The sign on the building is shaped like a curvy bull, midnight blue, with a starry flank and horns like crescent moons. Under golden hooves, taurus trucking is lettered in faded retro script with the ghost of an F over the T, a bad joke someone made and someone else scrubbed away.
“Your nana was a trucker?”
George laughs. “I mean, yeah. I guess you could say she was. Drove Ethel till she was in her seventies.”
“Ethel?”
“Her tow truck,” George says. “By the end, it was Ethel the Fourth.”
They’re on Division Street now, in Southeast, the sleepier part of the city. To get here, George and Iph rode over the fairy-lit Hawthorne Bridge, stopping at four Plaid Pantries along the way, but the phone was busy every time. Iph takes the street in, opening all her senses as wide as she can. The sidewalk is clean and smells of summer rain. The street is lined with shabby little houses with overgrown yards and weedy parking strips planted with sunflowers and rosemary and lamb’s ears that spill over onto the sidewalks. Roses are everywhere, climbing the telephone poles and clinging to fences and front porches cluttered with gardening shoes, children’s toys, and boxes of recycling. The odd little stores across the street seem barely plausible as businesses—a washing machine repair shop, barbecue supply outlet, and a barber shop with a sheet of plywood over a broken window and an actual barber’s pole out front.
It seems fitting that if Orr must be alone in a new world, so should she. Cut off from her family and home, this little neighborhood is Iph’s whole reality. George, a stranger two hours ago, is the only person she knows. The thought is a little revolution. Iph’s chest expands, lets in so much air she’s a little dizzy. Something akin to relief runs like a feather down her arms. Guilt follows, right on cue.
They enter through a side door. Iph feels the dark container of the garage around her. An old game she and Orr used to play was listing their three favorite darknesses. Whoever had the best answers won. Currently, Iph loves the fur of panthers, Maybelline black eyeliner, and the black velvet coat with black satin lining she stole from the costume closet at school but is afraid to wear anywhere but alone in her room at night. The darkness in Taurus Trucking is excellent, soft and deep, with bits of light wavering in like she and George are inside some massive underwater animal. The square building’s giant metal garage door and concrete walls distort the sounds of the neighborhood outside.
Iph thinks of Orr’s favorite childhood version of Pinocchio, the illustrations done with photographs of puppets. In the scene where the puppet maker/father figure, Geppetto, is stranded inside a whale, there is a whole living room. A table. A lamp. There, he mourns the loss of Pinocchio. Maybe Dad is doing that now—drinking whiskey, the empty house sighing around him.
“Sit tight,” George says, a little louder but still conscious of volume. Scout’s nails click against the floor. Iph peels off her shoes: pain, then pleasure. Or maybe just relief. They are so similar, she thinks, in the same way pain is caught up with want. Scout is at her feet sniffing her injuries, offering a soft lick. George is moving around the room. Spots of light bloom in the darkness as George turns on a series of flashlights that beam toward the high ceiling, tracing the shape of the empty garage.
“No trucks?”
“Not anymore,” George says. “Sold to pay the property tax. My nana left this place to me. Some people in my family think that isn’t fair. They want to, like, ‘help out’ and ‘run the business’ till I’m an adult.” George’s air quotes say it all. “My stepdad’s in charge of the estate. Tells you something that it wasn’t anyone blood-related. Anyway, he mostly got them off my case before he went back to Iraq. Now I’m sitting here waiting to turn eighteen.”
George is like Mom, Iph realizes. A complicated history and a lot under lock and key. The flip side to this amazing place is that George lives here alone and in secret with no adults around to help—and still rides around at night, helping other people. Iph’s stomach does a disappointed-in-herself drop. That’s the problem with being young. You’re immature, insufferable. And then you realize it and think, Why? How could I be that self-absorbed?
“So, um . . . welcome to my humble abode?” George says.
There’s a hay bale with a canvas bull’s-eye target stuck to it in the corner and a tire swing hooked to the rafters by a stout rope. In the other corner is a hammock. “Scored it on the street,” George says. “And uh, maybe you want to turn around. One sec, I’ll grab you a flashlight.”
Iph turns back to the garage door. It’s completely covered in painted images. “Oh!” She covers her mouth as the syllable bounces around the room, her flashlight illuminating a nearly life-size painting of George as both twins in Gemini, one with waist-length hair, the other with a short-cropped buzz. There are birds and flowers and animals, mythical and real. Trees. Constellations.
Iph moves closer to the Gemini twins, tracing the clasped hands of the two figures with her index finger. “It reminds me of this painting . . .”
