Pieces of Me (3 page)

The light coming through the side window of the car woke me up. I sat up, letting the blankets fall, and stretched.

“Maddie, are you awake?” Q said quietly.

“Yes.”

He pushed the blanket aside and poked his head around. “How did you sleep?”

“Good,” I said. Considering I'd been sleeping in the front seat of a car, I had. I was warm, and it had been quiet. Nothing with more than two legs had crawled over me in the night—no bugs, no rats.

“Mall washrooms open at seven,” Q said. “Bring your stuff, it's almost that now.”

We used the bathrooms at the far end of the mall. There were maybe a couple of dozen people walking a circuit in the building. Some kind of exercise group, I guessed.

Q was waiting for me in front of a store that sold video games. “Wanna split a cup of coffee and have some breakfast?” he asked. He pointed to a set of double doors at the end of the mall. “If we go out those doors, there's a Tim's just around the corner.”

I didn't have anywhere else to go. “Okay,” I said. “But I have some change. I'm buying.”

He tipped his head to the side and grinned at me as we started walking down to the doors.

“Yeah, I know, splitting a cup of coffee with you doesn't mean you're going to sleep with me,” I said, keeping my face serious.

“You'd have to at least buy me a donut,” he said with an equally straight face.

I bumped him with my backpack, and he laughed.

We got a large Double-Double and walked back to the car with it, passing the paper cup back and forth the way we'd shared the cake the night before. We ate the cheese biscuits from both of our bags, and I split a banana I had in my backpack.

After breakfast, I shook out my blanket and then rolled it up and stuffed it back in my pack.

“So what are you going to do?” Q asked.

I pulled an elastic off my arm and put my hair into a ponytail again. “I don't know,” I said. “Probably go to the library for a while and then go over to Pax and see if I can have a shower.” I didn't mention that I'd kind of gotten to be friends with Hannah, who ran the Pax shelter, and that she'd let me in to get cleaned up even before people started lining up for the hygiene bays. I tried not to take advantage of Hannah. And I didn't stay at Pax House very much. Hannah was always gently trying to persuade me to go home. Or at least call home. She couldn't conceive of a mother who cared more about herself than her kid.

“Why don't you stay here again tonight?” Q said as he brushed biscuit crumbs off the front of the heavy blue sweater he had changed into.

“I can't.”

“Why? Is the atmosphere at Chez Abandoned Building better than this?”

“Because…because…” I didn't know what to say. Because I felt like I was using him? Because a part of me was still waiting for there to be a catch?

He slid his fingers along the top curve of the steering wheel. “I'm not trying to pressure you, Maddie.” His eyes shifted sideways. “Okay, I am. It's just that I liked having someone to eat with, and I liked knowing I wasn't alone last night. And I knew I wasn't going to wake up in the middle of the night with a knife at my throat.”

He took a deep breath and let it out. “Why don't we team up, just for a while, until we each get some money and we can go on with our plans?”

“You don't even know me,” I said, fiddling with the zipper on the backpack.

“I know all I need to know,” Q said. “What have I got to lose?”

“What have you got to gain?”

“Company.”

“Uh-uh.” I gave my head a quick shake. “I have to do more than that. I mean, if I did decide to, you know, hang around.”

“Laundry,” Q said.

“Laundry?”

“Yeah.” He pulled the sleeve of his shirt down below the cuff of the blue sweater. The shirt was pink.

“Pretty,” I said. I wasn't sure what he was getting at.

“It's not supposed to be pretty, Maddie,” he said, stuffing the material back up his arm again. “It's supposed to be white.”

I laughed.

“See? My laundry ability is laughable. You help with my wash, and that'll more than make up for sleeping in that seat and some lasagna that's going to go into the garbage otherwise. Please.” He pressed both hands together and looked at me over the top of his fingers. “Pink is not my color.”

I probably should have said no. But I didn't. “Okay,” I said. “For a while. To see how it works.”

