Dime (19 page)

The other outcall that went all night tied me up. When he finished, he left me trussed up for hours before he came back. The only good thing about that one was he left the TV on and I got to see the entire documentary about those elephants.

“Eagle driving me?” L.A. asked.

“You mess with Eagle, and I will kill you.” Daddy didn't want anybody getting anything for free from one of his bitches. And he didn't want any of us catching feelings for anybody but him and then making any mad moves.

I gathered ice, a few Ziploc bags, and some paper towels. Lollipop went back to her room quietly, her face staying so still. Daddy and L.A. left. I helped Brandy onto the couch.

“Better not let me bleed all over L.A.'s pillow,” she told me.

“When did you get so uppity?” I was hoping to make her laugh.
Uppity
was L.A.'s word.

She didn't laugh. “I'm not uppity,” she said. “I'm just wore out. Getting locked up wore me out. That cop wore me out. Down south wore me out.”

I slid my fingers along the edge of a Ziploc bag, sealing in ice. Then I wrapped it in a paper towel. I lay the ice bag down on her right ribs as best I could.

She winced. “You going down south and I'm stuck up here with L.A. and I ain't never going to Disney World.”

I dropped the other ice bag. It burst, sending ice everywhere. How did she know? Had Daddy told her? “Disneywhat?”

She tried to shrug, but winced again instead. “You heard me.”

“He's taking you to Florida?” I knew I shouldn't let the ice melt into cold puddles, but I couldn't look away from Brandy.

“He's not taking me to shit,” Brandy said. “He said if I brang home fifteen hundred every night for two weeks straight, he would, and I was almost there.”

I was thinking fast to follow what she was saying. She knew Daddy was planning on sending me down south. Did that mean that L.A. knew too?

“But now he about to have two stables to run, and I can't earn for days until I heal up, and I'm going to be stuck up here with L.A. behind all of that.”

“Daddy told you?”

She shook her head. “I heard him and Eagle talking outside the hotel door when I was with a trick.” She eyed me. “How long you knew?”

“Since the day we picked up Lollipop.” I couldn't look at her, so I got on my knees to clean up the wet spots.

“Why didn't you say nothing?”

Because even though I trusted her the most, it wasn't enough? Because I was afraid Daddy would find out I'd told her, and if he found out I disobeyed him, I might get beaten, or worse? I wiped up the mess as best as I could and finally looked at Brandy again.

She rolled her eyes, which must have been difficult, because one was swollen shut. “I probably wouldn't have said nothing neither.” The cut over her eye started oozing again, so I dabbed at it with the wet paper towel. “He wasn't taking me to no Disney World anyway,” Brandy said. “Daddy full of shit.” Then her one good eye filled up, spilling over.

“You want ice for your eye?” It was the same one the cop got that time. She nodded.

While I put it together, she said, “I still got that card.” At first I didn't know what she was talking about. “It fit perfect underneath my powder. The powder dish part come right out.”

I could picture it. The circle of face powder lifting off its rectangular base. The card from when she got arrested, tucked away. The one with the lady from that place that say they get girls out of the life.
Pamela Terrence.
The North Star.
I could borrow L.A.'s phone when she was in the shower. Or I could ask to use somebody's phone. A john's phone. I couldn't text Pamela Terrence from someone else's phone, but I could call. Only who was Pamela Terrence, anyway, and how did I know she wasn't going to lock me up?

“You still want him like that?” Brandy asked.

I couldn't believe I'd ever wanted him the way I'd wanted him. It made me feel like a true ho. The shame of it hurt worse than my scorched insides.

Brandy nodded as if I'd said something she agreed with, even though I hadn't said anything. “I'm not using no card,” she said. “My place with Daddy.” She glanced at me with her one good eye and then glanced away. “He save my life.” I tried to think if that was true, but it was so hard to think sometimes. “He love me,” Brandy said. “Only one who ever did.” She touched her swollen eyelid. “I piss him off is all.”

