on till they’re closer to the somewhere else than they are to me.
The lot’s almost empty, except a couple seniors smoking by their cars and the after-school monitor, whistle around her neck like a gym teacher, so far on the other side of the lot that she’s just a little pinprick dot. Linda always says to call her if I miss the bus, but I’m sure she’s In a Meeting and if she’s not her first question will be what I did to be so late and I am not ever ever telling her why I missed the bus today, not ever. I’m thinking about walking, even though I’m about to puke and my eyes are so bloodshot the veins in them actually hurt, when I feel someone standing there again. I pull my breath in and hold it, ready for Julia or Jenny or the redhead, but then nothing happens so I look up. It’s Tracy.
“Come on,” she says. “I’m not supposed to be on school property.” I don’t know what she’s talking about but somehow I know if I do what she says it’ll be better.
I wipe the snot off from above my mouth and then go for my eyes. I don’t know what Tracy saw and what she didn’t so if there’s any way I can look like less of a pathetic dork I’m gonna try. But then she says “Come on” again like she thinks it’s way more lame that I’m wiping my face off than she does that I was crying. I leave the rest of the wet on my face. When I stand up I get a head rush and my stomach flops over inside and everything goes spotty and black. Before I even realize I’m about to fall down I think: shit I can’t fall on my ass in front of Tracy, and get this panicky feeling like right before Julia started running toward me. But Tracy just grabs my arm and even though I practically weigh twice as much as her she holds me up, even when I get dizzy again and lean all the way into her hand.
Then the head rush goes away and I stand up straight but Tracy’s still holding on to my arm. Her fingers feel like they’re made only out of bones with no skin or anything around them but somehow they’re strong. She pulls on me and starts walking and I follow.
Once we’re off the parking lot and across the street she turns to me. She’s four or five years older, Brian’s age, but also there’s this other thing I don’t know what it is that makes her look really old, like forty, which I’ve never seen before. Up close I can see her zits and the circles under her eyes which are really more like shadows and her eyes are the color of ice. Then she says “Are you okay?” to me and the look she has is the look that Linda’s always trying to fake when she asks me how school was but I can tell Tracy actually wants to know the answer.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say but I can’t look at her and talk at the same time. I try to wipe some more snot off so she won’t see. By now what’s left is crusty.
“Those kids are fuckin’ assholes,” she says to me.
“Yeah, whatever, I know.” Still trying to get the crust off.
“No, those kids are fucking assholes. They’re shit.” She says it like it’s really important that I understand; it kind of scares me. I look up at her. “Those kids are little shits, they don’t fucking know about anything and they’ll do that to people the rest of their lives because they’re fucking weak. You can’t let them make you fucking cry.”
She has this look in her eyes like a really sharp knife and all I can say is “Okay.” It comes out really quiet.
“What?” she says, all pissed.
I can’t tell if I said the wrong thing or I just said it too soft but I have to answer so I say “Okay” again, louder. I look at her eyes after. For practically thirty seconds she just watches me and I know I’m not supposed to look away so I don’t.
Finally she goes “All right” and stops seeming mad. “They’re assholes, okay?”
“Okay,” I say again, but I breathe first and look at her when I say it this time, and she looks at me back. She’s beautiful. I can’t really explain it since she has a face full of zits and her teeth are yellow like her hair and she looks like she hasn’t slept or showered in a week or eaten in a month. It’s not anything about the pieces of her fitting together right like Jenny Kirchner or matching up with anything I’ve seen before. It’s more about how Tracy’s got all this metal in her eyes like she knows five million things I’ve never even heard of, but then she looks at me like I know all those things too.
I still can’t look at her, though, because I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. I can’t get home unless I call Linda or walk, which’ll take at least an hour. And the idea of showing up two hours late, all bloodshot with my clothes ripped up, and getting the third degree is worse than what already happened. Not to even mention Brian. Who probably saw the whole thing. And when I realize that I actually almost throw up.
“Wanna go get a taco?” Tracy asks me.
I follow her all the way under the 101 and down to Sunset.
The place on Sunset has some guy she doesn’t want to see, she says when we’re close enough to know, so she tells me keep going down to Benito’s on Santa Monica. When she says that I get a kind of flutter in my throat: Linda and I pass Benito’s sometimes on the way to the highway and there are always transvestites there, and I’m pretty sure they’re hookers. They’re tall and loud with big lips and leopard print and faces that look more like billboards than like either a man or a woman. On the way to Route 10 I always watch them out the window without letting Linda see my eyes.
