I cry in toilet stalls, warm tears spilling into the neck of the peacoat, staring at the money Ellis and I earned. I’m finally going someplace, maybe someplace better, but she isn’t with me, and it hurts. Everything hurts me again, sharp and scary against my scary skin. I just keep trying to think of Mikey, and how good it will be to be with him, and maybe, this time, a little more than just friends.
It’s the middle of the night when we arrive. The driver’s sudden, cheerful shout of Toooooo–suuuun fills the bus and jolts several people awake. I join the sleepy line of people stumbling off the bus and into the warm, murky air.
A couple of passengers have people waiting for them and I watch them hug and kiss. I’ve got no one, so I pull out the envelope from Mikey, to keep myself from feeling lonely.
I read the letter over and over on the bus, just to remind myself that this was really happening, that I was really getting out.
Charlie! Everything is going to be okay, I promise. I’m sorry, I won’t be back for a little while, so you’ll be on your own. Don’t worry, my landlady’s cool, she’s an artist, she knows you’re coming. Her name is Ariel and if you need anything, ask her. Your mom said she had some money to give you, so you should be okay to get food. Here’s directions to my place and a map so you know where to buy groceries and stuff. CHARLIE: I can’t wait to see you.—Mike
I actually hold the notebook paper up to my face, just in case there’s a scent of Mikey that I can inhale to stop the stuttering of my heart, but there isn’t. I take some deep breaths, trying to calm myself.
I look at the map, struggling to make sense of where I am, where I’m supposed to go, and what Mikey’s arrows mean. The streets are empty, but I keep my head up.
Evan always used to say that it wasn’t what you couldn’t see that you should be afraid of, but what was right in front of you, in plain sight.
I grit my teeth as I walk through an underpass, willing myself not to think of that night. The handle of Louisa’s suitcase digs into the palm of my hand. The peacoat is way too heavy for this weather. I’m sweating, but I don’t want to stop and take it off. I pass a lot of little bars and shops. The sky here is like dense, dark cloth, stitched with faint white stars, something I want to put a finger to.
Mikey’s note is three pages long. You’ll see a house with a bunch of HUGE silver birds in the yard. 604 E. 9th Street. She lives in the Pie Allen neighborhood. Mine is the purple guest house in the back. Use the yellow bicycle and lock. Ariel left them for you. Key for door is under yellow pot.
They don’t look like birds to me, but they are luminous, glinting in the night air, their fierce wings open. The guest house is in back. I find the key under the pot. A yellow bicycle with a new-looking willow basket is locked to a laundry-line pole. I unlock the door and grope for the switch along the wall, blinking at the sudden glare of light. The walls inside are painted purple, too.
I have no idea what to do. Is the landlady home? Did she hear me?
There are no ping-lights here. No endless everywhere beige carpet. No crying girls. No secret room.
I am alone. For the first time in months and months, I am utterly alone. No Evan, no Dump, no Casper, not even irritating Isis. For a minute, pinpricks of panic shoot through my body: if something happens to me between now and when Mikey gets here, who will know? Who will care? For a moment, I’m back there: those terrifying days of street before Evan and Dump found me, when every day was heightened heartbeat and the nights lasted years, waiting for the dark to end, jumping at every sound, trying to find a safe place to hide.
There is being alone, and then there is being alone. They are not the same thing at all.
Breathe, Charlie. Breathe, just like Casper said. I slide my fingers underneath the peacoat and pinch my thighs, too, hoping the pain will snap me back in place. Bit by bit, my panic subsides.
My stomach growls loudly. Grateful to have something else to focus on, I scout the mini-fridge tucked into a corner. There are some bottles of water and mushy bananas. I eat a banana, suck back a bottle of water super quick. There are also two pieces of pizza in a small cardboard box. They’re so stiff and stale that they snap when I shove them in my mouth, but I don’t care. I’m ravenous. Slowly, my panic ebbs away, exhaustion bubbling up to take its place.
