I apologized to Lacy and took the bus home. The apartment was empty and I changed quickly, texting my small list of men to see who was willing to pay tonight. I tell myself I’ll start looking for new job postings tomorrow, that this is what it’s gotta be for now, the only way we gonna survive. It ain’t that I’m not scared. I am. But I know we’ll lose so much more if I don’t keep us afloat, that suddenly Trevor won’t have nobody to make sure he eats and Marcus won’t have a couch to sleep on and I will be closer to my own funeral day than I ever have been.
One of Davon’s friends picked me up around eight o’clock and parked his car on a side street. He pushed the passenger seat down so we were horizontal and had me lie on top of him, the windows steaming just enough with our body heat that when the sirens roared past, the lights shone through the haze and somehow it made them brighter. I stopped, like if I froze I could prevent them from seeing me, from getting out of that police car and tapping on the window. I know the stories of what happens when the blue-suits find someone like me doing something like this. The man beneath me asked me why I stopped and I didn’t answer, still waiting for a cop to jump out and turn on his flashlight, blind me with it.
The sirens receded into the night, and nobody came tapping on the window, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head of them zip-tying my wrists and shoving me into the backseat of their car, so I got off the man and he started throwing a fit and calling me a bitch and I thought he might try to hit me, so I opened the car door and fled.
Now I’m walking, the streetlamps looking like spotlights and I feel like I’m being followed, even though I know the ocean makes you believe things when it fills you up and tonight I am brimming.
Part of me hopes Alé might be out this late and run into me, find me on the streets, and take me home with her. I don’t want her to have to see me like this; she probably wouldn’t even look me in the eyes, but at least she’d take me somewhere safe. At least her arms would be warm. But Alé isn’t gonna find me and since I haven’t been answering her calls anyway, she probably wouldn’t want to.
Alé’s always dreamed big and lived small.
I met her when I tagged along with Marcus to the skate park and decided she was the only thing worth watching. Marcus and Alé hung out too, but then Marcus entered high school and suddenly she was too young to be his friend. Even in middle school, she was pointing out plot holes in every movie and questioning all her teachers, thinking beyond this city, but still living in it more fully than the rest of us. Alé’s graduation was the most breathtaking and devastating day of my life, watching her do something Marcus and I didn’t have the bandwidth or maybe the bravado to do. The entirety of last year I was waiting for her to tell me about whatever college she was gonna go to, bracing myself for her departure, but halfway through her senior year her mother had a small stroke and I think that stopped Alé in her tracks, made her stay when she probably shouldn’t have.
Alé isn’t unhappy, but I know she’s still dreaming. She’s always thinking about people, about how many of us been left in the dust. She secretly feeds families who don’t got no food at home, letting them into the back entrance of the taquería and sending them out with bags of food she made with her own hands. I know she wants to do more than that, take her skateboard and set out into these streets, heal what she never could with me, with her sister.
Alé’s sister went missing when she was twelve. Clara was two years older than Alé, just entering high school at Castlemont High. Alé says her sister was acting different those first months of school and then one day in November, Clara didn’t show up for her after-school shift at La Casa. The family called the cops, who didn’t say much beyond taking some basic information and entering Clara into some database. No news report, no AMBER Alert, just a cop who said she’d do her job.
After the first two days Clara was gone, their mama made posters that Alé and I uploaded onto Facebook and Myspace, then rode around the city taping them to poles and stop signs. Those first weeks after Clara disappeared felt like all the oxygen had run out in the city, like there wasn’t enough room for us to breathe and we were waiting for our next puff. After a few months, when OPD still didn’t have shit to say about Clara’s case, we all started to realize she was gone, that her being gone meant more than her being dead because in this city, it’s just as probable that she was stolen, that she’s out there somewhere walking streets just like I am now.
Maybe it didn’t make sense for me to leave tonight, when I’ve got money to make and it’s still early. The things your body needs most don’t usually make sense, though, so I let the air ripple my skin into a path right back to High Street, right back to the Regal-Hi. Sometimes when I walk, I look for Clara, try to find a glimpse of her in the shadows of these streets. I try to tell myself I’m nothing like her, that this is my choice and I’m old enough and I’m being smart. I’m starting to wonder if I even believe it at all.
I push the gate open to the pool greeting me like it hasn’t been following me up and down the streets: same blue, same glow. The stairs are massive, never-ending in these heels, and each step makes my ankles click like the joints are trying to find a way out of the climb. When I reach the landing, I don’t rush toward my apartment or even toward Trevor’s. Instead, I walk slow enough, close enough to the doors that I can hear the muffled sounds calling out to me. A child’s shriek. A stream of laughter. What sounds like the talking-to that comes right before the beating. A teakettle.
When I get to Trevor’s door, I don’t bother listening for a noise because there is none. Like Trevor said, Dee ain’t been home in weeks and, as far as I know, Trevor’s always in there sleeping or munching on another bowl of Cheerios.
Their door has an updated slip of paper taped to it: rent due in next 7 days or pending eviction. Vern keeps it sweet and simple, doesn’t even bother signing it. I continue on down the line to my door, to the same slip of paper that I leave to soar upward with the wind when the door slams shut behind me. I toss my heels across the room, sinking into the couch next to a sleeping Marcus.
Marcus stirs from his sleep, blinking his eyes open, yawning and looking over so the faint trace of ink twists below his ear. “You good?”
I pause, holding my breath, looking down at my thighs, and part of me hopes he’ll ask me where I’ve been. “No.”
He doesn’t move from his slouch. “Gonna be alright.”
“No.”
He shifts on the couch. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I don’t know how to do this either, Ki. But I got faith. Just go to sleep.” He turns over so his face is pressed against the back cushion.
I stand up, slipping into the bathroom.
On my sixteenth birthday, Marcus told me he had a surprise for me. We were sitting in that same patch of carpet behind the couch, the place we spent most of our time together since Mama left, eating my cake out of the box with plastic forks. Marcus was always fucking around or at work, but he told me he was all mine for my birthday and he kept his promise. It was before I dropped out of school and I was taking a couple short shifts at Bottle Caps while Marcus worked at Panda Express. Together, we made it work, up until Marcus met Cole and Uncle Ty’s album came out and Marcus stopped trying.
“What is it?” When Marcus told me he had a surprise for me, I assumed I wasn’t gonna get nothing but his company, which was really all I wanted anyway.
His grin covered half his face and I could see his silver crown better than I had since the day he’d gotten it and proudly opened wide to show me. He got up from the floor and left the room, heading to the bathroom. He hadn’t done that in over a year and I thought maybe I should go with him, hold his hand so he wouldn’t panic if he saw flashes of dripping water spilling across the floor. I stayed put and he came back a minute later with a needle in his hand.
“You want me to sew your pants or some shit?”
“Nah, I’m gonna pierce your ears.”