I’m kind of nervous to be near them and I wonder if Tracy knows that they hang out there. She doesn’t look nervous so I think she must not know. When we get close up their makeup is so thick you can’t see skin underneath but you can tell that it’s bumpy. They have long fake eyelashes and little red purses and their lip liner is perfect. One of them has a Spanish accent; I try to eavesdrop but Tracy interrupts. “Do you have five dollars? I’m out,” she says, and I’ve got some allowance left over so I buy her two chicken tacos and a large horchata. My stomach doesn’t feel great but I get a taco anyway: I know I always feel dumb when I’m the only one eating and I don’t want to make her feel bad.
We sit on the stools while we’re waiting for the food; Tracy spins hers around and I watch the big slabs of meat sizzle on the grill. I’ve never gotten food someplace with anyone besides my dad or Linda. Jenny and Julia and the JV guys all go to In-N-Out Burger when they get a ride from someone’s older brother, or the food court at Hollywood and Highland, but I never have. It’s a whole different thing, being able to get whatever you want and having someone to eat it with too. I could have a large Coke for dinner or just some chips, and nobody’s going to tell me to watch my nutrition.
I feel like a grown-up next to Tracy waiting for our food. Or not like a grown-up really, but something different from a kid. I feel like if someone saw me they would think that I looked cool. I’ve only ever thought that about other people. But now I think that I could lean against the counter and look just like a picture. I try it: lift my chin up, sort of squint my eyes. Tracy spins a half-circle toward me. “What are you doing?” she says. “You look fuckin’ weird.”
My face gets hot and I know it’s red which makes it hotter. “Who’re you making that face for, anyway?” she asks me. I don’t want to tell her the answer, which is her.
Just then our food comes up and I’m totally relieved: I can change my face without looking like I’m doing it on purpose. Tracy tears up the tinfoil around her tacos; the way she eats them reminds me of a dog who just got people food. “What’s your name?” she asks when she’s done swallowing.
It’s weird she doesn’t know since I know hers, but I guess why would she. I tell her and she scrunches up her nose. “That’s not your name,” she says and I wonder if she heard people call me Tits and that’s what she means. I can’t ask her though so I just sit there and chew. “Who gave you that name? Your parents?” and I nod through the taco. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s why you need a new one.”
I never thought you could just change your name. Just decide it was something else and make it that. Names were something that you came with; they got decided somewhere way before you and then were part of you just like your skin or face. But Tracy goes “So what’ll it be?” and looks at me and I know I have to pick and once I do she’ll call me it and even if she’s the only one I won’t be exactly Elly anymore. I think: Amy Stacy Sarah Laura Beth but all of them are weird and sound like dolls. “Does it have to be a girl’s name?” I ask.
“Fuck no,” Tracy snorts. “Who told you that? Pick a word or something,” but then there are so many words, and I can’t think of any except Taco or Pepsi, which are both retarded. She breathes out like I’m stupid. “Fine,” she goes finally. “What’s your favorite cartoon?” and my life fucking sucks because the true answer is Winnie the Pooh. And if she makes my name Pooh I’d honestly rather be Tits. But I have this feeling with Tracy that if I hide anything she’ll see right through to where it is, so I tell her.
She spins her stool around again and thinks and when she comes back around to face me she says “Eeyore,” and then stands up, and that’s my name. The Spanish one of the transvestite hookers watches Tracy pick my backpack up and sling it on her back. I can tell she’s still watching when Tracy grabs my arm and pulls me down the sidewalk; I want to look back but I don’t.
By now the sun is setting and the sky is orange and I’m starting to get kind of scared. You can see the hills from where we are, and the lights in the windows all gold-colored like polka dots in the dark green of the trees. I think about Whole Foods, prepackaged pesto pasta and the dinner table, and wonder if my dad has made a phone call to school or if he’s even home. Linda must be freaking out. That part makes me happy.
Tracy asked if I had enough to buy us donuts in the morning but she hasn’t invited me to spend the night, which is weird. We keep going toward West Hollywood so I think that must be where she lives but she hasn’t mentioned it and I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask and what I’m not. Also I would think she’d have her license since she looks at least as old as Brian but we just keep walking everywhere and my feet are starting to get blisters on the bottoms.
Finally when the sky starts to turn from pink to blue I ask her where we’re going. It comes out sort of mousey-sounding and right away I wish I hadn’t asked but it’s too late, she’s already answering. “This guy I know over by Fairfax. Probably we can crash there, plus Whole Foods throws the bread out when they close at nine.”
“Aren’t we going home?” I ask her. She looks at me like I just talked to her in Japanese.
