Tracy can tell, I guess, because under the highway she turns to me and says “You’re fucking green. What’s wrong with you?” I chew on my tongue. Number one, I’m scared of getting caught, which I obviously can’t tell Tracy. But more than that I’m scared of being in the house, by Brian’s room, the walls and the doors and the carpet and who I am inside them clamping down around me like a snake and squeezing tight. This past week has turned me different: now I’m a girl I like to watch in windows, purple-haired and dirty, and from the way that Tracy looks at me, I can tell I know so many more things than they would ever let me. But I feel like as soon as I’m in that house I’ll go back to how I was before, even if nobody’s home. I don’t know how to explain it to Tracy: I’m sure she’s never felt anything remotely that dumb. But she just keeps staring at me, and then goes
“What?”
and I know I have to answer.
I can’t let her think I’m backing out of going. The money is my one and only job; I can’t not come through. If I try to explain that I’m scared the walls and carpet in my house will turn me into someone else, she’ll look at me hard and like a stranger, the way she did that first night when I asked her if we were going home. Just imagining it makes me want to die. But she’s making me talk so I have to say something, and for some weird reason the only thing I can figure out to explain to her is Brian.
I have never breathed a word of him to anyone and the words feel bizarre in my mouth: they’ve been coiled up somewhere so much farther down than that forever and now they’re stretching out and up and I can feel them behind my teeth and it surprises me, like some weird food I’ve never tasted. I have no idea why I’m telling Tracy this or why I’d even think she’d understand. But for some reason I’m not scared. And after I get the first few sentences out from my mouth into the air she looks over at me with this kind of recognition I’ve never seen before in anyone, and she says “I know” and takes my hand. She holds it all the way to my house and she doesn’t let me go, even when my palm starts sweating.
At the house we take showers first. I stand guard for her outside of Dad and Linda’s bathroom and when she’s finally done and the mirrors are all steamy, we trade off. In the shower I can’t hear anything besides the water and it kind of freaks me out: I imagine someone showing up and seeing Tracy sitting on their bed; they’d call the cops. But the shower feels so good cutting through a week of dirt and grease that soon I mostly don’t think of anything but that.
When I come out of the bathroom Tracy isn’t there. For a second I freeze and listen: if someone came home there’d be voices. I think about crawling out the window if I need to. But all I hear is Tracy walking around below me. I call out her name but she doesn’t answer so I walk down the stairs, still drying my hair.
The door to Brian’s room is cracked. I say Tracy’s name again, secretly hoping she’ll come out so I don’t have to go in there, but she doesn’t. I push open the door and walk onto his ugly beige carpet.
Tracy doesn’t even turn around when I walk in. She just stands there, staring at his bed with her eyes slitted and her nostrils flared and this look on her face that’s really really far away. Brian’s bed is unmade, you can see his imprint in it, and the carpet suddenly feels itchy and gross under my bare feet. I keep walking toward Tracy. When I get up close I can see her cheeks are wet and it’s not from the shower because the rest of her is dry. She’s breathing hard like some kind of little animal and I say her name again, this time super soft like a whisper almost, and she snaps her head up and around to look at me and her whole face rearranges. She inhales hard, then closes her eyes and shakes her head. When she opens her eyes again she grabs my arm. “Come on” she says. “Let’s go raid the fridge.”
We leave with both our backpacks full of chips and cereal and peanut butter, bread and carrots, plus a jug of water and two sleeping bags. Tracy went through the drawers too and when she found this little knife small enough to fit in a pocket she told me to take it; I wrapped it in a paper towel and slipped it into my jeans. I keep feeling it. I took some twenties too from Linda’s room, memorizing how the bras were stacked and putting them back exactly perfect. I gave the money to Tracy right away; I thought she’d want to carry it. I cleaned everything up better than I’ve ever cleaned before, threw our towels in the hamper and rearranged the fridge so they wouldn’t see the empty parts. I didn’t even go into my room.
I lock the door behind us; Tracy watches while I put the key back down beneath the plastic rock. As soon as it’s out of my hands I realize the thing I was scared of didn’t happen: I went back in the house without it changing me back to how I was. I even went in Brian’s room and the only thing I thought about in there was Tracy. All of a sudden I feel really light even though my backpack’s ten pounds heavier.
After that I decide I don’t really want to go back. Or actually it’s not a decision exactly, it’s more of a realization. The whole last week I was procrastinating on going home like it was a math worksheet and every once in a while I’d hear Linda’s annoying voice in my head yelling at me for putting things off and my heart would get all poundy knowing I’d have to do it eventually and the longer I waited the worse it would get. But now all of a sudden it’s like my math teacher canceled the assignment and I just don’t have to do it. Coming down the hill and back toward Hollywood I’m someone different from Elly who goes to school and eats in the cafeteria and sits in class and comes home at night and tells Dad and Linda how my day was. I’m so much bigger now and beautiful and I can go back to the house and just take what I want when they’re gone and I even have a different name. I’m never going back.
