Dark Humanity

by Gwynn White

  This is important because at some point you’re gonna rest your head on your pillow and know that you are sleeping on concrete and you’re gonna start crying. Don’t let anybody see it cause it’ll make you a target. But it will happen. You’ll get so upset about your life and realize that you maybe wished you’d finished the school year or gone to the school swim party at least once, just to know what it would have been like.

  This is when your goal or dream or wish becomes really important to your survival because otherwise there’s no point getting up the next day except for the alcohol and drugs.

  Every street kid has one. What’s yours going to be? Maybe right now, it’s only to get out, to get some adventure, to get free of whatever beatings your stepdad did every night.

  Okay, but now you’re out, so now what?

  Me and my friends, we have a plan. We’re going to save up enough money to buy some land, we’re thinking maybe in Arizona where it’s cheap and warm. Or maybe in the State of Jefferson, in the woods with other people who understand that society has it all wrong. It’s going to be our own place. We’ll grow a garden and brew our own beer and live together and no one can kick us off it just for breathing because we’ll own it.

  Chapter Three

  “We have to run,” Gabbi said.

  “I know,” Spencer said.

  “We have to get out of here. People are going to notice,” she said.

  “I know,” Spencer said.

  I sat hunched over on the curb. I’d puked my guts out after Ano had stopped me from choking Jimmy.

  Jimmy hovered on the far side of the group now, next to Spencer. They talked over me as if I wasn’t even there.

  Gabbi opened her mouth again.

  Spencer held up his hand. “Gabbi, I know it. Just hold on.”

  She closed her mouth and crossed her arms.

  “If they knew we were going to be at the fitness center—how did they know?” Leaf said.

  “They didn’t,” Spencer said. “Officer Hanley knows where most of our regular haunts are. He got lucky we were at the one he checked out.”

  “What are we going to do about Mary?” Ricker said.

  “She’s fine,” Gabbi said.

  “She’s not fine,” Ricker responded.

  “I am,” I said.

  “You are not,” Ricker said.

  “I was chased, almost taken prisoner, beaten up,” I said, my throat croaking from the stomach acid that had burned it. “I think that would make anyone a little wacko. God knows you’ve had your moments, Ricker. Do you need me to remind you?”

  Ricker ignored my jab. “What about the puking? What about Jimmy?”

  “I’ve done more running in the last three hours than in the last three weeks. So I puked. It feels better now. I got angry at Jimmy. Not at Jimmy. I just got angry, and he was there.”

  “You don’t get angry,” Gabbi said.

  “Yes she does,” Spencer said quietly. “She used to.”

  Ano sat next to me and pulled me to his side. I leaned into him and didn’t care that everyone noticed Ano and I were having a moment.

  “Mary,” Leaf said, a warning note in his voice.

  Six pairs of eyes turned on me as if I had already been convicted of murder. “What?”

  “Your mouth,” Ricker said. “There’s white, leftover puke or something—”

  I swept my hand across and felt something wet, like I’d drooled in my sleep. For a long second I could only think about choking and didn’t know if I was about to choke myself or them. Them, me. It almost didn’t matter.

  “I want to get out of town. That’s all I want,” I said. “Get me out of town and drop me off at a clinic. But not here. Please. Not here.”

  Ricker looked to Spencer and Leaf. They were the unspoken leaders, especially when I was down for the count. The van was a tough loss, our extra clothes, basic supplies, a fast way out of town, all gone. But it was only stuff. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. Though I suspected it would take more than a simple impound fee to get it back this time.

  Spencer raised an eyebrow. Leaf nodded in assent. Somehow they had decided, even though they hadn’t spoken a word to each other.

  I should have been able to guess that decision, would have normally helped make it, but couldn’t think what it should be at that moment. Ano pressed his chin against my hair. I decided I would enjoy that feeling instead of worrying about things I couldn’t control.

  “We might have lost the van,” Leaf said, “but there’s still the bikes.”

