It’s six thirty in the morning and I hug myself in my new winter coat from the fire department giveaway, my breath streaming out over the top of the scratchy orange scarf Mama Alice knitted. I squeeze my legs together, left knee in the hollow of the right knee like I have to pee, because even tights don’t help too much when the edge of the skirt only comes to the middle of your kneecap. I’d slap my legs to warm them, but these are my last pair of tights and I don’t want them to snag.
The scarf scrapes my upper lip when I nod. It’s dark here behind the dumpster. The sun won’t be up for another half hour. On the street out front, brightness pools under streetlights, but it doesn’t show anything warm—just cracked black snow trampled and heaped over the curb.
“Nobody wants me,” I say. “Mama Alice gets paid to take care of me.” That’s unfair. Mama Alice didn’t have to take me or my foster brother Luis. But sometimes it feels good to be a little unfair. I sniff up a drip and push my chin forward so it bobs like the harpy swallowing garbage.
“Nobody would want to live with me. But I don’t have any choice. I’m stuck living with myself.”
The harpy says, There’s always a choice. “Sure,” I say. “Suicide is a sin.”
The harpy says, Talking to harpies is probably a sin, too. “Are you a devil?”
The harpy shrugs. Its feathers smell like mildew. Something crawls along a rat of its hair, greasy-shiny in the street light. The harpy scrapes it off with a claw and eats it.
The harpy says, I’m a heathen monster. Like Celaeno and her sisters, Aello and Ocypete. The sisters of the storm. Your church would say so, that I am a demon. Yes.
“I don’t think you give Father Alvaro enough credit.”
The harpy says, I don’t trust priests, and turns to preen its broken claws.
“You don’t trust anybody.”
That’s not what I said, says the harpy—
You probably aren’t supposed to interrupt harpies, but I’m kind of over that by now. “That’s why I decided. I’m never going to trust anybody. My birth mother trusted somebody, and look where it got her. Knocked up and dead.”
The harpy says, That’s very inhuman of you. It sounds like a compliment.
I put a hand on the harpy’s warm wing. I can’t feel it through my glove. The gloves came from the fire department, too. “I have to go to school, Harpy.”
The harpy says, You’re alone there too.
I want to prove the harpy wrong.
The drugs are really good now. When I was born, a quarter of the babies whose moms had AIDS got sick too. Now it’s more like one in a hundred. I could have a baby of my own, a healthy baby. And then I wouldn’t be alone.
No matter what the harpy says.
It’s a crazy stupid idea. Mama Alice doesn’t have to take care of me after I turn eighteen, and what would I do with a baby? I’ll have to get a job. I’ll have to get state help for the drugs. The drugs are expensive.
If I got pregnant now, I could have the baby before I turn eighteen. I’d have somebody who was just mine. Somebody who loved me.
How easy is it to get pregnant, anyway? Other girls don’t seem to have any problem doing it by accident.
Or by “accident.”
Except whoever it was, I would have to tell him I was pos. That’s why I decided I would sign the purity pledge and all that. Because then I have a reason not to tell.
And they gave me a ring. Fashion statement.
You know how many girls actually keep that pledge? I was going to. I meant to. But not just keep it until I got married. I meant to keep it forever, and then I’d never have to tell anybody.
No, I was right the first time. I’d rather be alone than have to explain. Besides, if you’re having a baby, you should have the baby for the baby, not for you.
Isn’t that right, Mom?
The harpy has a kingdom.
It’s a tiny kingdom. The kingdom’s just the alley behind my building, but it has a throne (the dumpster) and it has subjects (the winos) and it has me. I know the winos see the harpy. They talk to it sometimes. But it vanishes when the other building tenants come down, and it hides from the garbagemen.
I wonder if harpies can fly.
It opens its wings sometimes when it’s raining as if it wants to wash off the filth, or sometimes if it’s mad at something. It hisses when it’s mad like that, the only sound I’ve ever heard it make outside my head.
I guess if it can fly depends on if it’s magic. Miss Rivera, my bio teacher sophomore year, said that after a certain size things couldn’t lift themselves with wings anymore. It has to do with muscle strength and wingspan and gravity. And some big things can only fly if they can fall into flight, or get a headwind.
I never thought about it before. I wonder if the harpy’s stuck in that alley. I wonder if it’s too proud to ask for help.
I wonder if I should ask if it wants some anyway.
The harpy’s big. But condors are big, too, and condors can fly. I don’t know if the harpy is bigger than a condor. It’s hard to tell from pictures, and it’s not like you can walk up to a harpy with a tape measure and ask it to stick out a wing.
Well, maybe you could. But I wouldn’t.
Wouldn’t it be awful to have wings that didn’t work? Wouldn’t it be worse to have wings that do work, and not be able to use them?
After I visit the harpy at night, I go up to the apartment. When I let myself in the door to the kitchen, Mama Alice is sitting at the table with some mail open in front of her. She looks up at me and frowns, so I lock the door behind me and shoot the chain. Luis should be home by now, and I can hear music from his bedroom. He’s fifteen now. I think it’s been three days since I saw him.
I come over and sit down in my work clothes on the metal chair with the cracked vinyl seat.
“Bad news?”
Mama Alice shakes her head, but her eyes are shiny. I reach out and grab her hand. The folded up paper in her fingers crinkles.
“What is it, then?”
She pushes the paper at me. “Desiree. You got the scholarship.”
I don’t hear her right the first time. I look at her, at our hands, and the rumply paper. She shoves the letter into my hand and I unfold it, open in, read it three times as if the words will change like crawly worms when I’m not looking at it.
The words are crawly worms, all watery, but I can see hardship and merit and State. I fold it up carefully, smoothing out the crinkles with my fingertips. It says I can be anything at all.
I’m going to college on a scholarship. Just state school.
I’m going to college because I worked hard. And because the state knows I’m full of poison, and they feel bad for me.
The harpy never lies to me, and neither does Mama Alice.
She comes into my room later that night and sits down on the edge of my bed, with is just a folded-out sofa with springs that poke me, but it’s mine and better than nothing. I hide the letter under the pillow before she turns on the light, so she won’t catch on that I was hugging it.
“Desiree,” she says.
I nod and wait for the rest of it.
“You know,” she says, “I might be able to get the state to pay for liposuction. Doctor Morales will say it’s medically necessary.”
“Liposuction?” I grope my ugly plastic glasses off the end table, because
I need to see her. I’m frowning so hard they pinch my nose.