Tracy’s got a ring through her left nostril which I think looks really pretty, even though the metal’s sort of greenish. I told her I wanted one too and she said that was lame but how about my lip. So we went back to Rite Aid to steal some safety pins, peroxide and a ring and now we’re on the sidewalk across from Del Taco. I can taste the peroxide bubbling on my gums and I wonder if it’s poisonous. It tastes like eggs and rust.
She’s making me hold my lower lip out while she gets the pin ready; it makes it hard to talk so when I ask her about the guys sitting in the parking lot in front of 7-Eleven right across the street it comes out sounding like some retarded other language. She laughs and says “Hang on” and stabs the safety pin through the middle of my lip, fast. My head fills all the way up with the pain of it and my whole mouth tastes like liquid iron. I blink my eyes really hard so it won’t look like I’m crying while she screws the pin around trying to close it. Finally she does and it squinches my lip but only a little because we got the big kind. The bottom of it knocks against my chin. “Leave that in for a day or two and then we’ll put the ring in,” she says, and wipes her hands off on her jeans. “Now what were you trying to say?”
“I was just wondering if you knew those guys” I say, swallowing blood, and point over to the 7-Eleven lot. There’s two of them with a pit bull there, both dressed like Tracy, patches and black pants and splotchy dirty brown T-shirts, which is why I think she might know them. The dog’s got two collars, one with rhinestones, one with spikes, and you can see its ribs.
She looks over at them for a second and goes “Nah.” Sometimes Tracy lies about stuff like that but I can tell it’s true she doesn’t know them, and it’s obvious she doesn’t really want to. Which I think is kind of weird, in the same way as the smoking kids behind the auditorium: if you’re a person that looks different from everyone and you see someone who looks like you, to me that means you’d want to be friends or at least talk. But not Tracy.
I’m curious about the guys, though, so I watch them. They’re both around Tracy’s age, and the really tall and skinny one with the stocking cap has this perfect face like someone in the movies, green-eyed and almost pretty like a girl’s. The dog is sitting down and so’s the other guy; he’s short and strong and he looks sort of jocky even though he’s got freckles and tattoos and dirty patches on his hoodie. The dog belongs to him, I can tell.
I never saw anyone else who looked like Tracy and I can’t stop watching them.
I’m still staring across the street when Tracy reaches over and flicks the safety pin in my lip, which hurts like shit. “Come on,” she says. “Come buy me a donut,” and even though there’s food left in her backpack from my house I follow her.
That night and the next day and the next I keep trying to get Tracy to go to Del Taco instead of Benito’s hoping we’ll see those guys again across the street, but they don’t show up and after a couple days I forget. Something in me is different, though, just knowing they exist. To me it means there’s a whole bunch of people like her, which means the world is bigger than I knew. It means there’s something out there that’s not school or home or Brian but not Tracy either. It’s like Tracy, but it’s not exactly her. For some reason, that makes me feel a little more equal, like I could ask her questions without being scared that she’ll get mad. I don’t know why.
Also I keep thinking about Brian’s room, how I found Tracy in there staring at his bed and crying, the way she held my hand beneath the 101 after I told her and looked at me like I was someone she’d known forever but hadn’t seen since we were little kids. The rest of the time she never holds my hand or even touches me but it felt really good that time she did and I keep wanting it again.
One morning after rush hour when Tang’s Donut is empty and we’ve had two apple fritters plus leftover Boston cremes from yesterday, I bring it up. I keep picking at my nails and my jeans which are getting pretty brown. There’s a hole starting in one knee; I make it bigger thread by thread. What I really want to ask is: was she crying inside Brian’s room and why, but I think that she might kill me if I do. So I just say “How come you were so nice to me before?” which doesn’t make any sense, and of course she asks me what the fuck I’m talking about and I have to explain I mean on the way to my house when I told her about Brian. Personally I think it’s kind of obvious after that, but she looks at me and goes “What do you mean? I wasn’t nice to you.”
I rip the rest of the apple fritter up into little tiny pieces; it looks like donut turds. Then I try to explain: I mean when I told her about Brian and looking at the ceiling, how it started in fourth grade and at first it was nice having him in bed with me and then it started getting scary and by the end of that year I’d start throwing up the closer it got to bedtime. I mean when I explained how I could never tell Linda because all she cares about is her stupid job and Brian, and I can’t tell my dad either, even though I kind of wish I could, because if he ever believed me it would mean he’d have to kick Brian out, which might make Linda leave, and I’d mess everything up and everyone would hate me. I feel like a major asshole going through it all again, especially when the donut pieces get too small to rip up anymore. I start back in on the hole in my jeans but she’s still not talking so finally I look up at her and she’s crying again, not like normal where you can hear it and the person moves their face, but in this weird way where her eyes are like a statue and she’s hardly even breathing.
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.