  “But you just said they’ll be checking out all our normal haunts,” Ricker said. “We need to hitchhike or catch a bus or jump a train.”

  “The bikes are on the way to the trains,” Spencer said. “If we get to them, we get out of town faster, maybe get some info.”

  “If they’re hot?” Ricker said.

  “Then we’ll keep going, idiot,” Spencer said.

  Spencer broke us up into groups. Gabbi, me and Ano in one. Spencer and the rest in the other. They didn’t dare leave Jimmy with me and this made me want to cry. But they were right to do it. Ano and Gabbi could handle the worst in me, if it came to that. We’d done it for each other often enough. This was one of those hard times that sometimes happened on the street. They would know what to do.

  We took the back streets, the side roads, the empty lots, the alleys, the parking lots, the open fields. We hurried onto the bike trail, our preferred way to get from one side of the city to the other when public transportation wasn’t running. It was easy, flat, beautiful, and nobody yelled at us to get out. We could pop into dozens of neighborhoods from it.

  The cooler air rising off the river washed over me, smooth, refreshing, soothing my thoughts and emotions. The air smelled muckier here, but still cleaner than the streets. The sun had long disappeared over the horizon, all the colors gone, leaving only gray light behind. Vines climbed the oak trees that lined the river. Open spots revealed fields of yellow grass cropped short for fire control. We weren’t that far from the bike shop now, but we had to walk it and I had a limp.

  I asked Gabbi for the phone and typed out another post as we went. It didn’t take me long because there wasn’t much left to say. I used to burst with things to write, and now this little message seemed so hard.

  “If anyone shows up,” Gabbi said, “there aren't a lot of hiding places on the trail.”

  Her words interrupted my momentary focus. The trauma of the day crowded back in. I wished she hadn’t said that. “There’s the bushes,” I said. “The trees, the grass on that side. We could cross the damn river if we had to.” My voice rose at the end. My head started pounding, like someone was knocking my skull against a wall. I closed my eyes and saw red, bright, fire-engine red. A whole wall of it and my head banged against it.

  “Mary?” Gabbi’s voice from far away.

  “Maybe Ricker is right,” Ano said.

  The thought of being left behind, dumped off at the emergency room for the moon suits to find me while they all got out of town, this took the rest of my stomach. I vomited saliva onto the bike trail.

  I wiped my mouth on my arm, and then tapped to publish the post in an hour. It was my last little act of hope—maybe things would turn out all right and I could delete it before it went live.

  The two of them stood back a few feet, looking in different directions as if keeping watch, or not wanting to look, probably both.

  “I’m better now,” I said. “Don’t dump me.”

  Ano flinched.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Gabbi said. She took the phone I offered.

  I waited for Ano to say something. He looked down the trail as if he could see a thousand miles away. “Do you need help walking?”

  I imagined one of them touching me, helping me, and feared it might cause an explosion. “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. Throwing up helped.” I had always made it a point never to lie to them, but that was a lie.

  I used al
l my strength to step down the trail again. We paused at the incline that would take us from river level up and over the levee wall. I thought maybe if I stayed still and closed my eyes for a moment the pain in my head would lessen.

  It didn’t.

  I forced one step over the other. A hand reached out to grab my elbow, as if to steady me.

  I snarled. “Don’t touch me.”

  The hand disappeared as if bitten by a snake.

  I made it up the twenty-foot mountain and paused at the top, breathing hard, this time with my eyes open because it hadn’t done any good to keep them closed. The winding levee road disappeared between the trees, and everything was gray, gray, gray. The brilliant sunset that would have cast a pink glow on the river water, the clouds, the trees, the faces of Gabbi and Ano as they waited to see what I would do next—long gone.

  I wanted to curl up and burst into tears and tell them to please take the pain in my head away and take away my upset stomach and maybe it would have been nice to finish high school at least. I think I would have liked to go to prom once. Just to see.

