Shit.
I gazed up at the boy that currently eyed me like a criminal. I guess he wasn’t far off. I had stolen something, but I felt I had no choice. I was down to my last few dollars, and hell if I’d stoop to using my dad’s credit cards. I still had them, but I had a feeling a squad car wouldn’t be far behind. He couldn’t really do anything, since I was eighteen when I left, but if he knew where I was, he might come for me.
I pulled my hoodie sleeves up my arms. “I wasn’t going to steal anything. Just wanted to see if I could use the computer.” Since this was a library, he should have one, a good excuse.
The boy pursed his lips, clearly in debate here. In the end, I figured he decided to give me what I wanted. He pocketed hands. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. It’s in the back. Password for the lock screen is ‘Call me Ishmael.’”
A Moby Dick quote, cute, but I didn’t linger. I headed toward the back through the books, the tiniest library I’d ever seen in possibly the tiniest town I’d ever been in. Maywood Heights wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than this. I wondered quite a few times over the past two weeks I’d been here why Royal had decided to give me a bus ticket to this town out of anywhere.
He wanted you buried. He wanted to bury you.
He wanted me away. He didn’t want me and no doubt had freaked out about the whole abortion news. It was the only thing that made sense, which was stupid. That had nothing to do with him. Whenever I thought about all that, him, and how he’d handled things by letting LJ come to me, thoughts of fuck them all came to mind. After that, I let myself stop caring. I had to in order to move on with my life and the day. I stopped caring about a lot of things since getting on that bus, but one of the few I still did was the subject of an email I got when I used the library boy’s password to get onto the computer. I got to see how my baby was doing today, finally.
Rosanna had attached a picture of Hershey to her email this evening, Hershey and her. We used to FaceTime. That was until my phone died. I had no charger, and since I couldn’t currently afford one, all contact these days was through the local internet cafe. I usually logged on there to check into the rest of the world. They had a couple computers.
“We’re both doing well,” Rosanna’s email said, my saving grace and how she’d tried to talk me off that bus when I called. It’d been the first thing I did when I got on, wanting Hershey to be okay. She took her in, of course, but only after asking me a million questions I still refused to answer. No, I couldn’t tell her where I was. No, I wouldn’t be coming home, and no, I didn’t care about how my dad felt about it. He tried to tell me several times with phone calls I didn’t pick up, texts and the like. Aunt Celeste did the same thing, but the two weren’t getting anything from me. They said how they felt, and I’d heard it in bounds the day of my sister’s memorial service. They both could move on to living their lives now that they didn’t have me anymore, and wasn’t that what they wanted? Others had been a little harder, Shakira, Kiki, and especially Birdie. I didn’t call Birdie right after I ended our call, and she freaked out. She kept calling, kept texting, and the others too. Eventually, I answered them all. I explained I was staying in LA, was busy, which was why I didn’t get back to them right away. I felt I had to lie to them so they would back of, but they didn’t. They came with more questions.
My phone couldn’t have died any sooner.
“They wrote up a nice piece about your sister today in the paper. I attached it. Please check in soon, and I can send you money for a phone charger if that’s what you need. I can even send you a charger if you send me your address,” Rosanna’s email continued. I flat-out refused to take any money from her, and she’d unfortunately have no place to send the latter, considering I was homeless. I was getting by staying at the local shelter, but with my altercation at the local convenience store, I cruised right past the hour to get in there tonight. I was on my own this evening.
Wouldn’t be the first time, I guess.
My attention drifted to the news article Rosanna referenced, my heart squeezing. I opened it but couldn’t quite read it, not ready.
“One minute.”
My verbal alarm came behind me, the boy as he stepped from behind the bookshelves. He had on one of those bags guys strapped across their chests, a set of keys in his hand. “I’m locking up.”
He looked a little young to be running a library, but could have been older than me. I couldn’t really gauge his ethnicity on looks alone, but most people were a lot darker than me out here in the desert. If I had to guess, I would have said white mixed with something else. Maybe even a few something elses. The Hispanic population was more prevalent in this area, so that was a possibility.
My time up, I asked if I could print something before I left and he charged me ten cents a page. I guess this was one of those emergencies.
Nine
December
I had a long night ahead of me, a long night of wandering the streets and trying to keep warm. It got surprisingly cool out in the desert, and I eventually took my travels beneath a bridge, a few others there too, bundled up. They had a turned-over trash can or two with fire in the center, but I stayed away from those, letting others keep warm. I’d never camped out here before, but why I chose the place at all was because I saw kids. They were curled up with a woman, and I stayed near them, safety in numbers.
The woman watched me, smiling a little, but she did hold her kids close. I didn’t blame her. They didn’t know who I was at all, and for all I knew, she could shank me in the middle of the night. I kept my distance, using my shoulder bag to sit on as I curled myself up into my hoodie. I unsheathed one of my stolen grain bars, still managing to stay vegan out here. It was actually harder to be omni if one could imagine. Anything animal product related required heat to eat, and since I didn’t want that anyway, I was good. I got by on whole foods for the most part, the initial stash I bought with the cash I first arrived with holding me over for quite a few days before I started panicking. I’d recently started to ration. Hence, the stealing.
I wet my lips, trying not to fall into the depths of my decisions. If I did, I thought about all of them, my sister and Royal included. It was best to stay present, but I couldn’t help going down memory lane when I unfolded the printed paper from the article Rosanna sent me. I wanted to see my sister.
And I sure did see her.
She was so lively, her face already starting to fade from my memories. The paper was a memorial piece, the life and times of a youth gone too soon. That town didn’t care about her, probably just wanting a story. In the lead-up to the memorial, all kinds of things came out in the papers, major publications too considering how it happened. They’d been slandering my sister, saying how reckless and broken she was, the result being what happened to her. I didn’t read them all, but I read enough, washing my hands of it all before this.
I brushed my hand over her image, my sister smiling in her Windsor Prep uniform with her books in hand like she actually liked school and classes. The paper had quotes from other people, “friends,” they said but not one of them was Royal and the guys.
Until they were.
They had so many pictures of them together on page three, all of them, Jax, LJ, Knight, Royal…
My throat thickened at seeing Royal’s arm around her, happy with her and not so stone-faced. She was happy too, the two in their sports uniforms and running across fields together. In fact, there were so many photos I thought maybe Royal may have submitted some of them.
That would require him to be a decent person.
“Things with you and him… they just got too hot.”