Almost Home

by Jessica Blank

  It’s like two things are fighting in her face: one, she keeps almost opening it up like she really wants to say something or touch me; but the other, she is really, really mad. And the first thing I think is: she knows it’s kind of my fault that it happened. She feels bad for me, which is the first thing in her face and why she was so nice before; but I’m so stupid for it happening, and even stupider to want to tell my dad, and that’s the other thing. It doesn’t explain the crying but it’s all I can think of so I think it must be true. “I’m sorry,” I go, and really mean it. She doesn’t talk for a long time. “Don’t be sorry,” she says, and then stands up and grabs me and we go out into the street.

  That night we sleep behind Whole Foods again. Halfway through the night I wake up and Tracy is curled up around me, pressed into me through our sleeping bags. She’s on her side, her bony arm across my chest, holding tight, breathing loud. I wiggle sideways toward her so she won’t have to work so hard to hold on.

  That morning she doesn’t look at me the whole way to Tang’s Donut. She doesn’t say much either and at first I think she might be embarrassed. I try to keep my hands and knees away from her so there’ll be a cushion of space between us in case I was touching her too much last night. When she comes back from the counter with the bag she takes three donuts for herself and only gives me the dried-out cinnamon one with the powder half worn off. Usually we split them and I get jelly or a fritter or at least glazed. She keeps picking at some scab or something on her head and looking everywhere except at me.

  I try asking her different questions. What time is it, and what does she want to do today, and how much cash do we have left. She just looks around and picks at things and gives me just enough answers to make me stop asking. She seems mad and I think maybe she doesn’t like me anymore, now that she thinks the whole Brian thing is my fault. I want to ask her if it’s true but I’m too afraid to hear the answer. I tell myself there are a lot of things that could be wrong besides that though: I go through them in my head picking them up and looking at them like different-colored rocks, trying to find one I can put in my pocket and keep, but that one reason I’m scared of is underneath all of them rotting into the dirt and every time I pick another one up I can see it.

  I feel like a big asshole even though nothing’s even happened; it sort of reminds me of school, except worse. I pick at my shoelace and get really involved in it. Tracy picks at her scalp. After a minute I think we must look pretty weird, both sitting on the curb in front of Tang’s picking at things and not talking, but then I realize nobody’s looking at us.

  The rest of the day is a mixture of picking at shoelaces and sitting on curbs, and in between Tracy is dragging me like it’s really important to all these places where she thinks someone might be. She doesn’t say who. I hope it might be those guys from the 7-Eleven with the pit bull but I think she’d tell me if it was. We go to Jack in the Box up on Sunset and then back to Winchell’s and Del Taco; she’s looking for something but she won’t explain what. At Benito’s she walks right up to this transvestite hooker from before. I can’t stop looking at her face. She’s wearing leopard print and purple high heels. Also she’s about seven feet tall. Her name’s Bianca. She tilts her face down and asks, in a Spanish accent, what a little sweetie like me is doing out here and then she sort of glares at Tracy. Tracy shoves in front of me and starts talking to Bianca half in Spanish so I can’t understand, and then she grabs my sleeve and marches me away, and then we go and stand outside Goodwill for like half an hour. No one comes.

  Every time she says we’re going to find some person and it’s like she really needs to see them but there isn’t ever anybody there. There’s no talking, just a big swollen-up embarrassed silence in the air between us. My stomach is nervous and sick at the same time, like butterflies and throw-up, and I wish I could get in bed and stay home from school, but there’s nothing to stay home from and no home to stay in either.

  After a while she doesn’t even seem mad anymore, just like some other person in some place that isn’t here. I’m still here though, out on the asphalt, and without her I don’t know where here is or where to put my feet. For the first time since she led me out of the parking lot at school I feel really scared. Tracy’s always had a reason or a kind of knowing, and even when I can’t tell what it is it wraps around me like her arms last night and leads me to the next right thing. But today I can’t find it. All morning I tried talking and it just made her weirder so now I’ve been trying to find her just by feeling it, like if I breathe the right way our breaths will touch and I can pull her close again. But my stomach hurts too bad for me to breathe in deep enough to make it work, so I just wait at each place she takes me and then follow her to the next one even though I can tell we’re not really going anywhere.

