See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theatre kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big 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 got those pages, why they left them blank. 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. It’s naturally kind of blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back home,getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.
Around 6 am, 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 violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, 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. 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 non-speaking fairy, can’t even say hail!, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a blow coming down.
And 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 beaten-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 mousetraps. 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 Greeks by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul.
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 particle-board paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the 1 am 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. “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. Ok, 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 figured her for my age, and 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.”
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.”
“What do you know about it, Esteban? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedrooms gone from her voice.
“More than you,” snarled the boy. “Hey, chica. 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. Esteban was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.
“Well, it’s like that,” he sighed, and I could almost see him frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”
“You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”