I don’t move right away. It takes me a minute to sort through the confusion in my head, because my head and my body are saying two different things. It’s not like a guy hasn’t touched me before, but for some reason this guy’s hand on my thigh makes me feel special. Human contact, skin to skin. I hate that I feel starved of it and there’s a slight bit of enjoyment his touch brings, which makes me feel ashamed and dirty, yet at the same time wanted. And I rarely feel wanted.
Working up the courage, I fling his hand off my leg. He starts laughing at me, but doesn’t say anything else, and finally he gets off the bus, making a remark about me going with him so he can show me a “real good time.”
I unstiffen a little once he’s gone and try to stay focused on the outside as the bus passes street after street, the sun dipping lower on the horizon until it vanishes altogether. My reflection stares back at me through the window nearly the entire ride: my deep-set blue eyes, shoulder-length blonde hair, and my fair complexion that’s so smooth everyone thinks I wear makeup but I don’t. Beauty. I get told I have it all the time and people seem envious of it, yet it never gets me what I want. Love. Affection. To feel whole inside instead of so empty.
It’s dark by the time I reach my destination and the air has gotten chilly. The neighborhood my sister lives in doesn’t help either. It’s in the rundown section and there are a lot of people roaming up and down the sidewalks littered with garbage. There’s a man passed out on the bench at the bus stop, along with a group of guys standing in a circle shouting in front of a vacant building with boarded-up windows. One of the guys notices me when I step off the bus and he nudges the guy to the side of him, saying something in a low voice. They both look at me and I don’t like the expressions on their faces or the fact that they’re three times my size.
I veer to my right, even though my sister’s place is to the left, just to avoid walking by them. I keep my head tucked down, wanting to hide what I look like, because, like I’ve experienced before, my looks can cause trouble.
“Hey, where you goin’, baby?” one of them shouts out, his eyes following me. “Come back here and play.”
I take off and don’t slow down until I’ve rounded two of the corners on the block, practically making a U- turn. Finally, I reach a quieter area of the sidewalk, which borders a chain-link fence around a junkyard. I continue walking with my head tucked down, walking swiftly, until I reach my sister’s apartment a few blocks down.
I remember when I first visited her, how shocked I’d been. She’d just been kicked out of the boarding school for drug possession and my dad wouldn’t let her move back home or give her any help financially. She’d left home a loudmouth who liked to speak her mind, and rebelled every once and while, but nothing major. When she returned, she was subdued, addicted to drugs, and barely acted like the sister I remembered. This was the only place she could afford and I’ll admit it’s disgusting. Most of the windows on the outside of the three-story brick building are either broken or boarded up and there are people sleeping on the stairway. My mother calls it a crack house where trashy, unwanted people live, and she tells me she’ll never, ever visit my sister. I manage to make it to Abby’s floor without any confrontation from the people sleeping on the stairs or the woman shouting obscene things to a man who lives across the hall from her. It takes five knocks to get my sister to answer the door and as soon as I see her, I can tell she’s blissfully high.
“Hey, Lila,” she says dazedly as she blinks her blue eyes. “To what do I owe the honor of your being here?” She’s wearing an overly large gray sweatshirt and cutoffs, something my mom would disown her for wearing, although I guess my mother already kind of has so it doesn’t really matter.
“Hey.” I wave idiotically, feeling uneasy.
She opens the door wider so I can step inside. “I bet it was Dad, right?” she jokes disdainfully as she shuts the door behind me. “He must have sent you here to check up on me and make sure that his dear daughter is doing okay and isn’t dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“I just needed some place to go to clear my head,” I tell her, drawing a deep breath as I turn in a circle, taking in her living room that’s the size of the foyer in my house. The air smells smoky and kind of like garbage and there are all these eccentric glass vases everywhere and a lot of alcohol bottles. “Mom and Dad don’t know I’m here,” I say, facing her. I think about giving her a hug, because I really need one right now, but she looks so fragile, like if I hug her too tight, she might crumble.
She looks so much different from the last time I saw her and it’s been only six months. Her blonde hair looks greasy and thin and her pores are huge and she has a few sores on her skin that look like pimples she’s been picking at. Her lips are really dry and she has a couple of cold sores. She’s lost a lot of weight, which isn’t good since she was already too skinny to begin with.
She blinks her eyes at me and then motions to a tattered plaid sofa that fills up the narrow living room. “You can have a seat if you want,” she says, flopping down in the sofa herself.
I brush some crumbs off the cushion and take a seat. There’s this weird-looking lightbulb on the coffee table, sketched with colorful art, and I reach for it. “What is this? Art?”
“Don’t touch that,” she snaps, slapping my hand away. “That’s not art, Lila.”
“Oh, sorry.” I’m starting to regret coming here, since she seems unhappy to see me and is completely out of it. “Maybe I should go.” I start to rise to my feet, but she grabs my arm and pulls me back down.
“No, don’t go.” She sighs. “It’s just that…” She scratches her head and then picks at her face. “I don’t know why you’re here, especially since Mom made it pretty clear that the family was going to disown me.”
“I would never disown you,” I tell her, remembering how we once used to have a good relationship, before boarding school came along and then her drug addiction. “I just… it’s just that… Dad’s sending me off to boarding school,” I blurt out. “The same one that you went to.”
She stays quiet for quite a while, staring at the lightbulb on the coffee table. “Why? What happened?”
I pull a guilty face. “I got caught ditching school.”
She shakes her head and hatred flashes across her face. “Dad is such a fucking asshole. It’s like you can never screw up. Not once, even if it’s something small. And if you do… if you do, then you no longer exist to him.”
I don’t disagree with her. In fact, I’ve felt pretty nonexistent for most of my life. “What should I do?”
She shrugs. “There’s not much you can do… not until you’re eighteen and can get the fuck away from our parents.”
I slouch in the sofa, staring at the colorful poster on the wall that has a picture of a guitar on it. “How bad is it?”
She picks up a lighter from the coffee table and reaches for the lightbulb. “How bad is what?”
“Boarding school?” I ask, watching her with curiosity.
She puts the lightbulb up to her mouth. “Not any worse than being at home.” She flicks the lighter and starts moving the flame along the glass. I have no idea what she’s doing, but it feels like I should look away. So I do.
“So I can handle it?” I stare at the dark hallway that leads to a door covered with strings of beads. “I mean, going there. It won’t be that bad, right?”
She snorts a laugh and then it’s echoed by a cough. “That all depends on how great you think our home life is.”
“It not that bad,” I say, but the lie is thick in my throat.
She snorts another laugh. “Oh, Lila, don’t kid yourself. Our home life is a bunch of shit based on lies for the public eye. To everyone, we seem like the perfect family, but on the inside—behind closed doors—we live in a hollow shell of a home. No hugs. No kisses. No affection. An unemotional zombie mother who’s obsessed with her beauty and money. An absent father who hates us and prides himself on telling us that all the time, letting us know how much we annoy him just because we exist.” She coughs again, louder, until she hacks something up and then spits it out onto the floor. “It’s like he wants us to be as miserable as his father made him.”
I finally glance back at her and she’s setting the lightbulb down on the table and I notice the air is a little musty. “What is that?” I ask, pointing at it.
“Let’s hope you never find out. Let’s keep hoping you live some kind of rainbows and sunshine life instead of this.”
“But I thought you said things were better out here. That you felt freer.”
“I do feel freer.” She yawns, her eyelids growing heavy. “But I don’t want this version of free for you.”
“But if you don’t like it then why do you do it?”
