I bring the slippers and a hat up to the counter. The man studies me for a moment, taking in my chopped-off hair, the makeup, the MTA coat, the dress, my disgusting bare feet, and I know in a second he’s going to pick up the phone and call the cops. He surprises me, though, and asks. “You want socks?”
I sigh gratefully. “Mister, that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
“What color?” he asks, gesturing to the hanging strip of socks behind him. I’m not sure why socks warrant the extra security of being kept behind the counter, but I’m not about to ask.
This time, I can feel the darkness coming. I grab on to the counter as my vision narrows to pinpricks, and then to nothing. My brain takes a second to catch up when I come to. The man behind the counter is saying something. He looks annoyed. “Color?” he asks again.
“Um . . .” I look down at the blue slippers. “Purple, I guess?”
He nods and pulls down the socks, handing them to me. Thankfully, they’re knee-highs, but unthankfully, they are decorated with hearts and bunnies that are missewn, so both look like they’re bleeding.
“Wow, they feel so good,” I moan happily once I’ve pulled them on. They’re thin, cheap polyester for sure, but they’re warmer than nothing. And once I have the ugly slippers on over them, the feeling starts to come again to my toes.
I buy a giant bottle of water from the fridge by the counter and drain it all before I’ve even left the store. When I lower the bottle, I see the man watching me with wide eyes.
“Thirsty,” I tell him, handing him the empty bottle. “Could you please trash this for me?”
He nods, takes the bottle, and watches me leave.
CHAPTER 4
REMEMBERING
Rehab was all right. I guess.
My doctor was Dr. Friedman. We met every day. She smelled like campfire.
Technically the Center for New Beginnings wasn’t even really rehab, though I would never tell Seemy that. She’d never let me forget it if she found out I went to rehab lite, or that I kind of liked it. What kind of loser likes fake rehab? The thing is, once I stopped feeling like my guts had been pulled out through my nose, the feeling I had most when I first got there was relief. There was no one to perform for at New Beginnings. There wasn’t anybody I had to be other than myself. And it wasn’t like I had to go through some trite I don’t even know who I am! type thing. I knew who I was. I just didn’t know who I was without Seemy. I had six weeks to find out.
“Seemy says I’m just having a little Nanapocalypse.”
Dr. Friedman raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, which meant she wanted me to keep talking. Instead I stared at her eyebrows. They were furry and wild and almost met in the middle of her face, and I’d gotten really attached to them in my three days at New Beginnings. I wanted to know if they were long enough to braid, and I admired her for keeping them wild. Most people couldn’t pull a look like that off without looking unkempt, but Dr. Friedman had an amazing superhero-size chin that balanced her eyebrows perfectly. She favored oversize, deconstructed sweaters and skirts in muted purples and olive green, and tasseled scarves as big as tablecloths wrapped around and around her neck, making a little nest for her giant chin.
We sat in her office, which she’d outfitted with lots of tapestry throw pillows in earth tones. And ferns. Lots of ferns. There was a burnt-orange rug with fibers so long it bordered on shag. The wooden shelves were lined with clothbound books and exotic-looking knickknacks. She kept the overhead light off, used lamps with heavy shades instead. The place was so pointedly warm and inviting it put me to sleep the first time I came in. Then again, I think I may still have been drunk.
I got tired of staring at her eyebrows and shifted in my chair, the movement pulling at the stitches in my forehead. I winced, ran my fingers lightly over them, trying to count the raised ridges of surgical thread.
“Do your stitches hurt?” Dr. Friedman finally asked.
I smirked at her. “Would you give me something if they did?”
“I can ask the shift supervisor to give you Tylenol.”
“With codeine?” I asked, with fake hope.
“What do you think?”
I shrugged, ran my fingers over the stitches again. “I thought they’d be bigger.”
The eyebrows went back up, and she waited for me to continue.
“They said I had fourteen stitches. I thought it’d look more impressive or something.”
“Impressive to whom?”
I cleared my throat to keep from groaning aloud. “Me. Nobody. Everybody. I don’t know.”
“What about Seemy, your friend you just mentioned? Would you want them to impress her?”
“Best friend,” I corrected her, even though I wasn’t sure it was true anymore. She waited for me to continue. I wondered if she ever counted up the minutes she spent waiting for people to keep talking. I wondered if she could fall asleep with her eyes open. “And I don’t know . . . I guess.”
“You guess what?”
“I guess it’d be cool if my stitches impressed her.” I squirmed a little in my chair, uncomfortable with the honesty.
“Why is that?”
“Because maybe then she’d believe I need to be here.”
“She doesn’t believe you need help?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t drink as much as she does. She thinks I’m a fake.”
“A fake what?”
Her question caught me off guard, and I laughed uncomfortably. “That’s a really good question. Um . . . a fake drunk? A fake friend? I don’t know. . . .” I trailed off, and we sat there in silence for a long time. “She wants me to be dangerous. Wants us to be dangerous,” I finally said.
“Dangerous how?”
“The way we dress, the way we act, the way we drink. Everything. But it’s never enough. I’m never dangerous enough to keep her.”
