Girl in Pieces

The rush of breakfast has died down and I’m up to my elbows in dishes and coffee mugs when the screen door swings open. I look over to see Riley slouching in just ahead of a wide woman dressed like a kind of female tepee in long, loose brown fabric. She looks around, shaking her head at Linus behind the grill, who promptly finds an apron to cover her dirty shirt. Riley has showered: his hair is less matted, and his clothes, though again a white T-shirt and brown pants, appear to be a cleaner white T-shirt and brown pants.

He looks at me, amused, with a glint in his eye. “Well,” he says cheerfully. “Looks like you’re going to have that job interview now.”

He says it like nothing happened at all. There are still faint red marks around my wrists from where he pinned me so tightly.

The woman nods toward the long hallway, and I follow, not taking off my damp apron. Halfway down the hall, I turn around to face Riley, who is loping after me. I hiss, “You suck.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that, sweetheart.”

The woman collapses in a swivel chair behind a desk mountained with papers, receipts, folders, cups full of pens and pencils, and a bowl of luminous blue stones. She puts her forehead down on the desk. “I’m so tired.”

On the grayish wall behind her, there is a framed portrait of a girls’ softball team, sunburned faces, sun-bleached hair bunched under green caps. I look at the dark road map of freckles on the woman’s face. She’s easy to locate in the photograph, far on the right-hand side, bat against her shoulder, thighs straining the hems of her shorts.

Her hand feels around the desk for something, pat-pat-patting. She seems confused, but in a kind of funny, nice way.

Riley has stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes. I don’t know what to do, so I stand by the door, pressing my back against the wall.

“You didn’t bring in any coffee,” she tells Riley.

“You didn’t tell me to bring in coffee.”

“Well, go get me some.”

She lifts her head in my direction. “Julie. Julie Baxter. And you are?” She lays her head back on the desk and whimpers.

I wonder why she and Riley don’t have the same last name. Maybe she’s married?

“Riley? Why are you not getting my coffee?” Julie’s voice is muffled on the desktop.

Riley shuffles up from the couch. He pauses next to me. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

I shake my head. I’m still angry, and weirded out, by what he did. His face seems tired, yet he’s kind of jittery, walking out the door in a funny way. I wait until he’s through the door before I turn back to Julie.

Softly, I say, “My name is Charlie.”

Julie is sitting up now. She seems to not hear me. “Huh,” she says mildly. “That’s curious.”

She gazes at the ceiling, her mouth slightly ajar. Then she says, looking directly at me, “You see, a normal Riley never would have asked if you wanted coffee. A normal Riley would have just brought back coffee for you, probably something extravagant, like a mochaccino with extra whipped cream and strawberry sprinkles. Because normal Riley must flirt with every female person. Young, old, in between, fat, thin, middling. Doesn’t matter. He would have brought back his pretty gift for you and you would have fluttered and giggled and he would have assured himself of another ally. Though, to be fair, you don’t seem the fluttery type.”

She pauses and folds her hands. “Not a conquest, necessarily, but certainly an ally. He thrives on mass affection, even as he appears to want to push it away. So this is interesting. Very interesting.

“Something has passed between you two.” She rolls a pencil between her hands. “I can tell. I have real intuition.”

Her hazel eyes dart across my face, but I keep it blank. I’m not going to tell her what happened. She might not keep me around. I’ll just try to steer clear of him.

She opens her mouth to say something else but Riley has come back with two cups of coffee. She gives him the same searching, intent look she gave me.

“What?” he says crossly. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Intuition. I’ll have to develop my thesis further.” She twines her hands greedily around the coffee. “Anyway! So. Charlie! See? I was listening. I bet you thought I wasn’t. You have an awfully painful-looking scar on your forehead and you’re wearing overalls in the desert, two things that strike me as both interesting and sad.” She takes a long sip of her coffee. “Why are you here?”

I look at Riley without thinking, but he only shrugs, settling back down on the couch, resting his coffee mug on his chest.

I flex my fingers behind my back. “Money?”

“No, why are you here?” Julie closes her eyes briefly, as though very annoyed.

“Like, on the planet type of thing?”

“Just in Arizona. We’ll talk about the planet at some later date. That’s a much more complex conversation.” She crinkles her eyes at me as she sips her coffee.

“I moved here? From Minnesota?” What more am I supposed to say?

“For a boy, probably,” Riley laughs.

“Shut up,” I snap. “Why are you so stuck on that? It isn’t even true.”

Julie says, “Then what is true?”

