Maria’s face colored darkly and she scowled up at me. After a long, pointed silence, she said:
“Fig is a stupid name.”
I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress. I didn’t believe even half of it. I remembered 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 in it. I live on the train, and in Denny’s, and in the Citrus Heights Public Library, and that’s all.
Spring came, dry and full of olive pollen. No one came looking for me. I kept singing, and reading (Les Fleurs du Mal in May, and my Keats for the millionth time). Any time I managed to eat meat I just went wolf-blind with starving for it. I had become completely nocturnal, sleeping through the whole route from Starfire Station out to the suburbs and back again, my green backpack nicely padded with no-fare fines. Light rail. Rails of light. That’s me, speeding along towards Starfire on a rail of light. I rode longer and longer into the day, chasing the sun, and my roots got longer and I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere. I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow, bruised eyes, clothes worn into oblivion—and on the inside you just go hard and impenetrable, like skin, like metal. I stopped talking when I didn’t need to—that’s for social animals, and boy, I just wasn’t one anymore. I was something else, not a girl, not a wolf, something blank-eyed, tired, running after meat, running after trains.
One time, just before it happened, the ticket-taker shook me awake.
“Kid,” he said. “Come on. Wake up. You gotta go somewhere else. I see you here every day. You can’t stay. You gotta go somewhere else.”
He had blue eyes. With the 7 am sunlight shining slantwise through them, they looked silvery, like crystals.
“I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, and stretched. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about how totally amazing breakfast was, I mean, as an invention. Bacon and bread. I only thought about food abstractly anymore. Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after. I frowned at the fine-dispensing man. I didn’t hate the guy—adults just lived in this other world, this forbidden world, and in that world I only looked like a problem. Not his fault. Not mine. You can’t see one world from where you’re standing in the other, that’s all.
But he didn’t shove me off at the next station. Nobody else was in the car, and the sun gleamed on everything, glittering on the chrome like little supernovas. I settled back into my seat, hunching down so anyone who did come in would know to leave me alone. A greyish lump of girl got on, hauling a stiff rider of morning wind. She dropped into a heap in a seat on the far side of the car and I was pretty sure she didn’t have a ticket either. Her clothes were thrift-mish-mash, green skirt, dingy tank top under a ragged coat with a furry, matted hood. As the train pulled up to speed, her head dipped back and she started to snore. The hood slid off.
It was Maria.
I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized her. But I have a memory for faces. Everyone, all the time. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you forever. And it was Maria, but she was messed up, a hundred years older. Her cheekbones were cutting shards, one eye swollen up like she’d been hit. Her skin was half-sunburned, half-clammy, and she had hacked all her hair off, shaved her head. It had grown back a fuzzy, uneven half inch, a thin black cloud. She had sores on her arms, her lips cracked and bled.
“Hey,” I whispered. She stirred sleepily. I felt awake all of the sudden, sharp. “Maria?”
I went to the girl and slid into the plastic seat beside her. Her eyes slitted up at me.
“Lemmelone, I gotta ticket,” she mumbled.
“Maria, it’s me. Fig. Diogenes, remember?”
Her eyes rolled, unfocused. I cold see the bones in her sternum, like a bone ladder. “Fig’s a stupid name,” she slurred.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
I didn’t ask her what happened to her, why she didn’t just go home if she was so busted. It’s not polite. Her breathing got shallow and she fell asleep again. Maria smelled—kind of sweet, and kind of rotten, and kind of sour. She slumped against me and started coughing, spattering my arm with gooey strands streaked with pink. Not coughing blood like some movie girl with one big number left in her, but just about as bad.
“Hey, hey,” I tried to push her upright. “Wake up, Maria. Come on. Don’t put this on me. I can’t take it. Wake up.”
But she didn’t. Her heart was racing, but her skin was cold. She just fell into my arms like a baby.Oh god, oh god, have a seizure, whatever, just don’t die on me here, this is a safe place, bad things don’t happen on the train. What did you take, what did you do, what was so bad you couldn’t dream about magic anymore? “Maria, sweetie,” I said, and held her. I kissed her forehead. “Baby girl, just open your eyes. Like in the story. Just open your eyes and wake up.” She moaned a little, and put out her hand to find my face. Housing developments with red roofs whispered by outside the windows—she coughed again, greenish, and specks of dark, ugly blood in it this time.
“Ok, Maria, ok,” I shifted to hold her better, and started rocking. Shit, just stay awake til the next stop. Just don’t die. Come on kid, you gotta go somewhere else. “Just listen to me. Remember that place you wanted to go? Think about that place, think about the elves and the magic and you dancing with the fairies. You can’t go there like this, you gotta wake up. Listen, listen.”
And I sang to her. The words just came and I sang them into her ear, her shorn head, her phelgm and her sternum and her unicorns and her wizards and my voice came rough and quiet, but it came, and I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone I could, if she wasn’t a good enough soul for Diogenes I never would be, if she could die I would never get to be old. The panic in me was like a spider, a crawling, hungry thing. I rocked her, and went to that other place I go to when I sing, and the song poured out of me into her. Think about that place, that place, that place. Let’s run away. That other place. Nothing bad ever happened to you. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We’re just two girls taking the train to school. We’ll go to class and talk about Grecian urns. You can copy off my homework. We’ll have lunch in the grass. I sang and sang, and my voice got big in me, big enough to hurt, big enough to echo. Big enough for her. A voice like a hole. I pressed my forehead to hers and the world went away.
The sky shuddered from full daylight to stars and black and no moon at all with a hard lurch and a snap, like blinds zipping down.
Come on, kid. You gotta go somewhere else.