  “Wait here,” Gabbi said finally, she dug the toe of her shoe into the gravel, disturbing a line of black ants. “I’ll get the bikes.”

  “No,” I said, finding my voice, shaking my head to clear it a little. I wondered if I had any more spittle on my lips but I was too tired to check. “I’ll go.” I was dangerous and they needed to leave me behind. They’d understand that eventually. Plus it would be nice to see Ike one more time. He’d always allowed us to change our flat tires, and effortlessly argued with me about prices and borrowing tools from his shop in order for Ano and Gabbi to modify the bikes the way we wanted—a cross between utilitarian practicality and Mad Max flare—fixies, because brakes and gear shifts always failed, streamers and bells and trick bars, because being runaways didn’t mean we lost our sense of style.

  We entered the neighborhood of ranch-style houses with big front yards and double garages and lawn furniture that cost more than Spencer’s van was worth. The shop was one block in. The sign on the front, Ike’s Bikes, was faded wood with red lettering and a red border. A little hole-in-the-wall where bikes filled the space from floor to ceiling, requiring you to bend around tires hanging at face level. Ike also had an inventory building in the back almost as big as the store, with a mini-kitchen and a bathroom that he allowed us to use sometimes.

  Ike was out front, smoking, almost like he was waiting for someone.

  “Just stay here,” I said.

  Gabbi squatted onto the ground, against a redwood tree's trunk so large the three of us couldn’t hold our hands around it. The bushes were thick here, against the edge of someone’s property, obscuring us from the bike shop, but providing a clear line of sight. Ano remained standing. It didn’t matter what I said, he would follow whether I liked it or not.

  I stepped into the street.

  Someone in a navy jacket with that bright CDC lettering stepped around the corner of Ike’s Bikes.

  I lost my nerve and crouched behind a bush. The two of them spoke. Ike stubbed out his cigarette and went back inside. Navy jacket went around back.

  Gabbi sucked in her breath. “We’re not getting our bikes today. Where’s Spencer and the others?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ano said. “If they are caught, they are caught. If they are not, we should move and catch up to them.”

  “But where are they?” Gabbi said.

  “On their way to the trains,” I said. I told myself to stand up and walk across the street and around the shop and turn myself in. I didn’t move. The air blurred into wavy lines. Gabbi sidled across the dirt and crouched next to me. Heat came off her body in waves. Reddish waves that pounded into me and wouldn’t stop. She needed to back off. She needed to stop throwing this heat at me like a weapon, didn’t she know I could stand up for myself now? I wasn’t going to take it, I just wasn’t, I just wasn’t anymore—

  A rumble started deep in my chest and moved into my legs and arms and head. The pain woke me up. The relentless, pounding pain in my head that made me feel like someone was bouncing my skull off a wall.

  I opened my eyes and saw people. The backs of people. Sitting two by two, in plaids, solids, tanks and t-shirts. I sat up. My head had been bouncing off a glass wall.

  The window of a bus.

  Through the bus mirror, I noticed the driver was an older lady, in her fifties, plump, gray-haired, hawkish eyes and a frown permanently set into her sagging skin. She caught my eye and I looked away, not wanting to be noticed, because getting noticed would surely get us into more trouble.

  Gabbi sat at the aisle, cradling her hand in her lap. Ano sat next to me. There was a peacefulness to the hum of the engine, the rhythm of the tires, the shake of the bus. I should tell him. I should tell him and then he would help me figure this all out and maybe we could really belong to each other.

  I reached for Ano’s hand. He froze as if I were a monster about to attack. I grabbed his hand anyway. When nothing bad happened, he relaxed and squeezed back.

  Gabbi shifted. As if in slow motion, a drop of bright red liquid splashed to the metal floor.

  I dropped Ano’s hand. “What did I do?” I carefully pushed out the words because the act of talking caused my throat a great deal of pain.

  Gabbi didn’t answer for a long moment. When she did she didn’t look at me. “You passed out.”

