Welcome to Bordertown (18 page)

I asked the drama teacher: “What can I be without trying out?”

She said: “You can be a fairy.”

So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.

Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this
space
, this monstrous
thing
, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room:
Why did you do it?

Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up in the margins. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes the girl to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you because she’s not really your mother—that’s how the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.

So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway
into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.

My remaining belongings sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one
Lord of the Rings;
the
Complete Keats;
a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton; a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin; two shirts, also black; $10.16; and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on planet Earth.

I forgot my toothbrush.

*   *   *

So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, sleep in libraries. If questioned, pretend to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through
Les Misérables, Madame Bovary
, and
Simulacra and Simulation
before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something. And when it comes to filling your head, those dead French guys usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.

It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates:
poof.
Like dandelion seeds. I could say:
Don’t do drugs; don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away.
But the truth is, drugs are expensive, and you kind of have
to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.

At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.

See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theater kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big, benevolent yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never understood those pages, why they left them blank. Seemed like such a waste. But I filled them up with line after line. Songs. Poems. Anything.

I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. My hair is naturally kind of a blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back down to home, getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.

Around six a.m., the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey pink violation tickets
he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, through the rose-colored paper, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful. That’s all.

And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my Formica diner table—
drink of me and never sleep, never die.
At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck.

I didn’t want to do it, but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.

I could always sing.

Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. No chipmunks and doves alighted at my feet when I sang. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s, and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the nonspeaking fairy, can’t even say
hail
, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a fist coming down.

But I opened my mouth, and I turned my face up to the sunset, and I sang. I don’t even know what I sang about. I just made it up, brain to mouth to song. Seemed better than singing some love song belonging to somebody else. I don’t know anything about
music in a technical sense, and I hated the jolt of it, hearing my own voice break the air, to stand up there and sing down the streetlights like I was better than them, like it mattered, like I deserved to be heard at all. So I just kind of went somewhere else when I sang. Somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and when I came back the song was over and my feet were covered in coins. Usually. Sometimes I got a dollar or two.

That was my life. Sleep, read, sing, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Ride the train, all the way around the circuit and back to Starfire Station. I’m not even kidding—that’s what it was called, the station nearest my Denny’s and my library. I’d get on the train with the morning sun all molten and orange on a beat-up blue sign: “Starfire Station.” The rails glowed white. I thought:
Maybe something wonderful will happen here, and I could tell people about it later, but no one would believe me, because who names a train station that?

I didn’t talk to other runaways much. It was always awkward, dancing around how bad you had it in some kind of gross Olympic event. And even if I made a friend, we’re sort of a transitory race by nature. It got repetitive:

“Fig. That’s a stupid name.”

“Thank you.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Over the causeway.”

“Where’re you going?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t see the point. I had my routine.

But I heard about it.

Of course I heard about it. There used to be a place for kids like us. Some kind of magical city half full of runaways, where anything could happen. Elves lived there. Wizards. Impossible
stuff: unicorns and rock singers with hearts of gold. A girl told me about it at this shelter once—and let me tell you, shelters are fucking
mouse traps
. A warm bed and a meal and a cage overhead. All they want is to send you back to your parents on the quick, so they rate your crisis level and if you’re below their threshold they up and call the cops on you. I went to one called Diogenes. I liked the name. I knew it from books—I’d moved on to philosophy by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul. Never found one, but that’s not the part that matters. It’s the looking, not the finding.

They called my stepmother. I didn’t have bruises anymore. Not bad enough. But she didn’t come to get me. No one ever came for me. She thanked them and hung up the phone, and the next morning they sent me on my way. I guess I wasn’t their one good soul.

But the night before my expulsion from particleboard paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the one a.m. shadows.

“It’s like this place between us and the place where fairies come from,” she said dreamily, looking up at me from her thin bottom bunk. She had black curly hair all over the place, like wild thorny raspberry vines. Her eyes were kind of hollow, but they just looked delicate and wounded in that way that makes everyone want to rent a white horse just to save you. She wound one finger in her hair while she went on about this obviously ridiculous thing.

“And there’s, like, rock bands with elves in them and no one gives you any shit just for
being
, and there’s
real magic.
Okay, supposedly it’s kind of broken and doesn’t work right, but still, if it’s not working right, that still means it
works
, right?” She sighed like a little kid, even though I knew she was sixteen—I’d seen her file while I stood in the office and they called the candy house and
took the witch’s advice on child welfare. Maria emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary. How did this kid last five minutes out of a pink bedroom? Whatever happened to her must have been really bad—I don’t even know what kind of bad—to make some girl still drawing unicorns in her spiral notebooks take off. She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information. “But it disappeared or something, years ago. No one’s been there in ages. Sometimes I think the city ran away, just like me. Something happened to it and it couldn’t bear anything anymore, and so one night it just took off without leaving a note. But I’ll get there, somehow. I will. And I’ll
dance
, you’ll see. I’ll dance with the fairies.”

And for a second I could see it like she saw it, all the colors, and Maria dancing in the town square with bells in her hair. It struck me just then: she was really beautiful. Actually beautiful, not like an actress, but like the characters actresses play. Like Titania. I just wanted to keep looking at her all night. I guess that’s what you look like when you do it right, when you’re sixteen and on the road, and you don’t write poems, but poems get written about you. I was already writing one in my head. I figured I could fit it in the margins of J. R. R.’s appendices.

One of the other kids hissed at her from the second bunk in our four-loser room. “They don’t like to be called that. Fairies.”

“What do you know about it, Carmen? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedroom gone from her voice. And all the colors, too. She had me for a second, but I know better. In the end, I always know better than to believe anything.

“More than you,” snarled the older girl. “Hey, chica,” she said to me, chucking her hair back. “You know how in school they said we’d never get social security, because by the time we get old, our parents will have used it all up?”

“Sure,” I said. Carmen was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.

“Well, it’s like that.” She sighed, and I could almost see her frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”

“You don’t really believe this stuff, do you? I mean, it sounds great, but it doesn’t pay for coffee, you know?”

Maria scowled up at me. It hurt, that scowl. After a long, pointed silence, she said:

“Fig is a stupid name.”

I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress.

“I wish I could be like you,” I whispered, but not soft enough that the whole room couldn’t hear. “I wish I could believe, just like I wish I could believe the church kids when they say they can save me. But no power on this earth, girl. No power on this earth.”

No one said anything. They ignored me. I had broken the spell they’d worked so hard to cast. I’d ruined it. Only the quiet of all of them breathing and angry was left.

I didn’t believe even half of it. Remember when those homeless kids in Florida started talking crazy about the Blue Lady and how she’d come and save them? I thought it was like that. Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough. A place where everything you ever read about is real.

And of course it went away. Of course it did. I mean, that’s like the job of magical places, to vanish. Atlantis. Avalon. Middle Earth.

And even if it was real for someone, sometime, it wouldn’t be real for me. I ran away when I was fifteen. When Bordertown had already run away itself. I did it all wrong. Maybe other people could go there, but not me. That kind of shit is for Oberon and
Titania. Not Fig, shuffling in the background with paper leaves glued to her T-shirt. I don’t live in a world with places like that. I live on the train, and in Denny’s, and in the Citrus Heights Public Library, and that’s all.