DROWNED GIRL (Epilogue, Chapters 1 + 2)

DROWNED GIRL

Nikolas T. Monastere

 

                                                      PROLOGUE

    I’m six years old and the girl has just drowned.

    Purple and black marks stretch around her neck like a tiger’s stripes.  Her long blonde hair is still trying to curl, though the weight of the water bogs it down.  Her blue-striped dress is several shades darker than it originally was and a puddle of murky brown water is growing beneath her as it drips from the hemline.  Her pure-white eyes seem to glare right through me and into the space beyond.  I’m too young to know how I’m supposed to react emotionally; all I feel is wonder.  She lifts one gray arm and waves at me to come join her.  I turn to my mother and tug on her pant leg.

    “Mommy, can I go play with her?”

 

 

                                                          CHAPTER 1

Cookies and Dream



    My alarm clock screams and I open my eyes.  The dream starts to fade as soon as I’m awake.  I sit up and crack my neck before I turn off the alarm.  I pull my legs up from beneath the covers and rest my elbows on my knees as I hold my head between my hands.  You know those weird dreams that seem to bring with them a sense of déjà vu?  You know, where they seem too real to be a dream and very well could be just a repressed memory demanding to be acknowledged?  Well, the Drowned Girl dream is the only one that evokes that feeling in me.  I don’t know why.  I hate that dream though.  It scares the hell out of me.

    I decide that sitting still in my bed isn’t going to make a difference about anything one way or another.  I throw my legs over the edge and stand up, arching my back as I do so.  I groan in pleasure as my spine cracks in rebellion against being forced into movement.  I grab my box of cookies off the nightstand and leave the room, happily munching on one.  After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

    Every once in awhile, Mark and me will sneak into the Dollar Theater and catch the evening show.  The guards are either too stupid or aren’t paid enough to notice two teenage vagrants making their way past the concession stands and into the screening rooms without first buying a ticket.  There was a scene in one of the movies where a mom wakes up super early so she can wake up her daughter and husband, make the family breakfast and feed the dog all before she’s even had time to use the restroom.  I wish I had a mother to make me breakfast before I wake up.  Hell, I wish I had a mother period.

    Unlike the mother in the film I’ve seen, I do have a fully functional bladder that demands to be emptied every morning.  I slowly make my way into the bathroom.  If you ever saw it, you’d either laugh or cry.  The plaster is falling off the walls, but not in a neat and ordered sort of way.  You’ll see smooth patches of wall in some places, and then haphazard cracks in others, and then there’ll be these big missing pieces missing all together.  When you were young, did you ever take old magazine pictures and then cut them into small, crazy shapes just so that you could but the pieces back together again in some sort of neat puzzle?  The shapes that you came up with for puzzle pieces probably looked like the shapes of missing plaster.

    Our mirror has long since broken, leaving it half the size it originally was and with a crazy array of spider webs to fuck up your reflection when you try to look into it.  Our toilet is still in once piece though (thank God for small favors), and so is our bathtub.  I whip my dingus out of my pajama bottoms and pee.  I hold my breath as I flush the toilet.  A couple weeks ago Mark took a dump and when he flushed the toilet became a geyser, shooting water and shit out of the bowl and around the room.  Ever since then we’ve both been weary of it.  Thankfully, today history has chosen not to repeat itself.  I breathe a sigh of relief and leave the bathroom.

    Walking down the hall (while eating another cookie) I notice that the ceiling is sagging even more than it usually does.  Drywall coats the motley blue carpet in a layer of white dandruff.  The floorboards squeak and make grotesque, wet sucking sounds thanks to when the toilet overflowed and flooded our basement apartment.  It won’t be long before me and Mark will be forced to move out.