“Home?” she goes. “What do you mean ‘home’?” She pronounces the word like Linda says “curriculum,” like it’s separate from all other words and special.
“Aren’t we going to your house?” I say and right away I can tell it’s the wrong question. She looks at me like she looked at Jenny and the JV guys and the sidewalk sort of moves under my feet.
“You want to hang out with me or not?” she asks and of course I tell her yes, which is the absolute truth, her yellow hair is beautiful and the way she scares me is brand new and so much better than how Brian does or the idea of going home so late, having to see his face after he probably saw me naked in the parking lot. “Okay, then,” she says. “We can probably crash with this guy. Otherwise it’s warm behind Whole Foods and they almost never bust you.”
The bottom of my stomach feels like at the top of the first hill of the roller coaster just before you tip and go down: wanting to get out but knowing there’s no way so it just fills you up till you can feel all your veins and your blood and your insides lift up like something is about to happen and you just hope the bar over your lap holds. Tracy is talking about sleeping outside. I would never be allowed to do this, no way not ever. Sometimes Brian stays out past midnight but they always know where he is, and this isn’t one in the morning it’s all night; it’s not some soccer team kegger, it’s outdoors. I never even heard of sleeping outdoors besides camp. And this is not camp, it’s Hollywood. Somewhere underneath the feeling in all of my skin and stomach and veins I can tell that for about one more minute I could decide to go home, and I’d probably get yelled at but I’d be inside my house where it’s warm. But then I think about Brian maybe seeing me in the parking lot trying to cover up, him hearing everybody laugh, and somehow that makes him coming in at night not just a secret, now they all can see it, all those people sitting on the bus and watching me, their eyes are all so big and I am little like an ugly dirty bug. And then Tracy turns around and looks at me and makes all their eyes shrink down to tiny because when Tracy looks at me she sees an entire different thing. “Okay,” I say, and hurry to catch up.
The next morning before sunrise the sky turns the color of jeans; the light wakes me up before the traffic starts. It’s quiet back here by the Dumpster and the gravel in my back reminds me of the feeling of pebbles on a camping trip, except I don’t have a sleeping bag, just a T-shirt Tracy gave me. Her friend wasn’t home last night even when we came back to knock four times so we wound up here behind Whole Foods. I thought it’d take me forever to get to sleep but when I looked over and saw Tracy’s eyes still open, watching the alley around us, I must’ve stopped being scared because I don’t remember anything after that.
Now it’s the other way around: my eyes are open, she’s still sleeping. It’s cold so I take her T-shirt from under my head and put it over me, trying not to make any noise. When Tracy’s awake I can’t watch her the way that I want to: I know she’d catch me. But now she’s sleeping so hard it barely seems like she’s breathing and I put my eyes on her and it feels like a kind of rest, like if I wanted to I could drink in some of her and make it part of me.
It seems like forever that I lie there watching her eyeballs twitch from dreaming and her eyelashes move against her cheek. I think this is what dawn is, the part right before sunrise when the sky isn’t black but it isn’t blue yet and it isn’t orange either. After a while the cars start getting louder and the sky gets brighter too; it happens slow so I have a chance to get used to the idea that a day is going to start. In my head I say good-bye to Tracy sleeping and the dawn and the quiet, and then I hear myself and realize what a loser I must be.
And then I remember it’s a school day. Which makes me realize last night was a school night, which makes me realize I never went home. And then my heart starts beating in my ears because what am I supposed to do? If I go home I’ll get killed and I’m sure Linda’s called the school by now which means the second I show up there they’ll call her in and then I’ll get killed too. I guess last night I just assumed I’d be in homeroom in the morning because that’s what happens every day but now I start thinking what kind of shit I’ll be in if I go back there, not to mention everyone will know what happened in the parking lot and my hoodie is still ripped. Not to mention Brian. And I start realizing that maybe I can’t go back to school today.
Except you can’t just not go to school. You get expelled, or else in such huge trouble I can’t even picture what it’s like. I start really wanting Tracy to wake up.
There’s sweat trickling down my sides from my armpits making me colder and my palms are all sticky but I tell myself Tracy will know what I should do and it calms me down a little. I roll onto my back and watch the sky, waiting. I count my breaths which almost always makes the time go faster; I know that from Brian.
Finally after at least three people have come around to throw stuff in the Dumpster and almost seen us, Tracy opens her eyes. She sits up and then turns to me and says “Oh yeah,” like she forgot I was there. I have all these questions I want to ask right away but Linda always bites my head off if I talk too much before she’s had her coffee and I think Tracy might be the same. Yesterday Tracy asked if I’d buy her donuts in the morning so I owe her; I’m hoping on the way she’ll say what I’m supposed to do before I have to ask.