  Finally the sky gets halfway dark and we head back to Whole Foods. My stomach starts to calm down: that’s our place, we go there every night; there’s not ever anyone there but us. I hate today. The whole day just blended into itself, different in a way I can’t say the name of, and I want something back that I don’t even know what it is. Whole Foods makes me feel better though. When we’re sleeping I won’t have to think of anything to say and then tomorrow morning the cars will come and the light before the sun comes up and it’ll be like today just didn’t happen.

  For dinner we get muffins from the trash bags: tonight it’s cranberry almond. It’s weird how much food they just throw away and I’m glad there’s somebody hungry like us to eat it, otherwise it’d just turn into trash. Linda always shops here and I wonder if she knows we’re back by the Dumpsters eating all the stuff she doesn’t want to buy. I imagine her car full of grocery bags curving around the tiny hilly streets to get back home and then I think about our driveway, the birds of paradise and bougainvillea clustered up around the door. I think about all that stuff while we’re eating. When we lie down in our sleeping bags, I turn my back to Tracy. I don’t want her to know I’m at my house in my head and not here with her. I can feel her watching me, though, and after a while she pokes me. I roll over and she’s propped up on one elbow staring at my face. Her eyes are full like she wants to say something but she doesn’t. I almost ask her what, but I’m afraid if I talk it’ll break something. After a long time she picks up her hand and wipes my hair away from my eyes and off my forehead, soft, in this way that’s almost like a mom except awkward, like her hands aren’t supposed to move that way. It’s weird but I like it and I stop thinking about our driveway. She keeps on doing it until I fall asleep.

  The next morning when the cars start and the sun comes up the space next to me is empty and her stuff is gone. There’s nothing there to look at except asphalt and a Dumpster that’s all emptied out. It smells like muffins baking and my stomach growls.

  rusty

  “hold up!” this voice yells from behind me and I almost jump out of my skin. I don’t know if it’s a cop or what till I turn around and see the stringy blond-haired girl, halfway across the parking lot, careening up to the car like some crazy bird with half a wing. I recognize her face: I’ve seen her around the corner on Pacific, a little past the liquor store next to the beach; she’s the only other one out here in Venice near my age. But now out of nowhere she’s running in five directions at once, toward me and the guy in the car, who hasn’t even told me his name yet. He’s old, and at first he looks nervous, but then she catches up and throws her arm around my shoulder, squeezing her face next to mine so it’s me and her in his open window and I can feel her heavy breath. “You taking good care of my baby brother?” she asks the guy and when he nods, his eyes all wide, she grins and says “I’m Tracy. You wanna take care of me too?” I start to say something, but the guy leans over to open the passenger door so we both just get in.

  She shoves me over so I’m on the brown pleather hump pressed into him. I fumble for a seat belt, but the one in the middle is half stuck down in the seat and won’t come out. While I’m tugging, she leans into me quick and s
oft and whispers “My name’s Tracy; we’re from Fresno and I’m two years older.” Then she leans back, rests her feet up on the glove compartment, and points her face into the breeze.

  I’ve only been doing this a couple weeks. When I got off the Greyhound from Bakersfield a month ago I had two hundred bucks and Jim’s number crumpled up in my pocket. I’d had it memorized for practically a year but he insisted on writing it down, like he wanted to make sure nothing got in the way of him finding me to start our new life in L.A. He gave me everything I might need, toothpaste and money and a map, and he told me to stay in a hostel and call him every night till he came. He wished he could drive us to the city in his convertible Volkswagen and get us our own place first thing, but he said they might come find us if he quit with no notice on the same day that I ran away.

