Chapter 20
Chevy Station Wagon, San Francisco
The Past
OUR NEW HOME, set in an abandoned lot, is the same color as mint ice cream with brown panels on the doors that look like real wood and only three wheels, making it tilt to the left.
Mama J says it’s much safer than the tent because we can lock the doors.
One of the windows is gone but taped over with a garbage bag.
I sleep in the way back, unless Mama J has a date.
Then I go to the front seat and pretend I’m driving until the man leaves.
I try not to look in the rearview mirror.
Mama J says to never look back, or you’ll get sad or trip.
Last night was the scariest of my life but Mama J said, There’s time, you’re only seven.
A man climbed over the seats, from the back to the front, real fast. He had a tattoo of a skull on his hand and a knife.
Mama J was on him before he hurt me much.
She tore bloody streaks with her nails along his face and back.
I’ve never heard her scream like that. She was Demeter and the bad guy was Hades.
That made me Persephone, and later, the idea helped me sleep.
In the morning, she explained that the man was rotted out inside.
Now Mama J is very tired from a long night of work and has taken her medicine.
She falls asleep in the back seat sitting up, so I don’t have to be afraid that she’ll upchuck.
I’m not supposed to leave the station wagon, but it’s hot and my legs are cramped.
I slip out through the broken window and walk down the sidewalk, stop to pick a yellow flower growing in the cracks, and tuck it behind one ear.
I can’t read the names of the streets, but I make sure to memorize the run-down buildings and trash piles so I can get back home.
In the distance, high voices ring out, laughing, yelling, and I follow the noise like a dog smelling a good treat ’til I get to a chain-link fence around a concrete playground.
There are kids playing basketball and tag, and a group of six girls sit in a circle pushing a pink ball between them.
There’s a hole in the fence and I slide through, approach the girls, and sit next to one with red hair.
The girls all wear the same light-blue jumper, knee socks, and white sneakers.
The red-haired girl asks, “Who are you?”
“I’m Penny.”
“Do you go to our school?” the one with yellow pigtails tied with polka-dot ribbons asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“No, you don’t,” the red-haired girl says. Up close, she has freckles on her cheeks, a tiny nose, big gray eyes.
“I want to, though.”
Pigtails says, “You can’t. You don’t have the right clothes.”
I look down at overalls that are now too short, the hem above my ankles, the crotch tight. Mama J keeps trying to adjust them, but I’m growing like the weed I am.
“You’re dirty,” a skinny girl across from me says, pointing at my grimy hands, crescents of brown beneath the nails.
“And you smell,” the freckled girl adds, wrinkling her nose. “Like poop.”
“Stinky-stinky-stinky-butt,” says a kid with her arm in a white cast scribbled with hearts and letters. They all join in. “Stinky-stinky-stinky-butt …”
My eyes flood, and the world turns blurry.
“We don’t want you here,” the girls chant.
Never let ’em see you cry, Mama J mutters. If they know it hurts, they’ll do it harder.
But I don’t have the right clothes, and I am dirty; I do smell.
We didn’t go to the shelter last Sunday for a meal and shower.
Mama J says we need to be careful, now that I’m getting older, of the do-gooders.
Social workers, therapists, and volunteers are on the other side. The side that wants to split us apart.
The freckled girl picks up a stone and throws it at me.
It hits beneath my right eye and pain blooms. A few of the other girls find rocks and pelt me.
I run away to a chorus of we don’t want you here and slip back through the fence, find my way to the car.
Mama J is still asleep. I get in the back seat, put my head in her lap, pretend she’s telling me a story.
Usually that makes me feel better. Today it doesn’t.