Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.

  See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theater kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big, benevolent yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never understood those pages, why they left them blank. Seemed like such a waste. But I filled them up with line after line. Songs. Poems. Anything.

  I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. My hair is naturally kind of a blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back down to home, getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.

  Around six a.m., the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey pink violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, through the rose-colored paper, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful. That’s all.

  And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my Formica diner table—drink of me and never sleep, never die. At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck.

  I didn’t want to do it, but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.

  I could always sing.

  Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. No chipmunks and doves alighted at my feet when I sang. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s, and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the nonspeaking fairy, can’t even say hail, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a fist coming down.

  But I opened my mouth, and I turned my face up to the sunset, and I sang. I don’t even know what I sang about. I just made it up, brain to mouth to song. Seemed better than singing some love song belonging to somebody else. I don’t know anything about music in a technical sense, and I hated the jolt of it, hearing my own voice break the air, to stand up there and sing down the streetlights like I was better than them, like it mattered, like I deserved to be heard at all. So I just kind of went somewhere else when I sang. Somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and when I came back the song was over and my feet were covered in coins. Usually. Sometimes I got a dollar or two.

  That was my life. Sleep, read, sing, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Ride the train, all the way around the circuit and back to Starfire Station. I’m not even kidding—that’s what it was called, the station nearest my Denny’s and my library. I’d get on the train with the morning sun all molten and orange on a beat-up blue sign: “Starfire Station.” The rails glowed white. I thought: Maybe something wonderful will happen here, and I could tell people about it later, but no one would believe me, because who names a train station that?

  I didn’t talk to other runaways much. It was always awkward, dancing around how bad you had it in some kind of gross Olympic event. And even if I made a friend, we’re sort of a transitory race by nature. It got repetitive:

  “Fig. That’s a stupid name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Over the causeway.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I didn’t see the point. I had my routine.

  But I heard about it.

  Of course I heard about it. There used to be a place for kids like us. Some kind of magical city half full of runaways, where anything could happen. Elves lived there. Wizards. Impossible stuff: unicorns and rock singers with hearts of gold. A girl told me about it at this shelter once—and let me tell you, shelters are fucking mouse traps. A warm bed and a meal and a cage overhead. All they want is to send you back to your parents on the quick, so they rate your crisis level and if you’re below their threshold they up and call the cops on you. I went to one called Diogenes. I liked the name. I knew it from books—I’d moved on to philosophy by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul. Never found one, but that’s not the part that matters. It’s the looking, not the finding.

  They called my stepmother. I didn’t have bruises anymore. Not bad enough. But she didn’t come to get me. No one ever came for me. She thanked them and hung up the phone, and the next morning they sent me on my way. I guess I wasn’t their one good soul.

  But the night before my expulsion from particleboard paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the one a.m. shadows.

  “It’s like this place between us and the place where fairies come from,” she said dreamily, looking up at me from her thin bottom bunk. She had black curly hair all over the place, like wild thorny raspberry vines. Her eyes were kind of hollow, but they just looked delicate and wounded in that way that makes everyone want to rent a white horse just to save you. She wound one finger in her hair while she went on about this obviously ridiculous thing.

  “And there’s, like, rock bands with elves in them and no one gives you any shit just for being, and there’s real magic. Okay, supposedly it’s kind of broken and doesn’t work right, but still, if it’s not working right, that still means it works, right?” She sighed like a little kid, even though I knew she was sixteen—I’d seen her file while I stood in the office and they called the candy house and took the witch’s advice on child welfare. Maria emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary. How did this kid last five minutes out of a pink bedroom? Whatever happened to her must have been really bad—I don’t even know what kind of bad—to make some girl still drawing unicorns in her spiral notebooks take off. She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information. “But it disappeared or something, years ago. No one’s been there in ages. Sometimes I think the city ran away, just like me. Something happened to it and it couldn’t bear anything anymore, and so one night it just took off without leaving a note. But I’ll get there, somehow. I will. And I’ll dance, you’ll see. I’ll dance with the fairies.”

  And for a second I could see it like she saw it, all the colors, and Maria dancing in the town square with bells in her hair. It struck me just then: she was really beautiful. Actually beautiful, not like an actress, but like the characters actresses play. Like Titania. I just wanted to keep looking at her all night. I guess that’s what you look like when you do it right, when you’re sixteen and on the road, and you don’t write poems, but poems get written about you. I was already writing one in my head. I fig
ured I could fit it in the margins of J. R. R.’s appendices.

