2

Right before I was cast into exile, Dad gave me one of those mini HD video cameras for my birthday. I guess he felt guilty for splitting up the family.

“You always liked movies,” he said, searching for a way in. “I thought . . . maybe you could make your own. Maybe send me some about St. Louis.” He gazed at me with those gray-blue eyes of his, hoping it would help get me on his side. The camera looked tiny, engulfed in his thick fingers.

“Why don’t you just come and see it for yourself,” I shot back.

He winced, brushing his rough reddish hair off his forehead. “I will, Erica. When you and your mom are settled . . .” His voice trailed off and I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

He tried to smile, something I hadn’t seen him do for a while. He pressed the camera into my hands and neither of us knew what to say. I spotted my name and phone number engraved into the bottom of it, next to a little heart. He was a bail bondsman who was used to dealing with drug addicts, liars, and thieves. He was not used to saying good-bye to his daughter.

I wanted to smash that camera into a thousand pieces. But I took it and turned on him without a hug, running straight to the car, where Mom was already gunning the engine.

The drive took seven hours. Mom didn’t say much, just let the wind howl through the windows as if it would blow away the past. Normally, her hair was tied back tight in a bun; now she let it fly wild. Her pale blue eyes were fixed on the horizon, searching for something. Maybe a new beginning.

Through my new camera, I watched the Midwest rush by, but refused to record anything because that’s what Dad would’ve wanted. The camera had one of those flip viewfinders so you could point the camera at yourself and see what you were filming.

I didn’t like what I saw.

“This thing makes me look fat,” I said to myself.

“You look like a real girl,” answered Mom.

I turned the camera off. “A real fat girl, you mean.”

“No, a real girl. Not some skinny, anorexic home wrecker—” she caught herself, and didn’t say anything more.

She was all tensed up, so I rested my head against the window and stared at myself in the side view mirror. I’m big for my age I guess, but that wasn’t the thing that ruined my freshman year.

It was the red hair. In grade school, it was cute. Got called leprechaun, the usual little-kid crap. But by my freshman year when I really hit puberty, I blew up and everything got bigger—my butt, my breasts. I tried dying my hair but the red made every color muddy, so I just cut it short and took to wearing hoodies and baggie clothes—mostly to piss Dad off once it was clear things were coming to an end.

It’s not like anyone was ever going to ask me out or anything.

When we finally reached St. Louis, we had to go downtown to pick up the key to our place. We had to drive by the only thing I remembered about the city, its one real tourist attraction: the Gateway Arch. A couple years ago, we drove here just to go up in that thing. It was Dad’s idea of a weekend getaway. He talked the whole way out about having gone up there when he was a kid and how you could see forever out of those tiny windows. Told the whole history of how it was built and this crazy elevator system they had that worked like a Ferris wheel and how once you got up there, it felt like there was no way this thing should be standing.

He’d planned it so we’d arrive just before sunset because that was the perfect moment—Magic Hour. But by the time we got there, we found out the thing was closed due to renovations. Mom was pissed he hadn’t checked online. We had a silent dinner, then they decided to head all the way home rather than spend the night in a hotel.

That was the last trip we took together.

“We could go up in the Arch,” I said as we drove by it now.

She didn’t even look at it.

We stood in front of our new “home.”

“Wow, a brick house,” I said. If there’s one thing I knew about St. Louis, it’s that everything was made out of bricks. Every house was brick. Even some of the streets were brick.

“Matches your hair,” she said. A joke.

If the house didn’t look abandoned, I might have laughed.

Our area was called Tower Grove. Most of it was filled with these stately old buildings and majestic parks filled with grand old trees. It’s just that our street looked like it had missed the parade.

“Do we really have to stay here?” I asked, hoping we could upgrade.

“It was cheap. Right now, that’s important.”

We were right in the middle of the city, but you couldn’t tell by standing on this block. A lot of the houses had been torn down and the wild grass had taken over the empty lots around it again. Some of the other houses that remained were boarded up, standing alone like random tombstones in an abandoned cemetery.

“Can’t Dad pay more? Doesn’t he owe us?”

She nodded. “Problem is, he owes the IRS more. If he hadn’t . . . spent it, believe me, we wouldn’t be staying here.”

By “spent,” she meant gambled away. And not just on football games. I guessed home wreckers too.

We didn’t even get the whole house. It was divided up, so we were crammed up in the attic rooms. When we got inside, it smelled musty, like an old museum.

We dragged our stuff inside, piled up the boxes and ate some OK Chinese food. After I set up the blow-up mattress, I locked myself into the extra bedroom and listened to Mom pacing the floor until I fell asleep.

Welcome to St. Louis.