The neighborhood is still. What time is it? There’s a big trunk in the corner and I push it in front of the door, just in case. My whole body is sore from the bus trip and my legs are weak. I turn off the light. Even though my body is slicked with sweat, I don’t take off the peacoat. Taking it off would make me feel even more exposed right now. I need a little protective armor, just in case.
I arrange myself on the futon, Mikey’s futon, on the floor. I can feel things lifting from me, disappearing into the silence around me. I’m not listening to the sadness of several girls living along one hallway. Fucking Frank is far, far away, his hands cannot find me here. I have a little money in my backpack. My body is becoming lighter and lighter.
I can feel it, finally, after months and months of fighting it, and it’s pulling me deeper into the peacoat, into the futon: sleep. I bury my face in the pillow and it’s here that I finally find Mikey’s smell, something cinnamon-tinged. I breathe it in as deep as I can, letting it slip into all the crevices of me and rock me to sleep.
—
When I wake up, sunlight is pouring through the sole window in the guest house. I look around groggily, sliding the damp peacoat off. After almost two days on the bus, I can smell myself.
It takes me a minute, but I realize the guest house is just a crappy little converted garage: the two doors on the back wall against the alley have been soldered awkwardly together, their square windows covered with small blue curtains. The kitchen is just a sink set into a countertop on top of an old metal cabinet.
There’s a ceiling fan and an air conditioner set into one of the walls. The floor is cement and the bathroom is an old closet with a toilet and plastic insert shower.
I crawl out of bed and make my way to the bathroom. Pee and then turn on the shower. It spurts and then a thin trickle eeks out. I turn it off. I’m not ready to shower yet. Not ready to look down at myself and touch my new damage. Touching it will make it all the more real. And my scars, they still hurt. They will be tender for a long, long time.
At Creeley, most of us made do with just washcloth-soaping our pits, shits, and splits, as Isis referred to it, because if you wanted to take an actual shower, you had to do it with a female attendant present, just in case you tried to, you know, drown yourself with shower spray or something. And nobody wanted an audience while they were naked, so most of us preferred the other option.
Back in my overalls and out of the bathroom, I run my hands over the kitchen counter. It’s plywood overlaid with Mod Podge, postcards of foreign cities sealed underneath. Some of the postcards are turned over, with scrawled messages: A: Meet me at the fountain, love, four o’clock, like last year. A must be Mikey’s landlord, Ariel. I look at the postcards, the images, the messy handwriting. A little story unfolding beneath my fingers.
I spread out the money Ellis and I made. Fly over the ocean, Ellis said, arms out, spinning around her room. Touch down in London, Paris, Iceland, wherever. All the romantic-seeming places she wanted to live. Sipping espresso on the Seine will be fucking angelic, Charlie. You’ll see.
Nine hundred and thirty-three dollars and only one of us got out alive. Semi-alive.
I stare at it for a long time before tucking it far back under the sink, behind the dinky one-cup coffeemaker.
I have to find food.
—
The sun is so bright when I step into the yard that spots cloud my eyes, so I unlock the door again and root around a desk drawer until I find sunglasses that are painted gold and flecked with black, something a girl would wear and carelessly leave behind; did Mikey have a girlfriend? Does Mikey have a girlfriend? I don’t want to think about that right now.
Mikey’s hand-
drawn map is filled with arrows and notes: Circle K, three blocks ; Fourth Avenue (thrift, coffee, bar, eat, book) six blocks ; the U seven blocks . My face and arms begin to heat up as I trudge along the sidewalk to the Circle K. It’s weird to think that only a few days ago, I was in sleety weather with gray skies, and now, here I am, sun everywhere, no jacket.
Inside the Circle K, the air is cool; it’s like being underwater in a clear, deep pool. The guy behind the counter has huge black plugs embedded in his earlobes. He looks up from his thick book as I stumble down the aisles, grasping at bottles, boxes of gauze, sunblock, tape, tubes of cream. In the air-conditioning, the sweat dries quickly on my face. It feels gritty and sticky. I grab a glass bottle of iced tea from the cooler.