Q dropped his hands. “Good,” he said. “I'm going to have to move the car today because the
RV
people are moving on. But I think I have a couple of days' work lined up, cleaning out an old warehouse, and we might be able to park there for two or three nights. Can you meet me back here about six?”

It meant walking down the hill and back up again, but that wasn't really a big deal. “Six,” I said. “I'll be over there by the doors, under the big A.”

Q handed me the paper bag that still had two raisin biscuits in it. “Lunch,” he said.

I stuffed it in the top of my backpack and looked around to make sure I had everything. “Okay, so I'll see you later,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

“I'll be here, Maddie,” he said.

I nodded and got out of the car. All the way down the hill, I kept asking myself what the heck I had gotten myself into. I'd spent the night with some guy I'd only known a few hours, and now I was going to hook my life to him? As I walked in the cool morning air, it didn't make quite as much sense as it had in the All-mart parking lot.

I told myself that just because I'd said I'd be there at six didn't mean I had to be. Then it hit me that it didn't mean Q had to be either.

three

I had an hour before the library opened, so I decided to walk over to Pax House and see if Hannah was there. She was just coming along the sidewalk as I turned the corner. She saw me and waited.

“Hi, Maddie. How are you?” she asked. She tried not to be too obvious as she checked me out, but I knew she was looking to see if I was clean and if I was getting skinnier. I stuffed both hands in my pockets. Hannah was a hugger, and I really wasn't. “I'm okay,” I said.

“Do you have time for a visit?” she asked, shifting a canvas shopping bag from one hand to the other.

“Umm, yeah,” I said. I reached for the shopping bag. “Let me take that.”

Hannah smiled. “Thanks. It's heavy.” I peeked in the top of the bag. “Potatoes,” she said.

We walked around to the side door, which was for staff only. Hannah used her key to let us in. We put the potatoes in the kitchen, and then I followed Hannah down the hallway to her office. She put away her briefcase and then studied my face more closely. “Have you had breakfast?”

I nodded.

“How about some hot chocolate?” she asked.

“Sounds good,” I said. I never turned down chocolate.

“I'll be right back.”

She came back with a tall mug of cocoa for me with a marshmallow floating on top, and coffee for her. She pushed her glasses up her nose and leaned against the desk instead of going to sit in her desk chair, and I knew what that meant: the talk.

“I haven't seen you for a while. You haven't been coming here to sleep.”

“I was over at St. Paul's,” I said, bending my head over my cup to take a drink.

“Doesn't seem like your kind of place.”

Hannah wasn't stupid, and she'd gotten to know me when I'd been staying at Pax and helping out wherever I could.

“It's okay,” I said, licking marshmallow off the corner of my mouth.

Hannah took a long sip of her coffee. Something was going on behind the steadiness of her expression. “If you came back here, you might be able to go back to school,” she said, casually.

There it was. I was the mouse, and school was a big piece of cheese, because Hannah knew how much I missed school. I hadn't made the mistake of letting anyone else know so much about me. “How?” I asked. “I don't have any records. I don't have a parent.”

Hannah shrugged. “Those kinds of things can be handled,” she said. “You could stay here for a while before you make the transition to somewhere else.”

Somewhere else
was back with my mom. Part of me kind of admired how Hannah wouldn't let go of the idea of Mom and me having a happy family reunion. You'd think, working in Pax House, she would have lost that fantasy about loving moms and happily ever after. But she hadn't. But part of me also felt pissed off because I just couldn't make Hannah let go of the idea of that happy ending for Mom and me. For one thing, I couldn't see how Evan was going to fit into that picture, assuming he was still around.

I took another drink of hot chocolate to buy some time. I wasn't going home. I wasn't calling my mom. If that meant I couldn't go to school right now, then that's just how it had to be. And I didn't want to tell that to Hannah for the four hundred and seventeenth time. “I'll think about it,” I said, and I gave her a small fake smile over the top of my cup.

