Steamy Dorm

by Kristine Robinson

  I’m far enough behind the main event to see another way into the alley. I duck sideways and lose sight of the car, but I find myself in the alley and run along it in search of the kid. He knows a lot more about disappearing than I ever did at that age. He’s nowhere in sight.

  I slow to a walk and catch my breath. Then I hear tin cans rattling and I slow down even more. What will I find in that alley? I didn’t think I would find anything dangerous there. On second thought, I didn’t think at all. That’s how accidents happen―to me, at least.

  I inch along. I’ll never find the kid at this rate. Then I come to a corner between two brick buildings. I hear someone coughing around the corner and I peek around the corner to see.

  Chapter 2

  A amorphous shape slumps against the brick wall, and a terrible cough tears out of the shapeless form. Then the figure heaves to one side and wretches into the gutter before falling back. At first, I think it must be a man with a terrible case of cigarette rattle. Then I listen closer and realize it’s a woman, a woman who’s seen better days. She can’t stop coughing.

  She rolls over on her side and fishes a dirty paper bag out of a pocket in her ragged clothes. She hefts herself up against the wall and digs a zip lock out of the bag. She rolls it in her fingers and sighs. Through the clear plastic, I can make out white powder.

  I stare in horror at this wreck of a human being. How could a person live like that? No wonder she’s in such bad shape. She’s hanging by a thread. Do I have to stand here and watch her destroy herself with this stuff?

  Funny, I never once thought to turn away, but she doesn’t take the stuff out to poison herself. She must have done it thousands of times to end up like that, but for some reason, she lets the zip lock drop into her lap. She lets out another heavy sigh and coughs again.

  Then I realize she’s not coughing. Wracking sobs tear through her, and her shoulders heave up and down. She balls up the zip lock and paper bag together and throws them with all her feeble strength across the alley. They flutter to the ground when running footsteps approach from the other end of the alley. I draw back behind the corner to hide when the same boy runs into view.

  He glances up and down the alley. He doesn’t notice the woman. To him, she’s a pile of lifeless rags. She freezes against the wall like a deer in the headlights with her tears standing on her haggard cheeks. The boy steps on her zip lock, but he doesn’t see that, either.

  He glances over his shoulder. Shouts echo along the alley. Those men must be after him. He dashes forward and dives into a nearby dumpster. The woman scurries forward and seizes her bag. She scuttles back to her place against the wall just as the two meatheads lumber around the corner.

  They scan the alley, but they don’t see anything but the woman. One of them kicks her foot to get her attention. “Hey, wake up! Did you see a kid run through here?”

  The woman shakes her head and holds up her bag. She gives them a crazy grin.

  The man makes a face and spits on her. Then the two hurry away to search somewhere else.

  The woman waits until their footsteps die away. Then she struggles to her feet and goes over to the dumpster. She leans against the side to get her breath. “It’s safe. You can come out now.”

  The boy pops his head up and steals a glance around. “Thanks.”

  The woman nods, but doesn’t look at him.

  He climbs down to the ground and dusts himself off. Then he takes a good look at the woman. His eyes gleam with childish wonder. She doesn’t horrify him the way she does me. He just can’t understand why she’s so shabby and filthy. Maybe he’s never seen anyone like her before. Living with Mr. Fancy Pants, I can well believe it.

  He catches sight of the bag. “Is that.....is that drugs?”

  The woman looks down at the bag like she’s never seen it before in her life. She casts a quick peek at the boy’s wondering face. Anyone could read a world of wisdom in that face, and he doesn’t even know it.

  The woman nods, but she won’t face him. Then she puffs herself up and flings the bag into the dumpster. She guides the boy away with her hand on his shoulder. “Come here and sit down. I want to talk to you.” He hesitates and tries to pull away. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I just saved you from those men. Come with me. I want to help you.”

  “Who are you?”

  She has to think about that one for a minute. “My name is Michelle, Michelle Watkins. What’s yours?”

  The boy pulls his head down between his shoulders. “I’m Cory Bastion. I live at 27 Fairview Terrace, but I can’t go back there.”

  “Well, Cory Bastion from 27 Fairview Terrace,” she replies, “I won’t make you go back there, but you have to sit down here and tell me what this is all about. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

  He lets her lead him to the wall, where she sits him down next to her. She coughs a few times. “Now tell me what’s going on. Why were those men looking for you?”

  He stares down at his hands. “I guess they work for my father.”

  Her eyes widen. Then she nods. “Are you a runaway, then?”

  His head shoots up. “You don’t understand. He tried to kill me.”

  “Kill you! What for?”

  “I hacked into his computer,” the boy says. “I didn’t really know what I was doing until it was too late. I found out he planned to steal money from a bunch of people at the bank where he works. He had it all planned out, except I got the evidence on disk.” He pulls a memory stick out of his pocket and shows it to her.

  “You better go to the police.”

  “My father is a rich banker,” he tells her. “The Police Chief is a good friend of his. The police will make me go back to him, and if I do that, I’m as good as dead.”

  “So what do you plan to do?” Michelle asks. “You can’t hide in that dumpster forever.”

  “I planned to go to my mom’s house.”