The whole way to Winchell’s she doesn’t even talk except to ask me for five bucks to buy us breakfast. At the counter she leans forward on the white Formica and smiles at the guy, who doesn’t speak much English. She orders half a dozen, half jelly half glazed, and a coffee with four sugars and as he’s almost finished getting them she says “How about a discount” and sort of tilts her head. What’s weird is she kind of reminds me of Jenny Kirchner when she does that, but then the guy gives Tracy the donuts for only a dollar and she stuffs her pocket with the change, takes the bag and turns around and looks like herself again.
When we’re back out on the sidewalk she hands me a jelly donut and goes “So how does it feel to be playing hooky?” and grins at me totally different than the smile she gave the donut guy, showing all her ugly teeth. Inside the donut is raspberry and as soon as I swallow I say “Pretty good, I guess,” and that’s all we ever say about it.
After that she takes me to Rite Aid. On the way in she puts her hand on my back and pushes me in front of her. I don’t know where she wants me to go or what we’re even in here for, but she leans in over my shoulder and smiles and I can feel her breath on my face as she pushes me forward.
The lights are bright and there’s almost no one in the aisles, just bottles of things lined up and stacked to the ceiling. She pokes me in the back to point us toward the hair-dye section, where the boxes are white and all have girls on them that look the same except for different shades of hair. I wonder if they dye each girl’s hair with the actual stuff that’s in the box or if it’s just an imitation. Tracy wanders up the aisle a little with her hands out of her pockets and I stay where I am, reading the words Herbal Essences over and over till the H and the E look weird. Then Tracy comes back and stands really close to me and I feel a weight in my front hoodie pocket; when I turn around she looks at me hard. She goes “I’m thirsty, let’s go get some water” and then starts walking. All I know is I probably shouldn’t drop anything so I keep my hands cupped below my stomach.
Tracy gets the biggest size of Poland Spring from the refrigerator case and then heads toward the front. I follow her and my heart is beating again because she hasn’t told me to take the stuff out of my hoodie and we’re about to get to the register. When we’re there she still doesn’t say anything; I read the whole front of People about Drew Barrymore’s amazing new weight loss and move on to In Style while Tracy buys the water.
The register ka-chings and the lady goes “Have a nice day” in the boredest voice ever and Tracy takes the water jug and starts walking toward the door, which is a long way away. On the way there my heart weirdly slows down and I realize Tracy’s never messed up since I’ve known her. Maybe she just knows some stuff I don’t, I think, and all of a sudden that weird blurry nervous feeling goes away and it’s like I just leaned back in a big soft chair except I’m still moving. My breathing sinks down into my stomach as the automatic doors slide open and Tracy and I walk right through.
As soon as we’re away from the Rite Aid, the laughing starts. It all comes out in an explosive burst and then keeps itself going in my head and mouth and it feels so good I don’t want it to stop. Tracy kind of smirks at me. “Not bad,” she goes and then she reaches into my pocket and pulls out what she put in there. She holds up a blue plastic box with no pictures on it that says Lightening Power; in the other hand she has a box of Afro Sheen hair dye on it with a black lady’s picture that looks like it’s really old, like from the ’80s. Her bangs are kind of sculpted into curves and her hair is magenta. “I thought this color would look good on you,” Tracy says, and I start laughing again.
We run around the corner to a Laundromat that’s about from 1950; nobody’s in it except for an old guy sleeping in one of the yellow plastic chairs. We both sit down on the sidewalk in front of it and Tracy starts ripping open the Lightening Power package. There’s a piece of paper inside with teeny tiny directions. Tracy turns the box over and pulls two plastic gloves off the back and puts them on, and then she opens the blue box and mixes a powder into a little bottle that came inside. She says “Close your eyes” and squirts the bottle all over my head. It smells like floor chemicals and my scalp feels cold and then starts stinging but I stay there with my eyes closed while Tracy covers my head with the bleach. She says “Sit there for a while” and the sting turns to burning and my eyes feel hot, but then I remember how I felt on the way out of Rite Aid and it almost makes me laugh again.
After about forever Tracy goes “Okay” and tells me to bend over forward and keep my eyes shut tight. She rinses the bleach out with the water jug she bought, running her fingers through my hair; her plastic gloves on my scalp come in where the burn was. When she’s done she dries me off with the bottom of her T-shirt and says “Open your eyes and stand up.” In the reflection of the Laundromat window my hair is yellow just like hers.