I stayed quiet, wondering what was true and who got to decide. If I told Brandy that Daddy didn't love her, would I be right? And if I was right, would she believe it? For her sake, I didn't want to be right. I wanted him to love her, even though the idea of him loving her and not me made the burning spread upward from my belly into my heart, and it hurt.

“It under my powder. Stupid card. The little round part come right out. Don't forget.”

I stayed silent.

“You got to watch out for L.A.,” Brandy warned. “She lost that tooth and look all ugly and now she getting crazier than ever.”

I thought she looked ugly. But I guessed a lot of dates liked her mouth freaky like that.

We heard vomiting sounds coming from Lollipop's room. We were forbidden to open the door. We listened, and it stopped. But later, at lunch, she came out with a stinking bowl full of puke. She cleaned it out in the bathroom without a word.

*  *  *

Nobody was sure where she came from,
Truth would write. Lollipop had some guesses, and once I got her talking a little, it was hard to shut her up.
Maybe she was sold by her mother or by someone else without her mother's permission, or kidnapped. Her beginning is muddy, but Uncle Ray is clear. He never let her go to school. She lived in apartments and motel rooms, not
allowed out of them during school hours. In the summers she played
outside in parks and playgrounds with Ray, and sometimes with his friends. Lollipop liked her life with Ray, enjoying the best food from the best chains, plenty of toys and clothes, and television.

At first she thought all girls at home in their rooms played naked with their uncles in front of a computer camera. When Ray began to tell her this was not the way it was and that she was special, living a special life, she believed it. She felt special.
When Lollipop told me that part, she didn't even realize what she was saying. She just puffed up her little body and smirked, like she was some sort of celebrity
. When Ray began asking her to do unpleasant and sometimes painful things and to smile and pretend she liked and wanted those things, she learned fast. She had to because he punished her by taking away meals and TV and sometimes punching her for refusing or crying or looking scared. He gave her prizes for doing a good job: pretty headbands and bracelets, pink ponies and princesses and fairies and glitter glue and unicorn puzzles and shiny beads and cute sweatpants with words written on the backside in black cursive letters she couldn't read.

By the time Ray began to allow Lollipop's “fans” to visit in person, she knew exactly how to do the things Ray had taught her. She had also found a way to keep her face still, but friendly, like a kind statue, so that nobody would punish her. Ray was extra nice after she did a good job with fans in person. He made her brownies and painted her fingernails pink, adding sparkles to her thumbs.

When Lollipop went to live with her new Daddy and his stable, she thought it was temporary, that Ray was coming back for her. She missed Ray like crazy and was afraid of Daddy and the two older girls.
She had laughed when she said she wasn't afraid of me because I was too sad to be scary. Which made me feel mad and weak, both at the same time.
But she had learned to hide her afraid part, to show only the kind statue face. For such a silly little girl, she was strong.
Then Truth would apologize
. I'm sorry to upset you with all of this,
Truth would say.
But please. Please keep reading.

WHEN I FIRST understood what I was going to do, I expected to write the note as Lollipop. But in the six weeks since then, I've had to face the facts. Lollipop has lived in front of one screen or another her whole life, possesses the vocabulary of a four-year-old, can't read, and thinks a cheeseburger and a new pair of glitter panties are things to get excited about. Using her is just a poor idea.

Back in August, Daddy assigned Lollipop to me, saying,
You school her.
I must have been doing a good job hiding my insides from him, or he wouldn't have. L.A. was still the only one of us who touched the money. If she were to find out, it would be the second time she would learn about Daddy asking me to hold coins. Which would only make things worse than they already were.

Lollipop didn't know the difference between a twenty and a one. “What's that?” She held out her hands, nails trimmed neatly and painted little-girl pink. She was polite, even if she was stupid. “May I touch it, please?”

“Nobody touches the money but Daddy.”

“Listen to you,” Brandy said from the couch where she was dabbing Polysporin on the cut over her eye that was taking so long to heal. “Cat gave back your tongue?”

“You're touching the money now,” Lollipop said. She leaned her head in close to get the best look she could. Then she sniffed. At the one first. Then the twenty. “It stinks.”

