Pieces of Me (14 page)

“Why would somebody throw away peanut butter if there was nothing wrong with it?” I asked.

“Look at the label.”

I took the jar, turning it so I could see the front. “It's upside down.”

“Uh-huh.”

I tipped the bottle over. It wasn't dirty, and the plastic seal was still around the lid. “That's stupid,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

I glanced at her bags again. They were filled with food.

“Look, it's all good stuff,” she said. “I'll show you.” She bent over the bags and started taking things out: lettuce, packaged and washed; sealed bags of tiny carrots; little round tomatoes; a carton of soy milk; the jars of peanut butter; a bottle of orange juice; four wrapped sandwiches.

I thought about what Dylan and I had had for lunch—cheese and crackers, a banana, juice boxes. I looked up at Lucy. “Stores just throw this stuff away?”

“Pretty much. Vegetables, fruit and whatever packaged stuff that's gotten to the expiration date. End of the day, they toss it out.”

“So is it okay to eat?”

Lucy shrugged. “All I can tell you is that I've been eating like this for over a year and I haven't been sick once. The expiration date doesn't mean that's the day when the food suddenly goes bad.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. It just means it'll taste best before that day.”

I glanced behind me. There was no sound from the room behind me. Dylan was still sleeping. “How do you know where to go?” I asked.

Lucy unzipped her jacket and leaned against the stair post. “There's a bunch of us who go out together—maybe a dozen people if everyone shows up. Over time we've figured out the best places and the best times. You should come with us sometime.”

“Could I?”

“Sure. We usually go Monday and sometimes Thursday. You can come with me next Monday night if you want and you don't mind walking.”

“I don't mind walking,” I said. “What time?”

“Meet me here at quarter to nine,” Lucy said. She picked up her bags. “Don't worry about bags. I have lots.” She started down the hall. “See you Monday,” she said over her shoulder.

“Monday,” I said. I took the jar of peanut butter and went back into the room. Q said he had a plan. Well, now, so did I.

I was asleep when Q came in. When I woke up, he was sprawled on his air mattress, asleep and half dressed. He smelled like beer and sweat.

I gave Dylan apple slices with peanut butter. The third time I had to climb over Q's legs, I “accidently” tripped over them, which woke him up. He sat up, rubbing his face with a hand.

“You smell bad,” Dylan said.

Q smiled at him. “Yeah, I'm sorry about that.” He reached for his jacket, holding it upside down. Change came raining out of the pockets, bouncing on the floor and the air mattress.

“Wow!” Dylan shouted. There were dozens and dozens of quarters all over the room. He started picking them up.

“What's this?” I said to Q.

“I won,” he said, getting to his feet and heading for the bathroom. “Do whatever you want with it.”

Dylan and I gathered the money. I showed him how to make piles of four so I could count it all. There was thirty-five dollars and seventy-five cents.

“Maddie, are we rich?” he asked.

“Well, we are today,” I said, giving him a hug. I was already thinking about where we could go for lunch.

Q played poker again on Saturday. This time there was more than forty dollars in quarters. He smelled pretty much the same as he had after the first game.

Monday night, I was waiting for Lucy at the top of the stairs. When I'd told Q what I was going to do, he'd made a face. “Oh, c'mon, Maddie. It's not so bad we have to eat food from the garbage.”

“It's not garbage,” I said. “Lucy had good stuff—carrots, milk, tomatoes.”

“That she got out of someone's garbage.”

“No. That someone carried out of the store and then she picked up. If I bought the same stuff and came out of the store and gave you the bag, you'd eat it. So what's the difference?”

He glanced toward the bathtub, where we could hear Dylan splashing. “I won more than forty dollars on Saturday. If you want milk and carrots, you can buy them.”

I was starting to get pissed. I could feel a knot tightening in my chest. “What I want to do is go with Lucy and see what she does,” I said. I grabbed my jacket, stuck my head around the open bathroom door and told Dylan I was going out to try to get him more peanut butter. He'd been eating it with everything. “I'm going,” I said.

