They don’t come back that afternoon or night, or the next morning either. Squid doesn’t seem worried, but I am: I’m thinking about food. I don’t know any place to Dumpster besides Whole Foods and usually we don’t go that far west; I guess I got used to Eeyore doing it for us. And Squid always seems to have money, but I can’t ask him to pay for me. The one thing I could give him in return he wouldn’t want, and when you ask for stuff and don’t give back, people start wanting you to go away. Squid buys me a chicken and bean burrito without me asking the first morning they’re not back; it lasts me till it’s almost dark, but then I start getting that solid empty feeling in my stomach again.
That night Squid drinks a 40 and passes out in the alley. I lie there looking up at the moon and the stars and the helicopters, my hunger pangs too sharp for me to fall asleep, and realize I have to make some money.
Jim promised he’d show up before my cash ran out, and when I think about it I get really pissed that he hasn’t. A jolt runs through me like my blood is speeding up; it almost makes my stomach sick. But then I tell myself there has to be a reason, something that happened that’s keeping him away from his phone, and the pissed-off turns to worry, which is familiar and a whole lot better. I try to hang on to that feeling, keep it from switching back and scaring me again. My blood calms down and I remember that the thing I have to do is keep myself okay until he finds me. That’s what Jim said.
It wouldn’t be hard to work from here: it’s where I started anyway. Probably if I found a corner and stood out there a couple days I could make enough to live on for a week and even buy Squid a couple burritos. The problem is I have friends now. Squid is with me every day; he’d come looking if I left. He knows every corner and cross street in Hollywood, and if I stayed around here, he’d come find me.
When I imagine that, I feel like I’ve got dirt coating all my skin that won’t wash off and I look over at Squid, scared I’ll wake him just by picturing it. I know he wouldn’t hate me for it but he’d probably be grossed out and that’s worse. And it’s weird but I also feel this thing like it’d kind of be cheating on him, which is bizarre because I have a boyfriend, and even though he’s all the way back in Bakersfield, never picking up his phone, I haven’t ever felt like I was cheating on
him
.
I figure if Squid can sneak onto trains all across the country, I can ride a bus. And so in the morning when Squid goes for coffee I say I’m still sleepy, and while he’s gone I spange a dollar and get on the first bus going west. I ride it all the way to Venice. It takes two hours, but I finally get off at Rose and Pacific, three blocks from the liquor store parking lot, and when I walk up who of course is sitting there drinking out of a brown paper bag in broad daylight but Tracy.
“Hey.” I go up to her and kick her boot. “I think you owe me some fish tacos.” She looks up at me with this blank mean sleepy look that I’ve never seen before; it sort of scares me. But after about three seconds she sees who I am, and a big grin washes over her face and her eyes wake up again.
“What’s up!” She jumps to her feet and throws her arms around my neck. Her beer bottle hits the base of my skull but not too hard and I sort of laugh, surprised at getting hit but also that she’s so happy to see me. She takes a little step back and appraises me, like I’ve seen guys do sometimes when I’m working, except she puts a twinkle behind it. “You want fish tacos, you have to earn ’em, sweetie,” she says to me. “Let’s get to work.”
That whole day we’re like a factory: four tricks, one after the other. I’d never be able to do that many by myself, but with her I can. The first three guys stop for me and she tags along; they’re weirded out that Tracy’s there but she acts like it’s so normal I guess they feel like they can’t say anything. She doesn’t tell crazy stories like before, which to tell you the truth I’m a little disappointed, but she’s fun the whole time. Even though it’s embarrassing doing stuff in front of a girl, it’s way easier with her there. I don’t feel the kind of pushed-down scared alone I usually do, trying to make my face tough so the guys won’t be mean. With her around, my eyes relax and no one can hurt me. Tracy’s knees-and-elbows skinny, but having her in the backseat is like sleeping curled up beside Germ: it’s always good to have someone next to you who bites. Also, with her there I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. Usually I have to squeeze my eyes shut and try really hard to take my head to Jim or Disneyland or Taco Bell: all my someplace elses are far away from the lonely sweaty cars and it takes a lot of work to get to them. But with Tracy there the someplace else is right behind me, giggling, and she turns the whole thing into one big joke that we walk away from with lunch money.
