Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  Maia looks for a rack of maps, doesn’t see any. “Excuse me?” she says to the man at the register. He’s watching the girl with a wary eye, doesn’t notice her. “Excuse me?” she repeats, louder. He looks at her. “Do you have maps?”

  “Maps of what?”

  “Of, um, the area? Like a tourist map?”

  Now he’s irritated. “I look like a tourist to you, kid?” The girl is rummaging through bags of chips. “Hey!” he yells at her. “You ain’t got money. I know you kids. Come on, get the hell out of here.”

  “No crime being in the aisle,” she snaps back.

  “It is if I say it is. Get.”

  She storms up to the cash register, knocking Maia aside with the full weight of her slight body. Maia can smell her skin. Sweat and underneath it something musky and wild. “I could call the cops on you,” she hisses. “Fucking old perv.”

  The man at the register has gone from cranky to irate. “I mean it! Get the hell out of my store!”

  She lifts her chin. Despite the dirt, the ragged clothes, she looks like a queen. “I go where I want,” she says softly, and then she walks out the door. The man at the register scowls.

  “Goddamn street kids,” he mutters. “Someone oughta exterminate the lot of ’em. What kind of map you want, honey? I got a street map.”

  “You have any free maps?”

  “Free maps? Go to the goddamn library.” He stares at her in disgust. For the first time it occurs to her to wonder why the girl didn’t ask for her own map.

  “Okay,” she says. “Thanks anyway.” He snorts.

  Outside, the girl is waiting for her in an alley down the block, one foot against a brick wall. She’s smiling for real this time, a smile that’s not going anywhere. Her teeth are fetchingly crooked.

  “I didn’t get your map.”

  The girl puts both hands on her knees and hoots. Maia is bewildered by her reaction. “I bet you didn’t,” she says, still laughing. “It’s cool. Let me see your bag.”

  “No way,” Maia says. “Look, I don’t know what your deal is, but I’m going to go.”

  “Sure thing, princess. Just one minute, though.” The girl pushes off with her foot and in one swift movement reaches into Maia’s shoulder bag before she can protest. To Maia’s utter astonishment, she pulls out two bottles of beer.

  “Where did those come from?” Maia gasps.

  “You stole them.”

  “I didn’t steal anything!”

  “What did you think I was doing in there? Coloring? Come on, girl, don’t tell me you’re that dumb.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. That deserves a drink, don’t you think? Come on.” The girl takes her hand, tugs her down the alley. Maia knows to say no. Maia knows to get the hell out of here, right now, get home, never come back to this corner again as long as she lives. The girl pries the bottles’ caps off with a lighter and holds one out to Maia. “It’s just a beer,” she says gently. “It won’t bite you.” Maia accepts the bottle gingerly, as if she expects it to detonate in her hand.

  “I’m Cass,” the girl says. “Short for Cassandra. The bitch who knew everything and no one would listen to.”

  “I know who Cassandra was. I’m Maia.” She takes a sip, nearly spits it out. Beer foams over the lip of the bottle.

  “You ever even drink before?” Maia shakes her head mutely, mortified.

  “Well then. It’s a day of firsts for you.” That grin again.

  “How did you even—I mean, I didn’t even see you. You did it when you bumped into me?”

  Cass rolls her eyes. “You live near here?”

  “Up by the college.”

  “Fancy.”

  Maia shrugs. “My mom’s a professor. My dad—” She stops. What is there to say about her dad? “My dad’s a writer.”

  “Fancier and fancier.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I squat a place with some kids.”

  “You squat?” Maia imagines a roomful of dirty girls like Cass, crouched down on their haunches.

  “You know, like an abandoned building that we moved into?” Maia’s face is blank with incomprehension. “Girl, where are you from? Do you know anything?”

  “I know lots of things,” Maia says, indignant.

  “Different things than I know, I guess. Anyway, it’s an old house that no one was living in. Some people I know took it over, and I live with them.”

  “Those people back there? With the dogs?”

  “Some of them. People come and go.”

  “You said you weren’t from here.”

  “I lied. You know how it is.”