    Maybe I should re-phrase that; calling where we live ‘an apartment’ and saying that we’ll have to ‘move out’ implies that we’re paying to live here.  We’re squatters.  This building has long since been deemed unsuitable for human life.  Nobody knows we’re here.  To this day I’m not entirely sure how we even have a running toilet and shower.  The city must’ve fucked something up downtown when shutting down this building.  We have no heat, no gas, and no electricity.  My alarm clock is a cheap battery operated one that I stole from the dollar store not too long ago when I went in to steal a box of cookies.  Mark doesn’t see the point in owning an alarm clock; neither or us have jobs that require us to be at any place in the morning, so why bother with an alarm clock? 

    I like having some sense of routine though.

    After I make it into the living room of our long-since abandoned basement ‘apartment’ I walk over to the corner of the room where my guitar is leaning against the wall.  Like everything else in our place, it’s a cheap piece of junk that one of us stole from somewhere, but man-oh-man do I love this thing!  It’s a beat up acoustic Yamaha, and the wood finish has started to crack and peel away.  The back of the neck was worn away when I grabbed it from the back of the pawnshop, so I can move my hand up and down the fret-board real smoothly and easily.  The top of the headstock has a small piece of it missing, but thankfully that doesn’t interfere with the tuning pegs.  I sit down on the floor and put my cookies beside me.  I begin to twist the undamaged tuning pegs and strum the strings lightly with my thumb just like Ace taught me to, making sure it’s in tune.  I do it quietly so I don’t wake up Mark.  He tolerates my guitar because it’s a major source of income, but at the same time he feels that it’s not necessary for our survival so he will not hesitate to break it if it becomes a nuisance to him.

    Mark has a lot of faults.  I’m not saying I’m perfect, I’m far from it, but Mark might seem more morally unstable than most.  Even though you’ve never met him, I hope you won’t hold that against him.  He’s spent a lot of time on the streets and he’s seen more of the dark side of human nature than many would believe.  Does that give him an excuse for some of his behavior? No.  But I’d like to see you go through what he’s gone through and come out of it looking like a choirboy.

    I can almost guarantee that you’d fail.

    Mark took me under his wing when I first ran away about six years ago.  I was eight at the time and the shit had finally hit the roof at home.  Dad was cheating, Mom was drinking and I seemed to be the cause of all these things.  After one of those major fights Mom stormed into my bedroom and turned on the lights.

    “You little piece of shit!” she accused me before I had even opened my eyes.  “Are you happy? Huh? Well, are you!  Thanks to your little play set we’re officially broke!”  As she drew closer to slap me, I could smell the alcohol on her breath.  I knew I shouldn’t have asked for that play set, but I was a kid.  I didn’t think that it would lead us to financial devastation.  I mean, how can an eight year old know that a seemingly innocent plastic carpenter’s desk with plastic power tools and plastic screws and nails could possibly be so sinister as to max out the last credit card?

    In case you’re too dense to realize it, there was a lot of sarcasm going on in that last statement.

    As my mother got closer I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth; I knew what was going to happen next.  We’d been down this road more than once.

    Before she could hit me my dad came in.  “Don’t you tell him that!” He closed the distance between the doorway and where Mom was hovering over me, hand drawn back.  “It’s because of your drinking problem that we’re broke!”  With my eyes shut tight I heard an oomph followed by a thud.  He had shoved her against the wall and she had fallen to the floor.  “You drunken bitch!  Don’t you dare blame him for your spending habits!”

    I opened my eyes just a bit.  Mom had put her hand down at her side and clenched both of her fists, only now she was turned to Dad.  Whenever she took me to the playground that was how the other kids looked whenever they didn’t get their way.

    Wait a minute.  Time to cut the flashback short.

    Something just occurred to me.  The playground!

    I strum just a little bit too hard on my guitar and the sound echoes into the room closest to the living room.  I hold my breath.

    “God damn it, Neil!”  Mark yells out.  I cringe, just like when I was kid and my parents were fighting.

