The guy, middle-aged, wearing business casual, probably walking home from work, held out a dollar like it stank.
The cell phone lay in plain sight between me and Gabbi on the hot sidewalk. Seconds before Mr. Casual had shown up, I’d hit submit on two posts scheduled to go live an hour apart—my readers expected constant updates. And anyways, if someone were thinking right then about running away, they couldn’t exactly wait a week to read my next one, could they?
“Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.” Gabbi actually said it without any sarcasm in her voice, which was more than I’d have bet she could manage with his holier-than-thou attitude.
Their hands hovered in mid-air—hers, dirt-streaked, with half-moon lines under the nails. She grabbed for the green bill.
His pale, clean hand didn’t let go.
I looked up. His gaze was locked on a spot near Gabbi’s knee.
On the phone.
“What are you two playing at here?”
Gabbi folded her hands in her lap, her back straight, her round face and brown eyes expressionless.
The phone had been free, someone’s discard. We loaded it when there was extra cash. I liked posting more than the public library allowed, plus it kept us in touch with the rest of the group. But he wouldn’t understand. None of them ever did. “We’re good people. We just need some help,” I said.
“You stole that.”
“A first generation iPhone?” I said, not being able to stop myself. “Please. I would have stolen something newer than that.”
You could almost see him get madder even though he didn’t say a word. He stalked off a few steps, stopped. Looked down the street, started to come back.
Damn.
Between the window washing job I’d finished yesterday and today’s spanging money, we almost had enough for Jimmy’s birthday cake, some gas for the van, and this month’s gym membership. Clearly we weren’t getting any money out of Mr. Casual. The faster he left the better. This was a good spot, but only during rush hour.
Plus, we both feared Norman would appear at any moment to take back his corner. Street rumors said someone or something had murdered him in a weirdly gruesome way.
You had to figure people would exaggerate. But still.
A red four-door drove through the intersection and then another handful of cars all in a row. The light turned yellow and the cars began to slow, but Mr. Casual blocked them from our view. He stepped closer into our space. His cologne was so thick I wondered if he secretly liked to suffocate people.
“What do you want?” Gabbi said, all thankfulness gone now. I’d taught her that early on—be super nice when people help you out, otherwise get aggro.
“You two, out on the street like this, begging. It’s disgusting. You think it’s funny, acting like you’re hard up?”
“We ARE hard up,” I said, fiddling with the braided end of my hair. We got more money when I let my black hair down to offset my dark eyes and brows, but it was too hot for that.
“You should be in school. I work hard for my money. What do you do? Beg like this?”
“Don’t give us your money," I said, tugging on my braid until it hurt. "Go home to your wife and 2.3 kids and your TV and your mortgage. We don’t need your help. You don’t even know—”
“Is this what you always wanted—to be homeless?”
“We’re not homeless,” I said. “A homeless kid stays at a shelter and never leaves the neighborhood where they got left. We’re travelers. WE left. We’re out here, seeing the world and what it’s really like and all the cool people in it, and sometimes all the dicks in it like you.”
He stopped listening to me and pointed at Gabbi as if somehow sensing he was getting to her. “Where are your parents? They should know you’re pretending, taking peoples’ money just for kicks. Your parents must be disappointed in you. They must have hoped you would become so much more than this.” He jabbed his finger into Gabbi’s face.
She seemed to melt into the sidewalk. Each word made her head sink lower until her forehead was inches from the sidewalk, as if in an ashamed bow.
Crashing waves of air filled my ears. I lost feeling in my toes and my hands began to shake.
How dare he.
How dare he put that look on her face.
I jumped up and pushed him hard in the chest. My hands left dark imprints from sweat and dirt on his clean, pale blue shirt.
The flush of his forehead deepened into a purplish-red. His blonde hair was stringy, in one of those styles where you could see the pink flesh of scalp underneath.
“We were nice to you. We didn’t point any fingers. We didn’t harass you. You think you know her?” I pushed him again and he stumbled back a few inches. “You think you can talk to her like that because you were going to give us one stinking dollar?”
“Young lady, you should be ashamed—”
“You better stop right now.” I clenched my hands at my sides and dared him to say something else, anything.