  Maia has absolutely no idea how it is, cannot begin to imagine how it is. How does this girl eat? Take baths? What does she do for money? How did she get here? Does she have parents? Where does she sleep? Does she even have a bed? Maia considers which of these questions would be appropriate, decides none of them. “Do you like it?”

  Cass shrugs, tilts her head back, finishes her beer. “Come on, princess, drink up. It’ll do you good. We’ll find some more and keep drinking.”

  Maia thinks about what time it must be, and her heart thumps in her chest. “I can’t,” she says, handing her beer to Cass. “I have to go. Really. I can’t. My mom—I can’t.” Cass looks at her again. Those cool grey eyes.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again,” she says.

  Despite herself, Maia smiles. “Sure.”

  Cass’s story is so boring she tells it to no one. Dad dead of a heart attack when she was just a kid, a series of stepdads Cass’s mom picked up somewhere between her favorite bar and her second-favorite bar. Maybe her third-favorite bar. That would explain what assholes they were. Bad grades, bad home, bad friends. Pretty soon having to lock her bedroom door at night: Bad stepdad, what a surprise. Not that the lock stopped him.

  There was a shelter for a while when she was eleven, in between stepdads one and two; stepdad one had been a hitter. He’d seemed nice enough at first. He had a real job, something at the bank. He wore suits and took her mom out to dinner and bought Cass a doll with white-blond hair and a painted-on red smirk. When he’d gotten transferred to a branch in Portland he’d told them he wanted to move as a family, and so they did. Cass’s stuffed dog next to the new doll in her pink plastic backpack, a rented truck, a new apartment with mint-green walls. And then once the both of them were stuck, once they had no place else to go, no friends, no car, and no one to talk to, he went monster. Stopped going to his job, stopped paying for anything, stopped the candy-sweet words and steak dinners. The first time he’d hit Cass’s mom was when she told him she didn’t have any money left in her savings to pay for groceries. The first time he hit Cass was when they left, in the middle of the night like secret agents, one suitcase between the two of them. Cass’s mom couldn’t afford a cab, so they walked two miles across town to the shelter, Cass’s cheek blooming with a riotous purple bruise that matched the sunrise sky. If I were in a movie, Cass thought, there would be a shot of my face, and then a shot of the clouds.

  The shelter was in a residential neighborhood, an ordinary-looking house with a yard surrounded by other ordinary houses. The neighbors gave them dirty looks when they walked to the corner store for milk. The shelter was supposed to be a secret, but the neighbors weren’t stupid. There were other women and kids who lived in the shelter. The women who worked there sat in a little office by the front door. The daytime office women were serious and wore real office clothes. They had meetings with the moms and gave them lists of places to call and appointments to keep. But the women who sat in the office at night wore cutoff shorts and T-shirts and no bras. They chewed gum and ate their dinners, which they brought from home, in the big common room with the women who lived in the shelter. They slept on a bed in the office, and if you needed cold medicine in the middle of the night you could knock softly and they would come to the door, sleepily pushing their tousled hair out of their eyes, and hand it over to you i
n a tiny cup. All of them were pretty. Some of them were in college and told Cass about their classes. Anthropology, Cass said to herself later. Chemistry. Psychology. Those were things you could do, if you were a girl like that. One of the nighttime girls had brown skin, sleek black hair, orchids tattooed across her shoulders, and a ladder of white scars that stretched from her left wrist to her left elbow. Her dinner was always sushi that she had made herself, and once she gave Cass a piece: tofu, avocado, carrot, and brown rice, none of which Cass had ever had before. The orchid girl was Cass’s favorite.

  Cass did not like the shelter, which smelled bad a lot of the time. The bathrooms were always dirty, no matter how many times they got cleaned. The mattresses had plastic covers on them that rustled when you moved, and at night the sonorous breath of too many people in too small a room kept Cass awake. The other kids went through her clothes. Sometimes the moms got in fights. Her own mom had gotten a job at a gas station half a mile away and was so worn thin with worry and weariness that Cass thought she might disappear altogether. After they had been at the shelter for a week, the orchid girl came out of the office one evening and asked Cass’s mother if she could talk to Cass for a little while. Cass had been in the office that first morning, when one of the women had asked her mother a lot of questions about her life and what had happened before they came here, so many questions that Cass had eventually fallen asleep, but not since then.