I feel like a kid in a Halloween wig, but then I touch my hair and it’s mine. Tracy starts opening the Afro Sheen package with the magenta dye and I almost stop her. I kind of want to stay blond. But the reason why is so we’ll have the same color hair and I know how dumb that is so I don’t say anything, I just keep looking at myself in the window for as long as I can.
After that I have purple hair. I look awesome. It makes me feel like one of the JV guys walking down the street, or even bigger, and I stick out my chest and sway my shoulders like a football player when I walk and this time Tracy doesn’t say I look stupid. Every time we pass a window I stare at myself: my eyes lock on my reflection like they locked on Jenny Kirchner that day she looked so perfect and I can’t stop watching the girl I see, except now she’s me.
Tracy and I spend a bunch more nights outside by Whole Foods; it gets easier and easier to sleep through rush hour and the third or fourth morning I realize I sleep better out here than at home because there’s no door for Brian to open halfway through the night. There’s only Tracy, and as long as I’m next to her I’m safe.
After about a week my allowance runs out. I get twenty-five a week for cleaning my room and we’ve made it last pretty good: Tracy taught me how to Dumpster-dive plus she’s really good at that trick with the donut guy so he gives us lots of stuff cheap. Once a day we get tacos or something else salty and the rest of the time it’s apple fritters, day-old glazed or whatever we can Dumpster. But then one morning I reach for the wad of ones and fives in my pocket and it’s not a wad anymore, it’s just a dollar. I’m not sure how to tell Tracy; I’m a little afraid she’ll get mad.
She takes care of everything except for money; that’s my job. Once she pulled a hair band out of her pocket and I saw a little corner of green come out too but she stuffed it back down fast and didn’t mention it. The next time we went for donuts I waited for a second to see if she’d pull it out but she didn’t. It was fine with me.
But now I’m almost out and it’s only morning and I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do. I want to tell her before breakfast so she can plan ahead: I wait till she rubs her eyes and spits and sits up and then I say “Um, Tracy?” and she says “Yeah?” and I tell her. My heart is beating super fast like I did something wrong and I’m about to get caught. She doesn’t look at me or talk, which makes it beat faster because I can’t tell if she hates me now or not. After a long long time she turns to me and says “Okay. So where’s your house?”
We wait until the clock at Winchell’s says ten because some days my dad goes in late to work, and then start walking up toward Beachwood Canyon. Of course it sounds easy: I know where the key is under the fake plastic rock by the doormat, and I know where the food is in the pantry, and I know where Linda keeps spare twenties in her bra drawer and that she won’t miss a few. But as the hill starts getting steeper and we get closer to the 101 I’m feeling more and more like throwing up.
Tracy can tell, I guess, because under the highway she turns to me and says “You’re fucking green. What’s wrong with you?” I chew on my tongue. Number one, I’m scared of getting caught, which I obviously can’t tell Tracy. But more than that I’m scared of being in the house, by Brian’s room, the walls and the doors and the carpet and who I am inside them clamping down around me like a snake and squeezing tight. This past week has turned me different: now I’m a girl I like to watch in windows, purple-haired and dirty, and from the way that Tracy looks at me, I can tell I know so many more things than they would ever let me. But I feel like as soon as I’m in that house I’ll go back to how I was before, even if nobody’s home. I don’t know how to explain it to Tracy: I’m sure she’s never felt anything remotely that dumb. But she just keeps staring at me, and then goes “What?” and I know I have to answer.
I can’t let her think I’m backing out of going. The money is my one and only job; I can’t not come through. If I try to explain that I’m scared the walls and carpet in my house will turn me into someone else, she’ll look at me hard and like a stranger, the way she did that first night when I asked her if we were going home. Just imagining it makes me want to die. But she’s making me talk so I have to say something, and for some weird reason the only thing I can figure out to explain to her is Brian.
I have never breathed a word of him to anyone and the words feel bizarre in my mouth: they’ve been coiled up somewhere so much farther down than that forever and now they’re stretching out and up and I can feel them behind my teeth and it surprises me, like some weird food I’ve never tasted. I have no idea why I’m telling Tracy this or why I’d even think she’d understand. But for some reason I’m not scared. And after I get the first few sentences out from my mouth into the air she looks over at me with this kind of recognition I’ve never seen before in anyone, and she says “I know” and takes my hand. She holds it all the way to my house and she doesn’t let me go, even when my palm starts sweating.
At the house we take showers first. I stand guard for her outside of Dad and Linda’s bathroom and when she’s finally done and the mirrors are all steamy, we trade off. In the shower I can’t hear anything besides the water and it kind of freaks me out: I imagine someone showing up and seeing Tracy sitting on their bed; they’d call the cops. But the shower feels so good cutting through a week of dirt and grease that soon I mostly don’t think of anything but that.