  Jim is the choir teacher at Bakersfield High and we’ve been in love since spring of ninth grade. It was perfect and secret for eight months, till my mom came home early from work and saw his Cabriolet pull out of our driveway. She stopped talking to me then and started going through my shit, and even though I hid everything he ever wrote me, Jim was nervous. After he heard her click onto the line one night when we were talking, he said we’d have to go someplace else if we wanted to stay together.

  It wasn’t much of a choice: Jim and I are in love. He’s the only person who knows who I am in the places that you can’t put into words, those places that are alive and raw and secret, and bigger than your regular life. We all have those places, I think, but we almost never see or touch them in each other because everyone is always scared. But Jim’s not scared: he’s big enough to hold every single part of me, and brave enough to show me himself. We had sex for the first time at the end of ninth grade in the choir room and afterward he held me on the brown carpet and told me he was all I’d ever need and I breathed in the rough smell of his neck and knew that it was true.

  So the fact that he hasn’t answered his phone since the day after I got here is weird, and I’m worried that something happened to him. Every night I call Jim on the pay phone and let it ring twenty times till the operator comes on and says “Your party is not answering. Please try your call again later.” Every time I pray while it’s ringing that Jim will pick up, but I guess I haven’t learned how to pray well enough yet, because it keeps just being the operator.

  It’s been a month now since I left and we were only planning for a week, so the money Jim gave me ran out a while ago. I’m too young to get a job, so I was getting really hungry till one night in Hollywood by the hostel a guy asked me if I needed cash and I said yes. It was scary getting in his car, but he parked nearby beneath some trees and all he wanted was to touch me. I closed my eyes and thought about the apartment Jim was going to get us when he got here and the bed we’d have. At the end I told Jim I was sorry in my head, but I knew he’d understand I was just waiting for him.

  The second guy brought me over to his place in Santa Monica. I watched the ocean from his window and afterward I walked out his door and toward the sea and down the beach till I got to Venice. The sun setting turned the sky orange and the ocean black. The air was open in my lungs and there were seagulls and I thought maybe I could make some money over here instead of Hollywood, where the air was thick and close and way too hot. I walked the boardwalk while the hippies packed up their bad paintings into RVs and the T-shirt stores closed, then I crisscrossed the alleys in the dark till I saw people standing around who looked kind of like me.

  So here’s where I’ve been the last couple weeks: on Pacific and Navy by the liquor store, or else in the parks by the boardwalk. It’s not too bad sleeping outside, not like Hollywood where it’s hard and dirty and every place you go is full of trash. Here at least there’s grass and sand: every night I feel the ground against my cheek and imagine it’s the brown rug in the choir room.

  I’ve never gone so long without talking to anyone, though. To the guys I never say more than my name and what do they want and that I’m eighteen, which is a lie, and none of that really counts as conversation. I miss Jim so much it feels like a clamp twisting inside my chest. Closing my eyes to think of him when I’m working helped at first, but now it’s starting to make it worse. So even though I don’t really know what Tracy’s doing here in the car, taking up so much of the seat that I’m straddling the hump and paranoid my bony knees will knock the gearshift, I’m kind of glad she’s sitting next to me.

  I keep looking at my lap. I’m embarrassed to talk to the guy with Tracy here, which is weird because I can tell she does the same things I do. The silence gets dense and the guy drives and finally Tracy leans forward and goes “So don’t you want to know where we’re from?” He looks relieved that somebody’s talking to him and he says “Yeah,” so Tracy goes into this whole story about Fresno and how we slept in the same bed growing up and came to L.A. together for adventures. I guess I can see the resemblance— we’re both pale and skinny enough that our ribs poke out— but I still feel like the guy is going to know I’m not her brother. My hair is brown, not blond like hers, and besides I think he’ll just be able to smell it. I want her to shut up, but she just keeps talking about our bed.

  She elbows me at the end of her story like I’m supposed to say something. I don’t know what to say, so I just go “Yup” and look up at the guy all dumb. Tracy laughs and says “He’s really shy” and makes this face like they’re on the same team and they’re planning something about me. For a minute I get scared, and then Tracy leans back and pulls me toward her and I can tell it’s really me and her on the team.

