then
The girl behind the register was giving me the fish eye.
“You don’t got no ID?” she said.
“I told you, I left it at home.” I was starting to get antsy. I was hungry—I was always hungry back then—and I didn’t like the way the girl was looking at me, with her big bug eyes and the patchwork gauze on her neck, almost showing off the procedure, like she was some war hero and this was her injury to prove it.
“Haloway your pair or something?” She turned his credit card over in her hands, like she’d never seen one.
“Husband,” I snapped. She shifted her eyes to the place where my procedural scar should have been, but I had carefully combed my hair forward and jammed a wool hat down over my ears, so my entire neck was concealed. I shifted my weight, then realized I was fidgeting too much.
Scene: IGA Market on Dorchester, three days after the bust at Rawls’s. Piled on the conveyor belt between us, the source of all the tension: a tin of instant hot cocoa, two packets of dried noodles, ChapStick, deodorant, a bag of chips. The air smelled stale and yeasty, and after the brutal winds of the streets, the store felt as hot as a desert, and as dry.
Why did I use his card? To this day, I don’t know. I don’t know whether I was getting overconfident, or whether, just for a moment, I wanted to pretend: pretend that I wasn’t a runaway, pretend that I wasn’t squatting in an unfinished basement with six other girls, pretend that I had a home and a place and a pair, just like she did, just like everyone was supposed to.
Maybe I was already a little tired of freedom.
“We’re not supposed to take cards without an ID,” she said after a long minute. I’ll never forget her: those black bangs, the eyes as incurious, as flat, as marbles. “If you want, I can call the manager.” She said it like she’d be doing me a favor.
Alarm bells went off in my head. Manager meant authority meant trouble. “You know what? Forget it.”
But she had already swiveled around. “Tony! Hey, Tony! Anybody know where Tony went?” Then she turned back to me, exasperated. “Give me a second, okay?”
It was then: a split-second decision, the moment she left the register and went looking for Tony—a thirty, maybe forty-second reprieve. Without thinking, I stuffed the ChapStick in my pocket, pushed the chips and the noodles inside my jacket, and took off. I was a few feet from the door when I heard her yelling. So close to the street, to the blast of cold air and people bundled and indistinguishable. Three feet, then two . . .
A security guard materialized in front of me. He gripped me by the shoulders. He smelled like beer. Ffacfont>
He said, “Where do you think you’re going, little lady?”
Within two days, I was on a bus back to Portland. This time my sister, Carol, was with me—and, for extra insurance, a member of the Juvenile Regulatory Commission, a skinny nineteen-year-old with a face full of pimples, hair like a tuft of sea grass, and a wedding ring.
I knew Carol wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut for long—she never had been able to—and as soon as we had pulled away from the bus terminal, she rounded on me.
“What you did was selfish,” she said. Carol was only sixteen at the time—we were born almost exactly a year apart—but even then she could have passed for forty. She carried a purse, an actual purse, and red leather gloves, square-toed black boots, and jeans she actually ironed. Her face was narrower than mine, and her nose was upturned, as though it disapproved of the rest of her features and was trying to distinguish itself from them. “Do you know how worried Mom and Dad are? And how embarrassed?”
My mother had been one of the first volunteers to be cured. She’d had the procedure even before it was federally mandated. After three decades in a marriage with my father—who was charming and loud when he was sober, mean and loud when he was drunk, and a philanderer whenever he could get his hands on a woman who would sleep with him—she had welcomed the cure like a beggar welcomes food, water, and the promise of warmth. She’d bullied Dad into it too, and I had to admit, he was better for it. Calmer. Less angry. And he hardly drank anymore either. He hardly did anything anymore, since he’d been air-traffic control most his life—except sit in front of the TV or fiddle downstairs at his workbench, playing with old machine parts and radio equipment.
“Which is it?” I blew my breath onto the window, drew a star inside the condensation with my finger, then wiped it off.
Carol frowned. “What?”
“Are they worried? Or are they embarrassed?” I blew again, and drew a heart this time.
“Both.” Carol reached out quickly and smudged the heart away. “Stop that.” A look of fear flashed across her face.
“No one’s looking,” I said. I leaned my head against the window, feeling suddenly exhausted. I was going home. No more bumping up against commuters, fumbling for easy picks, feeling the mix of shame and elation when a target worked out. No more peeing behind a folding screen in the middle of the night, trying not to wake anyone else up. I’d be cured right away, probably by the end of the week.
A small part of me was glad. There’s always relief in giving up.
“Why do you have to be so difficult?” Carol said.
I turned to look at her. My kid sister. We’d never been close. I’d wanted to love her, really. But she Kallime had always been too different, too cautious, likely to tell, impossible to play with.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t give you any trouble again.”
I slept for most of the trip back to Portland, my hands tucked in my jacket and my forehead resting against the window, and the ID of Conrad Haloway cupped in my right palm.