Anonymity (8 page)

EMILY DRAGGED the black spongy bar mats through the kitchen, past the heated ballgame banter. To Angel and his sous-chef Tino, futbol was religion. Frank had bought the guys a television for the kitchen and mounted it to the wall above the food prep station. He'd gotten them Telemundo so they could watch la Liga Mexicana.

Angel and Tino quarreled and shouted, shaking their fists at the TV and spewing Spanish. Angel had polished his kitchen skills and his English in the resorts of Cancun, but Spanish was always the language of futbol. At times, the kitchen crew's shouts could be heard above the music in the bar, always some disagreement over which team was superior. Angel liked the dominating Atlante from his hometown of Cancun. Tino criticized Atlante for being a glamour team that imported talent. Tino, apparently a purist, liked the allnational Mexico City team Cruz Azul.

Emily paused to watch them rant.

“No, that's okay, guys. I got it,” she said, propping the door open with her butt. “I don't need any help. Thanks anyway. Really. I'm fine.” They didn't bother to look her way.

Emily leaned the heavy mats against a wall and turned the hose on them.

Someone stepped from the shadows. Emily gasped at the looming figure. She thought it was a hefty guy, but then she realized it was the tall homeless girl with a big pack strapped to her back. She clutched a sleeping bag. One of her hands was wrapped in bright-white gauze.

“Hey,” Emily said.

“Hey.”

Emily waited.

“So, you got any food you don't need?” the girl finally asked.

Emily finished dragging the last mat up against a wall to drain while she stalled. She brushed her hands off on her pants.

“How'd you know I work here?”

Lorelei shrugged. “You followed me, so one day I followed you.”

“I didn't really follow you. I just saw you at Batfest.”

“Whatever. You got any food or not?”

Emily waited a moment, trying to give the impression that she was deciding if she wanted to help. Then, “Sure, there's just me and the cooks here right now. They're cool. Come on in.”

Lorelei trailed Emily inside. Tino's hands were down in the industrial sink, but his eyes were on the TV. He flung soapsuds in the air and cried, “Que idiotas!”

Angel laughed and dried knives.

“Excuse me, guys,” Emily said. “This is Lorelei.”

Tino only nodded, but Angel extended his hand.

“Hola, Miss. I'm Angel and this is my cousin, Tino.”

She started to shake and then remembered her injury and pulled back.

“What happened to you?” Angel asked.

“Centipede,” she said. She pouted like a little girl, an unexpected change in demeanor.

Angel grimaced and sucked air through his teeth. “I have felt the scorpion's sting, but not the centipede. Did it hurt?”

“A lot!”

“Ay, caramba!”

This made her smile, and her stance became less guarded.

“Hey, are you hungry?” Angel asked. “I was about to make myself a sandwich. How about you, Emily? You hungry?”

Emily looked around at his clean kitchen.

“Sure, man,” she said. “I'd love a grilled cheese.”

“What about you? You want a grilled cheese or maybe turkey sandwich?” he asked Lorelei. He lifted a skillet down from its high hook.

“Could I have turkey
and
cheese?” the girl asked in a childish way. Emily thought Angel must seem fatherly to her. She probably missed having someone to feed her and protect her.

“Si! Turkey and cheese! What about my orange juice, Emily?” Angel was a recovering alcoholic and juice was all he ever drank.

“Lorelei, you want anything?” Emily heaved open the steel door to the walk-in.

“Juice is good.”

“Tino?”

He shook his head and continued to clean without taking his eyes from the game.

The walk-in cooler smelled like Emily's grandparents’ basement cellar, earthy and weird. She found the jug of juice. She grabbed a giant jar of pickles and slammed the door with a metallic thud. She wiggled up onto a countertop and began fishing for pickles with a giant serving fork.

“Pickle?” she asked, holding out the big fork with one skewered to the end.

Lorelei grabbed it and crunched it down in three bites.

Angel slapped a slab of butter into a frying pan. He chattered on about his new baby, pointing with a spatula to a photo of his wife and baby girl. There was another of his whole family—Angel, his wife, their baby and both of their sons.

Lorelei studied the photos with genuine interest, but her eyes kept drifting back to the frying pan.

Angel slipped the toasty sandwiches onto a plate and cut each in half. He piled the plates high with salty potato chips. Emily poured glasses of OJ. Angel crammed his mouth full and patted his stomach.

“Cochino,” Tino said, and snickered.

“I know, I know,” Angel said rubbing his round gut. He winked at Lorelei. “He just called me a pig.”

