: Part 1 – Chapter 44

Everything is happening fast.

I stare at the computer. I’m on the page for my online class, though I have no intention of doing any work. I’m leaving in the morning, going home with my mother. There won’t be a bed at the halfway house for weeks.

Ellis pursed her mouth at Mikey and me after we sang the Black Flag song. She turned away from us and dropped a record on the turntable. Like me, she had a record player and actual records, lots of them, not the usual jumble of CDs or an overloaded iPod or phone like other kids. There were blues albums framed on the walls and big posters of the Velvet Underground and the Doors. A ratty, stained suede couch slumped against the wood paneling; the bar was a fake-brick wall with three tall stools and humming refrigerator. The basement ceiling was low, the air damp and musty. I liked it, this cramped and comfortable space. It had an air of easiness to it, unlike my mother’s apartment, which she kept dark, magazines and full ashtrays everywhere. Ellis set three cans of beer on the bar top.

I wondered why she’d picked me to be her friend: me with my haphazardly cut red-and-black hair, my holey cardigans and ripped jeans hiding the stuff Ellis didn’t know about yet. I was used to walking the edges of school, ignoring the nasty words scrawled on my locker, gritting my teeth at shoves in the bathroom, but she found me, somehow, this creature of velvet dresses and striped tights and Frankenstein boots, white-powdered face and deep purple lipstick. I watched the older boy watch Ellis. There was an intensity to his face that both interested and disappointed me.

Ellis took a bearlike gulp of her beer, wiped her mouth, and shook her head, her newly jet-black hair bobbing against her powdery cheeks. “Mikey lives down the street but he goes to some loopy liberal charter school.”

The insistent bounce of the Smiths, that clever, driving sound that I could not resist, despite preferring music that throttled my brain and stormed through my heart, heaved itself into the opening lines, “I left the North / I traveled south…”

The older boy, Mikey, got up, tossing his comic to the side, grabbing Ellis’s hands. They pogoed up and down, singing in unison, “I found a tiny house / And I can’t help the way I feel.” Ellis and Mikey held out their hands to me, Ellis’s face flushed and giddy.

On the way to her house that afternoon, she’d said, “The only way I get through the stupid day is knowing I can go home and get trashed at the end of it.”

The beer was cartwheeling hotly in my stomach; the poppy music burrowed in my skin. The basement smelled of old wood paneling and stale popcorn and dirty pink shag rug. For years no one had wanted me. For years I’d been pushed around, yelled at, made fun of, and now, now I had two beautiful people who’d picked me. Me.

I let them pull me in.

At the computer, I shake my head to clear my thoughts. Fuck this. What could they possibly do to me now, at this point? I look back at Barbero, who shrugs and looks down at his iPod. He hasn’t been the same since Jen S. left. I log into the email and open the chat box, my heart beating fast. Please be there, please.

A little blip and Michael is typing, and then:

Sorry I lost it at the hospital. Don’t want you to end up like E. Leaving tomorrow morning for a three week run of shows. I’ll try to call u again at the hospital.

My mother’s dank apartment on Edgcumbe, the second floor of a leaning house with broken siding and a can on the balcony filled with butts and tabs. I don’t have any other choice. I have to take a chance.

Mikey, I type. Please save me.