“Stop,” I told her. “Money is dirty. You don't know where it's been. Don't put your nose on it.”

Brandy grunted. “That there the funniest thing I heard all week.” She didn't sound amused.

I pointed. “That's a two.” I pointed again. “That's a zero. That's twenty.”

“I know that says twenty.” Lollipop pretended to be offended. She was obviously lying. “What's that one?”

“A one next to a zero is ten. You didn't even learn any of this from TV?”

“They have numbers on
Sesame Street
all the time,” Lollipop said. “And
Little Einsteins
.
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
. They have it on a bunch of stuff. So I know them, but I never paid attention to what's more. Only I know a hundred is a lot and a thousand is even more than that. A thousand keeps me pretty in pink.”

“Do you know letters?” I asked.

Lollipop nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “TV and Uncle Ray taught me those.”

Brandy grunted again. “I bet he did.”

“Do you know how to read?”

“Some signs.” Lollipop scrunched up her face, thinking.
“Exit.”

I waited.

“
Ladies
. Um.
Ice
.”

I waited some more.

“Maybe that's all the signs I know. But I can read two books.”

That didn't seem likely. “Which ones?”

“ ‘In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon . . .' ”

Some kind of a hiss or a gasp or the sound of a punctured lung came out of Brandy.

“ ‘. . . and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.' ”

Brandy flew off the couch as much as anybody still limping can and smacked Lollipop so hard that Lollipop fell, a perfect handprint seeping onto her cheek. She didn't cry out a sound. Not a whimper, not a squeak. She just got still, like a statue knocked over. You have to respect an eleven-year-old who gets smacked like that for no good reason and keeps quiet. That Uncle Ray trained her well.

“Brandy!” I stepped between the two of them. Brandy wasn't weak, but this. This was a whole side of her I never knew existed.

Her face was twisted up again the way it had been the other day with Daddy, only now it was beat up from him, fat lip and bruised eyes.

“What was that?” Brandy asked Lollipop. Her cut seeped blood right through the shiny Polysporin. “What was that?”

Lollipop answered as plain as she could manage. She didn't move any part of herself but her mouth. “
Goodnight Moon
.”

“Get off the floor.”

“Brandy.” Those flames that were lit in my belly the day we took Lollipop rose up, flaring. Was Brandy going to turn vicious now, on top of everything with Daddy? But Lollipop was standing, calm as anything.

“Don't you ever say those words again.” Brandy smacked Lollipop's other cheek. Lollipop went down. This time tears oozed like rain dribbling down a wall.

“Daddy's going to kill you,” I told Brandy. Even saying
Daddy
made me want to slide through the floor and die, but there was nowhere to slide to and no way to die, so somehow I just kept on.

Brandy slipped around the corner to the alcove where my sleeping bag was. I heard her zipping into it.
L.A.'s going to kill you!
I wanted to shout, but the cat took back my tongue again. Anyway, probably Daddy was getting home before L.A., who was doing an outcall. So Daddy would get to Brandy first.

I hauled Lollipop up and propped her on the couch. I made sure the bills we had been studying were in my back pocket. Then I wrapped ice in a paper towel and held it to both sides of her face. She had white features and good, light-brown hair. Her skin was the color of wet sand. Mostly she seemed white, but with that color, it was confusing. She was prettier than the rest of us. Baby-faced.

“What's the other book you know?” I asked her. “Whisper.” I didn't want Brandy hearing anything else that might make her charge back out here. But it had been a long time since anybody could talk to me about any kind of book.

“ ‘Be still,' ” Lollipop whispered. “It's monsters. There's more, but I can't remember it right now.”

*  *  *

I had never been in the front seat of the Escalade. The streets looked different with a view through a windshield instead of just a side window. I liked feeling so high up. I thought maybe if Daddy drove fast—maybe fifty miles an hour—I could open the door and throw myself out and die. But the traffic was thick and slow, and if I didn't die and just got hurt, Daddy would be furious. And I didn't really want to die. I wasn't ready. I still needed to touch an elephant one day.