It is the kind of scorching summer day that lies to you, tricks you into seeing puddles shimmering on bone-dry sidewalks. The kind where the sun, shining with what should be optimism, will settle its weight upon your chest like a six hundred-pound man oblivious of his size and power, and suffocate you. At least, that’s what it feels like to me.

I’m sitting on a bench at the corner of an oak-shaded street in old downtown Sarasota, cello between my knees, sweat seeping through my whisper-thin tank top. For over two hours I’ve been here, performing every tune I’ve ever memorized for anyone willing to endure the heat long enough to listen. Not many can, but today there were enough. I’ve still banked more per hour than I would have as a cashier or waitress or in some other low-wage job befitting an eighteen-year-old high school grad. Busking is my bread and butter. Well…our bread and butter. Mine and Liza’s and Aunt Bonnie’s.

After today I should have enough money for the gas I need to make the few hours’ drive to college in my beat-up Honda Civic. I slept with a grungy-looking mechanic in exchange for the car, and I’m not as ashamed of that as I think I’m supposed to be. A person can only play cello in the boiling street for so many hours, and I don’t have lovely, middle class parents with whom I can strike a deal to split the cost of a reliable midsize. If necessity is the mother of invention, then she is also the mother of opportunistic motherfuckers.

I finish the final chord of Bach’s G Major Allemande, and a white dude in his early twenties—ripped jeans and thick, swaying dreads—steps forward and throws a few bucks into my open case. “Keep on keepin’ on, little sister,” he says, then shoves his hands in his pockets and drifts off toward the train tracks, almost hovering over the undulating waves of heat, like a hippie Jesus.

I brush sweat from my brow and bend to count the money in my open case: thirty-three dollars and a pile of loose change I don’t bother to add up. Along with the rest of the week’s earnings in my pocket, which I know better than to leave lying around the trailer for Aunt Bonnie to swipe, I have a hundred and sixty-two dollars. There was more last week, but I needed to buy clothes and books for school and pay my car insurance.

Still, it’s enough.

The grocery store is busier than usual, even for a Saturday. With my cello case strapped to my back like a turtle shell, I hurry through the aisles, tossing boxes of cereal and other nonperishables into the cart, avoiding eye contact with shoppers and stock boys. Grocery stores make me twitchy. There’s something about knowing how much of that food will end up in the dumpsters out back, or maybe it’s the noise of the bumping metal carts and tantruming children, or the way the employees always greet me even though I’ve made it clear with my downcast eyes that I don’t want to talk to anyone—the whole thing makes me want to shrink backward into my cello case as if I were a real turtle, all cozy and hidden and safe. But then I wouldn’t be able to function at all.

I push my cart into the checkout and toss a few Slim Jims on the belt with the other items. Ahead of me, a young woman in cutoffs and a ribbed tank top swipes her card as the bagger loads her groceries into her cart. Her daughter coos around her pacifier, her chubby baby legs dangling from the seat of the cart. Next to them, two little boys, maybe five and seven, stare hungry-eyed at the wall of candy, chips, and magazines that hedge the checkout lane. The littler boy lifts his hand in slow motion, aiming for a pack of Starburst, but the older one, without speaking and without taking his eyes off a bag of Cheetos, reaches out in the same slow motion and presses his brother’s arm back down, away from temptation.

I grab a magazine to flip through, careful to angle myself in the aisle so as not to knock a shelf over with my cello-case-turtle-shell. Over top of the magazine, I see the younger boy turn and stare up at me with huge, round eyes. I wink at him.

“—possible it’s the system, ma’am.” The cashier. He sounds around my age, but I don’t look at him directly. I might know him from school. People from school are not generally friendly with me.

“It’s…no, I’m so sorry,” the woman says. “We were supposed to get a deposit today. It must not have come through yet. I can put everything back.” There is a tremor in her voice.

I keep my eyes fixed on my magazine.

The cashier says with a kind, patient tone: “It’s no problem, ma’am. We can return the items for you.”

“I’m so embarrassed.”

“It happens, ma’am.” He’s been trained to say these things. To accommodate. To diffuse.

I peek at the little boys again. Their gazes remain on that awful, teasing wall of chips and candy, though I think they must be aware of the scene behind them.

I put the magazine back on the rack. The young mother’s wallet is still resting against the card swiper, her hands hesitating over the little zippered pouch as if doing so might allow some solution to present itself, poof, like magic. She’s nervous, licking her lips, her chest rising and falling with labored breaths. My own breathing shallows as I watch her.

