Girl in Pieces (14 page)

Well I'll do anything in this godalmighty world

If you just let me follow you down.

—Bob Dylan, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”

The bus is a giant, lumbering monster filled with sadness and stale air. In each town, it shits us out for twenty minutes, two hours, three, it doesn't matter, it's all the same: a diner, a convenience store, trash in the restrooms, trash in the gutters. I hide the money Vinnie gave me deep in my pockets and use it only for chocolate bars and sodas and salty chips and once an egg salad sandwich with the expiration date blacked out. The taste of chocolate in my mouth is like an explosion of bliss.

I don't talk to the people who sit next to me. They drift in, smelling like smoke or dirt, and then drift off at the next stop. In Kansas the bus breaks down in the middle of the night in a town where Christmas is still happening in mid-May: faded wreaths on darkened storefronts, fat lights twinkling in the window of a gas station. The woman next to me drops her chin inside the thick shell of her fake fur coat and mumbles
Blessed be
as we lurch off the bus and stand awkwardly in the lot of a boarded-up diner. The men in the back of the bus simply move their shell game outside to an alley while the driver paces and waits for help. I sit on a curb away from everyone else, still too warm in the peacoat. My ticket says we'll drive through six states before we reach Arizona and that it will take one day, twenty-one hours, and forty-five minutes. The driver says he doesn't know how long until a new bus comes.

I cry in toilet stalls, warm tears spilling into the neck of the peacoat, staring at the money Ellis and I earned. I'm finally going someplace, maybe someplace better, but she isn't with me, and it hurts.
Everything
hurts me again, sharp and scary against my scary skin. I just keep trying to think of Mikey, and how good it will be to be with him, and maybe, this time, a little more than just friends.

It's the middle of the night when we arrive. The driver's sudden, cheerful shout of
Toooooo–suuuun
fills the bus and jolts several people awake. I join the sleepy line of people stumbling off the bus and into the warm, murky air.

A couple of passengers have people waiting for them and I watch them hug and kiss. I've got no one, so I pull out the envelope from Mikey, to keep myself from feeling lonely.

I read the letter over and over on the bus, just to remind myself that this was really happening, that I was really getting out.

Charlie! Everything is going to be okay, I promise. I'm sorry, I won't be back for a little while, so you'll be on your own. Don't worry, my landlady's cool, she's an artist, she knows you're coming. Her name is Ariel and if you need anything, ask her. Your mom said she had some money to give you, so you should be okay to get food. Here's directions to my place
and a map so you know where to buy groceries and stuff. CHARLIE: I can't wait to see you.—Mike

I actually hold the notebook paper up to my face, just in case there's a scent of Mikey that I can inhale to stop the stuttering of my heart, but there isn't. I take some deep breaths, trying to calm myself.

I look at the map, struggling to make sense of where I am, where I'm supposed to go, and what Mikey's arrows mean. The streets are empty, but I keep my head up.

Evan always used to say that it wasn't what you couldn't see that you should be afraid of, but what was right in front of you, in plain sight.

I grit my teeth as I walk through an underpass, willing myself not to think of
that night.
The handle of Louisa's suitcase digs into the palm of my hand. The peacoat is way too heavy for this weather. I'm sweating, but I don't want to stop and take it off. I pass a lot of little bars and shops. The sky here is like dense, dark cloth, stitched with faint white stars, something I want to put a finger to.

Mikey's note is three pages long.
You'll see a house with a bunch of HUGE silver birds in the yard. 604 E. 9th Street. She lives in the Pie Allen neighborhood. Mine is the purple guest house in the back. Use the yellow bicycle and lock. Ariel left them for you. Key for door is under yellow pot.

They don't look like birds to me, but they are luminous, glinting in the night air, their fierce wings open. The guest house is in back. I find the key under the pot. A yellow bicycle with a new-looking willow basket is locked to a laundry-line pole. I unlock the door and grope for the switch along the wall, blinking at the sudden glare of light. The walls inside are painted purple, too.

I have no idea what to do. Is the landlady home? Did she hear me?

There are no
ping-
lights here. No endless everywhere beige carpet. No crying girls. No secret room.

I am alone. For the first time in months and months, I am utterly alone. No Evan, no Dump, no Casper, not even irritating Isis. For a minute, pinpricks of panic shoot through my body: if something happens to me between now and when Mikey gets here, who will know? Who will
care
? For a moment, I'm back
there:
those terrifying days of street before Evan and Dump found me, when every day was heightened heartbeat and the nights lasted years, waiting for the dark to end, jumping at every sound, trying to find a safe place to hide.