She smiled again and ate as if she hadn't eaten in a week.

“Lorelei, I like that name. She's a superhero. Right?” Angel asked.

She stopped eating for a second. “Wow, how'd you know that?” she asked, her mouth full of bread and cheese.

“Yeah, how
did
you know that?” Emily asked.

“I have teenage sons. They read comic books. I like them too,” Angel said. “And tattoos.” He pushed up his sleeves, revealing tats on his forearms. One was a snapping banner that read,
Familia
, another the Atlante team brand emblazoned across a soccer ball. A small scroll on the inside of his arm read
Easy Does It.
Another was Speedy Gonzales, his floppy feet accelerating, air puffs shooting out behind him.

Lorelei touched the cartoon. “Why do you have that?”

“Because I'm the fastest cook in Austin.”

She studied his work but didn't offer to elaborate on her own ink.

Tino scrubbed the skillet Angel had used, then pulled the plug. Water gurgled and burped down the drain.

“So, where you going to stay tonight?” Emily asked. “It's supposed to turn cold.”

Wrong move.

“Don't worry about it,” Lorelei snapped in an icy voice.

“I'm not worried. Just asking.”

“Don't ask. I can take care of myself.”

“Hey, I'm not gonna hassle you.”

“I gotta split.” Lorelei shoved the rest of her sandwich into her bag. She took the glass of juice with her.

Emily followed her to the back door. The girl shoved outside and started down the alley.

“You're welcome,” Emily called after her.

“Whatever,” Lorelei said over her shoulder. Then she stopped and said, “Look, don't think this means we're friends or anything.”

“Why would I think that?”

“Because people think if they give you something that you owe them. I don't owe you anything.”

“No. You don't owe me anything.”

“I hate charity. Charity's never free.” She jerked her hood over her head, her breath a pale cloud in the alley's last light.

SHE COULD have played the sympathy card and probably ended up couch surfing at Emily's. But Lorelei had reacted before she thought things through. Sometimes she had low impulse control, or so she'd been told.

Now she would have to find a place to sleep. She scanned the unfamiliar street in this unfamiliar part of town. Town Lake was close, but she didn't know that terrain or who might be hanging there. While considering her options, the lights flickered out inside the bar. Lorelei watched from the shadows of an alley across the street as Emily, Angel and Tino came outside into the alley. Emily pushed a bike. They walked up to a rattletrap truck, one her father would have called a rice burner. Tino hefted the bike into the back. All three got into the little truck and drove away.

Lorelei made her way back down the bar's alley and assessed the wooden fence. She'd been rock climbing, so the fence wouldn't ordinarily present a problem, but her hand was beginning to hurt again. She needed something to stand on.

She walked to the dumpster, took a deep breath and wrestled open the corroded square access door. A putrid reek hit her in the face. Inside she found an enormous refried bean can and thanked God not everyone in Austin recycled. She shoved the door shut to cover her tracks.

The can added more than a foot to her height. She'd always been tall, nearly five ten, which had helped her pass as older on the streets. Standing on the can, she could easily get a grip and swing a leg up and over. Bars never opened early, so she was sure she could be gone before anybody showed up in the morning. She'd have to remember to hide the can when she left.

She threw her bedroll and pack over the fence.
Man up
, she whispered. Three agonizing tries later, she dangled inside the fence. Her feet touched a wooden bench, and she dropped down.

It wasn't a large area, just big enough for half-a-dozen tables. Flea market chairs were scattered around a fire dish. Her heart leapt! A fire! In a corner lived a poorly stacked rick of wood and a pile of kindling. She used a long, thin piece of firewood to poke at the ashes gathered in the bottom of the metal saucer. A glimmer of orange hope appeared.

She needed to stoke the coals. She searched for newspaper to no avail. She opened her pack and pawed through her things with her uninjured hand. She could feel her heart pulsing in her other hand. It was painful, but she could live with it.

She poked through her pack but found nothing. She rarely carried anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. She could go through the dumpster or take stacks of local papers that always lived in racks along the sidewalk, but climbing back out sounded painful. Then her fingers touched her library book.

Survival instincts told her to sacrifice the book, but her heart told her that it would be worse than stealing, worse than lying. Books had been her closest companions, her escape from misery. And she knew if she burned it that she would never be allowed to check out another.

Besides, if she burned
Twilight
what would she use to entertain herself tonight? Reading held her rapid thoughts at bay until she could fall asleep. Without a good story to follow, her own tumbling, twisting thoughts kept her awake all night, leaving her exhausted and depressed the next day.

