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.”