“You're coming back, right?” he said, his face serious. He was getting less clingy as the days went by.

“You bet,” I said. “I'll bring you and Fred a treat.”

That made him smile.

“See you,” I said to Q and went out to wait by the stairs.

When Lucy came down the hall, she was carrying a bunch of bags. She gave me a couple of cloth bags and three plastic ones. “You got gloves?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “But it's not that cold.”

She smiled. “No. I meant plastic gloves.”

“I thought you said you didn't actually go through the garbage.”

“I don't,” she said. “But sometimes things like milk cartons or yogurt containers break.” She pulled a pair of thin plastic gloves out of her pocket. “Here.”

I took the gloves and shoved them in my own jacket pocket. I thought about what Q had said, that things weren't so bad that we had to eat stuff out of the garbage.

Lucy walked fast. We headed across town in the general direction of the university. About four blocks over, as we waited to cross the street, she pointed ahead to a group of people—maybe five or six of them—standing on the next corner. “That's everyone else,” she said.

“They won't be mad that you brought me?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would they be?” she said. “There's always way more food than we can all use.”

“Hey, guys, this is Maddie,” she said as we got to the others. Everyone smiled and said, “Hi.” They all looked like university students except for one man in dark-rimmed glasses. His hair was dyed yellow, and he had an accent I couldn't figure out.

We walked maybe another three blocks and then the yellow-haired guy said, “Perfect timing.”

At the corner, a guy in jeans and a long apron was carrying plastic garbage bags to the edge of the sidewalk. Everybody stopped. The same guy carried out three more bags. As soon as he'd gone back inside, we were moving again.

Lucy pulled on her gloves, lifted a bag away from the pile and opened it. She shook her head. “This one is garbage.” She closed the bag and handed it to the guy behind her who set in on the sidewalk away from the other bags.

Yellow-hair had a second bag open. “Got it,” he said. He pulled out two bags of sealed packages of salad stuff and handed them to me. “Just lay them out on the sidewalk.”

I made a row of bags along the curb. There were eight all together. On the front of the bags it said,
Washed and
ready to serve
. After that there were bags of little carrots and chopped up peppers.

“I've got yogurt,” Lucy said. She had another garbage bag open and was handing big plastic tubs to a girl with blue hair.

“I've got sandwiches,” someone else called.

Once all the food was spread on the sidewalk, Yellow-hair and a guy with a messy beard carefully set the remaining garbage bags in a pile. Lucy passed around a bottle of hand sanitizer. I took off my plastic gloves and cleaned my hands.

Everyone pretty much just took what they wanted—or maybe it was needed—and it all seemed to work out fair. I got a bag of lettuce, one of carrots and a big tub of strawberry yogurt. Someone had found apples. They looked a little bruised, but I took two anyway. Lucy handed me a jar of peanut butter.

Yellow-hair looked at his watch. “We'd better get going,” he said.

We started up the sidewalk, and the girl with blue hair ended up walking beside me. “Hey,” she said. “I'm Alicia.”

“I'm Maddie,” I said.

“Kind of surprising how much gets thrown out, isn't it?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you do this all the time?”

She nodded. “I couldn't afford to get my degree, otherwise.” She smiled and kind of shrugged. “Well, I couldn't eat and get it.”

“Do you get all your food this way?” I asked.

“Pretty much. And my clothes and stuff.”

“Clothes?”

Alicia nodded and brushed a clump of blue hair back from her face. “Clothes, a monitor for my computer, dishes. Lucy found an iPod last week.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. You should come with us next week. It's end of term, and Friday is garbage day. There'll be good stuff on Thursday night.”

At the front, Lucy and Yellow-hair had stopped walking. After a minute they saw whatever they were looking for. It was another pile of garbage bags. We were outside a small bakery. I ended up with a bag of different rolls and four cookies. People were saying goodnight and heading off in different directions.

“Hey, Lucy, bring Maddie on Thursday night,” Alicia said. She waved at me and headed up the hill with Yellow-hair in the direction of the university.

“You wanna come?” Lucy asked.

