The expected howls and hoots of the midnight woods rattle my nerves, but the haunting sounds are immediately discounted by the thought of what I am actually running away from. There is nothing more dangerous in these woods than what is sitting back in that parking lot, and nothing more terrifying than what they are trying to send me back to. I am okay with pretending when Lucy is around to make it all feel like a dream, but it’s real. It’s real, and if I stop, if I slow down, if I turn back now, I will never be free.
Continue Reading Chapter 1
By fourth grade I knew a lot. I knew Ray wasn’t supposed to touch me like he did, and I knew I shouldn’t have let him, but if I didn’t let him I was almost sure that he’d take it out on my mother. But if I told anyone about what he was doing, I knew that they’d be so disgusted, just like my mom was. She couldn’t even look at me anymore; I couldn’t stand everyone in my hometown looking at me that way. I was already different enough. I wasn’t white, at least not completely, but I was too afraid to ask my mother about the other fractions, the fractions that were nothing like her. I was afraid to even look at her. Her eyes had changed. The stony gray color that once comforted me now looked stormy and empty.
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At first Chicago is nothing like the pictures and the postcards that we had pinned up on Lucy’s wall. It is gray, dingy, and, overall, a little frightening, up until we hit the city. The buildings no longer look like scenes from America’s Most Wanted. There are massive loads of billboards instead of graffiti covered walls. More unbroken glass than disgruntle faces. Amelia drives me around a loop she calls the inner loop—a collection of crisscrossed highways that had chaos written all over them, but manage themselves as smoothly as a synchronized swim team. I’d never seen so many buildings squeezed into one area. I can’t imagine how people can breathe in this city, or how they see the stars.
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I watch the people in the city like a short foreign film with excellent subtitles. The old lady walking her Yorkie, the guy rollerblading, oblivious to all reality as he bobbs his head along to his headset, the construction workers in their jeans and hard hats sitting on the sidewalk eating sandwiches bigger than their heads, the old man scooting along his walker, or the young, proud new mom pushing her expensive, new stroller. They could be anyone from my hometown, and that frightens me. But the girls about my age, dressed in plaid blue and white uniforms, backpacks on their shoulders, laughing with one another—they are the scariest of all.
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The lights disappear behind us. We are zigzagging through streets and avenues with four story brick buildings, cracked sidewalks and names I will never remember. The wind dies down, as does the overflow of traffic. This part of the city isn’t in any of the pictures I’ve seen. Kitty opens the bottle of whatever it is in that bag, puts it to her lips, and sips every few minutes. She isn’t talking, just walking me along and sipping. Her heels click as my sneakers scrape the pavement, scratching out some sad melody as we move along the dark causeways.
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Clear. The doctor screamed before she sent a charge of electricity through my best friend’s body. I fell to the ground. Those volts were shooting through me. Clear. Lucy’s body jumped off the table, but the heart monitor continued with the frantic, rhythm-less pattern. Clear. The guy tried once more, pulling me up off the floor, but I fought him, throwing my weak fists at his chest. He lifted me up over his shoulder. Clear. I looked up and saw Lucy’s face, pale with streaks of blood streaming from both nostrils.
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When I opened my eyes, I was staring at Lucy’s great-aunt, Opal. I looked around. I had fallen asleep on the front porch. On Lucy’s front porch, in my blood smeared clothes, clutching the bag of Lucy’s belongings from the hospital.
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Tam shows me most of her favorite parts of the city, Union Station and downtown, and over to some area she refers to as The Loop. She is a people watcher, too, which makes me really happy, but I don’t let her sense my excitement about the fact that we have something in common, lest she perceive it as nonbadgirlish and cut communication ties completely.
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Candy and I spend a day getting manicures and pedicures at a place around the corner to her old neighborhood. She introduces me to a few people who I promise myself I will never hang out with. Candy is a fast talker. She talks with her hands. At times, I don’t know whether to listen, or whether to help her fight off the invisible swarm of gnats that seem to be surrounding her.
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Kitty and Tick take off on a drug run. After they slam the door behind them, I float off to the kitchen. Nothing in particular is on my mind. I’m drunk, I’m hungry, and I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, but instead of going upstairs to bed, I pick up the phone. Those numbers, the ones I’d lost, the ones handed away to Cracker last week, somehow turn into the only numbers I know. All I want to do is hear her voice again. All I want to do is know that this moment was real, and that this wasn’t a dream. I hold the olive green wall receiver in one hand and dial with the other, pressing each button carefully, and I wait.
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It wasn’t until I was holding a handful of my mother’s ashes that I realized what death really felt like. What death meant. Death was this clump of lifeless dust that I was supposed to set free with the next gust of wind. Death was sliding underneath my fingernails. Death was cold and gritty, and I couldn’t wait to let it go. Before the next gust even moved forward, I unclenched my fist and watched my mother drift down to the ground, disappearing among the dirt beneath my feet.
Continue Reading Chapter 11
The streets of Chicago are bustling. Everyone, once again, is on his or her way somewhere. Work, school, home, the store—they all have a somewhere. I have nowhere. Nowhere to be, nothing to do, but not only do I have that, I have the grand trio of loneliness: nowhere, nothing, and no one. I’m all alone again in this strange city, with this mysterious boy and my plastic bag.