    “My bad Mark!”  I yell back.  Mark doesn’t like to be awakened in the morning.  He’s just started a job at a fast food joint, which is awesome because now we have a semi-reliable source of income for a short time.  The bad news is, they have him working some pretty crazy graveyard shifts.  He usually comes home at around 9 a.m. and falls asleep as soon as he makes it into his room.  He sleeps until about six in the afternoon.  At eight, he begins his two-hour walk across the city to get to work.  His shift starts at eleven, so he has just enough time to get to work, clean up in the bathroom and grab a bite to eat before working.  He doesn’t like being woken up.

    “Just keep it down or else I’m chucking that fucking thing into the river…” he mumbles, already falling back asleep.  I put my guitar down and think about my epiphany.

    The Drowned Girl dream has been a recurring one in my life since I was about eight; it first came to me not too long before I ran away.  I always remember what she looks like down to an exact detail but I’m never sure where we are in the dream.  I have just realized that it was at the park that my mother took me to all the time when I was a kid.  Slowly, pieces begin to come back to me…





CHAPTER 2

Escape. Capture. Repeat.

      This was back before the cheating and the drinking became quite so obvious.  This was back in the good old days when my parents and I lived comfortably in a big two-storied suburban home.  Dad was a bank director and made enough money so that Mom never had to work.  Almost every day that it wasn’t raining she would take me to this big park on Ocean Avenue.  In this park there were slides, swings, several teeter-totters and a large gazebo for picnics. A small creek ran through the park; one that all of us kids could play in during hot summer days, or skate on when it was frozen solid in the winter.  Across this creek it was mostly just trees.  Oak, beech, and maple were over there, but it was the pine trees lining the side of the creek that always fascinated me.  They kept their green color year around, and when it was winter it was like a scene from a Christmas card.

    I remember now that the Drowned Girl was standing across that creek, underneath one of the pines.  It was summer, and pinecones and long brown needles littered the ground beneath her.  She was standing, glaring past me in that creepy way corpses seem to always do.  She slowly lifted one gray arm and motioned for me to come join her.  At the time, I was too young to realize that she was dead.

    I shake myself out of my thoughts.  What the hell is wrong with me!  I saw a dead girl when I was six and I’m just now remembering the details?  What a load of crap!

    It’s a crazy thought, but crazy thoughts have a way of sticking with you even after you’ve dismissed them as crazy.  I haven’t thought too much about my parents these past four or five years; I’ve even tried convincing myself that they don’t exist.  When I first ran away, I spent entire nights lying awake on park benches or playground equipment, crying.  I didn’t know where I was or what was going to happen to me.  As soon as I had ran out the backdoor at my parent’s home I had gone to the train yard and climbed into an empty boxcar, just like the people in the old black and white TV shows that my dad had on DVD.  I had laid there in the dark for hours, scared shitless, expecting at any moment for my parents to somehow find me and beat me.  That was at the top of my list of fears, which is surprising looking back on it now.  It was pitch black outside and I was alone, eight years old, and the only thing I was afraid of was my parents finding me.  If I were a normal eight-year-old kid I suppose I would’ve been more afraid of the Boogeyman, vampires, werewolves or any other number of beasts that haunt the night.  The only things that scared me were the smell of alcohol on my mother’s breath and my father’s anger. How sad is that?

    After lying awake for hours, shivering and afraid, I eventually drifted off to sleep in a dark corner of the boxcar.  The movement of the train was what was eventually woke me up, and when I peaked out the door of the car I realized that we were flying down the tracks.  I sat down in the middle of the car and watched with fascination as the city gave way to open country in a matter of maybe ten minutes.  I sat there for hours clutching my knees and staring with awe at the magnificent rolling fields.  It was beautiful.  Great patches of wheat under a dark blue sky, stars numbering in the billions looking down on Earth like the many eyes of God.  I was a city kid; I never got to see the stars.  A large harvest moon hung low in the sky, the same color as the wheat.  For those couple of hours I forgot myself.  I forgot that my parents were monsters; I forgot that I was alone; I forgot that I didn’t have a bed to sleep in any longer.  I forgot even how to think.  All I could do was see and feel.

