Then come all the happy sounds of Joya’s mama arriving. I listen, lying stiff and still, as Joya’s things are loaded up. I hear the thump of the bags and the grown-lady voices of Mrs. Mack and Joya’s mama talking. If I stand up, I’ll be able to see them from the window. Our room faces the drive. But I stay rigid on my bed, even when the car doors close. I don’t cry or move as I hear the engine start, when I hear them drive off, when she is gone away with her own mother.
It’s long past midnight when I finally crack. Alone in my bed in the darkest part of night, I wake to find I am already weeping. My body bucks and rocks, and I have to smother the loud brays that I feel rising. I turn to the wall and push them down deep into my pillow. I hug my cool pillow to me, and it does not hug me back. I gulp and weep into the cloth anyway, biting at it, pressing close until I’m gagging on it.
I roll away from the wall, sick, and find Candace’s bug eyes looking at me, six inches away. She’s peeping up over the edge of my bed, alligator style. I jerk back so fast it feels like I left all my skin behind, and a scream bangs its way up my throat. I snap my mouth shut, trapping it behind my teeth. I sit up and glare at her, letting the scream out as a long hiss of breath. I’ve been startled out of puking.
Candace doesn’t move, still crouching on her knees by my bed. I can see the whites of her eyes gleaming in the dim light from our clock.
“You’re whoopin’ in your pillow so loud that I can’t sleep.”
She says can’t so redneck. It sounds like ain’t with a c on the front. I don’t speak her brand of English any more than I spoke Joya’s. No one here speaks like me and Kai. No one wears colorful scarves or admits to playing the tambourine. Kai’s people eat sardines tinned in mustard and talk about The Tao of Pooh. They are all art-farts and petty criminals—light-fingered musicians, stoned painters, writers penning novels and bad checks. Even Tick, that racist asshole, was a poet. Kai’s tribe owns water pipes and finger bells the way regular Americans own coasters. We are gypsies among other gypsies, shifting in and out of love, towns, names, constantly in flux, reinvented by and for each other.
No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don’t look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.
I scrub at my face with my hands, and all at once anything is better than being alone. I scoot back, making room for Candace. She rises up enough to rest her pointy chin on the bed’s edge, suspicious of the offer. It’s unprecedented. She’s always had to wheedle or bribe her way in.
I press my back against the wall and say, “I’ll sleep better with you taking up seventy percent of my mattress than creeping around on the floor and goggling at me.” I try to say it tough like Joya would, but my throat is full of snot and my voice is trembly.
Candace thinks about it, then slithers in under my covers. She lies on her back, looking straight up at the ceiling. “Yesterday, you wouldn’t’ve peed on me if I was on fire. You’re just crying over Joya.”
“I’m not crying over Joya,” I said, and it’s true enough to sound true.
“Well, why then?”
I am not going to tell Candace, of all people, that I miss my mother.
“Maybe because I’m going to get my ass kicked in the morning.” Candace’s eyes gleam, full of questions in the dark. “Shar, Karice, and Kim. They never got Joya. Now that she’s gone, they’ll come after me.” Just to be mean I add, “They’ll probably whip the shit out of you, too.”
Candace swallows audibly, then whispers, “Do you think they’ll come in here and get us while we’re sleeping?”
This is the last place they will start it. Mrs. Mack’s suite is exactly under our room. But Candace isn’t a fighter, and she doesn’t think strategically. She is staring at the door, big-eyed. I soften and I add, very exaggerated, so she’ll get it, “They could burst in any second and kill us all. If I were you, I’d sleep under the bed.”
She makes a tittering sound and relaxes. “They wouldn’t mess with me nohow,” she says, “excepting Kim.”
“Kim’s big, but Shar’s the one you have to watch for.”
I may not be crying about the fight, but it is coming. It’s nice having a living body, even Candace’s, between me and the door. Or maybe, tonight, it’s simply nice to have a living body close.
“Are you really scared?” Candace whispers, as if the idea I might feel human things like fear is new to her.
“Who wants to get the shit beat out of ’em?” I ask instead of answering.
“I could help you,” Candace says, almost truculent. “If you wanted to make friends with me.”
I snort at that. Candace cringes at the sight of any lifted hand. I can’t wave at the girl without her shivering and crawling backward like a beaten dog, except a dog is at least a vertebrate. Candace is as spineless as a bag of jam.
“I’d like to see you be my friend in front of Shar,” I say.
“You never wanted me to before,” she says, sulky. “I can’t hardly even come in my own room. All Joya ever said to me was Get out, and you let her.”