I have to restock my tender kit, just in case. I don’t want to hurt myself; I want to follow Casper’s rules, but I need these.
Just in case.
I pay, stuffing everything in my backpack.
Outside on the sidewalk, I unfold Mikey’s map. There’s a grocery called the Food Conspiracy, up the street, so I start walking.
It’s a co-op, earthy and expensive-seeming, with whispery music drifting down from the ceiling. I’m not sure what to get. I never looked at what Mikey had to cook with, if anything. I sweep a box of crackers, a block of pepper jack cheese into the wire basket.
The store hums with activity. Two hippieish ladies squeeze pears. A tall guy ladles curry from the salad bar into a Tupperware. I was shoving my bare hands in Dumpsters, and then I was shoving cardboardy mac and cheese in my face with a spork, and now I’m shopping.
At the checkout, I’m suddenly afraid I don’t have enough money. I’m using Vinnie’s money. Did I even count it? Did I even check the prices on the shit in my basket? I’ve forgotten how much food can cost. Blue comes back to me. Don’t let the cereal eat you.
The cereal is eating me. The cereal is eating me alive.
Is everyone looking at me as I fumble for the bills in my pocket? They are. Aren’t they? My fingers tremble. I jam the food in my backpack, don’t wait for the change.
Outside, the sounds of cars and people are chain saws in my ears. I squeeze my eyes closed. “Don’t float,” Casper would tell us when we got stressed, when the pressure in our brains began to fight with the pressure inside our bodies and we’d start to disassociate. “Don’t you dare float. Stay with me.”
I walk too far in the wrong direction and end up inside the underpass, cars whirring by.
The concrete reeks of piss. My boots crunch broken glass. He comes back to me.
Passing cars make grimy shadows on the graffitied walls. I was tucked all the way at the top, trying to sleep, my throat choked with gunk and my body steaming with fever. I was sick on and off my whole time outside. Now I know I had pneumonia.
The first thing I felt was his hand on my leg.
I try to remember: what did Casper say, what did Casper say.
Stop. Assess. Breathe.
In the dark and clammy underpass I clamp my hands over my ears and close my eyes, holding my breath and letting it out in slow waves. The cars blow warm, musty air against my legs; I concentrate on that. Gradually, the fire leaves, the saws drift away, the memory disappears..
Hands lowered, I turn and walk straight for blocks up Fourth, passing everything on Mikey’s map: Dairy Queen, a coffeehouse where men are playing a game with white pieces on a table on the sidewalk, bars, restaurants, vintage stores, feminist bookstore. I go too far again and have to double back, finally reaching Ninth Street and practically running, so desperate am I to reach the purple guest house.
I lug Mikey’s trunk in front of the door to keep the world out.
I have to find a way to quiet the black inside me. First, I take out the glass bottle of iced tea and drink it down all at once. I find a faded hand towel in Mikey’s tiny bathroom and wrap it around my hand. I close my eyes.
And then I smash the bottle on the cement floor.
It’s like a thousand birds of possibility, all beautiful, spread over the cement, glinting. I choose the longest, thickest shards and carefully wrap them in the linen that held my photographs. I slide my photos into a baggie. Mikey’s got a dustpan and hand broom under the sink. I sweep the rest of the glass up and throw it in the trash.
I take out my tender kit and prep it: nestling all the rolls of gauze, the creams, the tape, the glass in the linen, side by side until everything fits perfectly.
It’s all I need for now. I just need to know it exists and is ready. Just in case. I don’t want to cut. I really don’t. This time, I want so much to be better.
But I just need it. It makes me feel safer, somehow, even though I know that’s all messed up. Casper can tell me to breathe, she can tell me to buy rubber bands to snap on my wrists every time I panic or get an urge to cut and I will, I will try all of it, but she never said, or we never got around to talking about what will, or would, happen if those things…didn’t work.
I tuck it under some T-shirts in Mikey’s trunk.
