by Chloe Garner
“They always show up,” Zee said, coming to stand in front of her. “As for you.”
She snorted and let her eyes slide closed. Unless he hit her, there really wasn’t anything he could do to make it worse right now.
“You’re weak,” he said. “You should have torn them apart. But you ran away and you let me win. When they kill you, I’ll be glad you’re gone.”
“Go to hell,” she answered. She hauled her heavy eyes open and watched as he considered kicking her, but something held him back, and he went after one of the hooligans instead. Blister scrambled out of the way, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough. Lizzie stood, finding herself unstable but too angry to resist.
“Don’t…” she started, then stumbled back against the building and tumbled to the ground, hitting hard. Even having woken up on the floor, she couldn’t remember feeling that weak or out of control of her on body. Zee turned and laughed.
“You aren’t going to last,” he said and shook his head, leaving to go down the stairs. The hooligans shifted to peer at her for a moment, but no one approached her save Slug, who came and sat at the corner of the structure and watched her with guilty eyes, like he knew he was supposed to be doing something but he didn’t know what. She tipped her head back against the wall again, wishing for hot water, hoping for sleep.
She got neither.
***
She sat up the next morning, stiff, sore, unslept, and weary like she’d trudged loops around the roof all night, but everything seemed to work okay. Slug looked at her with tired eyes and curled back up on the roof, going back to sleep. Lizzie’s stomach was empty and had been for more than a day, now, and she was feeling lightheaded. One of the hooligans was going down the stairs as Lizzie started into the building, and she looked at her.
“What do you do for food?” she asked. “How do you all keep alive like this?”
Lizzie realized that the girl had a faint glow to her, weaker than even Paul had had yesterday, but enough that Lizzie could recognize her as one of the ones who should have been on her team, and she watched the battle between not wanting to get involved and a sense of allegiance that finally settled out in a sigh and a shrug.
“Come with me.”
Lizzie followed her out of the building and then out of the area into a more populated one near the park.
“The bakery is good,” the girl said as she walked. “The always throw out the stuff that’s more than a day old, and they do it in the morning, so if you can get there early, it usually isn’t that bad. Especially if it hasn’t rained.”
Lizzie nodded and stepped up her pace as the girl went around the side of a business and went to open their dumpsters.
“You have to be quick, because the lady who owns it sends her boyfriend out here with a rolling pin sometimes to try to get rid of us.”
“Do you make a mess?” Lizzie asked. The girl twisted her mouth to the side and shrugged.
“Some of us do,” she said. “But the furlings are worse, and they follow us everywhere.”
Lizzie nodded, and the girl opened the dumpster and looked in, then sighed.
Lizzie looked over her shoulder and grimaced. A furling lay in on top of a raft of bread loaves, sprawled on his back. The bread was molded where it was dry and squished and wet everywhere else.
“It got here first,” the girl said, hesitating, then putting her hand out toward the bread, trying not to touch the furling. Lizzie took her elbow and pulled her arm back, tipping her head at the furling.
“Scram.”
The furling gave her a calculated look, then rolled over and climbed out of the dumpster, heading down the alley with a put-out posture. Lizzie let go of the girl’s arm, as the girl looked at her with a careful expression.
“They listen to you.”
Lizzie nodded. The girl shrugged down the corners of her mouth, then started pulling bread out and smelling it.
“Some of the mold can make you sick,” she said. “We can come back if we don’t find anything else.”
She found one sandwich bun that appeared to just be wet, and she ripped it in half, giving half to Lizzie and shoving the other half in her mouth. Lizzie put the bread to her nose, smelling dank water, like it had come off of the roof, but nothing more foul than that. And she was hungry.
She ate.
They moved on, and the girl - Rat - showed her the best places to look for discarded food.
“There’s a school, that way,” she said, pointing. “If you go at the right time, kids will dump a whole lunch in the trashcan outside on their way in.”
“What’s the right time?” Lizzie asked. Rat shrugged.
“Right after school starts and right after they let out. They get out of the car and put their lunch in the trash, or they throw it out before they go home, sometimes. Good stuff, too. Sandwiches and apples and everything in plastic.”
Lizzie nodded.
“Okay.”
They walked toward a deli where Rat said that they sometimes threw out meat that was expired, and Lizzie looked at her.
“Will you tell me what your name was, before?” she asked.
“No,” Rat said.
“Okay,” Lizzie tried again. “Are you from around here?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever talk to your family?”
Rat looked at her like she was crazy, and Lizzie sighed.
“Does Zee treat you okay?”
“No.”
Lizzie looked at her meaningfully, and Rat glanced over.
“No. He doesn’t go for that. Don’t think he knows that the girls are any different from the guys.”
At least there was that. Lizzie nodded.
“You think that makes any difference?” Rat asked.
“Yes,” Lizzie said, and Rat laughed.
“Maybe. But we’re all going to die, anyway. What does it matter, really?”
Lizzie looked at her.
“It matters.”
