Circle Nine (23 page)

As soon as I enter the alley, I realize it’s a mistake; whereas the sidewalks were lit by streetlamps, the alley is pitch-black. It’s just after eight but dark enough back here to be three a.m. As my eyes begin to adjust, I notice that it’s not just an alley at all: it must have been a back path into some small housing development. I turn back only to find that I can’t see the road anymore; it’s vanished entirely. I realize I must have lost track in my panic. I must have wandered down one of the other paths that stretch from where I stand like fingers, or spiderwebs, or a maze. I take a breath and turn, walking a few paces back toward the direction I think I came from.

Nothing looks familiar.

And then a familiar and irrational thought: I’m going to die out here.

I steady myself. I am not going to die out here. I will walk through this place until I see someone or hit a main road, and then I will ask for directions. I must be so close. No more than a half mile away.

But it looks dangerous back here.

I shouldn’t be afraid. I don’t need to be afraid. I push myself forward; I have no idea, no idea at all, how I became so lost. As I walk, I’m surrounded by trash, broken bottles, and leftover chicken bones sitting next to crumbling stoops. I’ve never really been out of the shelter until now. On the way to my session, when Lara walked me so carefully and told me I’d be OK getting back — after all, I’m eighteen — my mind was preoccupied with lies.

And then I see two figures on one of these urban stoops, and I am terrified. They watch me silently with glittering eyes; they wave cigarettes, the only evidence of light, with slender wrists. They are mistresses of the dark, so dark that I am nearly upon them before I see them. And after I do, I look straight ahead, too afraid to ask them where I am. Afraid of everything now. The alley is so small; I wonder if it is worse to pass them without saying something. But I do it anyway, quickening my step.

It’s too late by the time I notice one long, bronze leg extending itself in front of me. I stumble, and I nearly fall before I catch myself. I try to walk on as if nothing happened, but they’re laughing too loud and too long for just two people. It’s a chorus behind me, half beautiful and half cruel.

I run for far too long, maybe more than half a mile, before I stop feeling the familiar sears of panic. Before I can think again. I don’t know what I’ve wandered into — some sort of housing project. It hits me that I have no way out; that this is the worst place for me to be, that I can’t ask for directions here.

But is this place any different from where I was with Sam? Am I any different from those girls on the stoop? No, surely not. I am thinking the way Addie thinks, not the way Abby would have thought. And now I’m both girls, both identities. Or neither girl, someone braver still. My fear is nothing.

It’s as if this realization saves me, as if my fear had been sabotaging me, leading me deeper into the maze. Because as I turn left, relying on instinct and calmer than before, I see a dim haze of light far ahead. It doesn’t matter what road it is. Any road will do. Any road with people or maybe a gas station where I can ask for directions. I walk straight ahead, quicker and more confidently now, and I’m only a few blocks away when I hear a voice beside me: “Hey, sexy.”

I whip around; there’s a figure next to me who hadn’t been there just a second ago. He’s about my age, and he’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. But I’d recognize that build, that skin, anywhere. My heart turns to fire-ice.

Sam.

I am too afraid even to scream, but screaming wouldn’t do me any good here anyway, so I run. But as I run, I realize I
am
screaming, kind of. A high-pitched squealing sound that isn’t loud enough to get any attention, but I can’t seem to get any louder.

“Wait!” I hear, then some muttering, then some other voices and then, louder: “That chick is
wacked,
yo.” And still louder, in a shout so I can hear: “You hear me, girl? You
wacked.
”

I run and run. It’s only a few blocks, but it may as well be miles.

I can’t tell whether he’s behind me.

I almost cry when I reach the street because I recognize it; there is Saint Francis on the corner, just twenty feet away.

I run without looking back.

And it is only now, only after relief washes over me in a tidal wave, after the onslaught of emotion lifts me outside of my body, that I can answer my own question.

I know. I know what happened to Katie that night.
The memory is thick and rancid, and with it comes a final, unbearable pain.

Sam pushes me to the ground, and we start down the staircase on all fours, me in front and him behind. I am feeling my way down and am nearly there when I hear a shriek that doesn’t belong to me. I am seized by it briefly, and I almost can’t move because I’d know it anywhere. Katie is inside. And now, now I remember what she whispered to me once, her secret I’d dismissed as false, an attempt at showing off.

“Sometimes, Addie, I skip cheer camp and nap away the day, listen to music, do my own thing for a while, and Mama never knows the difference. She doesn’t even know I’m home.”

“Yeah, right. Where would you even go?”

“The attic, silly. Right behind all those old crates, on top of the ratty sofa in the corner.”

“I hope you know you’re using
ratty
literally, Katie. That’s disgusting.”

“Suit yourself. Just don’t rat me out.” Then she’d laughed at her joke, looking up at me teasingly.

“If you’re always skipping out, Katie,” I asked quietly, “how do you stay on cheer?”

“I’m just that good,” she said with a wink. “It doesn’t take much.” And I felt revulsion fill my mouth and belly despite myself. Katie could flirt her way out of anything. Classes, cheer practice, extra chores around the house. She was that charming and, if I was honest, that sneaky.