When I come out of the bathroom Tracy isn’t there. For a second I freeze and listen: if someone came home there’d be voices. I think about crawling out the window if I need to. But all I hear is Tracy walking around below me. I call out her name but she doesn’t answer so I walk down the stairs, still drying my hair.
The door to Brian’s room is cracked. I say Tracy’s name again, secretly hoping she’ll come out so I don’t have to go in there, but she doesn’t. I push open the door and walk onto his ugly beige carpet.
Tracy doesn’t even turn around when I walk in. She just stands there, staring at his bed with her eyes slitted and her nostrils flared and this look on her face that’s really really far away. Brian’s bed is unmade, you can see his imprint in it, and the carpet suddenly feels itchy and gross under my bare feet. I keep walking toward Tracy. When I get up close I can see her cheeks are wet and it’s not from the shower because the rest of her is dry. She’s breathing hard like some kind of little animal and I say her name again, this time super soft like a whisper almost, and she snaps her head up and around to look at me and her whole face rearranges. She inhales hard, then closes her eyes and shakes her head. When she opens her eyes again she grabs my arm. “Come on” she says. “Let’s go raid the fridge.”
We leave with both our backpacks full of chips and cereal and peanut butter, bread and carrots, plus a jug of water and two sleeping bags. Tracy went through the drawers too and when she found this little knife small enough to fit in a pocket she told me to take it; I wrapped it in a paper towel and slipped it into my jeans. I keep feeling it. I took some twenties too from Linda’s room, memorizing how the bras were stacked and putting them back exactly perfect. I gave the money to Tracy right away; I thought she’d want to carry it. I cleaned everything up better than I’ve ever cleaned before, threw our towels in the hamper and rearranged the fridge so they wouldn’t see the empty parts. I didn’t even go into my room.
I lock the door behind us; Tracy watches while I put the key back down beneath the plastic rock. As soon as it’s out of my hands I realize the thing I was scared of didn’t happen: I went back in the house without it changing me back to how I was. I even went in Brian’s room and the only thing I thought about in there was Tracy. All of a sudden I feel really light even though my backpack’s ten pounds heavier.
After that I decide I don’t really want to go back. Or actually it’s not a decision exactly, it’s more of a realization. The whole last week I was procrastinating on going home like it was a math worksheet and every once in a while I’d hear Linda’s annoying voice in my head yelling at me for putting things off and my heart would get all poundy knowing I’d have to do it eventually and the longer I waited the worse it would get. But now all of a sudden it’s like my math teacher canceled the assignment and I just don’t have to do it. Coming down the hill and back toward Hollywood I’m someone different from Elly who goes to school and eats in the cafeteria and sits in class and comes home at night and tells Dad and Linda how my day was. I’m so much bigger now and beautiful and I can go back to the house and just take what I want when they’re gone and I even have a different name. I’m never going back.
Tracy’s got a ring through her left nostril which I think looks really pretty, even though the metal’s sort of greenish. I told her I wanted one too and she said that was lame but how about my lip. So we went back to Rite Aid to steal some safety pins, peroxide and a ring and now we’re on the sidewalk across from Del Taco. I can taste the peroxide bubbling on my gums and I wonder if it’s poisonous. It tastes like eggs and rust.
She’s making me hold my lower lip out while she gets the pin ready; it makes it hard to talk so when I ask her about the guys sitting in the parking lot in front of 7-Eleven right across the street it comes out sounding like some retarded other language. She laughs and says “Hang on” and stabs the safety pin through the middle of my lip, fast. My head fills all the way up with the pain of it and my whole mouth tastes like liquid iron. I blink my eyes really hard so it won’t look like I’m crying while she screws the pin around trying to close it. Finally she does and it squinches my lip but only a little because we got the big kind. The bottom of it knocks against my chin. “Leave that in for a day or two and then we’ll put the ring in,” she says, and wipes her hands off on her jeans. “Now what were you trying to say?”
“I was just wondering if you knew those guys” I say, swallowing blood, and point over to the 7-Eleven lot. There’s two of them with a pit bull there, both dressed like Tracy, patches and black pants and splotchy dirty brown T-shirts, which is why I think she might know them. The dog’s got two collars, one with rhinestones, one with spikes, and you can see its ribs.