Rat shook her head and kept walking.
“How old are you?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know,” Rat told her.
“What year were you born?”
Rat told her, and Lizzie did the math. The girl was three years older than she was. It didn’t show. It wasn’t that she had youth to her so much as she lacked the stature and confidence that Lizzie associated with age. Beyond that, her hair was too tangled and thin to get a good sense of her features, and her skin was drawn tight with lack of nutrition.
Rat didn’t seem to think that the conversation was that interesting, so they both let it drop. The deli had a package of meat - ham by smell - out in the trash, and Rat seized on it like treasure.
“No rotten bread today,” she said. “Come on. We can’t eat all of this.”
Lizzie wasn’t entirely sure she agreed, by the way her stomach felt, but she started back toward the abandoned building willingly enough as Rat tore off bites of meat and ate them, alternating with giving Lizzie a share.
“Eat slow,” the girl cautioned after a minute. “If you eat it too fast, this will make you sick.”
Lizzie had a hard time believing that her system was that unbalanced, but she took the advice anyway out of goodwill, and they continued along.
“I want to make things better,” Lizzie said after a while.
“I know,” Rat said. “They all do.”
“How many angels have you seen Zee and the furlings kill?” Lizzie asked. Rat shrugged and kept eating. “How many?” Lizzie pressed.
“I don’t remember,” Rat said.
“How many do you remember?” Lizzie asked. Rat glanced at her.
“Six.”
“In how much time?”
Rat shook her head.
“You think years matter?” she asked. “It’s just time.”
It did matter, in point of fact, because Lizzie was trying to get a feel for how much time she had. Pragmatically, she understood that she was a brand new angel, and odds were g
ood that there weren’t many of those around, and that Zee had killed angels more like Lara - might have actually killed Lara, if the woman had left Robbie instead of defying the furlings and getting herself killed that way instead - which made any estimate of how long they lasted irrelevant to Lizzie’s life expectancy, but underneath everything, Lizzie was an optimist, and she expected to do better than average.
Rat sighed.
“I’m sorry. I know no one wants to die.”
“No,” Lizzie said. “They don’t.”
“But you’re going to,” Rat said. “We all know it. It’s best not to get attached. Okay?”
“I understand,” Lizzie said, watching as Rat ran ahead now, still carrying the meat. The edge was gone off of Lizzie’s hunger, and Rat had been right - she did feel a bit queasy, though it was hard to tell if that was because of how much she’d eaten or the quality of the meat.
She got back to the building and leaned against the outside wall for a few minutes, then looked at the sky.
It was hard to tell time that way, and she missed her phone, but now seemed like as good a time as any to head to the park.
She had an appointment to keep.
***
She sat on a bench on her own, watching teenagers play on skateboards for most of an hour before Paul and his mom arrived. He sat down next to her easily enough and watched the skate park with her, but Magda didn’t sit.
“Paul made me promise I wouldn’t stay,” she said. “But I’m not going far. I’ll just be right over there. And then I want to talk to you privately afterwards.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said, remembering to breathe. She hadn’t spent the entire night leaning against an outdoor brick wall, sleepless and miserable.
She was a mental health professional who was here to help Magda’s son.
Sure.
“So how are you today?” Lizzie asked.
“I’m okay,” Paul said, and she looked at him. He grinned at the ground.
“Really,” he said. “I’m better than I’ve been in a while. There was a… thing… sitting on the chalkboard at school, and it didn’t freak me out. I just ignored it, because… It’s there. You know? What am I going to do about it?”
Lizzie nodded.
“Yeah. That’s all you can do.”
He grinned at the ground again.
“Can I meet the… the other ones like me? Like us?”
Lizzie licked her lips, thinking of Rat and Slug and Blister, and shook her head.
“Not today,” she said. “I’m still really new and they don’t all completely trust me yet. That and I don’t know them very well.”
“But someday,” he said, and she shrugged.
“If it turns out that they aren’t going to be a good group for you to spend time around?” Lizzie said. “Maybe not.” She held up a hand as he started to argue. “I understand. Being around people who can actually see what you see… I can understand how that would really be important, but you need to understand something about them. They didn’t have someone find them as early as I found you. They went through bad treatment that didn’t help, and through an awful lot of people not believing them, and then they ended up on their own, homeless and drug addicted. These aren’t people your mom is going to like you being around. You get it?”
“You don’t want my mom to see the kind of people you hang out with,” Paul said with a little bit of a teenage smugness in his voice. She smiled and nodded a bit begrudgingly.
“That certainly crossed my mind. When I first met them, I thought it was a cult. No way those people hang out without something being really messed up about it. And…” she shrugged. “It kind of is a cult. In a way. These are people believe something is true that no one else believes. You have to be careful with how you treat that, if you want your mom to think you’re credible. That I’m helping you and not just fostering a delusion.”
He twisted his mouth to the side.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. What are they like?”