  One of the other kids hissed at her from the second bunk in our four-loser room. “They don’t like to be called that. Fairies.”

  “What do you know about it, Carmen? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedroom gone from her voice. And all the colors, too. She had me for a second, but I know better. In the end, I always know better than to believe anything.

  “More than you,” snarled the older girl. “Hey, chica,” she said to me, chucking her hair back. “You know how in school they said we’d never get social security, because by the time we get old, our parents will have used it all up?”

  “Sure,” I said. Carmen was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.

  “Well, it’s like that.” She sighed, and I could almost see her frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”

  “You don’t really believe this stuff, do you? I mean, it sounds great, but it doesn’t pay for coffee, you know?”

  Maria scowled up at me. It hurt, that scowl. After a long, pointed silence, she said:

  “Fig is a stupid name.”

  I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress.

  “I wish I could be like you,” I whispered, but not soft enough that the whole room couldn’t hear. “I wish I could believe, just like I wish I could believe the church kids when they say they can save me. But no power on this earth, girl. No power on this earth.”

  No one said anything. They ignored me. I had broken the spell they’d worked so hard to cast. I’d ruined it. Only the quiet of all of them breathing and angry was left.

  I didn’t believe even half of it. Remember when those homeless kids in Florida started talking crazy about the Blue Lady and how she’d come and save them? I thought it was like that. Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough. A place where everything you ever read about is real.

  And of course it went away. Of course it did. I mean, that’s like the job of magical places, to vanish. Atlantis. Avalon. Middle Earth.

  And even if it was real for someone, sometime, it wouldn’t be real for me. I ran away when I was fifteen. When Bordertown had already run away itself. I did it all wrong. Maybe other people could go there, but not me. That kind of shit is for Oberon and Titania. Not Fig, shuffling in the background with paper leaves glued to her T-shirt. I don’t live in a world with places like that. I live on the train, and in Denny’s, and in the Citrus Heights Public Library, and that’s all.

  * * *

  Spring came, dry and full of olive pollen. No one came looking for me. I kept singing and reading (Les Fleurs du Mal in May, and my Keats for the millionth time). Any time I managed to eat meat I just went wolf-blind with starving for it. I had become completely nocturnal, sleeping through the whole route from Starfire Station out to the suburbs and back again, my green backpack nicely padded with no-fare fines. Light rail. Rails of light. That’s me, speeding along toward Starfire on a rail of light. I rode longer and longer into the day, chasing the sun, and maybe I wanted to get caught. My roots got longer and I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere.

  I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow, bruised eyes, clothes worn into oblivion—and on the inside you just go hard and impenetrable, like metal. I stopped talking when I didn’t need to—that’s for social animals, and boy, I just wasn’t one anymore. I was something else, not a girl, not a wolf, something blank-eyed, tired, running after meat, running after trains.

  One time, just before it happened, the ticket taker shook me awake.

  “Kid,” he said. “Come on. Wake up. You gotta go somewhere else. I see you here every day. You can’t stay. You gotta go somewhere else.”

  He had blue eyes. With the seven a.m. sunlight shining slantwise through them, they looked silvery, like crystals.

  “I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, and stretched. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about how totally amazing breakfast was, I mean, as an invention. Bacon and bread. I only thought about food abstractly anymore. The way you think about paintings. Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after. I frowned at the fine-dispensing man. I didn’t hate the guy—adults just lived in this other world, this forbidden world, and in that world I only looked like a problem. Not his fault. Not mine. You can’t see one world from where you’re standing in the other, that’s all.

  But he didn’t shove me off at the next station. Nobody else was in the car, and the sun gleamed on everything, glittering on the chrome like little supernovas. I settled back into my seat, hunching down so anyone who did come in would know to leave me alone. It’s an easy psychic telegraph: Keep out. Like a body is a clubhouse.

  And that morning, when a grayish lump of girl got on, hauling a stiff rider of morning wind, she did leave me alone. She dropped into a heap in a seat on the far side of the car, and I was pretty sure she didn’t have a ticket either. Her clothes were thrift-store mishmash, green skirt, dingy tank top under a ragged coat with a furry, matted hood. As the train got up to speed, her head dipped back and she started to snore. The hood slid off.