He opened his mouth, closed it. He backed up a step, then a second one. “I’m calling the police.” He left quickly, rounding the corner.
The light turned. The cars, filled with people pretending not to look, disappeared in a thick cloud of exhaust.
I tried to calm the roar in my ears.
Gabbi hadn’t moved.
“Gabbi.” I brushed my hair off my face and realized my hands now smelled like his cologne. I spit on them, rubbed in the spit, and then wiped the smell as best I could onto the newspaper. “He’s a jerk. He’s a 9-to-5 wage slave who knows nothing about you or me or anything. Forget him. Stand up for yourself next time. You’ll feel better about someone being a jerk if you’re a jerk back.”
“I’m fine,” she said after a long second.
“Come on.” I touched her shoulder. “We need to move.” No doubt Mr. Casual was already calling the cops. I decided I would find a way to make her laugh. God knows we both needed it.
I gathered up the newspapers we used to keep our pants off the gum-pocked sidewalk. Gabbi slipped the phone into a zippered pants pocket. Both of us wore our spanging shirts—ratty, threadbare things we kept dirty. People gave more money to kids who really looked the part. The dirt I had sifted into Gabbi’s hair had caked into mud a while ago. My long dark hair washed out pretty easily. Gabbi’s light brown frizz was a different story. At least the newspapers grimed up our hands in an easy-to-wash-off way. We’d go by 24 Hour Fitness later and clean up.
A couple of blocks away, I set down our jar and sign and we folded ourselves against the wall of a corner liquor store. Gabbi moved into the shade to keep herself from burning. I didn’t like the heat, but my skin never burned, it only turned a darker cinnamon.
I sighed. Spanging was the crappiest job ever.
We made sure to hide the phone when a green Ford sedan slowed. The driver’s side window hummed down, revealing a woman behind the wheel with a too-sunny smile even for summer.
“Can you spare any change?” I said, returning her smile. You had to smile, you had to be nice no matter how horrible you felt, and Gabbi wasn’t that good at acting.
She held out a fiver. A gold bracelet caught the light, flashing us.
Gabbi jumped up, her shoulder-length hair frizzing like nobody’s business.
“Thank you,” I called out when Gabbi said nothing. “God bless you.”
Their fingers brushed. She pulled back her manicured hand like she feared an animal was about to bite her.
The window rolled up and she drove off.
Gabbi returned to a cross-legged position. I leaned over and brushed a leaf from her shoulder then tugged her hair. “There are worse ways to earn money.”
I didn’t need to say it. I shouldn’t have said it. We didn’t need reminding about other ways we’d scrounged up cash in the past. But that was over. Things were going to be different now. “You know Jimmy’s hankering for that special dark chocolate cake,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“It feels dumb getting money for cake,” Gabbi said. “Especially when we can get a whole box of day-old donuts for free.”
“But he’s desperate for it. You can’t really hold it against him.”
“Watch me.” She harrumphed in that way of hers that tried to cover up how young she still was deep down, how she wanted to belong to somebody, just like the rest of us. But she would die before letting anyone know it. Her parents did that to her. They didn’t throw her away like they did Leaf, but they drove her off all the same.
“He’s still an oogle.” I smiled and showed my teeth. “Like you were—not so long ago.”
“Over a year!”
I realized I hadn’t made her laugh yet. I decided to take this as a personal insult. “Being a runaway isn’t so bad.” I talked in my deepest, most reflective, most professorial tone to match that woman who had stalked us for two weeks. She had wanted to do a college paper on how life was REALLY like for street kids. She kept asking about survival sex, and how often we did this drug or that drug, or how often we’d beaten somebody up, and how many murders we must have witnessed, and how much did we drink. She didn’t want to know anything we really cared about, like how cramped the van got sometimes, and how we wanted more public library hours, and what were our favorite Tumblr blogs, and how at the last park concert Leaf got invited to drum on stage during the band’s encore.
“Being a street kid means you get the freedom to party whenever you want and you don’t have any college debt or responsibilities.” I pushed imaginary glasses up my nose. Like taking care of our food, shelter, clothing, safety, hygiene, not getting pregnant, it was no big deal, true freedom, living it up.
Gabbi smiled—but I wanted her to LAUGH.
