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A text notice blipped on her phone. She looked down at it. Her dad had called four times in the last two hours.
Marah shoved her phone in her back pocket and started walking.
It was a gorgeous September day in downtown Portland. Sunlight bathed this historic section of the city, made the squatty brick buildings look well kept. She tucked her chin in close. She’d learned a long time ago not to make eye contact with “normal” people when she walked. They dismissed kids like her in a sour glance. There weren’t really “normal” people anyway. Most were like her on the inside, fruit slowly going bad.
As she walked toward her apartment, the view degenerated around her. Only a few blocks in, the city became uglier, darker. Garbage collected in gutters and posters for lost kids were hammered onto wooden poles and taped in dirty windows. In the park across the street, homeless teens slept beneath trees, in faded sleeping bags, their dogs beside them. In this part of town, you couldn’t go five feet without a homeless kid begging you for money.
Not that they asked her.
“Hey, Marah,” some kid in all black said. He was sitting in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, feeding M&M’s to a scrawny Doberman.
“Hey, Adam. ” She went a few more blocks and paused, glancing left to right.
No one was watching her. She stepped up the concrete riser and went into the Light of God Mission.
The quiet was unnerving, given the number of people in the place. Marah kept her gaze down, moved through the maze of check-in, and went into the main space.
Homeless people sat together on long benches, their arms coiled protectively around the yellow plastic food trays in front of them. There were rows and rows of people seated at Formica tables, dressed in layers, even on this nice day. Knit caps, most sporting holes, covered dirty hair.
There were more young people in here than usual. Must be the economy. Marah felt sorry for them. At twenty, she already knew about carrying everything you owned into a gas station bathroom because, even as little as it was, it was all you had.
She got into the slow-moving line, listening idly to the shuffle of feet around her.
The breakfast they served her was a watery oatmeal, with a piece of dry toast. As tasteless as it was, it filled her up and she was grateful for it. Her roommates hated it when she came here. Paxton called it takin’ from The Man—but she was hungry. Sometimes you had to choose between food and rent; especially lately. She took her empty bowl and spoon to the window, where she set it in the gray rubber bin that was already overflowing with dirty bowls and spoons—no knives—and cups.
She hurried out of the mission and turned onto the street. Climbing the hill slowly, she went to the sagging old brick building with the cracked windows and lopsided stoop. Dirty sheets hung as drapes in several of the windows.
Home.
Marah picked her way around an overflowing garbage can and past a motley-looking cat. Inside, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. The bulb in the hallway’s light fixture had gone out two months ago and no one had the money to replace it. The so-called super couldn’t care less.
She climbed four flights of stairs. On the front door of the apartment, half of an eviction notice hung from a rusty nail. She ripped the rest of it away and tossed it to the floor, and then opened the door. The small studio apartment, with its sloping, water-damaged floors and putty-colored walls, was thick with smoke and smelled of marijuana and clove cigarettes. Her roommates sat in mismatched chairs and on the floor, most of them sprawled comfortably. Leif was strumming his guitar in a half-assed, high kind of way, and dreadlocked Sabrina was smoking dope from a bong. The boy who called himself Mouse was asleep on a mound of sleeping bags. Paxton sat in the La-Z-Boy chair she’d rescued from the trash near her work.
As usual, he was dressed all in black—skinny jeans, unlaced antique-looking boots, and a ripped Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. The pallor of his skin was emphasized by shoulder-length blue-streaked black hair and whiskey-colored eyes.
She stepped over clothes and pizza boxes and Leif’s old shoes. Paxton looked up at her, gave her a stoned smile. He showed her a piece of paper with scribbles written across it. She could tell by the handwriting how high he was.
“My latest,” he said.
She read the poem aloud, in a voice too quiet for anyone else to hear. “It is us … we two … alone in the dark, waiting, knowing … love is our salvation and our demise … no one sees us save each other. ”
“Get it?” he said, smiling languidly. “It’s a double meaning. ”
His romanticism spoke to her damaged soul. She took the piece of paper from him, studying the words as she had once studied Shakespeare in high school lit class, a lifetime ago. As he reached up, she saw the beautiful white scars on his wrist. He was the only person she’d ever met who understood her pain; he’d shown her how to transform it, to cherish it, to become one with it. Each of the people in this room knew about the fine lines a knife could leave behind.
On the floor, Sabrina lolled sideways, holding out the still-smoking bong. “Hey, Mar. You want a hit?”
“Yeah, sure. ” She needed to draw the sweet smoke into her lungs and let it do its magic, but before she could cross the room, her cell phone bleated.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the small purple Motorola Razr she’d had for years.
“My dad’s calling,” she said. “Again. ”
“It drives him crazy that you’re your own person. Of course he’s going to check up on you,” Leif said. “It’s why he keeps payin’ your phone bill. ”
Paxton stared up at her. “Hey, Sabrina, pass me the bong. The princess is getting a call. ”
Marah immediately felt ashamed of the way she’d grown up, the luxuries that she’d been given. Pax was right; she had been like a princess until the queen’s death. Then the whole fairy tale had collapsed. The bleating stopped. Immediately a text came in. It read: Emergency. Call me. She frowned. She hadn’t spoken to her father in, what? A year?