“The Two Fridas?”
“Yes! I love Frida Kahlo,” Iph says.
“Me, too. I call mine George and Georgina.”
Touching the long-haired figure, Iph wonders if this is how George once looked. “Are you still both?” Iph asks, hoping it’s not the wrong thing to say. “Or just George?”
“Good question,” George says.
Iph moves the flashlight across the art-covered walls. There’s a sort of cubist rendering of Scout chasing a squirrel that makes her laugh. A bear as high as the warehouse ceiling with its arms open to catch a school of starry fish. A figure—half man, half badger—holding a machine gun. An old woman in a sky-colored kimono flying with a great blue heron. Iph pauses again, this time at a large portrait of a naked blonde girl holding a golden apple. “Who’s this?”
“This?” The word is a soliloquy of unrequited feeling. It is a perfect example of Iph’s favorite thing: a true reveal. It’s a Santos Velos term, something Mom and Dad made up to describe their favorite element in all kinds of art. A building could have a reveal. Or a dance, a play. A song. It starts with a particular kind of noticing. This heightened attention, Dad says, is performed by the noticer but initiated by the art itself, like a siren song calling you to see it. The true reveal is the moment you heed the call and slip into the artist’s secret world.
Iph’s brain goes where it usually does—she’s onstage in London playing Antigone and whips out the sound of longing George has jammed into the tiny throwaway word about the girl in the painting. The theater is silent and electric, but . . . no. Iph shakes it off. The play dissolves. She might write a play with a moment like that, even direct one, but star in one? Not likely.
Last year, when she fired all her fake theater friends, she resolved to stop wanting the things she’d never get. The world is what it is, and Iph is what she is—medium height, medium brown with bombshell boobs and a butt that hasn’t fit into a single-digit dress size since she was eleven. Since puberty, she has been the girl with “such a pretty face,” a red pouty mouth and big brown eyes and Mom’s skin and Dad’s ridiculous lashes. Even she can admit to liking her freckles, and her cheekbones are legitimately great. Sometimes, if she is brave, she lets herself look in the mirror after a candlelit bath and see herself as beautiful. If this were the Renaissance and she could learn to sit still, she’d have a promising career as an artist’s model. But it’s not. Models today look like the girl on the garage door—slender, with high breasts and sculpted abs and thin, waifish limbs. She traces the golden apple with her finger. “I thought it was the snake who tempted Eve, not the other way around.”
“Oh!” George’s eyes open wide. “I never knew why I painted her like that. You might be onto something.”
Iph is silent, waiting for more about the girl. It doesn’t come. “So,” she asks, “what are the rules of this lost-boy hideout, please?”
George grins. “The governing principle is to avoid detection.”
“Who’s detecting us?”
“Pirates. Grown-ups. The tricks are few. We come in late and leave when the neighbors aren’t around. We don’t use flashlights upstairs except for navigation—too many windows.”
“Upstairs?”
“There’s a whole apartment up top,” George says. “We’ll sleep up there. It gets cold in here at night and super hot in the morning. Upstairs is insulated.”
Iph follows the beam of George’s flashlight up a narrow staircase.
“We have water. The city never turned it off. But it’s cold. The bathroom window has a shade that’s pretty tight, so we can use a little light up there if we’re careful. C’mon, Tinkerbell. I do think we should go up and take a better look at those feet.”
Upstairs is shadowy, but Iph’s eyes adjust. The streetlight seeps between the cracks in the drapes. Kitschy fifties paneling lines one wall of an oddly situated living room. The other wall is a muddy green. They pass a scratchy-looking plaid sofa and matching La-Z-Boy recliner, both a little big for the room. Iph follows George to a narrow elephant-themed bathroom.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Iph says. There’s even a pink elephant soap dish and matching cotton-ball canister.
“Nana redecorated in 1964. After that, she said why mess with perfection.”
“That’s valid,” Iph says, touching the shiny wallpaper with its pattern of champagne glasses and round, tipsy elephants.
“Sit.” George puts the pink fluff-covered toilet lid down, grabs something from the medicine cabinet, and squats in front of her, reaching for her ankle. She allows this without protest, even though her feet are truly gross, crook-toed and bony. Iph sighs as her feet are washed with a cold cloth and dried with a soft towel, and antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids are expertly applied, along with the fuzzy socks from the hotel lost and found box. She is already used to George taking care of her.
“You could be a doctor,” Iph says.
“I want to be a nurse.”
“You’d be awesome at it.”
“I’m also pretty good with a hot plate. Want some SpaghettiOs?”