    Eventually, the train moved past the fields and into woodland.  By that time the sun had risen a bit and its golden glow was illuminating bright green patches of wood and fern.  Dew and sunlight sparkled and danced in a pagan ritual meant to please the lord of the woods.  I was witnessing all the natural beauty and magic of the natural world.

    After passing through the woods, the land began to smooth out again and I could see buildings off in the distance.  They started out small, made miniature by the distance.  But eventually, the distance began to shorten and the buildings began to heighten.  They went from low ugly gray things into tall hulking monuments to the modern age.  Soon the tracks began to intersect actual roads and I crawled back into the dark confines of the car, away from the open door.  I didn’t want to be seen; I knew at that time my parents had probably already gotten a hold of the police and they were looking for me.  I didn’t know how far I had traveled in the train, but I did know that if any police were to pick me up they would eventually find out where I lived and where my parents were and I would be forced to go back to them.  I didn’t want that.

    I hoped that the train would keep traveling and I would once again be able to see my beloved woods and fields, but that was not the case.  The chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga of the wheels became chuh-ga, chuh-ga and then they let loose an evil screech and the train stopped moving all together.

    I was scared again.  Not so much of my parents, but of being caught.  I sat still in the dark corner of the boxcar, hoping to wait until the train started up again.  I don’t know how long I sat there.  It could have been hours or minutes, I really don’t know.  My stomach started growling though, and I wanted food.  I eventually stood up and peeked around the side of the side of the open door, towards the front of the train.  No sooner had I peeked my head out than I heard “Hey you, kid!  Get down from there!”

    I jumped and nearly fell out of the boxcar.  I looked to the back of the train.  Standing back there was a fat man, middle aged and wearing blue jeans with holes in the knees and a dirty, red, button-up flannel shirt without sleeves.  He twisted his green John Deere hat a little bit on his head to block out the glare of the sun to get a better look at me.

    “Yeah, you-“ he pointed a short, fat finger at me.  “Come here right now.” 

    I stood where I was, afraid of what would happen if I went to him.  He looked big and mean, plus he was an adult.  Adults can do a lot of things that kids can’t do because they’re bigger and stronger.  But, there are certain things they can’t do.  One of those things involves crawling underneath a boxcar and running like there’s no tomorrow.

    I leaped down onto the rocks beside the rails, wincing and wishing I’d had the frame of mind to put on shoes before leaving home. The big man started towards me.  “Boy, just what the fuck do you think you were doin’ up there?  This is the US railroad and we won’t have any smart-ass kid on our cars and being a liability, d’ya hear?  Shit, if you were my kid I’d beat you black and blue and then I’d…Hey! Where the hell you off to?”  I was on my hands and knees scrambling for the other side of the boxcar.  I was nearly across the railroad ties when I felt a hand grab my ankle.  I looked down and saw the fat man on his belly with his hand wrapped around my shin.  He grinned up at me with yellow teeth.

    “Do you know what happens to little boys that try to run away from Big Blake?”  He asked as I struggled against his grip.  “Those little boys get hurt.”  He licked his lips in anticipation.

    I had grown up in the city, and everywhere I went I heard about what dirty old men did to young little boys and girls.  I was young, but not naïve.  I knew what would happen.  I knew then that there are scarier monsters in the world than drunk and angry parents.

    My fear gave me strength and cunning I didn’t have only moments before.  I pulled my free leg up to my chest.  Big Blake had started to pull me out from beneath the boxcar, a smile on his face and a hard-on in his jeans.  He dragged me completely out from beneath the boxcar and I was lying flat on my back.  He sat up for just a moment to look around, afraid that somebody would take his kill away from him.  He seemed satisfied by his surroundings and he looked down on me with a mixture of hunger and lust.  I rolled up onto my shoulders and fired a straight toe-kick into his eye. 