Her total is visible from here, lit on the display in neon green digits: a hundred and eighteen dollars and twenty cents. I have a hundred and sixty-two dollars in my pocket. Forty-three would be enough to buy the few things in my cart, food I intend to leave for Liza and Aunt Bonnie before I depart for school.

I reach across the belt and scoop up the Slim Jims, put them back. I can play in the street again tonight and maybe at lunchtime tomorrow. Maybe I can drive to school in the afternoon instead of in the morning like I planned.

The woman tucks her wallet back into her purse, her eyes brimming with tears she must be trying hard to keep back.

I pull the wad of money from my pocket and flip through it. The woman is lifting her little girl out of the cart now, fumbling because of how much her hands are shaking.

“Hang on,” I say. I’m not sure how to phrase my offering; I don’t want to embarrass her further. I’m counting as quickly as I can, keeping the bills low, trying not to draw attention.

She turns and looks at me, her daughter half-in, half-out of the cart.

I slide a thick stack of fives and ones toward the cashier. That oughta do it.

“Oh, no,” the woman says, plunking her daughter back down in the cart. “No, please, you don’t have to do that. You’re just a kid!”

“It’s cool,” I say, waving my hand dismissively. “My parents won’t even miss it. I swear.” I raise my eyebrows and shrug in a “golly gee, I can’t help it that I’m rich” sort of way.

She opens her mouth as if to protest again, but she’s stuck. The groceries are already in her cart, already rung up, and her children need to be fed. The cashier’s gaze darts between me and her. Another customer pulls his cart up behind me and begins loading items onto the belt. He throws us an uneasy glance as if worried we’ll hold him up.

Finally, the woman’s shoulders sag. “Thank you. Just…thank you. This is so embarrassing.” She puts the back of her hand against her mouth as if to stop a well of emotion from rolling out.

My heart is doing funny things in my chest. I can’t look at her anymore. I push the stack of bills a little closer to the cashier, and he takes the money, deposits it into the drawer, and prints the woman’s receipt.

The young mother pushes her cart out of the store, the two little boys trailing like ducklings behind her. In my peripheral vision I see her turn and look back at me once more, but I focus hard on the cashier’s hands as he slides my items across the scanner. I won’t be that person who gazes longingly after my charity case, eager to bathe in her gratitude.

I’ve been that charity case enough times to know better.

---

I draw a slow breath and glare at Liza with as much condescension as I can muster. I’m so pissed that my ears are hot. “How is this happening again?” And on a day I’ve had yet another compulsive attack of conscience and unloaded a pile of money on a complete stranger. Fuck.

Liza gulps but stands her ground, her blue eyes blazing. She’s clutching a copy of The Great Gatsby to her chest as if classic literature will protect her, and her long, dirty blond hair, normally swinging free around her shoulders, is bound in a knot on top of her head. “It’s not my fault, Malory. Jessie said her mom treated—”

“Jessie’s mom does not know how to treat for lice. We have established this ad nauseum.” My scalp is already itching. I ball my fingers into fists, willing the crawly feeling back into my imagination. I need to sit—my legs have that hollow, scraped-out feeling, like someone stole my muscles—but I force myself away from our battered plaid couch. It looks like the perfect place for a colony of parasites to take up residence. What if I infect it? What if it infects me?

Liza tosses her book on the couch and sits in the exact spot I was just eyeballing with disgust. “She’s my best friend. How can I not—”

“Classes start Tuesday.” I pace the raggedy shag carpet of our tiny living room and push at my cuticles with my thumbs. “I’m supposed to drive over tomorrow. What if I pass it to my roommate? I’ll be in a dorm, an enclosed building with three hundred other students…”

A colorful scene pops into my head: I’m surrounded by a gaggle of beautiful, confident, wealthy new girlfriends who have, beyond all logic, accepted me into their tight-knit group. They’ve invited me to a party, shared their clothes with me, and are giving me a makeover while fawning over my mass of shiny black hair…which is crawling with lice. And then they see the bugs wriggling between my hair follicles and turn on me, shrink from me, point at me—poor, lice-infested white trash girl.

I hate myself for seeing this in my head. I hate that my brain tortures me with such pathetic schoolgirl paranoias. A gust of wind whips up against the side of Aunt Bonnie’s trailer, and the corrugated metal creaks and groans, a harsh, grating sound that makes me shiver.