“It’s not so bad, not if you’re smart and careful and stay out of the drug houses, shelters, pimp control, gang territory, rich people territory, poor people territory, middle people territory. You know, all the territory.” I leaned over and pantomimed opening a notepad while holding a pencil. “Now please tell me exactly how many blow jobs you gave in exchange for food this week.”
Gabbi’s laughter rang out like a bell. That helpless kind of laugh that started from the belly and shook the chest and made you hiccup at the end.
I toed the sidewalk and hid my smile. She’d be mad at me later for making her bust up like that, but it was worth it. She was fifteen, I was seventeen. But both of us liked to laugh as if we were little kids. I think it was partly because neither of us had laughed much when we were actually little.
Minutes passed. Only one car drove by. An old man popped into the liquor store before I could ask for change. This corner was SLOW.
The digital doorbell beeped again. The old man came out, his plastic bag boxy from a six-pack. He dropped some coins in the jar before I could say a word.
I tipped my head and smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
He nodded. “I’ve been in your shoes once or twice. Good luck to you.”
“Why can’t they all be like that?” Gabbi said after he left. She sighed. “What do you think Spencer will find tonight?”
I leaned back against the wall, happy that at least someone didn’t see us as worse than dirt. “Ano said he was going to swing by the bakery on O Street and try to score some day-olds. That’s all I’m thinking about. And maybe buy some new toothbrushes.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s NOT all you’re thinking about when it comes to Ano.”
“Very funny,” I said, but we both knew she was right, and mostly I didn’t care since he was hot and really nice and we both had a thing for each other.
“Jimmy wants another disposable camera.” Gabbi shook the jar, the coins clanging together amongst the dollars.
Jimmy was the newest to the group. I still hadn’t decided if he was a lifer yet, or if he would end up going back to his family after playing street kid with us. But I suspected he was going to stay. Sometimes you can just tell.
“Heads-up,” Gabbi said.
A man dirtier than us limped across the street. It looked like he’d come from the two-story office building that had been shut down for days—if the pile of newspapers at the door was any indication. His clothes were ragged, his shirt torn at the collar. His hair was cropped short but still somehow managed to look like a terrible case of bedhead.
No one else was in sight. The old guy was long gone. I jumped up and wondered if we should go into the liquor store and hide until the owner called the cops on us for loitering.
For all my jokes and lightheartedness, things could turn mean real fast. Thoughts of Norman came to mind. If he was back, he’d have already heard we’d been spanging on his corner. We’d be in for a beating for invading his territory. I didn’t totally believe in angels anymore, not like I used to when I was a kid, but I still believed that demons were pretty much real—and Norman was a homeless one in human form.
“Is that—”
“Can’t tell.” Gabbi sat on the ground as if she didn’t have a care in the world. But her leg was too relaxed, her fingers too splayed out.
A lone car passed by, blasting hot air. The man tracked it, distracted by the movement or the engine noise. The car and its person and its chance for help disappeared. Silence returned. His right pant leg was ripped from the ankle to his thigh, revealing a bloody gash.
Sweat itched down my cheek. I wiped the bead away.
He turned in our direction now as if he had noticed my movement. As if he had smelled us. His hands spasmed open and closed around something small and bloody, like he had dipped wrist-deep into a bucket of blood and pulled out a heart or something.
My mother had always accused me of a vivid imagination—it was why she called me a liar when I said my stepdad had kicked me in the ribs for not getting him a beer one night. I hoped in this case that it actually was my imagination going wild.
“What’s that in his hand?” Gabbi said.
“Nothing good for us,” I said. It might not be a bloody heart, but that didn’t make him Mr. Nice Guy either.
Finally the sound of another engine appeared just as I decided we should risk the liquor store. I waved it down before realizing it was a black and white.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Gabbi said.
“Better than the creep.”
“Not really.”
Officer Hanley leaned over, showing off short, silver hair that still covered most of his head. Cops weren’t my favorite people. They kicked us out from underpasses, and harassed us off street corners, and confiscated our van if we didn’t move it often enough. But Officer Hanley could sometimes be all right.
Cool air blasted through the open window, raising goosebumps on my skin. His aviator sunglasses matched nicely with his scowl. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s a free country,” Gabbi said.
