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Outside her classroom, they stopped. David gave her another kiss, then headed to his own class. He hadnt gone more than a few feet when he stopped, turned around.
"Hey, I forgot to ask. What color tux should I get for homecoming?"
She felt the blood drain from her face. Homecoming. The dance was ten days away.
Jeez. Shed organized all of the decorations and set up the DJ and the lights.
How could she have forgotten the most important thing: a dress?
"Lauren?"
"Uh. Black," she answered, trying to smile. "Black is always safe. "
"You got it," he said with an easy smile.
Things were always easy for David. He didnt have to wonder how to finance a new dress--forget about shoes and a wrap.
All through her trigonometry class she was distracted. As soon as class was over, she bolted to a quiet corner in the library and burrowed through her wallet and backpack, looking for money.
$6. 12. That was all she had to her name right now.
A frown settled into place on her forehead and stayed there for the rest of the day.
After school, she skipped her decorating meeting and raced home.
The bus let her off at the corner of Apple Way and Cascade Street. It was raining hard. No longer a silvery mist, this was an onslaught that turned the world cold and gray. Raindrops hit the pavement in such rapid succession it looked as if the streets were boiling. Her canvas hood was ineffective at best. Water dripped down the sides of her face and burrowed cold and sticky against her collar. Her backpack, stuffed full of books and notebooks and handouts, seemed to weigh a ton. On top of all that, her vinyl shoes had broken a heel three blocks ago, so now she was limping down the hill toward home.
At the corner she waved at Bubba, who waved back, then returned to his tattooing. The neon sign flickered tiredly above his head. The smaller sign, posted in the window--I Tattooed Your Parents--was streaked with rain. She limped forward, past the now closed Hair Apparent where her mother allegedly worked, past the mini-mart run by the Chu family and the Teriyaki Takeout that the Ramirez family owned and operated.
Outside her apartment building, she stopped, loath suddenly to go inside. She closed her eyes and imagined the home she would someday have. Buttery yellow walls, down-filled sofas, huge picture windows, a wraparound porch overgrown with flowers.
She tried to latch on to the familiar dream, but it floated past her, as insubstantial as smoke.
She forcibly changed her mind-set. Wishing and hoping had never put food on the table or brought Mom home one minute early. It certainly didnt get a girl a homecoming gown.
She walked down the cracked concrete path, past the box of garden tools that Mrs. Mauk had set outside last week in a feeble attempt to encourage tenant pride. Soon they would begin to rust. Those tools would be ruined long before someone bothered to cut back the leggy roses and runaway blackberry bushes that covered the back half of the lot.
The dark hallway greeted her.
She went upstairs and found the door to their apartment standing open.
"Mom!" she called out, pushing through the unlatched door. There was a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the coffee table. The mound of used butts was huge. Here and there, smoked-down cigarettes lay littered across the Formica table.
The apartment was empty. Mom had probably come home from work about five (if shed even made it to work in the first place), then changed her look from white-trash beautician to biker slut and run off to her favorite bar stool.
Lauren hurried down the hallway and into her bedroom, praying all the way there. Please please please.
It was empty beneath her pillow.
Mom had found the money.
EIGHT
LAUREN MEANT TO MOVE. SHE MEANT TO GET UP, put on fresh makeup, and borrow Suzi Mauks suit again, but somehow she sat there, on the floor, staring at the stack of cigarette butts in the ashtray on the coffee table. How much of her twenty dollars had literally gone up in smoke?
She wished she could cry the way she once would have. The tears, she now knew, meant hope. When your eyes dried up, there was none.
The door swung open, cracked against the wall. The whole apartment shuddered at the force of it. A beer bottle rolled off the sofa cushion and thumped to the shag carpet.