That’s how it is with the first three, at least; but the fourth one stops for her, not me. He’s more than forty and he’s got a mustache, which is always gross. I’m thinking he’s not gonna be cool with me coming, but Tracy grabs me by the hand and pulls me in. His first question to her is “Who the hell is he?” He asks without even looking at me.
“He’s my little brother; I’m just babysitting.” She has this way of saying the most ridiculous things like they are completely one hundred percent normal, so normal you feel stupid arguing with her or even asking questions.
The guy just grunts and drives to an alley behind Lincoln. He puts the car in park and goes for her right away. I know I’m supposed to say funny things and distract Tracy like she does for me, but I can’t think of anything to say. Also, I can tell this guy thinks I’m invisible and that’s the only thing protecting me from getting my ass kicked. So I just slink down in the backseat as low as I can, and in my head I shrink smaller and smaller until I understand what people mean when they say “fly on the wall.” From the back the only thing I can see is Tracy’s face. She’s looking out the windshield at nothing. Her eyes have that glassy tired mean look, and there’s nothing I can do to make it funny or easier.
When it’s over, she holds her hand out without looking at him. He sets the money on her palm like it’s a table and I can tell he wants to say something but he doesn’t. She opens the door and gets out onto the gravel.
I have to almost run to catch up with her. She’s staring straight ahead with empty eyes; I’m afraid she’s mad at me. But when I finally get beside her, panting, she snaps her eyes out of their stare and fills them up with herself again. “Hey,” she goes, and pulls the money out of her pocket to show me. “Look, he gave me a tip.”
“Cool,” I say, still watching to make sure she’s really here. She takes my hand and leads me toward the beach.
We go to the biggest food stand on the whole boardwalk, the one on the corner by Muscle Beach with yellow menus painted on the outside walls, and get pizza and onion rings and fries with extra ketchup and mayonnaise. Tracy buys an extra-large Coke for us too, and we take our food up to the hill by the sand and sit down on the thin cool grass and eat. If you look north you can see the curve of Malibu; the sunset silhouettes it, dark black mountains against the burning orange sky, and the pink ocean spread out in front of it forever, glistening and moving. If you look south it’s all factories, some kind of chemical refinery: spidery towers stacked up all the way to the ocean, delicate and complicated as lace but ugly and stinky and made of hard metal. The smog browns the sunset and helicopters hover like big black bugs. While we eat, I turn my head back and forth a couple times, up at Malibu, down at Long Beach; I feel like a different person depending which direction I’m pointed. I finally settle on the mountains and finish the fries.
When we’re done, I tell Tracy to take off her shoes and follow me north. We walk up the beach as the sun sinks and the sky turns purple, then gray, then black. By the time our feet get achy, we’re almost up by Malibu; through Venice, past Santa Monica and the Vons by the highway pouring its late-night grocery-store light onto the sand. I’ve never been up this far before, but I know if you go much farther the beach starts being private property and you’ll set off alarms just by walking. Here it’s still free. We plop down on the sand, and right away Tracy lies back and starts counting stars. She only knows a couple. The waves crash in front of me and cars rush by in back, but the noise and moving feel really far away, like there’s a cocoon of quiet and dark around us. After a long time she turns to me. “So where’d you come from, anyway?”
I realize we never talked about any of that: we were brother and sister from Fresno, it was all made up. “Bakersfield,” I say.
“That’s not too far,” she goes. “What’re you doing here?”
I start to say something but it stops in my throat like a plug. Jim made me promise not to tell and I haven’t, not the whole two months I’ve been here waiting. That’s what keeps me tied to him: the cords from me to Jim, from here to Bakersfield, are made up of a million little sparkling threads like spiderwebs; those threads are built from promises between us, the only thing that keeps me from floating away. If I tell our secret I know I’ll cut those cords, and come untied, and I don’t know where I’ll go.