And before I can stop myself, because this whole morning has been a clusterfuck that now includes this weird job interview, I blurt out, “I tried to kill myself, okay? I messed up, and here I am. And I’m fucking hungry, and I need money. I need a stupid job.” As soon as I say them, I desperately want to gather the words up and shove them back inside my mouth. Freak, she’s probably thinking. Instinctively, I feel for my shirtsleeves, making sure they’re pulled down far enough.

I can feel Riley staring at me, hard. It’s all I can do not to look over at him.

Abruptly, he gets up from the couch and leaves the office.

Julie squints a few times, like she’s trying to evacuate unexpected dust from her eyes. My stomach flip-flops. She’s going to tell me to get out. There’s no way she’s keeping me now. I start to untie my apron.

Instead, she cocks her head at me. Her eyes are kind and sad. “There’s a lot of stuff in here, isn’t there?” Like a bird, her hand flutters before her chest, near her heart.

She nods to herself, touching the bowl of blue stones on her desk. “Yes, this is what I do. I like to talk to people. It gives me a much better sense of them than wanting to know if they’ve ever washed dishes or brought out a plate of food or handled a mop or what they studied in school.” She looks right at me, her freckled face open, her eyes clear. “Come here,” she says.

I step forward and she takes my hands in her own. Her eyes are little ponds of warmth. Julie’s hands are sure and smooth, motherly. Pat, pat, pat. The scent of lavender oil drifts off her skin.

She closes her eyes. “Right now, I’m really feeling you.”

When she opens her eyes, she lets go of my hands, reaches into one of the bowls, and presses a stone against my palm, closing her fingers around it. The stone has a curious heat.

“Lapis lazuli,” she tells me. “They have such an amazingly strong healing ability, do you know? Their power is to carve a deep path through confusion and emotional turmoil. Really helps me work through shit sometimes. You into stones at all?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” I say. My voice feels small. How can a little stone have so much power? I close my fingers around it. “Do you, like, pray to it, or something?” Talking to rocks. Blue would have a field day with that one.

“If you want.” Julie smiles. “Or you can just hold it, and close your eyes, and let yourself really feel its energy, and trust that the stone’s energy will feel you.”

She starts writing on a pad of paper. “It’s some really beautiful knowledge, stones. You should think about it. Tomorrow I’ll bring some aloe vera for that scar on your head. Keep the stone. It’s yours.”

She slides some forms across the table. “Here. You need to fill these out for taxes and payroll. Bring them back tomorrow along with your ID and we’ll get you on the books.” I take the papers and fold them, putting them in the pocket of my overalls.

She hands me a piece of paper, with days and hours written down. Four days a week, seven a.m. to three p.m. “That’s your schedule, Charlie. My brother can be a real prick, but he’s my brother. He falls down, I pick him up, he shoves me away, he falls down, I pick him up, et cetera, et cetera.”

The phone rings, and she swivels away to answer it.

I stand there for a moment before I realize it’s my signal to go. I walk down the hallway slowly, the stone still in my hand. When I see Riley in the dish area, wiping the counter, I look away quickly, slipping the stone into my pocket.

I start unloading coffee mugs from bus tubs, trashing the soggy napkins and bent stirrers. Riley comes over and picks up a mug, tilting it so I can see inside.

“You’ll want to soak these, see the coffee stains? Soak them once a week or so, with a couple capfuls of bleach in hot water. Just fill up one of the sinks or an empty pickle bucket. Whenever you notice, really. Julie likes them nice and clean.”

I nod without looking at him.

Riley whispers, “I’m a lousy person. But you’ve learned that already.”

When I don’t say anything, he presses a finger against my sleeve, just above my wrist. He leans closer to me. “You didn’t have to lie to me about a cat. I’m no stranger to fucking up.”

“Riley!” the tattooed guy yells from the wait station. “Tell us about the time you threw up on Adam Levine’s shoes!”

“Oh, that’s a good one.” Linus laughs hard, like a cartoon horse. I turn around and she winks at me.

Riley lights a cigarette and inhales deeply, smoke sidling from his nostrils as he walks back to the dish area. “Now, now. Vomiting is not uncommon in rock and roll. It’s kind of a staple, actually. I was not the first and I am sure I will not be the last to vomit on Mr. Levine. But I’d like to remind you, it was not just his shoes, it was Mr. Levine himself that was the unsuspecting target of my sudden digestive vulgarity. The story begins like this….”

I go back to the dishes, still listening to Riley spin his story, following the lilts and cadences of his cigarette-gravelly voice, but I’m also thinking about what he said: I’m no stranger to fucking up.

Even though I don’t want it to, what he said kind of touches me. What he said: I should have it printed on a fucking T-shirt, because it’s the motto of my life, too. Which means that however horrible he was this morning, and however kind he’s being to me right now, and very funny, with this story, he and I are closer than I’d like to admit.