“To keep her what?”
I looked at Dr. Friedman. “Just to keep her. Interested. Happy. I don’t know.”
“And this is the friend who gave your overdose a nickname?”
I shifted in my seat. “It sounds stupid when you say it.”
“And how does it sound when you say it?”
“Funny.”
Dr. Friedman nodded. “And sitting here, with me, do you find this funny?”
Part of me wanted to laugh, just because she looked so serious when she asked the question. But I told the truth instead. “It’s not funny at all.”
“Well,” she said, smiling so wide her eyebrows stretched out. “That’s a start.”
CHAPTER 5
TODAY
I don’t want to go back toward the subway. The cops might be looking for me. So I take the long way to school. I know I need to ditch MTA guy’s jacket as soon as I can, but I can’t bear to part with it.
I sing to keep warm, using the rhythm of my slippers slap-slap-slapping on the sidewalk.
I used to go to high school across town, on First Avenue. It was fine, I guess. I had friends there, but not many, and we weren’t that close. I used to count them, my friends, and it always felt like a light handful, a number with enough room to shake around in your palm. Seemy, though, she filled my hands, both of them. And I didn’t need anybody else.
Mom didn’t know I was skipping school last year until after the Nanapocalypse. She called the school to tell them I was going to rehab and would be out, and they told her I couldn’t come back even if I made up the work because I’d missed too many days already. It wasn’t even that many days. Five, tops. Two in the fall, and three in the spring, after we’d found the carriage house.
Tick goes to kindergarten next door to my old school now, which I feel bad about because Mom was so excited when he got assigned to that school because it meant I could take him every day. So Mom has to rush there in the morning for drop-off and pay someone else to bring him back home at the end of the day.
&n
bsp; But not today, not this week. He’s staying with Dad while Mom’s away, so he’s bringing Tick into the city every morning and picking him up in the afternoon. Dad asked if I wanted to stay with him too, but I said no.
Mom was on the phone all summer, getting me into a new high school on Eighteenth Street. It’s not as good of a school as my old one, but we were lucky to find a place close to home that would take me. There is a set of black double doors at the top of the school’s front steps. And when I turn the corner, I see they’re already closed. That means I’ll have to ring the buzzer and get the security guard to let me in. That means I may have missed homeroom, maybe even first period, and that means they’ll report me to my mom, and that means everything is going to split open again.
I scuff up the stairs as fast as my slippers will allow and jam my finger on the buzzer. There’s no response.
“Oh, come on!” I groan aloud, buzzing again.
Finally a youngish guy in a blue security guard uniform and hat opens the door but blocks me as I try to hurry through. “ID?” he asks.
Realization floods me with panic.
“Where’s my bag?” I ask him and myself at the same time. He snorts at me. I spin in a circle, like maybe I’ve been wearing my backpack the whole time and just didn’t notice. “Please. Please, this can’t be happening.” My voice is shaking, and I feel like I’m going to scream myself to pieces right here on the front steps.
My backpack has everything in it. My cell phone, my wallet, my school ID, my textbooks. If I lost my backpack, I can’t just walk into school right now, change my clothes, and pretend like this morning never happened. Even if I try to replace everything, my mom will find out. I know she will. And everything will unravel. That stupid backpack is the only thing standing between me moving on with my life and everything going to shit.
“No,” I say. My voice is too loud. “It’s fine. Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll go inside and get a day pass at the front office. Then I’ll go home at lunch and get my ID, because I’m sure that’s where my backpack is. Right? Right.”
The security guard smirks. “ID?” he says again.
“I’m late, man, can you please just let me in?” I ask, standing awkwardly with one foot on the front step and one foot inside the door.
I can feel a patch of darkness coming, like a blanket being pulled over my scalp and over my eyes. I shake my head, hard, but it does nothing. I come to and it’s only been a moment, because the guard is saying, “Don’t call me ‘man’. You need an ID to come inside.” He looks down at my feet. “And shoes.”
“Sorry, lady,” I answer, “but my ID is at home and I am wearing shoes.”
He snorts in reply. “You can’t come in without an ID.”
I can see over his shoulder into the front hall; the clock says 7:42, and that means I have exactly twenty-three minutes, until 8:05 a.m., to get to the front office without being marked late before first period starts.
“Don’t lie, you know I can get a day pass.”
“You can’t come in without—”
“Seriously”—my voice gets all whispery and high-pitched like it does right before I’m going to cry—“I’m having a really, really crummy morning, and if I don’t get into school before the next bell rings, I’m going to catch all kinds of hellfire.”
He’s not impressed, doesn’t move aside.
“Weren’t you ever a kid?” I ask.
He snorts. “Once. A lifetime and five minutes ago.”
“Good,” I say. “Then you remember how shit like being late for school can snowball. I’m just trying not to get buried, you know?” He keeps watching me, and something changes in his face, softens a little. “I’m freezing out here, man,” I whisper. “I just want to come in and go to school. How can you punish a kid for wanting to go to school?”
“Fine,” he says, moving aside, and I push past him into the warmth of the building. “Find your ID!” he calls after me.