There is being alone, and then there is being
alone
. They are not the same thing at all.

Breathe, Charlie. Breathe, just like Casper said. I slide my fingers underneath the peacoat and pinch my thighs, too, hoping the pain will snap me back in place. Bit by bit, my panic subsides.

My stomach growls loudly. Grateful to have something else to focus on, I scout the mini-fridge tucked into a corner. There are some bottles of water and mushy bananas. I eat a banana, suck back a bottle of water super quick. There are also two pieces of pizza in a small cardboard box. They're so stiff and stale that they snap when I shove them in my mouth, but I don't care. I'm ravenous. Slowly, my panic ebbs away, exhaustion bubbling up to take its place.

The neighborhood is still. What time is it? There's a big trunk in the corner and I push it in front of the door, just in case. My whole body is sore from the bus trip and my legs are weak. I turn off the light. Even though my body is slicked with sweat, I don't take off the peacoat. Taking it off would make me feel even more exposed right now. I need a little protective armor, just in case.

I arrange myself on the futon,
Mikey's
futon, on the floor. I can feel things lifting from me, disappearing into the silence around me. I'm not listening to the sadness of several girls living along one hallway. Fucking Frank is far, far away, his hands cannot find me here. I have a little money in my backpack. My body is becoming lighter and lighter.

I can feel it, finally, after months and months of fighting it, and it's pulling me deeper into the peacoat, into the futon: sleep. I bury my face in the pillow and it's here that I finally find Mikey's smell, something cinnamon-tinged. I breathe it in as deep as I can, letting it slip into all the crevices of me and rock me to sleep.

When I wake up, sunlight is pouring through the sole window in the guest house. I look around groggily, sliding the damp peacoat off. After almost two days on the bus, I can smell myself.

It takes me a minute, but I realize the guest house is just a crappy little converted garage: the two doors on the back wall against the alley have been soldered awkwardly together, their square windows covered with small blue curtains. The kitchen is just a sink set into a countertop on top of an old metal cabinet.

There's a ceiling fan and an air conditioner set into one of the walls. The floor is cement and the bathroom is an old closet with a toilet and plastic insert shower.

I crawl out of bed and make my way to the bathroom. Pee and then turn on the shower. It spurts and then a thin trickle eeks out. I turn it off. I'm not ready to shower yet. Not ready to look down at myself and touch my new damage. Touching it will make it all the more real. And my scars, they still hurt. They will be tender for a long, long time.

At Creeley, most of us made do with just washcloth-soaping our pits, shits, and splits, as Isis referred to it, because if you wanted to take an actual shower, you had to do it with a female attendant present, just in case you tried to, you know, drown yourself with shower spray or something. And nobody wanted an audience while they were naked, so most of us preferred the other option.

Back in my overalls and out of the bathroom, I run my hands over the kitchen counter. It's plywood overlaid with Mod Podge, postcards of foreign cities sealed underneath. Some of the postcards are turned over, with scrawled messages:
A
:
Meet me at the fountain, love, four o'clock, like last year.
A must be Mikey's landlord, Ariel. I look at the postcards, the images, the messy handwriting. A little story unfolding beneath my fingers.

I spread out the money Ellis and I made.
Fly over the ocean,
Ellis said, arms out, spinning around her room.
Touch down in London, Paris, Iceland, wherever.
All the romantic-seeming places she wanted to live.
Sipping espresso on the Seine will be fucking
angelic
, Charlie. You'll see.

Nine hundred and thirty-three dollars and only one of us got out alive. Semi-alive.

I stare at it for a long time before tucking it far back under the sink, behind the dinky one-cup coffeemaker.

I have to find food.

The sun is so bright when I step into the yard that spots cloud my eyes, so I unlock the door again and root around a desk drawer until I find sunglasses that are painted gold and flecked with black, something a girl would wear and carelessly leave behind; did Mikey have a girlfriend?
Does
Mikey have a girlfriend? I don't want to think about that right now.

Mikey's hand-drawn map is filled with arrows and notes:
Circle K, three blocks
; Fourth Avenue (thrift, coffee, bar, eat, book) six blocks
; the U seven blocks
.
My face and arms begin to heat up as I trudge along the sidewalk to the Circle K. It's weird to think that only a few days ago, I was in sleety weather with gray skies, and now, here I am, sun everywhere, no jacket.