But Jim hasn’t answered his phone in two months and I can’t remember the sound of his voice. And Tracy is here, right here, and she is the only one who I could ever tell. And the night around us is quiet enough to keep a secret. So I do it. I tell her I am in love and I explain who Jim is and why I had to go, and that he said he’s coming, but that he hasn’t yet. I try to explain to her the feeling of locking together with someone like a puzzle piece, and it’s not just your outsides that fit or the way you seem to the world, but all the inside parts of you that you didn’t even know had a shape until they matched up so perfectly with his. Tracy’s looking at me like she doesn’t quite believe what I’m saying, like she’s not sure it’s possible for a person to feel that way with someone, and I understand: lots of people don’t believe in love. And you have to believe in it before it will let you see or touch it, so if you don’t make the leap you might not ever see it. But it’s there.
Tracy doesn’t know that. I can tell. But she asks me lots of questions, and it feels so good to answer. Jim’s been more important to me than even myself for almost a year, and all of it has only happened in two places: inside of me or in the space between me and him. Telling Tracy’s like opening a faucet.
It comes out of my mouth like water: the things he said at the beginning, what it’s like to know a person’s smell, the anxious catch that now has dulled to normal when I hold the pay phone and it rings and rings. How underneath I don’t believe he’s coming anymore, and I wish I could turn the air beside me into something solid to fill the hole he leaves. How sometimes when he’d touch me I’d go out onto the very edges of myself, far like on a tightrope or a plank, and balance knowing there was only air to catch me; how he’d hold me there till it got scary, sometimes longer, and it was realer and more raw than any thing I’d ever felt. How he would always close his eyes and seem so comfortable, casual even, and I was always amazed at that: how brave he must be for it not to scare him at all. How sometimes it broke me into two pieces, and I’d lie there under him naked and stretched out past my skin, and another me would watch from the ceiling. Even if it was too much I had to grow to hold it, because it belonged to me now, and I belonged to him, and if I let any of the pressure of it spill like water from my faucet mouth, it would all leak out and be gone from me forever. That’s what he always said.
And he was right: now the words go out of me, and Tracy catches them, and somehow the swelling of the secrets shrinks down and Jim is smaller inside me, and far away. My own skin goes back to my own size finally and is tight enough to hold me; the space beside me is full of air and ocean and I’m all one piece. My cheeks are hot with tears, which run under my chin making it sticky, and I try to sniffle them up but they just keep coming, and I don’t even know why, and Tracy takes my hand and holds it in the sand and we both watch the waves break, spreading out and getting sucked back into the sea.
We stay there all night, watching the red lights from the oil drills blink way out toward the sky. When the sun first starts to lift the curtain of black we finally fall asleep, just a little while before the cars start their early morning roar.
I wake up before Tracy does and lie there, watching. Everything looks different in daylight. I have this funny feeling in my chest, half light and half nervous, like I changed something big last night, even though all I did was talk.
I know Tracy didn’t get the stuff I said about jigsaw puzzles and fitting together and love. But when I talked about the other stuff, the secret stuff—being stretched out past your edges, split in half, and the feeling you could fall and fall and nobody will ever let you tell—that was when she held my hand.
Something happened then: part of me that’s been knotted up for a year came loose when I started telling all those things and Tracy heard me. Her fingers locked in mine, our palms pressed tight; we were together, but I could feel where she ended and I began. I never had that with a person ever: being close and whole at the same time. And I told her all the secret scary things, and the whole time she kept holding on to me.
I haven’t showered in a month almost, but I feel clean. I lie there breathing and watch the nannies show up at the beach, all black and brown with other people’s shiny white Malibu babies on their backs. They look at each other and laugh and are bored with the children and really, really tired. For some reason they make me think of me and Tracy working.
All of a sudden I want to get out of here. The beach is softer than the sidewalk in Hollywood and Tracy is my friend but our friendship is too much in the backs of guys’ cars. I want to go back where no one knows that part of me.
Squid bought me a burrito just because he liked me. He didn’t want anything back. My head fills up with his face and I need to get back to him.
I shake Tracy’s shoulder. “Tracy,” I whisper.
She rubs her eyes and looks up at me, bleary and soft. “Hey,” she goes.