Chapter 2
Pacific Heights, San Francisco
The Past
“CLOSE YOUR MOUTH. You look like a fish tossed out of water.”
Mama J yanks my hand, and I stumble. We’re not anywhere near home—the Tenderloin, sometimes the Mission if the police decide to clean up the neighborhood, which just means pushing us to a different underpass.
“That house,” I say, looking back over my shoulder at the white castle with turrets and windows filled with blue, yellow, and green glass, “is where I’ll live when I grow up. ”
“Places like these,” Mama J says, gesturing at the three-story homes with balconies, trimmed hedges, and gardens filled with perfect blooms, before hawking up phlegm and spitting a yellow-green gob on the smooth sidewalk, “aren’t for people like us.”
“Why not?”
“Penny, there are stories and there’s real life. In real life, happily ever after doesn’t happen the way you think.”
“But it could.”
Mama J sighs. “You’ll get it, eventually.”
A man in a suit and tie walks to his car.
It’s a white one with a Mercedes symbol on the front.
He glances at us, frowns. My skin burns.
I’m dressed in my favorite cherry sweatshirt and the overalls Mama J found at the Salvation House that have cartoon characters sewn above the pockets—a mouse, a duck, and a grinning pig.
I loved the overalls but now I don’t as much.
“Fake it,” Mama J says, then squares her shoulders, lowers the sunglasses she swiped from the Dollar Store, and struts like she owns this street. I stand up straighter. “That’s my girl.”
We near a mother, yellow dress, low heels, putting her baby in the back of a shiny silver minivan. When we pass, she glances at us, waves. Maybe Mama J is right about pretending.
“Keep up,” she instructs.
We fall in behind three teenage girls in matching gray-and-blue plaid skirts.
Snow-white collars peek from cabled sweaters, shiny loafers make tappity-taps.
They must be best friends. If I found a magic lantern on the beach and a genie came out of it, granted me one wish, I’d ask to be them.
The tallest girl, her hair in a blond ponytail, giggles as they race up the wide steps of a columned stone building.
I can’t read the sign, I’m only six, but bet it’s a school.
Jealousy is like the cough syrup Mama J once made me take when my skin was on fire, throat too sore to swallow.
“Can we go home?” I ask, longing for the familiar orange walls of our tent; desperate not to see a world that’s like the chocolate in a store window we can never taste.
Mama J nods at the plastic blue cans lining the street. “Rich folks throw out good food, nice clothes, and new shoes, sometimes even jewelry. It’s garbage day, and who better to take out the trash than us?”
“I don’t want to,” I whine, embarrassed.
“Damn it, kid, sometimes you’re hard to like.” Mama J drags me over to the trash bins. “Get used to it. This is life.”