CHAPTER 6
REMEMBERING
The day I met Seemy was a Saturday. The first Saturday after school let out for the summer. The first Saturday of being in the netherworld between sophomore and junior year.
I woke up with Tick’s butt in my face. He was sleeping on his side in just his underwear, bent like a paper clip, knees curled up so his feet pressed into my belly, the rest of him doubled over, hugging my pillow.
“My hair conditioner stopped working last night,” Tick informed me, yawning and rolling over to face me. “So I came and slept with you.” He shivered a little. “Now I’m cold.”
I picked some sleep out of the corner of his eye and flicked it across the room and then pulled the blanket up over him, leaned up to switch the AC to low. “Why didn’t you go sleep with Mom?”
“She was working,” he said, “and I wanted to sleep.”
I stretched. “Well, at least she’s working.”
Tick nodded and then asked, “Is it still summer?”
I snorted. “School just ended three days ago.”
He blinked at me for a second and then said, “Oh.”
Tick’s kind of a melancholy kid. Maybe not melancholy, just serious. He’s a thinker, my mom says. And now I was watching him wrinkle up his little brow and think so hard about summer vacation that he started to drool a little bit. I let him think, and let my own mind wander. Our home is a quiet home. Once I read a profile of this comedian and she said, “Growing up, our house was filled with laughter.” I read that and thought, Our house is full of thinking. Back when we all spent time at Dad’s, before Mom started making excuses for having to get back to the city whenever we visited, Dad would tease Mom and Tick and me. He would say, “I have been sitting here watching you all not talk to each other for the past five minutes. You’re sitting right next to one another! Are you communicating telepathically?” Tick would smile shyly, jump onto Dad so he could burrow into him, and say, “Dad, we’re just thinking!” Dad would always ask what we were thinking about, which struck us as a weird question. We never asked one another that. If we thought of something important, we’d say it.
I cuddled up next to Tick and thought about how summer was here, and I was still me and that it kind of broke my heart. I wanted to shake myself off, like a dog coming out of water. Sometimes the urge to scream was so strong I would bite at the collar of my T-shirt until the feeling passed.
It wasn’t that I hated myself. I just hated how afraid I was. I towered over most people, so I slouched, which barely helped at all. I wore the most basic, boring clothes I could find, to avoid standing out even more. I’d inherited my mom’s voice, with its volume and texture that turned heads from across the room. The fact was that I lived in fear of people looking at me, and at the same time all I wanted to do was stand out.
Tick sighed. “Last night I dreamed it was winter and we were putting the plastic stuff on the windows to keep out the wind, except it wasn’t plastic, it was cereal.”
“That was just a dream. It’s still summer for a long time yet.”
“Oh. Okay.”
From the other end of the apartment there was the click and squeak of Mom’s bedroom door opening. “There’s Mom,” Tick said, smiling. Neither of us moved. We stayed there, looking at each other and listening to the floors creak as she made her way through our apartment. The Tick is six years old and didn’t get the sort of burly physicality that strikes the women in our family. He looks like his dad. Slight, wiry, a smile that seems almost too big for his face. He has our hair, though. Unruly and puffy and sticking out in all directions. Mom did this awesome drawing of the three of us for our Christmas card last year. It’s just our silhouettes, but with our crazy hair you can totally tell it’s us. She called the picture our family crest. The only bummer was that it made the Tick cry because Dad wasn’t in it.
We listened to Mom make her way through our apartment. It took a while because our apartment’s huge, but not because we’re super rich. We’re on the top floor of an old br
ick building in SoHo that used to be filled with garment shops. Mom and her friends moved in right after college, but she was the only one who would sign the lease. Everyone else moved out eventually, but Mom stayed on, and since the place is rent-controlled, she says the only way she’s leaving is feetfirst. When she and her friends first moved in, the place was a huge, raw, open space. There was a pile of half-finished bras that reached the ceiling in the middle of the floor. They built walls to form art studios and bedrooms, put in a bathroom and a kitchen. They did everything themselves, even some of the electrical, which is why when you flush the toilet, the light in the kitchen flickers. When everyone else moved out, Mom tore down some of the walls to make a large art studio, three bedrooms, and a giant living room.
The floors slant and it’s drafty in winter and the grout in our bathroom is falling out in chunks and most of our furniture is stuff from flea markets upstate, but Mom says it doesn’t matter as long as it’s clean and filled with love. Barf.
The building owners have been trying for years to get us to move out, but Mom’s got a really good lawyer and says we’re here to stay. They renovated the whole building around us. On all of the floors below us are condos, sleek and clean with metal and glass and “architectural” bathroom fixtures, which means square sinks. On our floor, the top floor, they won’t even replace the lightbulbs in the moldy-smelling hallway outside the elevators. We do that ourselves.
“There you are,” Mom said as she opened my bedroom door. “Did you two keep cool last night?”
She walked over and sat on the foot of my bed, and Tick immediately crawled into her lap. She was dressed already, which meant she’d worked all night without sleeping and then showered and dressed to wake herself up.
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