  It was Maria.

  I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized her. But I have a memory for faces. Everyone, all the time. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you forever. And it was Maria, beautiful Maria, the girl who knew everything. But she was messed up, a hundred years older. Her cheekbones were cutting shards, one eye swollen like she’d been hit. Her skin was half-sunburned, half-clammy, and she had hacked all her hair off, shaved her head. It had grown back a fuzzy, uneven half inch, a thin black cloud. She had sores on her arms; her lips were cracked and bleeding. My lips peeled back like a dog’s. Her whole body was like a threat, a ransom note that said: Fast-forward, and this is you.

  “Hey,” I whispered. She stirred sleepily. I felt awake all of a sudden, sharp. “Maria?”

  I went to the girl and slid into the plastic seat beside her. Her eyes slitted up at me.

  “Lemmelone, I gotta ticket,” she mumbled.

  “Maria, it’s me. Fig. Diogenes, remember?” One good soul.

  Her eyes rolled, unfocused. I could see the ridges in her sternum, like a bone ladder. “Fig’s a stupid name,” she slurred.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  I didn’t ask her what happened to her, why she didn’t just go home if she was so busted. It’s not polite. Her breathing got shallow and she fell asleep again. Maria smelled—kind of sweet, and kind of rotten, and kind of sour. Like meat. She slumped against me and started coughing, spattering my arm with gooey strands streaked with pink. Not coughing blood like some movie girl with one big number left in her, but just about as bad.

  “God, I fucking told you, Maria!” I yelled at her suddenly. “There’s no such thing as fairies or magic, and there is no city waiting for you at the end of this train. Look at you, puking your guts out on my arm. Where’s your magic? Where is it?” I was almost crying, shaking her. She promised me that stuff was real. She said we could go there. How could she do this to me? Her head flopped back and I caught it up, like a baby’s. I could see the whites of her eyes, and it just stopped me cold. Like a fist.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, softer. “I’m sorry.” I tried to push her upright. “Wake up, Maria. I didn’t mean it. Wake up and tell me what a bitch I am. Come on. Don’t put this on me. I can’t take it. Wake up.”

  But she didn’t. Her heart was racing, but her skin was cold. She just sagged into my arms like a puppy. I kept thinking: Oh god, oh god, have a seizure, whatever, just don’t die on me here, I cannot handle this. This is a safe place. Bad things don’t happen on the train. What did you take, what did you do, what was so bad you couldn’t dre
am about magic anymore?

  “Maria, sweetie,” I said, and held her. I kissed her forehead. I couldn’t say it, but my heart filled up with the image of her glowing, pink-bedroom face below me on the bottom bunk, in the dark. This wasn’t supposed to happen to you. The beautiful one. Titania. And under that thought, the next one, black and ugly: It was supposed to happen to me. “Baby girl, just open your eyes. Like in the story. Just open your eyes and wake up.” She moaned a little and put out her hand to find my face. Housing developments with red roofs whispered by outside the windows—she coughed again, greenish, specks of dark, ugly blood in it this time.

  “Okay, Maria, okay.” I shifted to hold her better and started rocking. Shit, just stay awake till the next stop. Just don’t die. Come on, kid, you gotta go somewhere else.

  “Just listen to me. Remember that place you wanted to go? Think about that place; think about the elves and the magic and you dancing with the fairies who don’t like to be called fairies. You can’t go there like this; they’d never let you in. You gotta wake up. Listen, listen.”

  And I sang to her. The words just came and I sang them into her ear, her shorn head, her phlegm and her sternum and her unicorns and her wizards, and my voice came rough and quiet but it came, and I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone, I could; if she wasn’t a good-enough soul for Diogenes, I never would be; if she could die, I would never get to be old. The panic in me was like a spider, a crawling, hungry thing. I rocked her and went to that other place I go to when I sing, and the song poured out of me into her. Think about that place, that place, that place. Let’s run away. That other place. Nothing bad ever happened to you. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We’re just two girls taking the train to school. We’ll go to class and talk about Grecian urns. You can copy off my homework. We’ll have lunch in the grass. I sang and sang, and my voice got big in me, big enough to hurt, big enough to echo. Big enough for her. A voice like a hole. I pressed my forehead to hers and the world went away.