Liza doesn’t seem to notice. “Malory, you probably don’t even have it. I’m sure I’m the only—”

“You know we still have to do the whole damn trailer. For the third fucking time.”

She squeezes her hands between her knees. “I know. I mean, I know it’s…bad. But we have time. I’ll help you… We can fix this.” She looks on the verge of tears now—her lips are trembling. She’s wringing her fingers. Scratching her fucking head, for Christ’s sake.

I finally let my hands fly to my scalp so I can give myself a good scraping too. I scratch furiously, forcing my sleek hair into jungle-girl tangles, not caring that I look insane since it’s only Liza, and Liza already knows I’m nuts. “This is the worst. I hate this! I fucking hate being poor!”

The concern melts off Liza’s face, replaced with a look that tells me she thinks I’m being dense. “First of all, Malory, rich people get lice just as easy as poor people.”

I stare at her, waiting for what I know will come next.

“And second of all, you know goddamn well that this is not ‘the worst.’”

The hollow place inside me yawns open, stretches into a gaping cavern the way it sometimes does. In the corner, the window AC unit jerks to life with a bang and a rattle, and Liza and I both jump even though we ought to be used to the sound by now.

“At least you get to leave, Miss Valedictorian.”

I force my face to remain impassive, but inwardly, I flinch. It’s true: I am abandoning her here.

“And, you know…” She stands and picks her purse up off the peeling side table. “I could have just not told you. I could have waited until after you left to do the treatment.”

I pull my hair tie off my wrist and twist my messy, probably lice-infested black hair into a knot to complement hers, the yin to her yang. “That would have been fucked up.”

She raises her eyebrows and purses her lips at me, silent sister-speak for “No shit.”

“Plus,” I say, “you need my money.” All my money. My stomach tumbles again over my foolish philanthropy.

“True,” she says, and the tension releases from her shoulders. We are at peace again, that fast. Always that fast.

“You told Aunt Bonnie?” I ask her.

“She gave me ten bucks. Said she’ll treat herself tonight when her shift’s over.”

I open the front door and wince at the blinding bright of outside. “How much do you have?”

“Thirty,” she says, following me out the door and down four half-rotted wooden steps to the gravel drive. “Then I’m broke till next Friday.”

“I’ve got forty.” I unlock my Civic and slide in. The interior still smells faintly of cigarette smoke from the previous owner though I clean the car often and have deodorizers clipped onto the air vents. Some stenches never go away no matter what you do.

Liza slides in beside me and pulls her seatbelt across herself, rolls down her window—the Civic’s AC stopped working long ago. “Eighty’ll buy enough chemicals, right?”

“Should.” I’m already exhausted thinking of the hours of cleaning and nitpicking and washing, not to mention the extra time I’ll need to spend busking downtown. I start the old car with a sigh and maneuver it over the dirt road that leads out of the trailer park. On the corner near the exit we pass a particularly neglected double-wide, where six or seven guys lounge under a shaded stoop—shirtless, sweaty, and sipping brown-bottled forties like it’s in their job description. Thugs. One of them shouts something at us but I focus on the road ahead and turn out of the park, a white plume of dust billowing up like a cloud in our wake.

Outside my window a patchwork of neighborhoods rolls by as if on a conveyor belt: beaten-down trailer parks, clusters of old Florida flat-roof ranches, and spanking-new gated subdivisions with names like Stonybrooke and The Preserve and Tuscan Villas. Do the people in those fancy homes really get lice, like Liza said? I doubt it. I glance over at her to see if she watches the gated neighborhoods too, but she’s absentmindedly scratching her scalp and flipping through The Great Gatsby. Liza is never not at home with herself.

The town’s main drag is a busy four-lane road with dated strip malls, drive-throughs, and gas stations. We turn into the parking lot of the pharmacy, and as I pull the key from the ignition, I burst into sudden tears. It is an unexpected and violent outburst, one that feels like a betrayal by my own mind; up to now I really believed I was holding it together. But I’ve got my hands covering my face and my whole body is heaving.

“Malory, it’s okay!” Liza’s hand lands on my shoulder, gives me a gentle shake. “Hey—it’s just a little lice!”

I laugh through my tears at the absurdity of her words. “No, no—it’s not that.”

“What then?”

“I’m just so fucking sorry.”

“Sorry? I’m the one who—”

“Sorry for leaving you. I’m sorry for leaving you, okay?” I peek at her through the cracks between my fingers.

“Aw, Malory.” She leans over my car’s center console and hugs me tight.

Well, great. Now I definitely have fucking lice.