    “Mother-FUCKER!” he yelled, letting go of my leg to put both hands over his eye.  I rolled over and got up, sprinting as soon as I had my feet underneath me.  I ran to back of the boxcar and then crawled under the connector that held my boxcar to the one behind it.  I then shot off like a bullet, adrenaline giving me the speed of an athlete twice my age.  Big Blake was still on the other side of the boxcar, cursing and screaming and tending a wounded eye as well as a case of blue balls, I’d imagine.

    I wondered around that new city for I’m not sure how long.  I did my best to avoid people, but that was hard.  The buildings were tall and the sidewalks and streets were overflowing with people going to and from school or work.  I hid in alleyways most of that day.  I was an eight-year kid who was alone in the city, the only clothes I had were Scooby-Doo pajamas that were smothered with dirt from crawling under the boxcar.  My hair probably looked horrible; even after I wash it and comb it it’s still kind of greasy and messy.  I can't even begin to imagine what it looked like on that day.

    I finally found food that day by trying to steal it from the tables at an outdoor restaurant.  It was a pretty sophisticated looking place, with a bunch of upper-middle class couples eating at tables beneath umbrellas or under a big gazebo.  The waiters all wore white tuxedos and called everybody "sir" or "m'am".  It wasn't too different from the places my dad used to take my mom and me whenever we went out to eat.  That thought brought tears to my eyes.  Yes, my parents were monsters, but they were still my parents, and it's not like they had always been monsters.  It's just that some people change.

    It's not always for the best.

    Anyway, I'd decided wait in a dark corner just beside the building, watching the waiters go in and out of the big steel door carrying trays of food.  My original plan had been to sneak into the building and steal some food from the kitchen and try to make a clean getaway, but then I noticed how wasteful people could be.  I watched as a young couple stood up from one of the tables with the umbrella over it and stretched, obviously full of food and content.  The man made a joke and the woman laughed loudly.  Nobody turned to look; I've noticed in my short life that people have a tendency to stay in their own little world without giving a damn about the lives of others.  Whether or not that's a good thing, I don't know.

    The woman smiled and gently placed her hand on the man's forearm and they shared a quiet kiss.  I read her lips as she said "thank you".  He just smiled and picked up the bill that the waiter had left on the table earlier.  He threw down a five-dollar bill as a tip and then he and his girlfriend walked to the booth that guarded the fenced in eating area.  He paid for the meal and then he and his girlfriend left, eager to conquer yet another day with nothing but young love as their weapon.

    I was young and didn't appreciate the display of love at the time; all that mattered to me was what was left on their plates.  The waiter had yet to come and pick up the dirty crockery and his tip, and the table sat there unattended.  On the woman's plate was about a quarter of an uneaten steak, and on the guy's plate were about three bites of a cheeseburger left.  Maybe I wouldn't have to resort to stealing from the kitchen after all.

    I slowly peeked around the side of the building, checking for witnesses.  Like I said, people keep to themselves and their own little worlds.  The remaining couples and young businessmen kept focused on their meals and their own conversations and nothing else.  That was good, because the food table was in the middle of all the rest.

    I slipped through the iron bars of the food enclosure and tried to be as stealthy as possible.  No matter how absorbed the people were with their own meals, they couldn't help but notice an unattended dirty little boy in pajamas as he literally tiptoed barefoot (the pavement was quite hot, and besides; all kids know that when you tiptoe you’re obviously much more discreet) across a crowded dining area.  Nobody said anything to me, and all I did was focus on the food on the table.  Finally, someone spoke up.

    "Kid, where's your mother?"

    Crap!  Obviously my ninja skills needed refining.

    I broke into a sprint and grabbed up both of the plates on the table.  A waiter, maybe thinking I was trying to steal the five dollars, ran up behind me and grabbed me around the waist in a bear hug.  The plates fell to the ground and shattered.  Pieces of the food rolled away and under other tables.

    I screamed.  "Let me go!"  I kicked blindly and swung my arms futilely.  "Let me go! They aren't eating it!"