  “Cassandra,” the orchid girl said. She sat down on the floor, her back against the bed in the office, and stretched. After a moment Cass sat down next to her. She stretched, too.

  “Do you like it here so far?” asked the orchid girl. Cass considered lying; she did not want to get her mom in trouble. One of the other kids had told her that his mom had gotten kicked out of the last shelter and they had had to spend the night in an alley before his mom found a man who would pay for a hotel room. But something about the orchid girl’s face was so honest, so friendly, that Cass trusted her immediately.

  “No,” Cass said.

  “That’s pretty normal,” the orchid girl agreed. “Not the most fun, right? Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

  “I’d live on the beach,” Cass said, surprising herself. “I’d live in a little cabin on the beach. And I’d eat tofu and avocado every day. I would have a boat.”

  “A warm beach?”

  “Maybe. Well, no. I mean, the beach where I’m from. My mom took me there when I was really little. We went to the rainforest and then the ocean. It would be that beach, but warmer. So I wouldn’t need a coat.”

  The orchid girl nodded thoughtfully. “I like that. Would your mom live with you?”

  “If she wanted,” Cass said. “My mom’s okay. She’s just tired. If we lived on the beach she wouldn’t have to work. She could eat tofu and avocado, too.”

  “You must really like tofu and avocado,” the orchid girl said solemnly. Cass shot her a sidelong glance and saw she was making a joke. Cass grinned a little.

  “We could eat spaghetti, sometimes,” she said.

  The orchid girl asked her more questions: What she liked to do for fun, what was best about school, what had happened in their last house. Sometimes she wrote Cass’s answers down on a piece of paper. Had the stepdad ever done anything bad to her? What was Cass afraid of? Cass wasn’t afraid of anything, but she told the orchid girl about her dreams. She’d always had dreams that were more than dreams. She’d dream of glass breaking, and the next day her mother would drop a bowl in the kitchen, curse as it shattered. She’d dream of a raft of dying animals, floating in a dark sea, and in the morning she’d find a newly-dead kitten moldering next to the sidewalk, eyeless, its matted fur crawling with maggots. Sometimes she dreamed things that she knew would not come to pass for a long time to come: herself in a bright kitchen, its shelves lined with mason jars, tendrilly plants hanging from baskets. Herself on a beach, a white-sand beach, not the one she knew. Sun warm on her bare arms, the ocean flat and glassy before her. Herself in a vast apartment, chandeliers filled with candles hanging from the high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows showing a view of a dark sea under a darker sky. A dark-skinned man with long dreadlocks, sailing a little wooden boat across a whitecapped grey sea. A girl whose blue eyes were startling in her brown skin, looking up at a night sky glowing white with stars.

  When Cass was a small child, she’d been out one afternoon in the woods, playing alone in a stand of evergreens. A cloud moved across the sun and a hush fell through the forest. She lifted her head and saw a man standing between two trees a little ways away. Tall and thin, in a long black coat. Death-pale face. The glitter of rubies at his throat. “Hello,” she said.

  Hello, Cassandra, he replied, in a voice like stone. His mouth did not move when he spoke.

  “Are you a ghost?” she asked.

  The people of your time do not have a word for what I am.

  “You look like a ghost. Are you sad?”

  He had taken a step forward, looking down at her. I am very old. And before she could tell him that that wasn’t what she had asked, that wasn’t an answer at all, he stepped back into the shadow of a tree and vanished. There was a bright fuzz around the edges of her vision and the air tasted of smoke and ashes. She went home and told her mother she’d seen a ghost. Her mother was watching television with all the drapes drawn, her face slack, lit greenish in the flicker of the screen. “I told you not to talk to strangers,” her mother said, changing channels. “Go outside and play.”

  Even then, Cass understood that the world was not quite the same for her as it was for other people, that the lines between the real and the not-real, the present and the past, were sometimes blurred inside her. She tried talking to animals, but they did not understand her any better than they understood other girls. She tried telling the weather to change its patterns, but the sun shone or didn’t no matter what kind of morning she’d asked for. But sometimes out of the corner of her eye she saw a group of tall, stern, pale people, battling one another with swords, or sailing ships across a wine-dark sea. She saw an island of one-eyed monsters dotted with sheep. She saw a woman with the face of a goddess and serpents winding out of her skull. She saw these things when she slept, and saw them again in waking, and sometimes if she called after them, if she cried out, “Wait, wait,” one of them would half-turn as if listening. “Take me with you,” she begged. “Take me with you.” But they never did.