Depression was like an ugly uninvited friend that came for an extended visit, familiar but unwanted. Depression allowed her to finally sleep, but it wasn't the type of sleep that nourished. It was a sucking black hole that made her forget to eat, made her immobile until somebody literally forced her to move along.

So she tried to stay happy, to focus on the positive, like when she had a good group of friends to hang with, when somebody gave her a real meal, or she found an animal buddy for a while. Lorelei didn't worry about her moods. She had come to realize that hers was a common cycle of the destitute—hopefulness, frenzied restlessness, depression. Nobody was in control of their emotions all the time.

At the moment, Lorelei was content with her situation. She had found an ideal setup—a private spot where she wouldn't have to sleep on the ground. She decided not to burn the library book. She could make fire from far less than she had to work with here. She'd built fires from practically nothing at that brat camp her parents had sent her to.

Lorelei found a Naugahyde chair with a hole in the seat. She picked at the cushion stuffing and out came a wad of curly fibers perfect for growing a fire. She gathered all the stuffing she could without it showing. The last thing she wanted was to ruin a sweet spot by calling attention to her presence.

She decided to use one of her soiled shirts for fuel too, just in case the fibers didn't have enough burn life. She gathered kindling, then a handful of larger pieces of wood, and finally a couple of logs from the stack in the corner. She stuffed her shirt and the fibers in the bottom of the fire dish, added the kindling, then a few larger pieces of wood. She built the embers into a flame that spread their healthy glow to the dry wood, and finally, she arranged the logs on top.

Soon, she had a blaze that she feared might call attention from neighbors, but a quick look around revealed only one-story businesses. There were no second-story apartments to look down on her. She felt confident that the flames weren't visible from the street.

Lorelei pulled a bench close to the fire and spread her sleeping bag out. She fed the blaze and ate the rest of her sandwich. From a water hose, she filled the red plastic glass she'd taken. It was a good glass. She'd keep it.

The fire was reassuring, and she made a mental note to acquire the needed equipment for a new tinderbox. Her tinderbox from camp had been in the pack that was taken in Phoenix. Making fire was one of the survival skills she had learned at Nez Perce, the wilderness camp her parents had sent her to when she was fifteen.

Adults called it wilderness therapy, but all the kids recognized it as their desperate parents’ attempts to reprogram them. The idea was to make a child so miserable, so hungry and cold and tired, that they developed a renewed desire for home. What are a few chores and an early curfew compared to eating twigs and sleeping on bitter ground?

Only sometimes, it backfired. Sometimes, instead of resulting in a child's submission, the camps served to stoke the fires of willfulness and defiance. Or, as in Lorelei's case, it made the children realize their ability to survive on their own.

Living in hard circumstances had given her confidence and cunning. The camp taught her how to make temporary shelters and tell time from the sun. She learned there were many edible things that a person didn't have to buy. She learned about hypothermia and sun exposure and first aid.

They'd dropped her group in the middle of the woods with a compass and told them to find their way out. She'd learned to navigate on foot, how to walk her way out of a situation. She'd never been independent before, had always been driven by her harried mother from home to car to school to car to mall to car and back to home for so many years that she felt as if her feet rarely touched actual ground.

She discovered that she liked to walk. Getting around through her own physical efforts felt
good.

Camp made her realize she was strong. Not just strong-willed like her parents insisted, but durable. She'd always lived a cushy life filled with television and Twinkies and temple. But once she went long stretches without eating or sleeping, she realized she was tough. She learned that she didn't cry easily and that she rarely got sick.

The most significant thing she learned at camp was that she wasn't alone. Nez Perce was filled with other kids just like her—not the popular, not the athletes, not the scholars—kids with parents disappointed in their offspring.

Back home, she'd kept in touch with her camp companions. Even though Lorelei's father had taken away her cell phone and computer privileges, she'd gotten around that problem with an online account at the library. Her mother was always happy to drop her there.

For more than a year, she'd written to her Nez Perce friends. Eventually somebody suggested they form a clan to travel around. One boy had an older cousin who lived in a community house in Oregon. He suggested they could all live there and share the rent. One by one, e-mails started to contain stories of adventure. One by one, her camp friends left home and made their way to Oregon.

As tension mounted at home, Lorelei planned her own escape. She saved money and stocked her travel pack.

She left in the middle of the night, a note on her bedside table.

Don't worry, Mommy. I'll come back. I just have to do this. I'm searching. I hope you understand.

But the road had transformed her, both mentally and physically. She couldn't go back now, even if she wanted to.