Once, maybe a month after I escaped Lady Ebony for good, I managed to get on-board a train heading east. I was huddled against the window shivering and this guy in the seat behind me poked his head over to look at me.
“Ya don't look so good, kid.” he grunted over at me.
“You alone?”
I nodded wearily and this guy pulled the grey fedora right off of his bald-ass head and plunked it right on mine. I didn't refuse it and he disappeared back to his seat. I offered my gratitude and fell asleep as soon as the warmth that the hat offered hit me. If you've never ridden a train before, let me tell you, the sound of the wheels constantly moving can be deeply hypnotic if you let it be. Even when the whistle blows you stay caught up in that flux. At least I do, or did the last time I was on a train. Then again I was exhausted and hungry and sick...
But I digress.
Once I got around the New Jersey area, Tanner and I picked up drinking. I had met this boy at the train station who took me back to the place he had been staying, and things progressed from there. I found myself living with a group of boys aged sixteen through twenty in a dilapidated old house that was supposed to be condemned. I mean- this thing was ancient. Every night somebody had something for everyone to get fucked up off of. The beauty of this time of my life lay in the fact that to them, I was just some “dude” that Kyle brought home from the train station. I was literally “one of the guys.” By the time I was fourteen years old I was drinking like a champion and Tanner was hidden safely in the closet of a room decorated with painfully sixties wallpaper that was sagging off the walls and revealing crumbling plaster and bare boards. I was still too young to try to find honest work to pay for my fair share of the food and whatever else I was included on, but luckily they liked me enough not to make a big deal out of it. The guys would joke about how if I were a “bitch” they would just pimp me out and take turns with me in the bathroom to cover room and board... you know, so I could earn my keep. I laughed heartily along, although on the inside I was seething.
Eventually my free ride was taken off the road. The oldest guys at the house got busted robbing a gas station, leaving the rest of us with no way to support ourselves from home-base. We were left with absolutely nothing to do, so not long afterwards, we all kind of scattered. One of the guys who had been arrested had a girlfriend named Lacey who had been staying at the house with us for a few months. She ended up talking me into dealing with her. We promised to do so only until we had enough money to get back to her hometown in Pennsylvania, where she promised I would have a place to stay if her parents were okay with it. I was just glad to have somewhere to go, whether or not it panned out.
The more time we spent together, the more I realized that Lacey seemed to have some sort of crush on me. I started acting all tough and protective the same way I saw her (by then ex) boyfriend act with her, because that's what she acted like she enjoyed. However, the longer we were around each other, the more naturally we interacted. I found out that it bothered her when guys acted like they owned her so the more myself I acted the closer we became. By the time we arrived on her doorstep we were pretty infatuated with each other, but her loaded parents weren't particularly fond of the idea of taking in her-increasingly supple-boyfriend. So she kissed me goodbye and begged for some money on my behalf, which they gave me pityingly before I turned to walk away.
“Call me sometime!” Lacey called after me from her porch steps. But when I looked at her, we were both thinking the same thing. I didn't have her number. Or a phone. I didn't even know where I was going to sleep that night. And I sure as hell wasn't going to come back for a visit. I had even almost let it slip that I was a girl, which I knew she wouldn't receive well. So basically I figured the sooner we forgot each other the better.
Obviously that day has yet to come.
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