“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” a girl’s voice said. I looked up. Tanya was leaning over the man in the truck, waving at me. Tanya had worked at The Colonnade with my mom until the manager’s girlfriend caught him and Tanya messing around in his car in the parking lot after work and made him fire her. That’s what Dell, one of the other waitresses, had told my mom. Tanya was trouble, she said. Tanya had long hair that she could put in a bun using only two chopsticks. She was short, but she always wore sandals with huge cork platforms. After she put on lipstick, she would stick her pointer finger in her mouth to make sure none of it got on her teeth.
Dell had told me once that my mom bragged about me, that she said I was “no trouble at all.” I didn’t say anything when Dell told me, but I had felt a blush rising to the surface of my skin that I couldn’t help, like trying to push yourself under the surface of a pool and floating back up to the top despite your churning.
They were waiting for me to say something. “It’s a holiday,” I said, and immediately regretted it. The man smiled. The sidewalk shimmered in the late-morning heat.
“A holiday, huh?”
“It’s not actually a holiday,” I said, crossing one leg in front of the other. “I didn’t mean to say that. I was going to go.” I slung my backpack off one shoulder as proof. “I have all my stuff with me.” I looked up at them.
“Get in,” Tanya said. “I’ll take you back home. It’s hot out. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mom.” I exhaled. Sometimes it felt as if my life was just a series of moments where I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I let it out. Tanya hopped out and folded the seat back for me to climb behind. “This is Jeremy,” she said.
The music was loud and I was working on keeping my face blank like I didn’t care about anything and also trying to figure out who was singing until I realized we weren’t heading toward my apartment, that Tanya didn’t even know where I lived. “Um,” I said quietly, but neither of them heard me, so I said it again. “Um, I didn’t tell you my address?”
Tanya turned to Jeremy and I saw an expression appear and disappear like a shadow on the side of her face. “Your mom won’t be home till later, right?” she said. “If she’s still working the mid-shift.” She was. I nodded. “What are you gonna do at home all by yourself?” she said. “Come hang out with us! We’re going back to our place.” I was uneasy. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted from me. When you couldn’t tell what somebody wanted from you, it was hard to know how to behave. Tanya seemed like she was trying to be my older sister but also kind of like she was making fun of me.
I was in the car. I was way too far from home by now. I didn’t have a choice. “Sure,” I said. “But I want a burger first.” I said it tough, trying to disguise how helpless I felt. She laughed.
“Sure, we’ll get you a burger,” she said. “There’s a Burger King right by Jeremy’s. Fries?” I relaxed a little bit. This was fun. She was right. This was better than being home alone. I didn’t care why they wanted me around.
I sat with my burger and fries, recovering from the sting of Tanya asking if I wanted a Happy Meal, which they didn’t even sell at Burger King. I was too old for Happy Meals and she knew it. I wiped my greasy fingers on the backseat in silent revenge. My cheeks burned. We turned right off Hillsborough onto a small road, and immediately Jeremy swerved right again, into a parking lot. It was one of those apartment complexes so big that the parking lot was like a maze, twisting left and right and opening up to paths that just led to dead ends. He pulled into a spot and stopped when the wheels bounced off the curb. “We’re here,” Tanya said. I looked at the dashboard before Jeremy turned the car off. My mom would be at work for another six hours. It was fine.
The apartment was heavy with the smell of smoke, a smell I’d recognized but hadn’t known what it was until then. I didn’t smoke any weed with them because Tanya said my mom would kill her if she ever found out but I was glad, because I was a little scared to try it. I sat sandwiched between the two of them on the couch, our warm thighs touching as they passed the bong back and forth over my lap, bubbling and exhaling and coughing and laughing. The television was on in front of us, but it blended into the background—I couldn’t understand any of the words anyone was speaking, and the image kept flickering and changing too quickly for me to keep up with it. It felt safer to stare at the coffee table where my feet were propped up, at my sandals and the dirt underneath my toenails, at the magazines and sketchpads and Ziploc baggies and piles of change and pencils, at the mugs stained from paint and coffee, the crusty plates that a line of black ants was idly crawling over.
“Oh, shit, I think she’s getting a contact high,” Tanya said, laughing. “We should stop, Jeremy.”
“Nah, she’s okay,” he said. Everything seemed as if it was in motion, and it felt better to stare at something slow, something still. I didn’t know how to say that in words, suddenly, but it didn’t worry me.
“I’m okay,” I whispered, and put my hand on Tanya’s thigh to reassure her. It was so smooth. My legs were tan, and covered in blond hair you could barely see. I hadn’t ever felt like shaving my legs, though I’d watched my mom do it a million times before going out on a date or to the beach. But I had just been thinking about how they looked. Not about how smooth they felt. I ran my hand all the way down her leg to make sure the whole thing felt that way.
“What are you doing, you freak?” she said, laughing, but not in a mean way. “Jeremy, she’s totally high.”
“Can I shave my legs?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
I sat on the rim of the bathtub with my legs near the faucet as Tanya ran the water. The fluorescent light was bright, and I closed my eyes so I could concentrate on how everything felt instead. The cold smoothness of the porcelain seeping through my shorts, the warm water blasting onto my legs, the lightness of the shaving cream as Tanya sprayed it into my open palm. Tanya nudged me, and I opened my eyes reluctantly. She handed me a disposable razor from a pack underneath the sink. “I’m not gonna do it for you,” she said. I gripped the razor and drew the blade slowly up my leg.
When I got home, I erased the message on the answering machine, climbed into bed, and fell asleep. I woke to my mom standing over me. “I’m going to Daryl’s for dinner. You comin’?” I slipped into my sandals and followed her out the door and downstairs to the parking lot.
It was hard to remember the times before Daryl had been around, back when my mom was dating Bruce. Now Daryl was over or my mom was at his place or we were all there. Daryl’s trailer was much smaller than our apartment, which wasn’t big. I didn’t know you could fit a life into a place that small. His younger brother Marcus lived with him, but he didn’t make much money, my mom said, so he had to sleep on the couch. It was supposed to be temporary but he’d been there ever since my mom started dating Daryl and it didn’t seem like that was changing anytime soon.
Daryl played drums in a band, the kind of band that played at weddings. They did other shows where they played their own music, but those were usually free. His arm muscles were huge from lifting his drum kit in and out of the pickup truck. My mom liked to wrap both of her tiny hands around his biceps and say, “Flex.” Then she’d smile like she was proud of him, but also