  The orchid girl was quiet for a long time, and Cass wondered if she’d said too much. If they were going to take her away now, make her sleep in an alley. Call the police. Whatever happened to freaky monster-seeing girls who didn’t fit the right way in the world.

  “I have dreams like that, too,” the orchid girl said instead.

  “Does everybody?” Cass asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

  Cass looked up at the orchid girl. “You seem fine,” she said.

  “Well then,” said the orchid girl. “There you go.”

  After a month, Cass’s mom saved up enough from the gas station for them to take the bus back to Seattle and get a room in an apartment they shared with another mom and her son, who went into their bedroom and shut the door whenever Cass was in the apartment. Cass went back to school. For a while, things seemed like they might be good. But then came the second stepdad, and another apartment with just him, and Cass having to lock her door at night. She knew better than to tell her mom. It was the stepdad or the shelter again, and anything was better than the shelter. After the second stepdad came the third. The third was a yeller, not a hitter or a toucher. “You little whore,” he liked to yell, at either Cass or her mother. Or sometimes “You goddamned whores,” at both of them: two birds with one stone. By the third stepfather, Cass’s mother’s eyes were dead and her shoulders had a permanent slump to them, and though she’d been pretty and chatty and alive when
Cass was younger, the stepfathers had wiped anything like beauty from her face. By the third stepfather, Cass’s mom had stopped saying anything at all. It was easiest for Cass just to leave, and so she did. Became her own bad news. Cass, catlike, landing feet-first, teaching herself young to fight her own battles with fists or with wits. Whichever got her clear of trouble she didn’t go out seeking herself. She took to drugs like she was born with an addict’s sneaky wit, rifling her mom’s prescriptions and then, when her mom caught on to that racket, finding the first of a long stretch of mean-eyed boys way too old for her.

  Half the girls Cass knows, all the girls Cass lives with, are living the same after-school special, with minor variations. She loves them, to be sure. They’ve kept her safe and fed and watched her back. The squat is like a family, riddled with squabbles and bad blood and old grievances, but at the end of the day they take care of each other. They share what they have, split their food stamps, aren’t stingy with their drugs or their booze. Cass fell into them, and they caught her. Brought her back to their derelict manor and welcomed her in.

  Squat is the wrong word, technically. It’s somebody’s aunt’s brother-in-law’s cousin’s house, more or less condemned, its front yard overgrown with chest-high weeds and pieces of its roof missing. No rent exchanges hands, but there is, somewhere, an actual owner; the only thing, Cass is sure, that keeps the neighbors from being able to get them out. There’s no power, though somehow they still have running water. They carry their garbage to a Dumpster outside a minimarket down the block, rather less often than they should. They keep a low profile, in exchange for the neighbors’ unwilling silence, and this tenuous equilibrium lurches forward toward an indefinite future. Cass has only lived here a year. Their elder statesman, Mayhem, has been here for four. It’s better than her mom’s house, though that’s not a particularly strong recommendation. Cass even has her own room, with windows she edges in duct tape in winter to keep out the cold and throws open in spring to let in the warm new-scented air. The room was carpeted in a filthy shag when she laid claim to it, but she’s since torn it out, sanded the floor, and painted it a rich dark brown. (That crisp fall afternoon, Cass and Felony pushing a full-to-the-brim shopping cart of paint and sandpaper and brushes and paint trays out the front door of the hardware store, cool as you please. Felony’d stolen a virulent magenta, with which to color her own room’s walls, but the color was, not surprisingly, an eyesore. “Goddammit,” she’d sighed, gazing at the fluorescent horror she’d created, “now I’m going to have to go back.”) Cass papered her walls with a collage of show flyers and pictures of faraway cities cut out of magazines pilfered from strangers’ garbage, made herself a desk out of milk crates and a board. Mason jars in the windowsills, filled with dried flowers. Candles to keep away the dark. Cass doesn’t like to sleep, because sleeping means dreams.