She looks over at them for a second and goes “Nah.” Sometimes Tracy lies about stuff like that but I can tell it’s true she doesn’t know them, and it’s obvious she doesn’t really want to. Which I think is kind of weird, in the same way as the smoking kids behind the auditorium: if you’re a person that looks different from everyone and you see someone who looks like you, to me that means you’d want to be friends or at least talk. But not Tracy.
I’m curious about the guys, though, so I watch them. They’re both around Tracy’s age, and the really tall and skinny one with the stocking cap has this perfect face like someone in the movies, green-eyed and almost pretty like a girl’s. The dog is sitting down and so’s the other guy; he’s short and strong and he looks sort of jocky even though he’s got freckles and tattoos and dirty patches on his hoodie. The dog belongs to him, I can tell.
I never saw anyone else who looked like Tracy and I can’t stop watching them.
I’m still staring across the street when Tracy reaches over and flicks the safety pin in my lip, which hurts like shit. “Come on,” she says. “Come buy me a donut,” and even though there’s food left in her backpack from my house I follow her.
That night and the next day and the next I keep trying to get Tracy to go to Del Taco instead of Benito’s hoping we’ll see those guys again across the street, but they don’t show up and after a couple days I forget. Something in me is different, though, just knowing they exist. To me it means there’s a whole bunch of people like her, which means the world is bigger than I knew. It means there’s something out there that’s not school or home or Brian but not Tracy either. It’s like Tracy, but it’s not exactly her. For some reason, that makes me feel a little more equal, like I could ask her questions without being scared that she’ll get mad. I don’t know why.
Also I keep thinking about Brian’s room, how I found Tracy in there staring at his bed and crying, the way she held my hand beneath the 101 after I told her and looked at me like I was someone she’d known forever but hadn’t seen since we were little kids. The rest of the time she never holds my hand or even touches me but it felt really good that time she did and I keep wanting it again.
One morning after rush hour when Tang’s Donut is empty and we’ve had two apple fritters plus leftover Boston cremes from yesterday, I bring it up. I keep picking at my nails and my jeans which are getting pretty brown. There’s a hole starting in one knee; I make it bigger thread by thread. What I really want to ask is: was she crying inside Brian’s room and why, but I think that she might kill me if I do. So I just say “How come you were so nice to me before?” which doesn’t make any sense, and of course she asks me what the fuck I’m talking about and I have to explain I mean on the way to my house when I told her about Brian. Personally I think it’s kind of obvious after that, but she looks at me and goes “What do you mean? I wasn’t nice to you.”
I rip the rest of the apple fritter up into little tiny pieces; it looks like donut turds. Then I try to explain: I mean when I told her about Brian and looking at the ceiling, how it started in fourth grade and at first it was nice having him in bed with me and then it started getting scary and by the end of that year I’d start throwing up the closer it got to bedtime. I mean when I explained how I could never tell Linda because all she cares about is her stupid job and Brian, and I can’t tell my dad either, even though I kind of wish I could, because if he ever believed me it would mean he’d have to kick Brian out, which might make Linda leave, and I’d mess everything up and everyone would hate me. I feel like a major asshole going through it all again, especially when the donut pieces get too small to rip up anymore. I start back in on the hole in my jeans but she’s still not talking so finally I look up at her and she’s crying again, not like normal where you can hear it and the person moves their face, but in this weird way where her eyes are like a statue and she’s hardly even breathing.
It’s like two things are fighting in her face: one, she keeps almost opening it up like she really wants to say something or touch me; but the other, she is really, really mad. And the first thing I think is: she knows it’s kind of my fault that it happened. She feels bad for me, which is the first thing in her face and why she was so nice before; but I’m so stupid for it happening, and even stupider to want to tell my dad, and that’s the other thing. It doesn’t explain the crying but it’s all I can think of so I think it must be true. “I’m sorry,” I go, and really mean it. She doesn’t talk for a long time. “Don’t be sorry,” she says, and then stands up and grabs me and we go out into the street.
That night we sleep behind Whole Foods again. Halfway through the night I wake up and Tracy is curled up around me, pressed into me through our sleeping bags. She’s on her side, her bony arm across my chest, holding tight, breathing loud. I wiggle sideways toward her so she won’t have to work so hard to hold on.
That morning she doesn’t look at me the whole way to Tang’s Donut. She doesn’t say much either and at first I think she might be embarrassed. I try to keep my hands and knees away from her so there’ll be a cushion of space between us in case I was touching her too much last night. When she comes back from the counter with the bag she takes three donuts for herself and only gives me the dried-out cinnamon one with the powder half worn off. Usually we split them and I get jelly or a fritter or at least glazed. She keeps picking at some scab or something on her head and looking everywhere except at me.
