I met Tabitha because she wouldn’t stop staring at me and I returned the favor—like let’s have a staring contest and see who blinks first.
Let’s call it a tie.
I’d gone to the library to draw my very own Bizarro comic book. Because it felt like I’d been transported there—to the planet Bizarro. I needed to get out of the house so no one could peek over my shoulder. Besides, libraries felt like home to me—that’s what I’d used them as between families, ratty crash pads, and the occasional hour-rate motel (sorry, not going there).
Maybe it was that shitty teen job at the mall that taught me it was actually possible. To walk out of Father and Mother’s house and never come back. Or maybe it was Father getting sick—not sick enough to die, but sick enough to spend more than two weeks in bed and suddenly look frail, like he’d lost his superpowers. Like from now on he couldn’t ever hurt me again. Or maybe it was something else—the day Father offered a customer something besides crystal meth.
That day.
When my bedroom door swung open and there was a sweating man in a tracksuit standing there who asked me if I’d like to keep him company.
They’d stopped locking the outer gate a long time ago, but it still felt like I was locked in—like those invisible fences used to shock dogs. On the day I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, I stood staring through the iron slats at that world on the other side of it, the way you stare at the moon and say to yourself there’s no way anyone could’ve actually made it all the way there. I walked through the gate holding my breath, convinced it was going to slam shut in my face. That I was going to be dragged back inside and locked in the closet for eternity.
When I finally stopped running, I found myself in a place that stayed open late, where nobody bothered asking why you were spending every single second there. Where an old People magazine and a Google search of missing kids on the library computer led me straight to Karen Greer.
I was drawing my comic on the sketch pad Laurie bought me. She’d noticed me scribbling on a stained napkin and asked if I’d like one.
Sure.
I’d started drawing comic books for the same reason I’d started reading them. To be somewhere else besides that house. Tiptoeing downstairs late at night after Father and Mother fell asleep and strolling into the Daily Planet. Where super-evil villains were persona non grata, and help was just a phone booth away. The first comic I ever traced—over and over until I could just about draw it by memory—was the one where Superman saved this little girl from a burning house, crashing straight through the roof with the girl tucked safely into his arms.
Don’t worry, Jane, my cape will protect you from the flames.
When I came up with Super Invisible Girl, I decided to draw my own comic book. The girl no one could see. Or catch.
Or touch.
One day Father discovered some pages shoved deep in my drawer and said, Stick to your day job.
I was putting the finishing touches on the last frame of my new Bizarro comic when I noticed Tabs staring at me. I didn’t know she was Tabs, of course—not yet—just this odd-looking girl peeking at me from behind a computer.
I was at a table directly facing her—that’s what I saw when I looked up. Her staring face. When I said she was curiously put together I mean she borrowed from different stereotypes. She looked kind of like a Goth cheerleader. Like she couldn’t decide which personality to wear so she decided to wear a bunch of them. Or maybe she was saying she was none of them. Or saying Go ahead, good luck figuring it out.
The staring contest ended when our eyes began watering. Later, she told me she was ready to say no más, when I quit at exactly the same time. She thought that meant something. The simultaneous finish. Tabs was like that—finding meaning in random things.
“Boo,” I said.
“Boohoo,” she answered.
She’d recognized me, she told me later. The poor little kidnapped girl. She’d felt a kind of kinship right then and there. Not because she’d been kidnapped. Because she often wished she had been, since her parents were soulless dullards, she said, and it would’ve been nice if she’d really been born to two other people—parents less concerned with material crap and keeping up with the Joneses—which was, like, their only reason for getting up in the morning.
“That’s so fucked-up,” I told her.
“What? Wishing for other parents?”
“Wishing you’d been kidnapped.”
“Sorry. Not trying to diminish what you went through. Just being honest.”
Apparently that was Tabs’s thing. Being honest. It made me want to be honest too—as honest as I could be given the circumstances.
Eventually we ended up splurging on skinny vanilla lattes at Starbucks, where Tabs admitted she didn’t have many friends. Since she didn’t fall into any discernable group, she existed out in the nether regions, neither one type nor another. Yeah, I noticed, I told her. Not that she was complaining exactly—most people were soulless dullards like her parents—but still, it was nice to talk to someone else who kind of fell between the cracks.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. When I was about seven, I’d tried. To break my mother’s back. Both mothers. Duck walking down the sidewalk searching for spidery fissures to stomp the shit out of.
One of the nice things about Tabs was she didn’t ask me all the obvious questions. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was being polite or because she just wasn’t interested. Maybe both.
I was grateful, because I was able to talk more like Jobeth and less like Jenny. As if I’d been let out of a cage.
Tabs was taking a gap year, she said. A year you spent after one thing and before another. A limbo year.
“Yeah. I had twelve of those,” I said.
She was using her gap year to pretty much do shit. She was pretty good at it. Hanging at the library, where she hacked into various websites on the library computers—she was a hacktavist, she confided to me. Meaning she liked to fuck with organizations whose principles she loathed—like the local NRA branch, whose website she’d managed to sneak into and plant pictures of school gun victims on—those little kids from Newtown.
“You got away with that?” I asked her.
“It helps if you don’t use your own computer.” She circulated among five or six Long Island libraries—never going to the same one twice in a row.
Tabs was an outlaw like me. That probably solidified it. Our new palship. We exchanged numbers and talked about maybe hooking up later that week.
“What were you drawing?” she asked me just before we split in opposite directions—we’d walked at least twenty blocks together and hadn’t shut up once. “Back in the library?”
“A comic book,” I answered shyly.
“Like Spider-Man?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Cool. Can I see it?”
“No,” I said, tucking the sketchbook tightly to my chest. “I mean . . . it’s not finished.”