She smiled back, and I could tell that she thought she'd won some sort of victory. We talked about stuff that didn't matter after that. Pax House was going to be painted; a bunch of do-gooders from some community group were coming to do it over a weekend next month. The fact that it meant people would have nowhere to sleep for at least one night, probably two, hadn't seemed to occur to them. Or that the building had just been painted about six months ago. Painting the shelter was a way to say you were helping the homeless without actually going anywhere near the homeless. No smell of bodies that hadn't been washed in a month. No puke. No piss. No crazy people who talked to their invisible friends. Just cans of white paint that covered up all the things no one wanted to look at.

I didn't say any of that to Hannah. She would have told me I was too young to be so cynical.

Finally I stood up. “I should get going,” I said. My face was starting to hurt from all the fake smiling and swallowing things I knew I shouldn't say.

“Do you want to use one of the hygiene bays before you go?” Hannah asked.

That was the whole reason I'd come there. I hated using the clean stations when there were a lot of people around. They didn't open until noon, but Hannah had let me in more than once in the morning. “Would it be okay?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “C'mon.”

I grabbed both cups so I could put them in the kitchen and followed her out. After she'd unlocked the door to the clean stations, Hannah wrapped me in a hug and I hugged her back, because even though I was never going to do what she wanted me to do, she was good to me, and I felt bad sometimes that I was never going to be who she wanted me to be.

“Think about school,” she said, nudging her glasses up her nose again. “Come back in a couple of days and we'll talk more about it.”

“Thank you, Hannah,” I said.

I could see from the expression on her face that she thought that “thank you” meant that she'd convinced me. At least my face wasn't giving away that she hadn't.

There were rules stuck up everywhere in the hygiene bay. Rules over the lockers about not taking the key with you when you left. Rules on the wall behind the washers and dryers about how much soap to use and how to clean the lint filter.

On the door to each of the clean stations was a list of rules about their use. No food inside. No drugs. No alcohol. No sex inside the stations. And at the bottom, a reminder to remember the environment and conserve water. That one always made me laugh. Who uses fewer of the world's resources than homeless people?

I opened the doors to all the clean stations and picked the one that smelled the strongest of bleach cleaner. I locked the door, stashed my things and had a fast shower and washed my hair.

The hardest thing for me was keeping clean. I hated wearing my clothes for days at a time. I always secretly smelled myself to make sure I didn't stink.

I jammed my dirty clothes into a plastic bag I kept for that in my backpack. I didn't like doing my laundry at Pax. I'd rather scrounge for money and do it at the Laundromat. It was warm there, nobody bothered me, and I liked to read all those crazy confession magazines that always seemed to be lying around, with stories like “God Needed an Angel” and “Confessions of a Credit Card Junkie
.
” My life didn't seem so bad in comparison.

I spent the rest of the day at the library. I read the newspaper, and after that I went back in the stacks and found the math book I was using to teach myself calculus. I felt a bit guilty about hiding the book. I would have borrowed it if I'd been able to have a library card, but you couldn't have one of those without an address and a phone number.

Q was standing under the big A when I came across the mall parking lot just before six. I'd argued with myself all the way up the hill about whether it was a good idea, but in the end, where the heck else did I have to go, other than back to Hannah at Pax House?

Q smiled when he caught sight of me, and I found myself smiling back. Then I gave myself a mental kick. This was only for a while. It would be bad to depend on Q too much or get used to having someone else around.

His hair was damp and combed back from his face. And something had put him in a good mood, because he was almost bouncing.

“Hey, Maddie, how was your day?” he asked as he led me across the pavement past people pushing carts toward the store.

“Okay,” I said. “How was yours? You look like you ate jumping beans for lunch.”

He laughed and ruffled his wet hair with one hand. “Actually I did have beans for lunch—with ham and brown bread.”

I'd had the leftover biscuits and an apple. I felt a pinch of jealousy.

We zigzagged through two rows of parked cars, and then I saw the white Civic parked next to a huge
suv
. Q let me in on the passenger side and went around and got in the driver's door. “I have somewhere we can put the car for the next three or four nights, maybe as long as a week. Plus there's a bathroom and a stove that works.”