Lizzie took a deep breath. She wasn’t well-slept enough for this. She hadn’t planned in advance. She wanted to tell him the truth, but even more than that, she wanted him to stay at home, and graduate high school, maybe college. Have a career. A family, if he wanted. Anything but becoming one of the hooligans.
She carefully picked her way through describing a few of the hooligans in Robbie’s pack - people she knew better, she told Paul - and then a little bit about the ones here.
“They need you,” he said finally as she finished, and she looked at him inquisitively. He nodded.
“That’s why you left, isn’t it? You knew there were people here who needed you more.”
She smiled.
“I wish it were that altruistic,” she said. “I came because they made me.”
“Who did?”
She nodded at the furlings, and he shifted.
“Are they going to make me leave?” he asked, and she shook her head.
“I don’t think that…” she bit her tongue. She didn’t want to use the words, but he heard her choke on something.
“What?” he pressed.
“I don’t think that people like you like to move and they don’t make you.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Why would they make you move? Aren’t you like me?”
She sighed. It was unavoidable.
“I’m the angel,” she said. “I can get rid of them, make them go away, but I have to go where they tell me to go. You’re something else.”
“What am I?” he asked, a tone of distrust showing up.
“They call you a hooligan,” she said. There was a spontaneous laugh and he shook his head.
“That’s stupid.”
It wasn’t, when you saw them at work, but she didn’t want to go into that at all, so she didn’t say anything.
“All the same,” she said.
“Hooligan,” he said, laughing at the sound of the word. “You have no clue what’s going on, do you?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lizzie said, “but I can look at a furling and tell it to leave, and it does.”
“Furling,” he said, equal disbelief. “I bet your group leader choked on that one.”
“I’ve never been in therapy,” she said. “Never been medicated. Never been treated.”
“Then what do you know about it?” he asked.
“My brother,” she said, but he was shaking his head.
“You don’t know anything about anything.”
He stood and she tried to signal for him to sit again, but he was walking away. Lizzie was torn over whether to go after him or not, but Magda slid into his seat.
“He does that,” she said, looking after him. “It’s actually a good sign. It means he’s actually listening to you.”
Lizzie snorted.
“He apparently didn’t like what I had to say.”
Magda shook her head.
“He doesn’t like much of anything. It’s been hard… the diagnosis.”
“I understand,” Lizzie said. “I remember.”
Magda nodded.
“But last night at dinner, he actually talked to us. He was excited to come meet with you. I haven’t seen him interested in treatment at all, before this. If we can get him to engage…”
“I can’t promise you that anything is going to work,” Lizzie said. “And if he does want to meet the other kids I know who have been through the same things… You aren’t going to like them.”
Magda straightened.
“If they help him,” she said. “I can tolerate a lot.”
“Drug use, runaways, a lot of paranoia,” Lizzie said.
“This is what a good outcome looks like?” Magda asked.
“That’s what late intervention looks like,” Lizzie said. “I can’t make you a promise that that’s not what’s going to happen to Paul, but I can say that my brother got so much better because he had someone who understood how to treat him, and I want to take what I observed a
nd learned from that, and use it to help him, and the people here that I’ve met. I’ve only been here a little while.” She paused, debating whether it was emotional blackmail or simple statement of the facts that she had in front of her. “I can tell you that, most of the kids who are really like your son… This is how they end up, if no one helps them.”
“I want to meet them first,” Magda said. “Before Paul meets them.”
“I can agree to that order,” Lizzie said, “but not necessarily that it will be soon.”
Magda nodded.
“I’m ready to take your references,” she said, and Lizzie drew a breath and nodded.
“I wish I could hand you a printout, but I don’t have one.”
She gave Magda the name of her company and her boss’ name, as well as a few coworkers, and Magda noted them in her phone.
“I will be calling,” she said, and Lizzie nodded.
“I should let you know, then, that I left abruptly. My brother’s wife died and I moved in with him to make sure that he would be okay on his own. I would have given more notice if I could have, but it wasn’t how it worked out.”
Magda gave her a long look, then nodded.
“Okay.”
She looked up and shook her head at Paul, who was leaning on a railing watching the skateboarders.
“Truly upset, right?” she asked and gave Lizzie a smile. “I wrote a check, but I didn’t have your full name.”
Lizzie gave it to her, and Magda filled out the check and handed it to her.
Money.
Lizzie smiled.
“Thank you.”
“Same time next week?” Magda asked, and Lizzie nodded.
“Absolutely.”
“And you’ll let me know when you get your phone working again,” Magda said. “I want to be able to reach Paul’s health providers immediately in the event of an issue.”
Lizzie nodded.
“Just as soon as I get a new one and a number, I’ll get it to you.”
Magda nodded, and pulled a pad of paper out of her purse.
“You call me here. Okay?”
Lizzie tucked the page away and stood.
“Thank you.”
Magda drew a deep breath and sighed.
“You, too. This is the first sign of hope we’ve had since the diagnosis.”
“I’m glad if I can help,” Lizzie said. “I remember exactly what those days were like.”