37Susie drives me to the strip mall twenty minutes out of town. I sit easy in the passenger seat of his old Camry, my hands folded between my knees. The day is rising bright and blue.I would be afraid, except I’m with him.I should be afraid, but I’m not.The strip mall peels into view ahead. A long, flat building with sunshine sparkling white on its roof. “Go see a movie or something,” Susie says. “I’ll meet you out front at five. To fetch you, I mean. And bring you…home.”The last time I went to the movies, Momma and me sat in the back row. It was the middle of the day, but it was dark in there. Giant people loomed on the screen in wide-angle views and close-up shots. When they spoke, their voices came from all sides. The Uncle who sat next to me told me what to do. I heard his voice just fine, even across all the noise. I fell asleep right after. Mom didn’t wake me until the end.I don’t remember what the movie was about.“Y
38None of this happened in any way I really know. I see it anyway. I don’t know how much of it is crazy kid-nonsense, tossed together like a junk pile of barbed wire and blunt razor blades. I feel it anyway. The rust, the scratch. The facts.Uncle Steve waited down at the gate in his car. The drive was long, and mostly through darkness. Backstreet twists and dirt-track roads. I rode up front in my mother’s lap, her arms wrapped so tight around me I didn’t need my winter jacket, not with her and the heater, and the glowing buzz of Uncle Steve’s voice. “You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. Over and over again. Talking to my mother, and not to me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll do great.”The cellphone he gave her was a Nokia, small and black. They don’t make those anymore.“There are people in this world who dream every damn minute of meeting a girl like you. Girls like the two of you.”“I don’t know if we can make it alone.”“You’d rat
39I drink coffee until it makes my heart beat too fast. The refills are free and the waitress doesn’t talk to me like I’m a kid. This is why I stay, I guess. The way it feels like I’m okay to be here. The way it feels safe. The seats around me fill up with singles and duos. Laptops and notebooks. Actual books, too. I don’t have anything to occupy my hands or my eyes except the cup in front of me. I test out white sugar versus brown sugar. Sweetener. Sweetener and white sugar. Sweetener and brown. Cup by cup. I don’t look at the people around me. Something about them seems too real. The things they’re frowning at, mouthing at, even as they sit alone and type stuff or write stuff or make their notes on printed pages. Like the thoughts they’re having might really be real.I only leave the coffee shop when my bladder fills up, my belly pressing too tight against my button-up jeans. I pay. I stand. Probably the coffee shop has its own restr
40She used to call me Angel-Kid. She used to call me Doll.Look, I hardly knew the woman. At least, that’s what my mother said, but I think she tried to help me once. I think she tried to stop this thing.“Little girls don’t need more than two eyes.”I know she never said this. Still, it’s her voice that speaks.
EpilogueSusie and me, we’ve decided my real age is seventeen. No more plastic bead bracelets, no more pigtails. No more cherry-scented lip gloss or strawberry-flavored gum. My real age is seventeen, we’ve said, but if anyone asks we tell them I’m eighteen. It was like a scene from the movie, the way we drove out of town. I sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, and it wasn’t so cold that I needed any arms around me. I wasn’t shivering so bad I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was better than a movie, because usually in real life nobody cares that much. All those close-ups on faces. Panic or tears in the eyes. The parents rushing to the child. The kids rallying around their friend. All those understanding expressions, those touching words and heroic promises. In a movie, the star gets to be everybody’s priority. But nobody makes another person more important than them. Nobody puts everything of theirs on hold like that, not f
1My mother, she’s standing at the counter with her hair shining loose over her shoulder, her eyes just as bright, her smile so wide she can only be oblivious to the lipstick marks on her teeth. She’s laying her change out onto the counter, one coin at a time, placing each down with a sharp, metallic tap on the smooth space between the till and the gum rack. The tapping sound, clear and deliberate behind the dancing wall of her voice, feels like the echo of a giant clock in the background. Ticking down to something. Tap-tap like tick-tock.“Eighty-nine,” she says. Tap-Tick. “Ninety.” Tap-Tock.Beside the rows of coins, stacked up to tens in neat piles, are two crisp bills. Beside the bills are her intended purchases. There are only three—a vanilla-scented lip balm, a box of salted crackers, and a carton of full-cream milk. “One hundred,” she beams. Tap. Tick. “Nearly there.”She’s twenty cents off the total. She’s fumbling in the de
2My mom was fifteen years old when I arrived in her world, and the way she tells it, you’d swear there was never a sign for her that she was even pregnant. “You gave me the worst cramps I ever had in my life,” she’s said to me. Like I was a forgotten tampon or a plate of bad seafood. “But when I first saw you, it made it all okay.”I know it’s not okay, and she knows it’s not okay, but since so much of life is pretending what’s horribly wrong is actually really okay, maybe the truth doesn’t matter so much in the end. Pretend okay. Real okay. Maybe there isn’t always a difference. A teenager gets pregnant, or not. A baby is born, or not. So many beautiful, terrible journeys leading out from so many different possibilities. Like a pane of glass cracking, fractures making fractures, a fragile crisscross of lines spreading out in a spiderweb shatter. “When something scary happens, or something hurts you, you have to weigh the bad up
3Where we are now, this town has been home for a touch over two weeks. It’s a moderate size suburban square, sprawling, kinda poor but not trash-torn. There’s a water tower up on one of the higher hills, which you can see from almost everywhere around. It doesn’t look so big from a distance, though it must be, or it wouldn’t loom like that. Metal bars and splayed legs. A dome-topped cage held high. The high street isn’t long but it snakes around in sections, hiding the post office behind the supermarket, the library behind the mechanics. I don’t know where the schools are yet—maybe tucked farther back.My mother says this town is a perfect ‘launch pad’. Small, safe. Separate, but connected. It has a coach depot and a train line and a highway running by. It’s a place with many exits. No locked doors. We live like rumors in towns like this. Sketch-book versions of ourselves with scratched-out features and unknown names. Vague address, no