My face flushes. I slip a hand into my pocket and wrap it around the stone, will it to tell me to stop thinking what I’m thinking, but the stone stays silent.

After work, I take some of the cash Riley gave me and buy a bag of chips and an iced tea at the co-op. I’m so hungry that I rip into them right away, stuffing my face while looking at the FOR RENTs on the community board outside.

It doesn’t look promising. My heart kind of sinks. Most of them ask for first, last, and security. Even for a one-bedroom for six hundred dollars, that’s eighteen hundred dollars up front, plus utilities. How do I get utilities? Do I have to pay up front for those, too? I do some math in my head: with what True Grit will pay, I’ll hardly have anything left over for rent anywhere, not to mention any extras like food or gas or electric.

I ride around downtown for a while until I find the library. I head to the bathroom first, and wait until a woman leaves before I take one of Mikey’s empty water bottles from my backpack and fill it with lemony hand soap from the dispenser. I can use this for the shower, but I’m going to need to find a toothbrush and toothpaste. I bundle toilet paper around my fist and stuff it in the pack. There aren’t any more rolls left at Mikey’s.

Downstairs, I find out you have to sign in to use the public computers, and that they time you. The young librarian looks at me warily when I write my name on the sign-in sheet, but I figure it must be because of the scar on my forehead, because I know I don’t stink, and my arms are covered.

I sit in front of the computer and pull out the sheet of paper Casper gave me. Her email address is typed, but in neat, round handwriting next to it she wrote Charlie, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I am thinking of you. She even signed her real name. Bethany. I ignore the information about the halfway house and support group, because that was for Minnesota, and I’m far from there now.

I log in to the email account I set up at Creeley during my ALTERNA-LEARN studies. I don’t really know what to say, so I just start typing.

Hi—I’m not where you think I am and I’m sorry. It wasn’t going to work out with my mom and she knew it. My friend Mikey lives in Tucson and I’m down here now. I have a little money and I’m staying at Mikey’s place. It’s not the greatest, but at least it isn’t outside. I found a job, too, washing dishes. I guess that’s what I’m good for. I’ve been drawing in my book a lot. I don’t think I’m scared, but maybe I am. It’s weird. Everything is just weird. Like, I don’t actually know how to live. I mean, I managed to live on the street and everything, but that was different than normal living—that was kind of just about not getting killed. I don’t know anything about utilities, or rent, or “security deposits” or what food to buy. I’ve hardly talked at all to anyone, but I’m already tired of talking. Tell everyone I say hey and tell Louisa I miss her.—Charlie

When I’m about to log off, I notice another message, buried in alerts from the online education center asking me when I will resume classes and from people in Nigeria asking for money.

The subject line is Bloody Cupcakes. My heart drops. I hesitate for a moment, then click on it.

Hey soul sister—Sasha snuck around on GhostDoc’s desk and found your file. Had some emails from that online school thing you were doing—found your email addy in there. GhostDoc’s got a whole FILE on yooooo. Talk about dramarama—you never said anything about some weird sex house. You with your mom now? How’s THAT working out? Tsk tsk on GhostDoc for leaving your file out, too, but how the hell are you? Francie’s out—she never came back from Pass one day. Louisa is still up to the same old same old, writin writin writin, blah blah blah. So whats it like outside, Charlie? Ive still got so much time ahead of me baby, I have no hope. Give me some hope! Isis will be sprung in three wks and she is freaking OUT. C U Cupcake, write back soon. BLUE

The sound of the timer startles the mouse from my grip. A large woman with meaty arms nudges me from the chair, barely giving me time to log out.

I make my way out of the library to the plaza. The sun is starting to go down, the sky turning pretty shades of pink and lilac.

Why did Blue want to find me? She didn’t even like me at Creeley. At least, it didn’t seem like it.

I want that world to stay hidden. I want that world to stay sixteen hundred miles away. I want a fresh start.

Three grubby guys on the library lawn catch my eye. They’re rolling cigarettes, sitting against their dark backpacks. I grit my teeth. I don’t want to talk to them, but I’m going to, because they’ll have information I need.

Two of them grunt when I ask where the food bank is, but the third man points down the street and tells me the name of the place. One of the other men says, “Yah, but you won’t get in, girl. Got to get in line for dinner practically at the crack of fuckin’ dawn and lately, it’s all babies and they mamas. Can’t take a plate of food might be for a baby, girl.”

I say thanks and unlock my bicycle. Riding home, I snag a damp plaid blanket from a fence. Someone must have left it out to dry. Next up on my list of fresh start items is a place to live. The blanket will come in handy.