Continue Reading Chapter 12
The city has died down, not much, but just enough to prove that, at this hour in particular, normal human beings are meant to be snuggled up at home with the ones they love with a mug of hot chocolate or a large glass of wine, not outside, in the nipple numbing winds searching for a place to sleep.
Continue Reading Chapter 13
Lights go out at ten o’clock—everybody scurries back to their cots and tucks themselves in. The elder church lady who had served us spaghetti earlier in the evening says a quick prayer over the room and closes the door behind her. I’m curled up on a hard, musty cot between Rex, who is nearly asleep, and a strange looking white lady with a toddler resting across her chest. I look up to see her peeking over at me, sheet pulled up to her chin. She smiles, her yellow teeth nearly florescent in the dark, and her hair, a powdery black color, matted to her scalp in certain sections.
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Two weeks creep by, but I survive. I have read over thirty books and slept in about fifteen different locations; park benches, near the beach, in the train station, on the steps of a library. And I was scared the entire time, but Rex made every effort he could to assure me of my safety in this city, to assure me that as long as we stay out of certain areas at certain times, nothing and no one in this city could harm me, and I’m finally starting to believe him.
Continue Reading Chapter 15
That was the longest walk of my life. Those familiar roads that we’d spent so much of our lives walking and running felt like torture, like a scary movie scene without the dramatic foreshadowing music. It was the quietest I had ever heard those woods. The owls owned the night. There could have been coyotes sniffing us out, or copperheads crossing our paths, but I was determined to get her there. When we reached the main street, I banged on the corner store window, smearing Lucy’s blood across the glass.
Continue Reading Chapter 16
Six month passed like six weeks. The girls are hard at work, meeting up with their appointed johns in their designated areas, and I’m missing my friend. I haven’t heard from Rex since that day he got carried away on that man’s shoulder, and I’m terrified. So I take all my stress out in the kitchen, cooking more than eating, attempting to fill the larger-than-life void that Hoss has left behind. Bonny takes it the hardest. Hoss was like a mother to her, and lately she’s been wandering around the house like a lost puppy. Kitty convinced Boss to let Bonny take a sabbatical from work, whatever that means, she convinced him to take me on as the new maid.
Continue Reading Chapter 17
The sudden urge to make Jell-O nearly overpowers me in the midst of my dish making this morning, but I have since learned how to suppress these urges. The urges to count the stars and to go to the park to swing sneak up on me less and less, just like the urges to call Lucy’s parents or the urge to call Nan. I learned to squash them. Squashing usually means a bottle of beer or glass of wine and one of Stitch’s chocolate cupcakes, but it works.
Continue Reading Chapter 18
I was one of them now; family. It seemed so simple. Easy. Like this was what I was here for. This is why I was born. God, or whatever, made me this way, gave me this body, this smile, this hair, but it was never mine. It never felt like mine. Everyone I ever loved left me, abandoned me here on this earth, like I was nothing, but now, I wasn’t nothing; I was something. I was something to them. I was worth something. I was a call girl. Someone beautiful, someone they wanted. I was Cookie. That’s what I told myself. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that even the most beautiful things can turn to filth under the right lighting.
Continue Reading Chapter 19
In the car on the way to the airport the next morning, I’m feeling the whirling aftermath of post-intoxication full force. I always have to get myself sloshed so that I don’t spend the entire ordeal crying like an orphaned whale calf, so that I don’t cringe when he touches me. Something tells me that Gil won’t take to kindly that sort of behavior. Gil is driving and I’m in the passenger seat staring up at the palm trees, wondering what it would feel like if one of them came crashing down on us.
Continue Reading Chapter 20
The following week goes down like all the others. Gil surprises me, leaving a box of chocolates at the house along with a gold bracelet. The following Monday and Wednesday are cancelled because he has to go to a convention in Spain. I’m glad that he didn’t drag me along with him, but a little nervous when I get the abrupt phone call from his doorman on Thursday night, demanding that I report to the apartment early the next day.
Continue Reading Chapter 21
We drink for hours. We manage to turn the city of Chicago into a giant drinking game. Step on the crack. Take a shot. Hear a car horn. Take a shot. Mention a street name in any conversation. Take a shot. See a jogger in ball constricting shorts. Take a shot. We take shots like photographers, and finish the bottle of cheap booze that I had smuggled out of the house before sunset. Deciding to move our endeavors to less congested areas is Rex’s idea. Two teenagers swaggering downtown at dusk are just asking for trouble. And we don’t want any trouble. We just want to escape.
Continue Reading Chapter 22
The weather is perfect. Crisp and fairly clean this early in the morning, until the buses triple up on routes and the commuters start making their way to jobs they hate, or jobs they love, but that they’ll never get ahead in. Life is, indeed, a depressing scene almost everywhere you look around this city; more homeless people making beds under park benches or busy overpasses, more kids diving into drugs than books, more cars than flowers, more cold than warmth.
Continue Reading Chapter 23