  “Why are you holding your hand?”

  This time she glanced at me, but still she hesitated. Gabbi wasn’t one to hesitate. She was one to act rashly, to speak her mind, however cruelly, to confront a person with the brutally honest truth of their stupidity.

  My stomach began acting up on me again.

  “We told the bus driver you were drunk and we were getting you home safe.”

  I grabbed for her hand and she flinched.

  She flinched like Ano had.

  I drew back as if I’d touched a hot stove. I locked my fingers together in my lap. Ano stared wide-eyed back and forth between the two of us.

  “Show me,” I said.

  Gabbi shook her head.

  “Show her,” Ano said.

  She separated her hands and peeled back a piece of cloth I realized had been torn from the bottom of her shirt.

  On the backside of her right hand were bite marks, most shallow enough to have only created bruising, several deep enough that they wept blood.

  She covered the wound back up. “It’s not a big deal. We all flip out sometimes.”

  A roar of air rushed to my ears. I had done this thing to Gabbi. I had bitten her and I couldn’t even remember doing it. And now Gabbi, fearless Gabbi, the one who had never been scared, not after that one night in the Florida squat, after we had met her and taken her in and showed her how the world worked, now she had the same look on her face as that first night. That same look of helplessness.

  And I had put it there.

  “Ano?” I said.

  “This is our stop,” he said, talking to the window.

  The bus slowed, everyone leaned forward. The air pistons released and the bus doors swung open with a jerk as the hydraulics lowered it several inches closer to the ground.

  Ano helped me up, except he avoided using his left arm, and so I knew. I had injured both of them and couldn’t remember any of it.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Ano said, but his eyes revealed the lie in his words.

  The passengers stared at us, at me, even though no one actually looked. It was like they were purposely not looking, like when I’d first run away and was dirty and alone on an East Coast subway, not caring where I was going as long as it was away from that house, from all of that anger, from all of that violence, and I had vowed I would never become a monster who hurt the people I cared most about.

  The bus sped away into the dark, the exhaust fumes tasting like poison on my tongue. The curb felt unsteady beneath my shoes, as if I were on an elevator that had dropped out from beneath me.
<
br />   Conversations echoed off the mansion-like interior of the train station. Murals, stained glass and architecture from a long time ago alongside plastic-molded benches and bright monitor screens showing arrival and departure times. And then the smells took over—of people, of unwashed human bodies, of perfumes and colognes and deodorants, of shampoo and hairspray, of lotion and toothpaste.

  I couldn’t hop the train. I wouldn’t. I was sick. I was hurting my friends. I was every dangerous thing to them I had once warned them about.

  And then I smelled lavender shampoo. I smelled them—my friends. Spencer and Ricker and Leaf and Jimmy.

  My body pinged as if sparked by electricity. Every cell in me lit on fire with the desire to find them and—

  I sprinted across the tile floor and out through the back exit. I sniffed the air, following their familiar scent of street sweat and fitness center shampoo. I followed the trail around the building. The back of my mind cataloged the scene—how Ano tried to hold me back, how Gabbi hovered, how several dark vans were parked in a line along the curb, how people trailed like ants from the station to the platforms, how a departing train whistled as it chugged along, slow at first and then picking up speed until it turned into a moving missile.

  There.

  Tucked against the back corner of a shed that stored tools and machinery. My friends were dark shadows against the outside of the tin wall that glinted orange from the outdoor lights. They were waiting for us.

  A keening started in my throat. My mouth filled with saliva. I ran faster.

  The wall, the ground, the trains in the background, the lights that should have been orange, my friends huddling together while backing away from me, arms outstretched as if to ward me off—everything had turned red.

  Ricker from the shoulder. Jimmy from the hand. Spencer and Leaf from the arms. Ano now from both his leg and arm.

  I fell to my knees and puked, and then kept puking when I saw the red flecks and white flesh in the first pile.