“Umm, yeah, I guess,” I said.

She shifted her bag from one hand to the other. “You won't believe the stuff that gets thrown away at the end of term.” She shook her head in disgust. “Most of them are just too damn lazy to pack stuff or even take it to the Salvation Army to donate it. It's easier to stick it out for the garbage truck.”

“Thanks for bringing me,” I said.

“You can come every week if you want,” she said.

I was pretty sure I wanted.

“We have to get ice,” Lucy said.

“For what?” I said.

“You don't have a cooler, do you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“We'll find one on Thursday,” she said. “I have three. I'll lend you one. Stuff like the yogurt and salad stuff lasts better if it's cold.”

We got ice at the grocery store, forty-nine cents for a big bag because they wanted to get rid of it. “They clean the machine on Monday night,” Lucy explained.

When we got back to the building, she got me the cooler, a red-and-white thing like people took on a picnic, and showed me how to pack it with ice and my yogurt and lettuce. “Eat this stuff first,” she said. “Everything else will last longer.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” she said. “Six thirty on Thursday.”

I nodded, and she headed down the hallway.

I slipped into the room. Q and Dylan were asleep. I put the peanut butter in the window. Everything else was okay. I got cleaned up, brushed my teeth and put on the T-shirt and sweatpants I slept in. Dylan was making those little kid snoring noises he made when he slept. If I was lucky, I had a couple of hours before he woke up from a nightmare. He was going to be real happy about the peanut butter and the cookie.

I rolled up in my blankets, suddenly so, so tired.

“Find anything good in the garbage?” Q asked quietly in the darkness. He rolled toward me.

My good mood was gone like that. “It wasn't garbage.” Okay, so technically it was garbage we were opening, but the food had been put in bags in the store and then carried out, and we got it. If the food had been in plastic grocery bags Q wouldn't be asking me such a stupid question.

“Maddie, I meant what I said before.” He reached out and touched my arm. “You don't need to do this. I can work more time if I have to, and I'm pretty damn good at poker.”

I didn't know how to make him understand that I needed to do this. Ever since Alicia had told me that scavenging was how she could go to university I couldn't stop thinking about it. All Q talked about was the house in the country we'd have someday. I didn't want to live in the country. I didn't want to milk cows and teach Dylan about growing carrots. I wanted to learn things and someday be a doctor. And I wanted Dylan to go to school.

“If you don't want to eat the stuff I got, you don't have to,” I said. “There's nothing wrong with it, and you might as well know I'm going back out again.” I rolled over. He didn't say anything else, and neither did I.

twelve

“Can you be here by six thirty for sure?” I said to Q as he got dressed Thursday morning.

“Why?” he said.

“Because I want to go out with Lucy. It's the end of term or something at the university, and she says people throw out a lot of good stuff.”

“Yeah, well, forget it,” Q said. “I'm playing poker.”

“So play another night.”

He pulled his T-shirt over his head. “I can't. This is a lot higher stakes that the quarter games I've been playing in. They don't let new guys in very often.”

“I can't take Dylan with me,” I said.

He reached for his sweatshirt, checked to make sure Dylan was still brushing his teeth and pulled me against him. “I keep telling you, you don't have to go picking through garbage. I mean it.” He kissed the top of my head. “See you tonight.” He called goodbye to Dylan and was gone.

I still had half a bread roll sitting on the window ledge. I pounded the roll into crumbs with my fist, pretending it was Q's head. Then I ate all the little bits. I probably shouldn't have felt better, but I did.

Just before six thirty, I told Dylan to go pee and wash his hands. “Why?” he asked.

“Because we're going on a treasure hunt.”

He zipped into the bathroom, did his stuff and came hopping out on one foot. “Can Fred come?” he asked. “Fred likes treasure hunts.”

What the heck, I figured. “Sure,” I said. “Stick him in my backpack.”

Lucy was just coming down the hall when we came out. “Is it okay if I bring him?” I asked. I showed her my makeshift wagon. “I can pull him, and if it's not okay, well then… that's okay.” Crap! I sounded lame.