    "Kid, calm down."  The waiter soothed.  "Just tell me where your parents are, and you can go to them."

    "NO!"  I swung one of my little fists and cracked him underneath the eye.  He grunted and jerked me off my feet.

    "Fine."  He was clearly irritated.  “Let the cops deal with you.”

    Cops?  No!  There was no way I was going to go to the police station.  They’d find out who I was soon enough and send me home.  I couldn’t let that happen.

    “No!”  I yelled again, screaming and struggling.  I landed a few more punches to the side of his head and probably left some good-sized bruises on his shins.  He was cussing and grunting a good deal, but still he would not let go.  I’d imagine that if there hadn’t been people watching he might have just let me go free, but we had all the eyes in that place on us.  If the people saw him let a starving little boy go free, they definitely would’ve raised some eyebrows and maybe he would’ve gotten in trouble. 

    I’m sure he didn’t want that to happen.

    Another waiter walked up to us, grinning a little bit as he watched his co-worker being worked over by a little kid.  “Hey Tony, need some help?”

    Tony sighed.  He took another blow underneath his eye.  Then he grew angry.  “Go get a manager!”  I’m sure I was walking a pretty thin line by that point.  It’s a wonder that Tony had the will power to not crack me a good one.

    The other waiter smiled and shook his head.  “I’ll be right back.  Don’t let the little punk go, ya hear?”

    “Yeah, I heard you.”  I landed a kick with my heel to his shinbone.  “Dammit!  Hurry up, please!”

    The other guy smiled and walked away slowly towards the kitchen.  He must not have liked Tony any more than I did at that point; he sure was taking time in getting him help.

    I kept up my kicking and screaming and crying.  Dear God, please, no!  Don’t make me go back to my parents!  I didn’t know what else to do.  For all the abuse Tony was taking, he wasn’t about to let me go.  Suddenly, an older woman stood up.  Her husband tried to get her to sit back down, but she waved him off.  She was calm throughout the whole thing and looked like she was genuinely concerned for my well being.  She wore a gray women’s blazer over a white dress shirt and gray dress pants.  She had gray hair, done up in a way that I’ve always associated as grandmotherly.  She came to a stop before me and Tony, just out of range of my wild swings.

    “Please, I’m a kindergarten teacher,” she explained.  “Maybe I can help.”

    “Is he one of your students?”  Tony asked, maybe hoping he’d be able to let me go become someone else’s burden.

    The woman smiled.  “No such luck.  But I am good with kids.”

    Tony’s grip loosened on me ever so slightly, and I stopped struggling ever so slightly.  Who was this lady, anyway?  She seemed nice enough, but you never can trust adults, being the strange and at times monstrous creatures that they are.  Tony let my feet touch the ground, but he kept me in the waist hugging bear hug.  He wasn’t that stupid.

    The woman bent down slightly so she could look me in the eyes.  “Hello, my name is Mrs. Kailee.  What is yours?”

    Why would this old woman want to know my name?  Would my name get me out of Tony’s arms and away from the police?  I didn’t think so.  I kept my mouth shut.

    Mrs. Kailee smiled.  “That’s ok.  You’re parents probably taught you not to talk to strangers, didn’t they?”

    I wasn’t about to discuss my parents with this old hag.  I kept my jaws set and my lips tight.

    Mrs. Kailee was undeterred.  No matter how irritating she was (being an adult and all) she was persistent.  “You know, stealing is wrong.”

    “They weren’t eating it.”  I said quietly.

    She nodded in agreement.  “Very true.”

    I waited for her to say something else, maybe bawl me out for taking things that weren’t mine and all that other stuff adults like to preach about.  Still, she said nothing.  Was she expecting me to break the silence?  Forget that one, lady.

    She must’ve read it in my eyes.  “But you are hungry, aren’t you?”

    Duh.  “Yes,” I said quietly, eyes downcast.

