41

Serge

“Hey, listen to this, Scarecrow!” Diamond yells even though she’s sitting right next to him.

He lifts his head from the bench. He thought her name was Ruby but now he knows it’s Diamond. This is good because she got mad at him and yelled whenever he called her Ruby and for the longest time he didn’t understand why. But now he knows. Before he called her Ruby he called her Red Poncho in his head. He never said it out loud because he knew it wasn’t really her name. But she does always wear the red poncho. Ruby red.

She waves a newspaper in front of his nose. “Look! Your old stomping grounds!”

He puts his head back on the bench.

“Sit up!” she commands. “This is important!”

He does what she asks. He usually does what she asks even though he’s not exactly sure why. She brings him food, for one thing, like she just did. And she brings him places where someone else brings him food. But she’s always talking in exclamation points. He prefers commas.

Diamond takes his plate off the bench and puts it underneath. She lays a crumpled-up newspaper between them, smooths it down. “Look!” she orders.

He looks but doesn’t see anything but a bunch of scribbles and a photograph of a castle. Diamond never takes his plate away, especially not when there’s still food on it because she’s always screaming that he doesn’t eat enough. So this must be important.

He looks again, blinks. He knows it isn’t scribbles. He’s not an idiot. It’s words. They’re sentences that will explain why Diamond took his plate away. He doesn’t really care why she took it away, but it’s sort of interesting that she did.

There’s not that much interesting in his days anymore. He sits with Diamond and sometimes the others on the grass, except that it’s all brown now and sometimes there aren’t enough chairs and there’s snow—so you can’t sit without getting wet but he sits anyway. He likes it better when it’s just the two of them. He also likes it if he can lie under the bench, but if Diamond sees him doing that she screams some more, so he only gets to do it when she’s not around.

When it’s dark Diamond takes him to where he slides his tray and people put food on it. It doesn’t taste too bad. Sometimes he sleeps there but most of the time he doesn’t. He likes to eat there but not to sleep there. Too bright. Too noisy. Too many people who talk too much. Lots of them yell just like Diamond.

She punches her finger at the picture of the castle. “Metropolis Storage Warehouse! Remember? You said you lived there!”

He thinks about this, but he’s pretty sure he never lived in a castle. “I never lived in a castle.”

Diamond throws her hands in the air. “It’s not a fucking castle! It’s a storage place, and you were living inside one of the storage units!”

“There are turrets.”

“Scarecrow! It’s just a building!”

He thinks about this and puts his head on the bench again. Now she’s talking in lots of exclamation points and it makes him not want to talk to her anymore. But he says, “I never lived there either.”

“You told me you did! A guy fell down the elevator shaft! Can you believe it? Fucking A. A real rich bastard too. What a way to go. I’d rather freeze to death or drown or anything else, but smashing two stories into concrete! Fucking A.”

“I never lived anywhere where there was an elevator.”

“You did! You told me you did!” She presses her face close to his and her breath smells like coffee and maybe a kind of rot. “Were you lying to me?”

“I don’t lie, but sometimes I forget,” he admits.