Girl in Pieces (9 page)

Barbero and Nurse Ava found Jen S. in the emergency stairwell. Her stomach wasn't bothering her, and she wasn't doing laps. She was, Louisa informs me later that night, doing Doc Dooley.

I'm under my sheet. When I blink, my eyelashes brush against the fabric. I grunt at Louisa.

“They've been fucking for a loooong time,” Louisa whispers. “I'm surprised they didn't get caught sooner.”

Down the hall, there's a flurry of activity: phone calls being made, Jen S. crying at the nurses' station. Louisa says, “Too bad, really. They'll kick her out now and fire him. Or maybe he won't get fired, just reprimanded. He's only a resident. They fuck up all the time.” She pauses. “I hope Jen doesn't think they'll get together on the outside, because that is not going to happen.”

She peels the sheet from my face. “You're young, so you don't really understand.” She hasn't taken off her makeup yet. Her mascara is smudged beneath her eyes.

“He chose her because she's easy. We're so easy, aren't we? Hell, I thought I found the one, too, once.”

Tentatively, I say, “Maybe…he really liked her, though.” He could, couldn't he? Doc Dooley is a dreamboat, he doesn't need to troll on damaged girls. He could get anyone he wanted.

Louisa's eyes flicker. “Guys are weird, little one. You never know what floats their boat.” She places the sheet back over my face and climbs into her bed. Her voice is muffled now, like she's under her own sheet. “I let this guy—I thought he was so beautiful, and kind—I let him take pictures of me. Then he turned around and sold them to some freak site on the Web.”

Is she crying? I hesitate. Jen S. is really sobbing out there now and I can hear Sasha starting up in her room, a low, mewing sound.

This whole place is a world of sobbing girls.

Louisa is crying. The whole fucking hallway is crying, except me, because I am all cried out. I kick off my sheet and climb out of bed. Mikey was so
close
and I lost him. I lost him.

Louisa mumbles, “They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we've done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way.”

Her hand snakes from beneath the sheet, groping in the air. I step into the cradle of her fingers. Her nails are painted a glossy blue, with tiny flecks of red. A sob catches in her throat.

“You need to understand, little one. Do you understand what it's going to be like?”

I do what people say you should do, when someone is hurt and needs help, so they know they are loved. I sit on the edge of Louisa's bed, on top of her Hello Kitty bedspread. She's the only one of us who has her own bedspread and pillowcases and a selection of fuzzy slippers peeking from beneath the bed. I peel the pink-and-white sheet off her face slowly, just enough so that I can pet that hair, that wonderful riot of hair.

I think of Jen S. later, after the hall is quiet, after she's been taken back to her room to pack, to wait. She'd been screwing Doc Dooley this whole time. Where did they go? Did they use the Care room, did they spread the crinkly paper on the floor? Did they do it on the table or always in the stairwell? Was it cold? What did they talk about? They're both so tall and good-looking, clean-faced and sexy. I picture them pushing at each other and the insides of my thighs get warm. And then Mikey is in my head, his blond dreads soft and never gross-smelling, smiling at me and Ellis from the old lounger in his room, letting us get wild and play music as loud as we wanted. I was never with Mikey, but I would have tried, I mean, I wanted to, so much, but he loved Ellis. The boys I found smelled like burned glass and anger. Dirt streaked their skin, and tattoos, and acne. They lived in garages or cars. I knew those boys would never stick. They were oily; they would slither away after what we did in a dirty back room at a show or in the bathroom of someone's basement at a party.

Ellis had a boy. He had wolf teeth and a long black coat and he fucked her in her parents' basement on the spongy pink carpet while I listened from across the room, cocooned in a sleeping bag. He left her things: silver bracelets, filmy stockings, Russian nesting dolls filled with round blue pills. When he didn't call, she cried until her throat was raw. When she mentioned his name, Mikey would look away, and you could see his jaw get tight, his face darken.

Thinking about bodies fitting together makes me sad and hungry for something. I roll over and press my face into the pillow, try to make my mind go blank, ignore the itching of my scars. Louisa sighs restlessly in her sleep.

I don't want to believe she's right.

Jen's mother is dough-plump, with round cheeks and pinched lips. Her dad is a fatty, the zipper of his coach's jacket straining across his belly. Her parents stand in the hallway, watching us apprehensively. In a little while, Nurse Vinnie herds us into Rec and locks the door. We won't be allowed to say goodbye to Jen. The girls flit about the room, pulling cards and games from the bin, setting up with Vinnie at the round table. Blue stands at the window. Her dirty-blond hair is tied in a messy knot today; the tattoo of a swallow gleams faintly on the back of her neck. After a little while, she murmurs, “There she goes.”

