“Ah,” I say.
“Yeah. How much money do you have left?”
“Honestly?”
“No, lie to me. Yes, honestly.”
I squint. “Sixteen dollars?”
She laughs. I laugh.
“No, really,” she says.
“Um,” I say, looking far to my left and then far to my right.
She shakes her head. “I thought your mom wired you money?”
“A hundred bucks,” I say.
“Can she give us more?”
I shrug. “She ordered me to come home, so, um …”
Aisha stares at me, mouth open. “And you didn’t tell me this because?”
I shrug again. “I’m an idiot.”
She sits on the blacktop of the gas station parking lot, leaning against the door of the Neon. “Carson. Dude.”
I hate when girls call me dude. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”
Three hours, a tow truck ride, and a plea on the surfingsofas.com bulletin board later, we are homeless and carless on the streets of Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, whatever that means. We need a new ignition coil, which is a thing. Apparently it’s what fires the spark plug, and hers is busted. It’ll cost $140, and they don’t have the part in stock. They won’t be able to fix it until the morning. And even then, we don’t have the money for it.
We are sitting at a bus stop along a boulevard with a lot of car traffic but hardly any people traffic. I have the canvas bag with our toiletries and my grandfather’s journal, Aisha has her satin pillow under her armpit, and I’m carrying the Porcupine of Truth, which will not be as good a pillow as Aisha’s satin one. I’m an idiot.
“Well, I guess there’s some comfort in knowing you’re totally screwed.”
“I guess,” I say.
Aisha takes out her phone and checks to see if our SOS on the surfingsofas.com board has garnered a response. Nothing. Nada.
I think about calling my mother. Nope. Not calling. It’s just me and Aisha.
We sit and wait for someone from surfingsofas.com to text or call. Then we wait some more. Then we wait some more. Soon it’s midnight, and we’ve been sitting at a bus stop for two hours.
“Maybe we can find a park,” she says. “We’ll take turns sleeping.”
Using Google Maps, she finds us a place about half a mile away. It’s a small, mostly empty park, with some grassy areas intersected by a lit path lined with benches and streetlights. The lights are so bright along the path that the pavement glimmers, unnaturally silver. We see a couple of homeless men sleeping on the benches. One wears only his underwear and a blackened sweatshirt. His legs are covered in sores.
“It’s too bright here.” I point to a hilly area to our left. “Maybe try the grass?”
Aisha shakes her head. “Too dark. Let’s do the benches.”
We find a couple of benches across from each other, right under a pair of streetlights, far away from the homeless guys. I lean back on my bench and watch Aisha curl up across from me. She tries her side for a while, which looks uncomfortable. She rolls onto her back and looks up at the sky. She laughs.
“What?” I say, laughing back.
“The car, a zoo, the car again, a park in Reno.”
“You’re naming places you’ve slept recently?”
“I’m just sensing, you know, a trajectory,” she says.
“People who use the word ‘trajectory’ generally don’t sleep in parks, do they?”
“Classist. And apparently we do,” she says. “Good night, Carson.”
“Sorry, by the way.”
“Hey, it wasn’t your car that broke down.”
“Good night.”
“Night.”
So this is what it feels like to be homeless, I think. I look up at the streetlight above my bench and wish I could see stars like in Wyoming. I think about how we all share the stars. My grandfather must have his thoughts when he looks up at the sky, and so does Laurelei, and so do I, and we can never really know what other people are thinking, even when we all see the exact same thing. Sometimes I just want to be able to know what the stars look like from another set of eyes. From Aisha’s eyes. I’d love to be inside her head for just one day. To know what it is to be truly beautiful, and also to know what it would take to make her be exactly her but in love with me.
Because still. There’s a part of me that wishes.
Before going to bed, I text my mom. As I don’t want her head to explode, I don’t mention that I’m writing her from a park bench in Reno.
I know you’re pissed. Sorry. We’re okay. I promise when we come back we will have a long, long talk
about a lot of things. I love you, Mom.
I’m sorry I’m a pain in the ass.
It’s the middle of the night, so I don’t expect a text back. I get one anyway.
Yes, we will talk. I feel a real resentment
about your behavior, and I know that we’ll
need to chat about future boundaries.
I know. Love you.
She doesn’t respond to that one. And I guess I can’t blame her. But part of me really wishes she would respond with a “Love you too.”
I put my phone away and pick up my grandfather’s journal. I decide to read the final page.
I hug the book close to me and quiver. My grandfather and I. We’re two peas in a pod. How is it that I can be so in the dark about what was going on with him, but still feel like the words came from my own pen? He felt stranded and terrified. I’m lying on a park bench in a strange city, and I feel the same way.
His life changed so fast, it seems like. Whatever it was that made him leave, it all happened quickly. We’re the same. My life has changed so much in nine days.
Would I change it back now if I could? I’m sleeping in a park. And yet, I don’t think I would. I wonder if my grandfather found something that made it all better for him too.
I try to figure out what we’re going to do in the morning. I don’t want to call my mom and ask for a bailout. I really don’t. I won’t. We got ourselves here, and it’s up to us to get us out of it.
My attention is drawn to a rustling near my feet. I look down. In the dim glow of the streetlights above us, I see it. A rat, about the size of a football. It sniffs the ground around my sneaker, its straight-as-an-arrow tail wiggling back and forth.
I yank my foot up onto the bench, stifling the scream that seems to originate in the pit of my belly. What the hell kind of rat gets so close to a person? A rabid one? Rats can be rabid, right? I begin to tremble.
All those times in my room, sitting on the radiator, fantasizing about leaving and the utter freedom of being on my own, rats never came to mind. I think of all the things that make me feel unsafe, like, right at this very moment. The guy with the sores on his legs, about fifty feet away from us. Not having shelter. Not being able to afford food. Losing all my stuff. Losing people. Being entirely alone.
The reality of Aisha’s life smashes me in the face. She was sleeping in the zoo. She was alone out there, no safety net. I knew it, but I didn’t know it.
The rat saunters across the path to Aisha’s bench. He sniffs around its legs. Her left leg is actually on the ground, about ten inches away from the nasty rodent.
The rat stands on its hind legs and begins to sniff up the leg of the bench near her feet. I emit a noise I’ve never made before, sort of an unhg sound. If I wake Aisha, she’ll move her leg right into the rat.