And now I know for sure in the worst possible way that Katie hadn’t been joking. I’m so close to the door I can almost touch it, but I turn anyway. Sam grabs for me again, but he misses this time, and I clamber back up the stairs toward the sound of the scream. Sam frantically yells for me from the bottom. When I reach the top of the staircase, it’s louder, but the wall of flames that covered the doorframe to the attic before has now shot across the first few steps, forming a curtain of flames. Through it, I see her.

“Addie!” she screams. “Please, Addie!”

I crawl toward her and look for a way around it. There is none.

“Come through it!” I yell to her. “Or jump from up there.” I motion toward the attic.

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m too scared.”

“Don’t be scared. Turn around, jump from the top. Or run through to me and I’ll smother the flames.”

“No.” She is crying now. She reaches toward me. I try to reach for her, and I gather every tiny piece of strength from deep in my soul and I stay strong for her, because I need her more than anyone. She is the one person who fully understands me, who never asks more from me than what I am. I am reaching toward the flames because I want to pull her through to me since she won’t do it herself. I am gasping and reaching when I see the wooden beam, a torch ablaze, hurtle from the rafters above her. I close my eyes because I know where it will land. And when I open them again, I see I was right; she is lying motionless and I can barely make out her eyes, wide and still, staring into mine.

I run from her. I am consumed by smoke and flames and guilt and shame and horror until I can’t tell them apart. Everything is crumbling; the stairs give way beneath my feet, and there is tremendous noise, as if from an earthquake. And when I wake up, there is an angel above me, stroking my cheek, and I can’t remember a thing.

I am a specter, haunting and haunted, living in an in-between land. But at least now I am living, instead of caught in a dream. Sometimes I think the dreamworld was easier; sometimes I even miss it. But then I look down at the scar that inches its way from my thumb and forefinger to my wrist, my painful reminder of the night I lost everything, and I accidentally catch sight of my hollow cheeks and sunken eyes in the mirror, and I know: the world I lived in with Sam was a beautiful fantasy, but it would have killed me in the end.

I slip in and out of the cracks at Saint Francis. I take everything in and give nothing back. I watch and hear. I never talk. Talking is damning, and my secrets well up in my chest and threaten to push out all the time. But the shelter isn’t a purgatory for just me;
thirty days
hovers thick in the air like a death sentence. I can see an invisible hourglass hovering over everyone’s heads. My own has fourteen grains of sand left. When I am tired of watching, I sketch furiously. Sketch and watch, watch and sketch. Anything not to think.

There are a few guests here, mostly younger girls — high-school dropouts and former crackheads and teenage moms, who keep the place filled with chatter as though there’s a perpetual TV on in the background. But most of the women here are like me. Quiet, private. Not very talkative except for the pleases and the thank-yous. That’s because there’s no reason to form connections when no one’s sticking around for very long anyway.

But I have extra motivation to stay silent: it’s impossible to feel safe here. Each morning, I wake up wondering if today someone will recognize me. If today I will see an old neighbor, or a friend of my mother’s, some kind-hearted soccer mom who’s willing to drive an hour from home to volunteer at the Saint Francis soup kitchen. Every day I wake up wondering if it’s my last day of freedom.

And then there’s Sam. I miss him and fear him all at once. I know by now that the boy in the alley couldn’t have been Sam; Sam never spoke like that, and he would have shown up at Saint Francis by now, looking for me. I know that, but I am still afraid.

I see Sam now just as clearly as I see myself; I hate him and I fear him so much that I wake up screaming in terror from the nightmares in which he’s pursuing me. But despite it all, I still love him. I hate myself for loving him. In my mind, I list the facts I’ve pieced together from memory:

— Sam was a drug addict.

— Sam traded my body for drugs.

— Sam knew the truth about my family and the night they died.

— Sam lied to me. Everything he said was a lie.

— We did not live in a cave-palace. The place we lived in was filthy and cold, maybe one of the hundreds of abandoned mines that litter the forests here.

Then why do I miss him? I do. I miss him. I miss the way he’d stroked my hair until I fell asleep. I miss his stories, and his brilliance, and his long laugh. Maybe part of me, in that alley, wanted it to be him.

Hey, sexy.

The beat of footsteps.

Being pursued.

Being caught. Wrapped in his arms. Taken with no choice.

But I am afraid of him. I am afraid of how much I miss him. I am afraid of the box of letters I keep hidden under my bed, letters I’ve written to him with the half intention of sending, if only I knew where. I’m glad I don’t know where. I’m glad that no matter how many hours I’ve spent scouring the Internet on the shelter’s computer, I’ve found nothing about him or the liquor-store robbery. Maybe Sam wasn’t his real name. Maybe he lied about that, too.

I’m glad he’s never there, hovering outside Saint Francis ringing the doorbell over and over and thumping his fist on the door, begging for someone to let him in, like so many of the women’s former lovers. I’m glad every day that I don’t see him on our stoop, but I’m also disappointed. Because he hooked me in the way the drugs hooked him. And now I don’t trust myself not to go back. I don’t know where he is, but I know he’s close. I can feel his presence the same way I felt Katie speaking to me, telling me the truth about things, through time and space and delirium and hallucinations. I am torn between a sickening desire for Sam and a terrible revulsion. I know what I’m feeling is wrong, very wrong. My weakness fills me with self-loathing.

There’s something else I found on the Internet: