Chapter Text
Rey pats down the edges of her sheets and pulls the comforter over the top, tucking it right up to the headboard. Her mom will be barging in any moment now and Rey isn’t keen on picking another argument. Today is not the day.
The floor is spotless, all her usual odds and ends tucked away and the carpet vacuumed. Everything is as it should be.
Without so much as a knock, the door swings open.
“Yello, daughter of mine.” Her mom brushes her long, wiry sheaf of white hair back over her shoulder.
Rey forces herself to smile. “Just finishing up,” she says.
“This is what just finishing looks like, huh?” Her mom’s eyes flicker over the spotless room, lips going pursed. “Okie dokie. Well, not what I’m here for.”
In the blink of an eye, the previously polished dresser goes dusty. Rey sits on the edge of her bed, fingers digging into the comforter. It needs to be washed. Everything needs to be washed again, needs to be wiped down twice, three times, what with her mom’s gaze weighing down the room. It’s filthy in here.
Her mom leans herself against the door frame, itching her hook nose, then holds out her palm. The wrinkles there go taut, white showing at every bulge of bone.
“Need your ID,” she says.
“Why?” Rey asks.
“Getting your passport paperwork going, obviously. How else am I going to get you into France with us?” She snaps her fingers once, then reaches further, ever unwilling to step foot inside her daughter’s hovel.
Rey’s fingers itch at each other. She finds the cusp of a peeling bit of scar tissue near her thumbnail and picks at it. “I can fill out the application if you—”
Her mom laughs, teeth yellow from being in her mouth for too many decades. “Like hell. You don’t know the first thing about an application like this. The correct answer is ‘yes, mommy dearest.’” She makes her voice high and crackly. “‘Let me jump right to it and get you just what you need. Oh, and thank you so much for being so unbelievably kind-hearted as to bring me on a fun graduation trip next year.’”
Rey looks at her knees. There’s a smudge on the outer edge of her thick glasses, blurring her mom’s red-heeled feet in her peripheral.
“Thanks, mom,” she mumbles.
“You’re so fucking welcome. Now—” She snaps her fingers again, twice in rapid succession, “—the ID, if you will? Or do I have to get on my knees and beg for it, your highness?”
Rey rises and shuffles to her purse where it hangs on the closet door. Colorful keychains dangle from every zipper and even from both metal loops that connect the strap to the body of it. She finds her wallet inside and sifts through the cards.
Her thumb is bleeding where she was picking at it.
There’s her shopper’s card, her debit card linked up to the portion of her part-time job money that she gets to keep, her health insurance card for emergencies. Three bucks in cash folded halfways and tucked around the family portrait she keeps in here at her mom’s insistence.
No ID.
Rey looks again. Her nails catch on each card, peeling them apart so she’s for sure not missing anything.
“How complicated is that wallet, anyway?” her mom drawls behind her.
A third pass. She could be here all day and she still wouldn’t find the ID because it’s not in here.
“Um,” Rey says. She abandons the wallet and sifts through the various pockets of her purse. It fell out, that’s all. She never moves her ID out of her purse, not ever. That’s the only place it goes.
“Oh my god.” There’s a shuffle near the door and a dull knock-knock, like her mom’s thumping her wrinkle-pleated forehead against the frame. “Don’t tell me you lost it. Don’t say it.”
Rey tears into her bedside drawer where she’s never once put her wallet. The blood from her thumb stains the cover of a notebook as she digs around, her hands thrashing fish out of water.
Nothing.
Her glasses are blurred over. She keeps her back to her mom and says the words. She says, “I’m sorry.” It’s the only admission she can give.
“Are you kidding me?” Her mom’s voice nails into the back of her hunched neck, driving points into the tight muscle. “All this trash you keep around—you’ve got a billion shitty keychains that you inventory every goddamn night, and yet you can’t keep track of one of the few things in your possession that actually matters?”
Rey’s shoulders hunch. The drawer stares back at her. It may as well be empty for all she cares.
“Maybe this means you don’t actually want to go to France.”
“I do,” Rey murmurs.
“‘I do,’” her mom repeats in that simpering voice. “Clearly not, or you’d be showing me what a responsible adult you can be. Do I have to babysit your every move right up until you turn eighteen? Because, honey, the world ain’t going to treat you nicely if that’s what you expect.”
Rey shakes her head. Her glasses drift low on her nose again, but she can barely see anything in front of her anyway so it doesn’t matter.
“Would you at least do me the respect of looking at me? Turn around. Good god, sometimes I think you belong in a fucking nuthouse. I got you tested for all that head crap and they told me you were just fine, but I’m starting to think they missed something important.”
And so Rey turns. She blinks and blinks, then stares at her mom’s tasteful slacks that sway with her every gesture.
“I want you going out and getting a new ID this very second. And you’re going to do it with your portion of your paycheck, too. I’m not paying for your mistakes, not this time.”
“I think—” Rey starts.
“What?” Her mom shoves her arms together across her body. “What do you think? Hm? Enlighten me, my darling sweetpea.”
“I think it’s something I have to do online,” she mumbles. “I don’t know, though.”
Her mom laughs. “Oh, you think? Well, if that’s what you think, then you ought to walk yourself down to the library and use their computer to do it. Better get running, I think it closes at seven.” She taps her watchless wrist with a dramatic flourish, then stalks away.
Rey digs around in her pocket and finds her cloth, then cleans her glasses. She wipes her face on her sleeve.
One of the keychains hanging from her purse, the mini etch-a-sketch, its little tin-foil knobs wink at her.
She gathers her water bottle and the discarded wallet, stuffing both inside the purse, then tugs on a sweatshirt and leaves. She waves at her dad on her way out, and his smile holds the same flat sympathy that always follows when her mom goes on a rager.
The door smacks her on the ass on her way out.
It’s warm for springtime but Rey runs cold inside her sweatshirt. This isn’t the first time she’s been effectively kicked out for the afternoon, and the only consolation is that it’s getting closer and closer to being the last.
The sidewalk shows her feet where to go so Rey doesn’t have to think much if she doesn’t want to. In health class they talk about meditation, but in the textbook pictures the meditating people are always sitting down with their backs straight.
Rey’s back hates being straight, and she hates sitting cross-legged. Makes her feet get pins and needles.
But this could be meditation, this walking and not really thinking.
Her purse jingles with all its toys hanging on tiny lengths of chain, each one a world of its own. They sound happy out here with the movement and the light to make them look new again.
The library is at least a half hour walk, but before that comes the park. The fence is chain link and old so that the top points are all bent and curled, the metal going rusty down where it connects into the ground.
Rey pauses at the fence. A man sits with his back to a tree, his face in perfect profile. He’s smoking a cigarette and she smells it before she really sees him.
She finds her thumb, the blood dry and flaky, and begins to pick again. The man smokes his cigarette and doesn’t seem to notice her pretending not to watch, but also not continuing down the sidewalk.
She remembers that she doesn’t have to do anything online to get an ID. It’s the DMV that hands those out, and she doesn’t know where that even is. It was a whole year ago that they went to get her first ID, and even then, her dad was the one that drove because Rey isn’t allowed and she didn’t know to pay attention to directions back then.
One of her fingers loops itself through the fence. The metal feels grainy.
Looks like she’ll have to go to the library anyway just to find the address to the DMV. If her mom would let her have a cell phone this wouldn’t be such a hassle, but alas. Alas.
The smoking man beneath the tree, he turns towards her, puffing smoke out the side of his mouth. If her lenses weren’t two years old, she’d be able to see him clearly, but for the most part all she can tell is that he’s pale with black hair, the long kind.
He points his cigarette hand at her, fingers curving into a gun, and he pretend-shoots her—then waves her over. His hand is dark at the back and knuckles.
She has places to be. He’s a strange man in the park and he’s smoking, and Rey’s only seventeen and busted by her mom.
Rey walks until she finds the open gate and lets herself into the park. Beneath all that smoke it smells like a park, the grass having been cut just recently. Some kids play way off in the other corner where there’s a sandbox and a jungle gym, yelling and hooting as kids do.
As she gets closer, she sneaks glances at the guy’s face. It’s long and kind of ugly, but in a way that’s nice to look at. He’s got a silver piercing at his eyebrow and when he raises the cigarette to his mouth, his hand is blackened with an intricate mass of tattoos.
Rey wonders how much that hurt.
What she’d thought were long shirtsleeves is actually more tattoos running from his wrists up to where his arms disappear into a dark shirt at the bicep.
“Don’t think you’re allowed to smoke here,” she says, voice almost lost in the loudness of him sitting there.
He pulls a fake pout so she knows he doesn’t care and takes another drag, letting the smoke roll out his nose this time. It’s kind of freaky-looking.
She’d love to be tough and ask him, so did you need something? But his tattoos glare at her and his smoke chokes into her throat and he’s a lot bigger up close, a full-grown man with thick arms and a big, crooked nose. Too big to get sassy with.
“Siddown,” he says, pointing the cigarette at the grass in front of him.
Rey sits, but slightly to the side so she’s not face-to-face with his black boots.
He leans his head back against the tree, the knot of hair at the base of his neck pushing into the bark. “Name?” he asks.
He’s a perfect stranger. Maybe he does child trafficking like her mom’s always yapping about when she and dad watch too much TV.
“Rey,” she says. She slips a nail along her calloused knuckle, searching idly for loose bits. Opportunities. She finds one and starts picking.
He holds out a palm for her to shake but she just stares at it, so he shrugs and scratches at a hole in his jeans. “Ben. ‘S nice to meet you, Ria.”
She pinches at her knuckle. “It’s ‘Rey’.”
“Ria suits you better.” Shadows flicker over his face as the wind rustles the tree above them. “What’s with your bag, Ria?”
She glances down. “My…?”
“Looks like it popped right out of a Toys R’ Us’s asshole,” he says.
Her face goes hot. She lifts one of her dangling keychains, this one a mini-version of Connect 4. “I just like them, I guess.”
“You don’t get out a lot, do you?” Ben says, cigarette bobbing in his lips as he stretches one arm across his body like they do in sports on TV.
He doesn’t say it like a question so Rey doesn’t answer, just tucks her purse into her lap and fidgets with her tiny etch-a-sketch instead of picking at her skin.
He laughs and widens his legs so his big boot nudges her hip. She flinches.
“You’re cute,” he says. “Real cutie pie, except for the glasses.”
The etch-a-sketch slips out of her fingers. The breeze is feeling warmer. “They were the cheapest ones,” she says.
“I don’t doubt it. No way your parents are taking care of you properly with glasses like that stuck on your face.”
Rey repeats what her mom’s always telling her. “I’m fed. I have a room and a roof and clothes. They might even take me to France when I graduate next year.”
He whistles. “Dream big. So that makes you, what, sixteen?”
“Seventeen,” she corrects.
“Seventeen,” he repeats, but he wraps it in this lower voice that’s all torn-paper around the edges. “Shouldn’t be chatting with a seventeen year old, now, should I?”
She adjusts her coke-bottle lenses. His head warps depending on where she points her face. “We’re just talking,” she says.
“You lonely, Ria?”
Rey thinks about it. Her mom doesn’t work so she’s around all day whenever Rey is, jutting in and out of her daily activities. But they don’t really chat or hang out like Rey sees friends do on TV. And her dad—he’s a dad. A man-shaped painting that sometimes smiles or wraps her in a hug when she’s crying, but for all the emotional warmth he gives, he may as well be a big stuffed teddy bear: nice to hold, but no feeling behind the gesture.
And that’s it. Those two, plus the keychains and the drawings Rey sometimes does in her notebooks.
“I think so,” is what she tells Ben.
He tucks his hand around that place between his legs, the bulging spot, and he adjusts it without caring whether she’s watching or not.
“Don’t have any friends at school?” he asks.
“I don’t go to school. My mom teaches me.”
His lip squirms up at the nose like he’s just smelled something bad. “Bet she’s shit at it.” Adjusting so his feet are pressed flat to the ground, he reaches under his butt and fishes a book from his back pocket. “So, what, you’re just stuck at home all day with your parents?”
An ant licks at her bare ankle with its antennae. She must not taste good, because it wanders back into the grass. “Well, I have a job on the weekends. I’m not really supposed to make friends with the other employees, though. It’s not professional.”
“Like hell. But okay, then. You’re living a hermit’s life.” From his other back pocket he digs out a key ring. The whole ring is pretty much all just boring keys, except for a flat oval of metal with a skull design stamped on one side. “Are they at least cool parents? Fun, nice, all that Brady Bunch shit?”
“Not really. My mom’s…kinda mean.” Mean is subjective, but Rey’s seen what other parents are like on the TV. She knows hers aren’t the same.
Ben glances up and raises his black eyebrows. “She hit you?” He pinches the metal disk between his fingers, tucking the keys up inside his palm.
“No—just, like, she calls me names and stuff. Yells. I don’t think she really likes me that much, but maybe parents aren’t supposed to like their kids.”
Without a smile attached, his brief laugh just sounds like pain. “Yeah, maybe they aren’t.” He digs the disc into the dirt next to him and scoops out a hunk of grass, then goes back for more. “Well, I can be your friend.”
“Thanks,” she says, a smile playing at the corners of her lips even though she tells them to go flat.
He pauses in his digging. “Jesus. I was kidding. I’m way too old to be your friend.”
“How old are you?” she asks.
The kids are leaving, draining out the other end of the park. Now there’s no one around except the eyes of the unlucky houses that border the park fence.
“I’m kissin’ thirty, little girl. I mean, look at me. Do I look like I’d make a good friend for you?”
He’s digging a hole in the grass, making a little pile of their greens and roots. The park people are going to be angry when they see it.
“I don’t really know what a good friend looks like,” Rey says. “At least you talk to me.”
Then his hole is done and he turns to his book. When he flips it over, Rey can read the big gold embossed title on the front: HOLY BIBLE. The inner pages are ragged, like a small animal’s been eating at it.
He opens the book and finds a page that’s clear and crisp, then carefully rips it from the binding. “You seemed sad, hanging onto that fence with your jangly-ass purse dragging you down.”
“And you asked about my keychains,” she adds. “Friends ask stuff like that, I think.”
He does that pained laugh again. “You got a phone number for me, then?” Rey bites her lip and he notices, so he says, “Friends have to contact each other somehow.”
“I’m not allowed to have a phone,” she says.
With a thump he shuts the book and begins folding the thin bible paper into a sort-of square. “You’re shitting me. You’re seventeen and you don’t have a phone? Not even a goddamn, like, Nokia or anything? A pay-by-the-minute brick plastic phone?”
Rey shakes her head. “I’m not allowed,” she repeats.
He stares at her for a really long time, then goes back to folding. His creases are clumsy, but she knows he’s doing origami by how specific the folds are. “Your parents okay in the head?” he asks.
“I think so. Sorta old and cranky sometimes, but so are all parents.”
He tucks open the paper and suddenly it’s a crooked swan, the neck leaning one way more than the other and its head too small. But it’s definitely a swan.
It sits in his hand for them both to admire it. Then he pulls out a lighter. The flame goes click-click before it blooms, and he sets it to the swan’s pointed nose. Its beak, really.
“Look, you need to get out of that house,” he says, his bible swan burning down to the neck, white ash dangling above his hand. “The world’s waiting for you, and the longer you stay, the more trapped you’re gonna be.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Rey says.
The flame gets bigger, licking at the body and making the wings flutter. He lets it burn just close enough to get the skin of his palm red before he dumps it in his dirt hole.
“You don’t have a bank account or anything?” he asks. “Didn’t you say you have a job?”
“I do, but my mom takes half of what I make to pay for my food and room and stuff, and then if I ever break one of the rules she charges me fees, so I don’t get to keep a whole lot of it. I don’t have enough for rent or anything.”
The swan is just flames and curling words now. At the edges, the grass is getting singed. It’s a strong, sad sort of smell.
“Oh my god,” Ben says.
Her vision’s going blurry again. She presses her lips tight together and blinks really hard. Maybe she’s broken through the skin on her knuckle, because it’s definitely stinging enough, but she can’t look down or else the tears are going to roll.
“Listen, kid—” he starts, but Rey interrupts him.
“I’ll be right back.” She slings her purse over her shoulder and scampers to her feet, grass clinging to her knees. “Don’t leave, okay? Just stay here.”
Rey practically sprints home. The sky is as pretty as it ever was, only she’s not usually looking at it so today it may as well be brand new. Each house on the block is just a little bit different, and Rey points her eyes at each one as she runs, feet tripping on weeds growing from the cracks in the sidewalk.
She finds her house and its face is a scowl, eaves drooping with the downspouts crooked and clogged. Her mom is inside and Rey’s not expected home anytime soon, not even close, but she brushes the grass from her clothes and unlocks the front door.
“That better not be my daughter,” her mom calls as she scampers down the hall to her room.
“Forgot sunscreen,” Rey calls back.
“You don’t need sunscreen when it’s barely April! Good god.”
But she doesn’t comment further and Rey shuts herself in her room, making the door latch silent. Then she finds her dad’s old backpack that he gave her once for a birthday present and starts stuffing it full. She has to go fast because there’s no telling how long Ben will wait, or if he’ll even wait at all. She might have to chase him down—but she’ll do it. She has to.
Right now, she’s supposed to be slouching in one of those stinky seats at the library, googling the DMV’s address. She’s supposed to be miserable.
Rey picks out three simple outfits, a bunch of underwear, and moves her wallet and keys from the purse into the backpack’s front pocket. Whatever space is left she fills with keychains. She doesn’t have room for them all. The rest she brushes her fingers over and presses that hand to her lips in goodbye.
She leaves without another word. Her dad’s cooking dinner now and he just raises his hand as she darts past the kitchen archway.
Rey tucks her arms through both straps before setting out at full-tilt. She doesn’t look at any houses or the sky this time. Her eyes are glued to the sidewalk so her feet don’t get snagged.
This must be meditation, this forgetting of everything that matters for one flying moment of carelessness.
The park comes into view, chain link fence going zigzag in her vision as she thrusts herself down the sidewalk. She finds the tree and he’s still there. Smoking and there. Watching and there, right there. Waiting.
Rey bounds over to him and kneels closer this time, shaky hands gripping her backpack straps.
“Hey,” she says. “Thanks for waiting.”
The hole—the paper crane’s grave—has been heaped over with pulled grass and loose clods of dirt. A week from now when the landscaping company comes, they’re going to wonder who was digging holes and lighting fires in the park.
“What exactly was I waiting for?” Ben asks.
She slides a strap off one shoulder and swings the backpack around. All the keychains are on the inside, so the outside is just plain canvas fabric or whatever it is backpacks are made of.
“I’m getting out,” she says. “And I thought maybe…”
The words won’t come to her lips. Suddenly she can’t stand to look at him, but he interrupts her before she can go hightailing it back home.
“You wanted me to help.” He nods and lets his eyes wander over her again. “I can do that.”
Rey covers her mouth with her hands. “Really? You will?”
He half-grins. “Sure. Consider us friends. I’ll help you out, no problem.”
He offers his big hand for a shake, and this time she takes it. He swallows her up.
Shaking, squeezing her hand, Ben says, “Easy as fuckin’ pie.”