11
Our ride dropped us off in the outskirts of Dallas, then turned and headed to a suburb. Marci and I hung out by the freeway on-ramp for a while, hoping to hitch a ride deeper into the city, but nobody stopped. Hitching was always harder in big cities, especially at night, and though it wasn’t dark yet, the sun was setting, and the streetlights were coming on, and the shapes rushing past us were changing from cars and trucks to black blobs and bright points of light. The highway wove through the city like two wide rivers, one of white lights and one of red, and we stood on the bank and wondered what to do. We asked at a gas station for directions to the nearest bus stop then hiked almost a mile to reach it. We bought two fares and sat silently in the fluorescent light as we rode downtown.
Ninety-four dollars and sixty-one cents. We hadn’t eaten since Ms. Glassman’s house, the day before.
The notes for Potash’s Dallas stash had an address and four numbers, one with three digits, and three with two digits. I assumed it was a locker number and combination, probably for a bus station, but when we finally arrived two transfers later, we found a storage facility: all internal, four stories high, and closed after 10 PM. It was nearly 11:00.
“Well,” said Marci. “What are the odds they have a drive-in theater we could crash at for the night?”
“We want to stay off the street if we can,” I said, watching scattered pedestrians still milling around in the darkness. Most of them looked ragged and filthy; homeless, or junkies, or close enough to make no difference. “Everything’s more dangerous in a city like this.”
“The small-town Withered would be offended.”
“The Withered don’t have a monopoly on evil,” I said and I thought about Derek and his friends. “They’re just the ones we’ve decided it’s okay to kill.”
“Where, then?” asked Marci. “If this was a bus station we could have slept on a bench inside and been fine.”
“We could look for one,” I said. “Or maybe a homeless shelter. We’d have to find one that doesn’t split up men and women, though.”
“Because you don’t know if I’ll still be me in the morning.”
I nodded. It had happened before.
“I’m going to need some tampons, too,” said Marci. “Does Brooke keep some in her bag?”
I nodded. “Just pads,” I said. It was about time for this to happen again. “Tampons freak out most of the older girls—anyone who died more than fifty years ago, really.”
“Ha!” said Marci. “I can only imagine.”
“This is the life we lead.”
Marci nodded, looking around. “Okay. We’ll need to find somewhere I can change in private, the sooner the better.”
“We’ve got another half hour on these bus passes,” I said. “Or we could look for a fast-food place with restrooms—most of those don’t close ’til late.”
“I’d rather have a bed than a booth in a taco place.” She pointed across the street. “I don’t suppose it’s a good idea to ask one of those guys about the nearest shelter?”
“I prefer not to,” I said. “Most of them are okay, but the bad ones are pretty bad, and you never know what you’re going to get.”
We ended up walking four blocks to a burger joint, just closing up for the night, and they let Marci in to use the restroom once she explained the situation to the girl at the drive thru. Boy Dog and I waited outside, and I asked the other worker about homeless shelters. He gave me some vague directions, but didn’t know much. Marci came back out after a few minutes.
“We’re going to need some more pads,” she said. “She only has a couple, probably just an emergency stash to tide her over until she gets to a drug store.”
“Can you make it through the night?”
“Probably.”
We wandered over what felt like half the downtown area before finally finding a shelter called Second Chance. They stopped taking new residents at 7 PM, which seemed ridiculous to me, but pointed us toward a sobriety shelter that was open all night. We walked another mile to reach that only to find they required ID and an extensive registration form. I wanted to stay off the grid, and we didn’t carry ID anyway, so we left and kept wandering. Eventually we broke down and went to a restaurant, one of these twenty-four-hour breakfast places, so Brooke’s body could get some good food, if nothing else.
“I can’t let y’all in,” said the woman at the front desk. Her name tag said Delilah. “The manager says we can’t take no beggars.”
“We have money,” I said, but she shook her head.