I try asking her different questions. What time is it, and what does she want to do today, and how much cash do we have left. She just looks around and picks at things and gives me just enough answers to make me stop asking. She seems mad and I think maybe she doesn’t like me anymore, now that she thinks the whole Brian thing is my fault. I want to ask her if it’s true but I’m too afraid to hear the answer. I tell myself there are a lot of things that could be wrong besides that though: I go through them in my head picking them up and looking at them like different-colored rocks, trying to find one I can put in my pocket and keep, but that one reason I’m scared of is underneath all of them rotting into the dirt and every time I pick another one up I can see it.
I feel like a big asshole even though nothing’s even happened; it sort of reminds me of school, except worse. I pick at my shoelace and get really involved in it. Tracy picks at her scalp. After a minute I think we must look pretty weird, both sitting on the curb in front of Tang’s picking at things and not talking, but then I realize nobody’s looking at us.
The rest of the day is a mixture of picking at shoelaces and sitting on curbs, and in between Tracy is dragging me like it’s really important to all these places where she thinks someone might be. She doesn’t say who. I hope it might be those guys from the 7-Eleven with the pit bull but I think she’d tell me if it was. We go to Jack in the Box up on Sunset and then back to Winchell’s and Del Taco; she’s looking for something but she won’t explain what. At Benito’s she walks right up to this transvestite hooker from before. I can’t stop looking at her face. She’s wearing leopard print and purple high heels. Also she’s about seven feet tall. Her name’s Bianca. She tilts her face down and asks, in a Spanish accent, what a little sweetie like me is doing out here and then she sort of glares at Tracy. Tracy shoves in front of me and starts talking to Bianca half in Spanish so I can’t understand, and then she grabs my sleeve and marches me away, and then we go and stand outside Goodwill for like half an hour. No one comes.
Every time she says we’re going to find some person and it’s like she really needs to see them but there isn’t ever anybody there. There’s no talking, just a big swollen-up embarrassed silence in the air between us. My stomach is nervous and sick at the same time, like butterflies and throw-up, and I wish I could get in bed and stay home from school, but there’s nothing to stay home from and no home to stay in either.
After a while she doesn’t even seem mad anymore, just like some other person in some place that isn’t here. I’m still here though, out on the asphalt, and without her I don’t know where here is or where to put my feet. For the first time since she led me out of the parking lot at school I feel really scared. Tracy’s always had a reason or a kind of knowing, and even when I can’t tell what it is it wraps around me like her arms last night and leads me to the next right thing. But today I can’t find it. All morning I tried talking and it just made her weirder so now I’ve been trying to find her just by feeling it, like if I breathe the right way our breaths will touch and I can pull her close again. But my stomach hurts too bad for me to breathe in deep enough to make it work, so I just wait at each place she takes me and then follow her to the next one even though I can tell we’re not really going anywhere.
Finally the sky gets halfway dark and we head back to Whole Foods. My stomach starts to calm down: that’s our place, we go there every night; there’s not ever anyone there but us. I hate today. The whole day just blended into itself, different in a way I can’t say the name of, and I want something back that I don’t even know what it is. Whole Foods makes me feel better though. When we’re sleeping I won’t have to think of anything to say and then tomorrow morning the cars will come and the light before the sun comes up and it’ll be like today just didn’t happen.
For dinner we get muffins from the trash bags: tonight it’s cranberry almond. It’s weird how much food they just throw away and I’m glad there’s somebody hungry like us to eat it, otherwise it’d just turn into trash. Linda always shops here and I wonder if she knows we’re back by the Dumpsters eating all the stuff she doesn’t want to buy. I imagine her car full of grocery bags curving around the tiny hilly streets to get back home and then I think about our driveway, the birds of paradise and bougainvillea clustered up around the door. I think about all that stuff while we’re eating. When we lie down in our sleeping bags, I turn my back to Tracy. I don’t want her to know I’m at my house in my head and not here with her. I can feel her watching me, though, and after a while she pokes me. I roll over and she’s propped up on one elbow staring at my face. Her eyes are full like she wants to say something but she doesn’t. I almost ask her what, but I’m afraid if I talk it’ll break something. After a long time she picks up her hand and wipes my hair away from my eyes and off my forehead, soft, in this way that’s almost like a mom except awkward, like her hands aren’t supposed to move that way. It’s weird but I like it and I stop thinking about our driveway. She keeps on doing it until I fall asleep.
The next morning when the cars start and the sun comes up the space next to me is empty and her stuff is gone. There’s nothing there to look at except asphalt and a Dumpster that’s all emptied out. It smells like muffins baking and my stomach growls.