We rush to the window. In the parking lot, Jen's father heaves two green suitcases into the trunk of a black Subaru. The day is gray and cold-looking. He tucks himself in the driver's seat, the whole car sinking down with the weight of him. Jen towers over her mother like a bendable straw. Her mother pats her once on the arm and opens the rear door, leaving Jen to fold herself into the front, next to her father.

She never once looks up at us.

The car melts into traffic, disappearing down the long block of cafés and bars, Middle Eastern trinket shops, and the place where they sell twenty-two kinds of hot dogs. Mikey worked there one summer; his skin radiated relish and sauerkraut.

The sky is pulpy with dark clouds. There have been a lot of storms lately, unusual for April. The sound of Blue's voice brings me back. “Poor Bruce,” she says softly, pointing out the window.

Barbero is standing in a corner of the parking lot. He's not wearing scrubs today: he's wearing a light blue hoodie and collared shirt, jeans and white sneakers, just like any other guy on the street.

“Oh,” I say. Then,
“Oh.”

He liked Jen. His name is
Bruce.

He's got little wire-frame glasses on that make him look not so…
oafish
…but kind of…nice. Blue and I watch as he wipes his eyes, climbs into his own car, a rusty little orange hatchback, and drives away,

“Poor, poor Bruce,” Blue murmurs.

Bodies fit together. And sometimes they don't.

Isis fingers the Scrabble tiles. Her nails are bitten down even farther than mine. Her tongue works at the corner of her mouth.

“Almost ready, Chuck.” She yanks a tile from the board. “Almost.”

I fiddle with my tie-dyed T-shirt and flowery hippie skirt. Mikey's mom did come by with a box of Tanya's old clothes, left over from her Deadhead phase: tie-dyed shirts and flimsy, whispery skirts, hemp sandals and grandma shawls. There were some old sweaters, though, too, and I'm wearing the best one: blue argyle cardigan with silver buttons in the shape of acorns. I didn't get to talk to Mikey's mom. If you aren't on a visitor list, you can't get in, and I don't have a visitor list, since I broke the rules. I don't know who would come, anyway, except for Mikey, but that's weeks away. Casper promised she'd put him on my list. Otherwise I know there's just one name on it: my mother. But I don't expect her to come, and Casper doesn't mention it.

When the phone in Rec rings, everyone looks around for Barbero. The phone only rings up here after a caller has been approved downstairs against a master list. Callers have to be checked against a list approved by your doctor, and only at the doctor's discretion.

Still, we aren't supposed to answer the phone by ourselves. “He must have gone to the shitter,” Blue says, shrugging.

The phone keeps ringing. Francie nudges Sasha. “Get it.”

“
You
get it.” Sasha resumes Connect 4. No one likes to play with her; she cheats.

Blue heaves herself up from the couch. “Wimpy Bloody Cupcakes,” she says to us. That's what she calls us, every once in a while: Bloody Cupcakes.
We could all be so cute, don't you think,
she said one day in Group.
If we didn't look like fucking zombies!
She raised her arms. Her scars made her look like a rag doll horribly resewn.

“Crazy Hut. Who is calling, please?” She twists the phone cord in her fingers.

She drops the phone so that it hits the wall,
ka-thunk,
and dangles, helpless, on its white cord. “It's your mother, Silent Sue.” She returns to her paperback, wedging herself into the stiff green couch.

I stop breathing. Isis is pushing tiles and muttering under her breath. Francie is busy watching a movie.

My mother. Why would she call? She hasn't even come to see me.

Slowly, I walk to the phone. I press the receiver to my ear and turn away from the girls, to the wall, my heart beating like fucking crazy in my chest. “Mom?” I whisper, hopeful.

The breathing is thick, raspy. “Noooo, Charlie. Guess!” The voice threads through my body.

Evan.

“I pretended to be your mom! Her name was in some stuff in your backpack.” He pauses, giggling, and suddenly switches to a honeyed, high-pitched voice. “Hello, I need to speak with my daughter, please, Miss Charlotte Davis.”

I don't say anything. I don't know if I'm relieved or disappointed.

“We had to take your money, Charlie.” He coughs, a splatter of mucus. “You know how it is.”

The empty film canisters in my backpack, the one he and Dump dropped off. The canisters I kept what little money I could scrounge in.