    She smiled and reached into her pocket.  When she pulled out her hand she held an individually wrapped chocolate-chip cookie.  “Normally I save these little treats for my students when they behave correctly,” she said as she unwrapped the cookie.  “But how can I turn down a hungry little boy?” 

    I reached out to grab the cookie that she had in her hand, thinking that maybe this old hag wasn’t that bad after all.  Tony’s grip had relaxed tremendously; I barely felt the pressure of his hold.  Now that I was calm and relaxed he was able to be the same.  As soon as my hand touched the cookie, I saw a movement just behind the Mrs. Kailee.  It was the other waiter, returning with whom I can only assume was an irritated manager.  I gasped in horror.

    “NO!”  I shrieked in that high-pitched yell that only little kids are able to do.  Mrs. Kailee’s eyes widened in surprise and Tony jumped.  I felt his arms completely let go of me for a split second, and I ran away at a sprint, cookie firmly grasped in my hand.  Some of the diners stood up to stop me, but I ran and bobbed and weaved in the way that only a little kid can.  I didn’t think about Tony, I didn’t think about the other waiter and the manager, I didn’t even think about kind Mrs. Kailee.  All I thought of was escape. 

    I slipped out of the iron bars of the food court the same way that I had slipped in.  I found an alleyway and took off down it.  I found another one and ran down there.  Another one came up on my right, and can you believe it?  I ran down that one as well.  I didn’t know where I was going, all I knew was that waiters were bad, cookies were good, and I didn’t want to get caught by any adults, even if they were as kind as Mrs. Kailee.

    Just as I was about to run down yet another alleyway, a foot tripped me.  I fell down face first on the pavement, arms fully extended.  I didn’t know who’d tripped me, but it was all too much.  I’d ran away from home, barely escaped from a pervert, been captured, escaped from there, and now I had fallen and my elbows and knees were scraped and bleeding.  I couldn’t help it.  I cried.

    “Aw, suck it up you big baby!”  A young voice taunted me.  I was lying face down; I didn’t even bother looking to see who it was that was being a bully.  “Quit you’re crying!  Stand up!” 

    I didn’t really want to, but I stood up.  I kept my head hung low and stared down at the cookie in my hands.  The person who had tripped me reached out and grabbed the cookie. 

    “What do we have here?”  He asked, snobbery dripping out of every syllable.  I could tell without even having to look at him.  He was a kid too.  He was an older kid, but he was still a kid.  I kept my head hung low.  I’d resigned myself to whatever fate lay at hand.  I was too tired, too hungry and too weak to care anymore.  I sniffled a little bit and wiped my arm across my eyes and nose. 

    “Hey, kid, look at me.”

    I looked up.  There he was, my future guardian angel and tormentor.  He was taller than me by about a foot, and he had really dark eyes.  He was wearing a dirty denim jacket over a black t-shirt, and his old jeans were torn at the knees and covered in miscellaneous forms of crud.  He looked angry at first, but then his face transformed as he grinned sweetly and broke the cookie into two pieces.  He handed me the smaller piece, and he put his entire chunk into his mouth.

    “So,” he said, spraying me in bits of cookie crumb and spittle.  “You’re an orphan too?”

    I wasn’t too sure what that word meant, but I knew he was asking.  ‘Are you like me?  Do you not have a home?’

    I nodded shyly and took a small bite out of my cookie half.  “Uh-huh.”

    He smiled.  “Cool!”  He swallowed the mouthful of cookie in a gulp and extended his hand.  “I’ve always wanted a brother.”

    I shook his hand, now feigning maturity.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, echoing the words I’d heard my father tell people at his job countless times.

    The older kid smiled.  “What’s your name, kid?”

    “I’m Neil.”

    “That’s a stupid name.”  He looked me over once or twice, like he was deciding whether or not I’d be worth the effort of taking care of.  “Are you still hungry?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Let’s go get some food.”



    And that was how I came to know Mark.