  Michelle brightens up. “Where does she live?”

  “Portland, Oregon.”

  Michelle stares at him. Then she laughs until she starts coughing again. Cory watches in disbelief. “Are you all right?”

  Michelle chokes on her own coughing. “I’ll take you to a place where you can spend the night. Then maybe we can figure out how to get you to Portland.”

  She has trouble getting to her feet. Cory’s on his feet long before and has to wait for her to steady herself against the wall. Finally, she heads out of the alley.

  I can’t wait any longer. If I’m going to help this kid, I have to do it now. I can’t let some half-wasted junkie lead him off to heaven knows where, where heaven knows what could happen to his father's henchmen.

  I jump out into the alley in front of them. “Stop!”

  Michelle draws back, and Cory stares at me with wide eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Aimee Springfield. You don’t know me. I work at the bank. Your father, Nicholas Bastion, is my boss.”

  Cory starts back in horror and tries to get away.

  I hold up my hand to him. “I’m not here to hurt you. I was standing in the garden outside your house when your father shot at you and tried to kill you. I saw the whole thing, and I heard what you said to Michelle just now about why he’s after you. Whatever you decide to do and wherever you decide to go, you’ll need a witness.”

  Cory steals a glance at Michelle. She frowns at me with her dirt-streaked face. Then she nods at Cory. “So what do you suggest I do? I can’t go to the Police.”

  “I’ll take you to your mom’s in Portland. I have a car. We can be there in a few days, and those guys won’t know where you are. Your dad probably doesn’t have contacts with the Portland Police the way he does here . You can tell them your story, and I’ll back you up.”

  He thinks it over. “All right. Where’s your car?”

  “It’s back down the street. I parked down the block from your dad’s.”

  Michelle interrupts. “That’s a good plan, but it will be dar
k soon, and it could take a while to get your car. I know a safe place we can spend the night here. We can get your car and leave in the morning.”

  I’m not so sure about that. “How do you know those guys won’t find us there?”

  She cracks a crooked grin. “When you see the place, you’ll know, too.”

  Chapter 3

  Michelle leads the way through several disreputable alleys scattered with human debris of every kind. At last, she ducks into a derelict warehouse and climbs a rickety flight of stairs. Cory follows her with me bringing up the rear. I keep an eye out for anyone tailing us.

  The second floor of the building opens out with the last dusky light of sunset coming through high windows at the other end. People cover the whole floor from wall to wall on sleeping bags, blankets, old mattresses―anything they can come up with. Coughing, crying, talking, and laughing fill the air. I stare into the room. I wouldn’t believe a place like this could exist if I didn’t see it for myself.

  Michelle chuckles when she sees the expression on my face. “See what I mean? Even if they found this place―which they won’t―they wouldn’t find us in this crowd.”

  She wades into the room. Cory and I pick our way between the beds until Michelle finds two empty mattresses in a corner on the floor. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  I sit down next to Cory. He hugs his knees to his chest, but he doesn’t dare look around. He gazes down at the floor in misery.

  I try to cheer him up. “I’m sorry about all this. I know you must be scared, but we’re going to do what we can to help you.”

  He doesn’t look up. “Thanks.”

  That didn't work out too well, so I try again. “Michelle seems nice, even if she is a junkie.”

  He nods.

  I can’t think of anything else to say, so I start babbling about myself. “I guess that job at the bank wasn’t worth as much as I thought it was. Deciding to flirt with the bank manager probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Now that’s what I call a stupid mistake.”

  “That was not a stupid mistake,” he blurts out. “A stupid mistake was me choosing to live with my dad instead of my mom after they split up. That was a stupid mistake.”

  “So why did you do it? Why didn’t you go with your mom? Don’t you like her?”

  “I wanted to hurt her for leaving my dad. I thought she abandoned him, and I wanted to punish her. I was wrong. Now I understand why she didn’t want to live with him. I wish I’d figured it out sooner.”

  “Do you regret hacking into your dad’s computer?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t,” he replies, “but I’m glad I finally know the truth about him. No one but me knows what he planned to do. Maybe I can stop him.”

  Just then, Michelle comes back, but it takes me a second to recognize her. She’s cleaned herself up and changed her clothes. I would never know it was the same person. She’s cut off all her matted hair and combed it to one side. Underneath all that dirt, she actually has a nice face, and she’s not as old as I first thought. She can’t be much older than me, although all the years of drugs and hard living certainly took their toll on her face. All in all, she’s not half bad looking, with long, lean limbs and angular shoulders.

  She’s wearing clean jeans and a blue T-shirt with a black windbreaker over it. She smiles at me and combs her hair off her forehead with her fingers. “What do you think? Not too shabby, huh?”

  I nod. “Not at all.”

  She sits down next to me on the mattress. “I guess it’s time I cleaned myself up. I never had any reason to before.”

  “How long have you been on the streets?”

  She shrugs. “Who knows? Five years, I guess, ever since I dropped out of college.”

  My head shoots up. “You went to college?”

  “You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but yeah, I got a scholarship to Chicago University. I hadn’t been there two weeks when I got hooked on cocaine. I made it through three years before the addiction caught up with me, and that was the end of that. It broke my mother’s heart.”