Evan is asthmatic and the drugs and the street do nothing for him. I've watched him curl up into a ball, wheezing until his face is purple, pissing his pants from the effort to not pass out. The free clinic only gives inhalers with medical exams and they won't look at you if you're high and Evan's life is about being high. He's from Atlanta. I don't know how he got all the way up here.

I keep close to the wall so the girls can't hear me. Hearing Evan's voice is taking me back to a dark place. I try to breathe evenly to keep in the moment, like Casper says.

Carefully, I say, “I know.”

I say, “It's okay.”

I say, “Thanks for bringing my backpack.”

He coughs again. “You were pretty messed up in the attic, you know? I thought me and Dump was gonna shit our pants. All that, like, blood.”

I say, “Yeah.”

He's so quiet that I almost don't hear him. “Was it Fucking Frank? Did he…did he finally come after you? Is that why you did it?”

I scrape the wall with what little nails I have left. Fucking Frank and his black eyes and those rings. Seed House and the red door where girls disappeared. He had boxes of sugary cereal on the shelves, and beer and soda in the fridge, and drugs in special locked boxes. He had filthy skin but teeth that gleamed like pearls.

The men who came to Seed House for the room with the red door, they had hungry eyes, eyes with teeth that moved over you, testing, tasting. That's why I hid in the attic for so long. Like a mouse, trying not to breathe so no one would notice me.

I say, “No. No, he didn't get me.”

Evan sighs, relieved. “Yeah, okay, that's good, yeah.”

“Evan,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“But he's part of
why
I did it. You know? Like, the straw and the camel. Everything. Do you understand?”

Evan is quiet. Then he says, “Yeah.”

I wonder where he's calling from—skinny Evan with his bad lungs and ripped pants, the funny houndstooth sport coat.

I ask him how he found me.

He tells me this is the place they send all the nutty girls. He tells me, “Dump and me found a ride to Portland.”

The night they saved me in the underpass, Dump broke a bottle over the man's head. It happened lightning quick. I saw a boy's terrified eyes appear over the man's shoulder and then the bottle in the air, gleaming against the yellowy lights. I picked slivers of glass out of my hair for days afterward.

Dump was mesmerized by the glass that glittered in the palms of his hands. He looked at me and his smile was a deep, curling cut. Bloody splinters of glass sparkled on the tips of his black boots.

The man who messed with me was at the bottom of the underpass, a lump of motionless, dark clothing. Evan wrapped me in his coat.

Evan tells me, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay and shit, you know?”

They said,
Holy fucking shit.
They said,
We've got to get the fuck out of here.
They said,
You crazy fucking bitch, you can't be out here by yourself.

“You were cool and all, for a wacko.” Laughter and coughing.

They walk-dragged me to a van and hauled me into the back. The seats had been taken out; the flooring was damp and there were patches of dirty carpet thrown over rust holes. Evan and Dump were keyed up, eyes popping, hands shaking.
Did we fucking kill that dude?

I stayed with them for seven months.

Evan will die on the street, somewhere, someday. I have seen what he will do for a high. I have seen the sadness on his face when he thinks no one is looking.

“So, yeah, also, I wanted to tell you, and, like, I'm sorry and all, but I took your drawings.” Evan clears his throat. “You know, that comic book you made. I don't know, I just like it. It's cool, you know, like, seeing
me
in there. Like I'm famous or something. I read a little every day.”

My sketchbook,
he
has my sketchbook. Dump would say,
Make sure you give me a cool superpower, like X-ray vision or something, okay? I wanna see through chicks' clothes.

My heartbeat picks up. “Evan, I need that back. Evan, please?”

He coughs and gets quiet. “I'll try, you know, see if we can get over there, but I don't know, we're leaving kinda soon. It's like, I just really like that book. I don't know. Makes me feel like I
exist,
seeing me in there.”

Evan,
I say, but only in my head.

“You get out, you come up to Portland, okay? Like, head to the waterfront and ask around for me. We do good together.”

I say, “Sure thing, Evan.”

“Later, gator.” The phone goes dead.

Isis is nibbling at a new tile. I fold my hands in my lap. These are my hands. They have taken food from Dumpsters. They have fought over sleeping spaces and dirty blankets. They have had a whole other life than this one here, playing games in a warm room, as the night keeps moving far from me, outside the window.

Isis says, “How's your ma? That musta been weird, huh?”

She has spelled
ball
. It took her ten minutes to spell
ball
.

I tuck my hands under my thighs and bear down on them. The pressure against my bones feels good. He has my book, but I have food, and a bed.

“She's excellent.” My voice is mild and uncomplicated. “Going on vacation. To Portland.”