I crawl across the floor and pop the locks on Louisa’s suitcase.
Looking at the inside of the suitcase calms me. It was never filled with clothes. Mikey’s sister’s clothes fit well enough in my backpack. The suitcase is for everything else: the sketchbook, pens, and pads of paper Miss Joni gave me; the baggies of charcoal, wrapped so carefully in paper towels. My Land Camera.
I open the sketchbook, unpeel a charcoal from the paper towel, and take a real look around at Mikey’s apartment.
Purple-painted walls covered with band flyers and set lists. Mikey’s single futon with the one black pillow and a worn blue-and-white serape blanket. A rickety desk with a wooden chair. An old record player, tall speakers, the shelves of LPs and CDs that surround them. Stacked red milk crates leaking T-shirts, boxer shorts, and frayed blue work pants. A white toothbrush resting in a tin cup on the kitchen counter. The casual accumulation of Mikey’s being.
I start there. I draw where I am. I put myself at this new beginning, surrounded by the comfort of someone else’s easier life.
For two days, I sleep and draw, nibbling the crackers and cheese, drinking all the bottles of water until they’re gone and I have to refill them from the tap.
On the third day, I’ve got a pair of Mikey’s headphones on while I draw. Morrissey’s singing sweetly at me when I hear a dull pounding. I slip the headphones off, my heart thumping wildly, as the door swings open. Mikey? Is he back already? I scramble to my feet.
The woman at the door is tall, her lean hands grasping each side of the doorframe. Her hair is white and straight, just past her ears. I’m wearing overalls, but my arms are bare in my short-sleeved T-shirt, so I tuck them behind my back. I’m disappointed it’s not Mikey—my heart slows back down.
She squints down at me. “Blind as a fucking bat. Forgot my glasses in the house. Michael texted me. He wants to know if you’re okay. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m the lady who owns this place.”
There is a rough edge to her voice, some type of accent I can’t place. She has the kind of lined face that people call etched. The kind that looks beautiful and intimidating and slightly creepy. I always wonder what these women looked like as children.
I nod cautiously. I’m always careful around new people, especially adults. You never know what they’re going to be like.
“Michael didn’t say you were mute. You mute?” Turquoise rings on her fingers clack against the doorframe. “So you okay, or not okay?”
I nod again, swallow.
“Bullshit.”
She moves quickly, reaching around me to grab my wrists. She flips my arms so the raised lines are visible. Instinctively, I stiffen and try to pull my hands back, but she tightens her grip. Her fingertips are tough with calluses.
She makes a growling sound. “You girls today. You make me so fucking sad. The world hurts enough. Why fucking chase it down?”
The breath through my nostrils is bullish, panicky. Fucking l
et go careens inside my head like a pinball and shoots from my mouth. I’m surprised by the sound of my own voice and she must be, too, because she opens her hands and lets my arms fall away.
I rub my wrists and consider spitting at her.
“A girl with teeth.” Her voice is weirdly satisfied. “That’s in your favor.”
The edge of the door brushes my shoulder; in my head I slam it in her face. I step away from her so that I don’t make that happen in real life. Who is this bitch?
“I’m Ariel. Here.” She presses a piece of paper to my chest. “I have a friend down on the Avenue. She’s got a shop. She needs some help. Tell her I’ll take her for appletinis on Friday.”
Halfway across the scrubby yard, she turns, shading her eyes. “You get a job, Michael’s friend. You find a place for yourself. You don’t stay here longer than two weeks.”
It takes me two hours to get up the nerve to leave the house. I spend those two hours walking the perimeter of the small guest house, talking to myself, rubbing my arms, doing my breath balloons. Going out to the shop to ask about a job means talking. It means opening my mouth and hoping the right words come out. It means letting people look me over, cast their eyes up and down me and my weird overalls and long shirt, funny hair, all of it. Right? Isn’t that how job things go? You have to tell people where you’re from, where you worked, what you like to do, all that shit.
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