  We’re at the guy’s house a little less than an hour. His place is gross, with stacked-up newspapers on the scratchy orange couch and just mustard in the refrigerator. And he’s older than my dad, like fifty or something, so it makes me this weird creepy kind of sad. Not for very long though, because Tracy grabs my baggy T-shirt and yanks me into the back hallway by the bathroom. She pulls out four cans of Campbell’s soup she’s stuck in her backpack, plus a package of ramen. She’s got two lighters too, and says one of them’s for me. She’s good: I never saw her open any drawers.

  After a minute the guy hollers out to us from the living room. My heart starts pounding because of the Campbell’s and ramen, but Tracy zips her bag up slow; when she’s ready she pulls me out into the living room and toward the couch.

  Before the guy can talk I tell him I won’t use anything but my hands. Tracy shoots me a look for a second like I really fucked up, but then a smirk flickers over her face like a mask and she goes “I told you he’s shy. It’s cute, right?” The guy sort of half nods and doesn’t look mad so then she smiles at me.

  I’m nervous around a girl, especially since the lights are on and Tracy’s just sitting there like she’s not planning to do anything except sit there and watch, but I go for his belt anyway, because that’s what we’re there for. Then she starts talking. She goes “He’s always been that way, ever since he was little,” and the guy closes his eyes like it’s all part of the same thing, her story and my hands, like he’s expecting her to start in on something sexy. But it starts turning into this weird long made-up thing about when we were kids, like the stuff your mom told you at bedtime when she was out of books to read and couldn’t think of what to say. When I finally look up at Tracy, she’s got this huge grin on her face and I snort out this giant sudden almost laugh. I swallow it fast but she makes the story weirder and weirder trying to get me to crack up and pretty soon I’ve got tears streaming down my cheeks from holding it in and I want to pee. I have to look at the wall; if I look at Tracy’s face again we’ll both lose our shit. Already the guy’s eyelids are twitching like this wasn’t what he expected and maybe he should stop and make sure everything’s okay. But he lets me keep going. At the end I don’t wait to hear the rest of Tracy’s story: I just get up super fast and run to the bathroom and she grabs her bag and follows me and we run the water full on while we both laugh so hard it hurts our stomachs and doesn’t make any so
und. After a second we calm down and I wash my hands with crappy liquid soap. Then she gives me this look in the streaky gray mirror and we both crack up again.

  Afterward Tracy takes the money, drops me off at the liquor store and goes to get some Baja Fresh. She says she’ll bring me back fish tacos, but without anyone to talk to I close my eyes and start thinking about Jim again and wind up falling asleep sitting up against the side of the building and wake up with drool all down my chin. When I open my eyes it’s late and I’m confused like when you lie down for a nap during the day and by the time you wake up it’s pitch black outside and the time in the middle just erased itself. Tracy never showed up with those tacos. I’m starving. I think maybe I should be pissed at her. I walk over to the beach so I can at least sleep somewhere soft.

  The next guy who picks me up wants to take me to West Hollywood. He’s in a Lexus, jocky like he’s probably got a girlfriend that he’s mean to, but I go with him. Before I get in I do one more check to see if Tracy’s anywhere, even though I can see she’s not. Just in case she’d want to come.

  He drives all the way east on Santa Monica with the windows down and the strip malls flicker by, their signs lit up even though they’re closed, the too-bright plastic lights against the black. Even the strip malls here are full of things hiding just behind where you can see, like if you reached past the outsides of them you could touch a thousand things you never knew. The air’s a mix of car exhaust and ocean; wind whips my hair against my cheeks. It hurts just enough to make me feel awake and I miss Jim. I wonder if he misses me the same, and then it scares me that I’m even wondering, so I tell myself Of course he does, and push away the question. The lights blink way into the distance, all the way out to Bakersfield and past it; if you look far enough you can’t tell the difference between lightbulbs and stars.