  “Have you seen your family since you dropped out?”

  She shakes her head. “I couldn’t face them.”

  “Maybe you could do it, now that you’re cleaned up.”

  “I had a nice childhood,” she says. “My parents did everything to raise me right. I would have to be a lot cleaner than this to show up around them after I threw it back in their faces.”

  “What do you mean, a lot cleaner than this? You look all right.”

  “I mean,” she replies, “I would have to be clean on the inside. I would have to quit the drugs.”

  “You threw them in the dumpster. I saw you. Does that mean you quit?”

  “I’ve thrown them in the dumpster dozens of times. I always go back to them.” She sighs. “I start thinking about my family and I get mad. I fight the urge to get high, but I always lose in the end. I would have to beat them for good before I dared go home again.”

  “There must be a way. Maybe I can help you with that.”

  She squints at me. “How would you do that?”

  “I don’t know, but there must be a way.”

  She leans back on the mattress and rests her head on her elbow. “It would take a miracle.”

  I turn back to Cory. “I guess we’re spending the night here. I wish we had some blankets to make you comfortable, but we’ll just have to make the best of it.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need blankets. I’m just glad to be safe.”

  Michelle speaks up. “You couldn’t be safer than you are here.”

  “I wonder what will happen when we leave tomorrow,” Cory muses. “Those guys will follow us.”

  “They’ll have to track us down first,” I tell him. “Now tell me more about what you found on your dad’s computer.”

  “He had some embezzlement scheme going. He installed a spider program on his computer that grazed pennies from hundreds of accounts and siphoned them off to an shelter offshore.”

  “How did you find it? What were you doing hacking your dad’s computer in the first place?”

  He looks away. He’s ashamed of it now. “I just wanted to see how far I could go, how good I really was. My friend hacks some files on the school computer and changed his grades. I wanted to show him up, so I hacked my dad’s connection to the bank. At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I found a bunch of boring financial stuff I didn’t understand. Then I found a file labeled in red and protected with a password. It took me a long time to break that password, but I did it in the end.”

  “And that’s when you found the spider program?”

  He nods. “I realized that, if he got away with it, he would be able to pull off the greatest bank robbery in history without setting foot in a bank. I copied the file and the program onto a memory stick, but I guess I left traces on his computer.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I went back to working on my homework. A few hours later, my dad called me downstairs. I could tell by his voice he was angry. I thought, ‘If he gives me any static at all, I’ll threaten to expose him’. So I put the memory stick in my pocket and went downstairs. I guess you know the rest.”

  Darkness falls, and the warehouse has no power, so we all settle down for a long night. I don’t get much sleep, what with all the coughing and hacking from every corner of the room. Sometime around midnight, something shakes me awake. I rub my eyes when I realize the bed isn’t shaking after all. Michelle huddles next to me with her arms clutched around her shoulders. She shudders from head to foot, and sweat soaks her clothes. Her hands tremble, and she grinds her teeth.

  I roll over to face her, but I don’t dare touch her. “Are you okay?”

  She mutters through her gritted teeth. “Gotta.....gotta get....a fix.....Get my stuff...hurry!”

  “You threw it in the dumpster. Don’t you remember, Michelle?”

  “Gotta....gotta get it.....
gotta get a fix. Hurry!”

  I take hold of her shoulders. “Fight it, Michelle. Fight the urge to poison yourself.”

  Wordless shaking and teeth rattling answer me.

  She’s not arguing, so maybe I have a chance to encourage her. “Don’t throw your life away anymore, Michelle. This is your chance to break free of it, once and for all. Hold out a little longer, at least until the withdrawals wear off.”

  Her head snaps up, and she fixes me with wild eyes. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, Aimee. Don’t you remember me from last night? Let me help you. Don’t get high. Fight it. You’re strong enough to beat it this time.”

  She whimpers under her breath. “I can’t! It’s too strong.”

  I shake her by the shoulders. I’m as desperate as she is. “You can! I know you can. Think of your family. Think how wonderful it will be to see your parents again. Think how you’ll be able to hold your head up around them and tell them how you beat this addiction. Don’t give in! Hold out a little longer, and the worst will pass.”

  She clamps her eyes shut and hugs herself tighter. “Help me!”

  I put my arms around her and hold her through the shudders. “I’m here. I’ll help you. I’m not leaving. You’re not alone. You can get through this.”

  She buries her head in my chest and lets the shaking take her. She moans and cries into the night, but closer to morning, everything stops and she falls asleep. I hold her until dawn streaks through the windows. The other street people start getting up and making noise.

  Cory rolls over and scratches his head. He sees Michelle asleep and smiles at me. “I’m going to get my car,” I whisper. “Keep an eye on her until I get back.”

  I hurry out the place and take a deep breath of the fresh air. It’s a perfect autumn morning. Too bad the bad guys are after us, so I can’t enjoy it. I race back to Fairview Terrace, but I don’t see any meatheads.

  I get in my car, and my heart patters when I start the engine. I weave through the streets and pull up outside the warehouse. I recline the passenger seat and run back upstairs to find Cory and Michelle where I left them.