I felt proud she actually stood up for herself, but messing with the police wasn’t such a great idea. “We were just leaving. And your real problem is standing over there, probably spreading hepatitis or swine flu or HIV all over the street.”
Officer Hanley looked, and then dropped his voice so low it was almost a whisper. Officer Hanley never whispered. “How long has he been there?”
Gabbi shrugged.
“Has he been in contact with anyone else?”
“What are you—” I said.
“Has he touched, or hurt, or otherwise injured anyone?”
“I don’t think—”
“You need to leave this area. Now.” He grabbed for his receiver and spoke some weird coded words, his voice clipped and fast.
I realized he was scared.
“You can’t kick us off,” Gabbi said. “We have a right—”
“Gabbi,” I said. “We should listen to him.” I pulled on her shirt. She took a resisting step back.
“You girls get out of here.” The window began to close.
Gabbi yelled.
There was a loud bang.
We stumbled backwards as if skateboards had slipped out from under our feet. The creep had thrown himself against the backseat window of the cruiser. His hands smeared red down the glass and crushed whatever he had been holding, and then he dropped away as if knocked unconscious.
It wasn’t a heart, I told myself, no matter how much it looked like a heart out of the books Gabbi and I had poured through together once at the library. Ricker had sworn he was having a heart attack at the ripe old age of thirteen—it had been heartburn but we hadn’t known any different at the time.
A wild look came into Officer Hanley’s eyes. He used his side mirror, then reached for the door handle.
A metallic voice barked from his dashboard. The words sounded like some sort of order. He returned both hands to the steering wheel. His gold wedding band glinted as he flexed his hands.
“You can’t leave us here,” I said.
He hesitated.
The creep hadn’t stood up yet and that freaked me out. A lot. What if he was crawling around the car on all fours?
“Get in,” Officer Hanley said.
A head appeared at the back bumper. The creep HAD been crawling.
I yanked open the passenger door, grabbed a handful of bills and coins from the jar, stuffed them in my pocket, pushed Gabbi into the front seat, and jumped practically on her lap. I slammed the door closed.
The grate kept Gabbi and me from crawling into the back seat. The window had a gap several inches wide. The creep’s grimy, bloody fingers hooked through the gap, reaching for my hair. I couldn’t breathe. Gabbi screamed.
“Do something!” I said, shrinking back.
“I have orders to lead him away,” Officer Hanley said. “Don’t let him touch you, don’t let the blood get on you—you should have run.”
“Story of my life!” I shouted.
The window rolled up enough to pin the creep’s hands in place. The car moved forward several feet then settled into a slow, steady pace.
My stomach flipped. I stared at Officer Hanley because I couldn’t stand looking at the creep’s maniacal face any longer without going crazy myself. “You’re going to, to…You should just shoot him!”
“Can’t,” Officer Hanley said. “Can’t risk the blood.” His forehead gleamed with sweat even though the air conditioning blasted frigid air. That was the only sign that maybe he wasn’t feeling as cool as he acted.
It was like an insane form of dog walking. I looked everywhere but at the creep. The street was empty. Rush hour over, people inside. A couple of cars zipped by in the other direction, not even slowing. Up ahead was a four-way stop. A woman from the corner house dragged her garbage can to the gutter, saw us. Stopped. Stared. In a different house, a face appeared in the window, on a cell phone, also staring.
His fingers were dark red, bright red, grimed with mud and something slimy. He limped alongside the car, unseeing. He twisted, pulled, pinched the glass, let it go. Something wet flew from his hands onto my face.
In my eye.
My eyelid closed on instinct. I flinched back into the seat. I blinked, rubbed at my eye, thought about all the terrible things probably infecting this meth head. I wiped my hand across my cheek. A small smear of blood transferred onto my skin. I wiped it off on my pants. I wanted to cry.
“What’s wrong with him?” Gabbi said in a small voice. She’d wrapped her arms around my waist as if I could keep her from drowning.
“Drugs,” I said. I told myself I’d gotten it off. It was fine. I was going to be fine. “He’s high. Hopped up on a new meth recipe, right?”
Officer Hanley looked as if about to say something that would wreck my mind.
Sirens blared from everywhere. The inside of the car flooded with red and blue lights.