“What do you like on your pizza?”
“Anything but pineapple,” I said. Then I thought it over, about whether I was brave enough to ask. And then suddenly I was just really brave, like all the brave I’ve ever needed to be, and I said, “Can I please use your bathroom to wash up?”
“Of course,” she said.
Probably doesn’t sound like much, but it’s hard for me to ask people for stuff like that sometimes, because I have to sound like I think I deserve it or something.
And then when she answered me I remember being really surprised that something could be that easy.
We got up and I followed her down the hall and it was still bright with all those fluorescent lights. I felt like I just couldn’t get away from that, like I’d come out of the dark in more ways than I could really count up, but not all of them were good.
She stopped at one of those restrooms that are not just for men or just for women. Just one plain single restroom, no stalls or anything, and anybody can use it. She held the door open for me and then reached in and turned on the light, which was on a timer.
“Thank you,” I said.
I locked myself in.
It was still really bright, and I was avoiding looking at myself in the mirror, because I was afraid of what I would see.
I looked around to see if there was a window, but there wasn’t.
I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, because there was pizza coming, and they wanted to get me off the street. But they also wanted me to have no control over what would happen to me next, and besides, nothing is scarier than the thing you haven’t seen yet. It was actually harder to think about moving forward into whatever unknown situation they had planned for me than to ditch out and go back to what I knew.
What I knew was terrible, but at least I knew it, and there’s something that’s almost a comfort in that.
I used the toilet and then stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. It wasn’t really a mirror. It was shiny metal like the kind Bodhi said they had in jail. It made me wonder if I was under arrest. I mean not literally, but . . . you know. Being underage and everything, I wasn’t sure if I was free to go or not.
I washed my hands and face, but there wasn’t anything I could do with my hair, because I didn’t have a brush or a comb. It was all tangled and matted with dirt, and that made me ashamed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Just as I opened the door again I wondered if that lady cop would be right there waiting for me, and if she wasn’t whether I should just walk out the door. If I walked out the door I’d be free, but still on the street, and if she was there I’d have to go to whatever they had planned for me.
I honestly didn’t know which I wanted. I couldn’t decide.
I opened the door and she was there, so that was that. No decisions to be made.
Then I looked down the hall and saw the baby again. She was being carried in the door by a lady who I figured must be her mother, and that nice cop who gave us water was walking in beside them.
She was older than I thought she’d be, to have a kid so little like that.
When the lady saw me, she held the baby tighter, like maybe I would try to steal her away or something, which I thought was pretty crappy. I mean, if I didn’t want her to have her kid back she wouldn’t have her. I worked hard to get her back to her mom.
When the baby saw me she started saying my name.
“Molly, Molly, Molly.”
Not like she was trying to get to me. She didn’t reach out for me or anything. She was with her mom and she wanted to stay with her mom, which any idiot could understand, but she wanted me there, too.
Little kids are like that. They want everybody they love all together in one room with them, and they can never understand why anybody has to leave.
I looked at the mom, right in her eyes, and just for a flash of a second she looked back. Then she looked down at the linoleum, and it hurt me. I felt it like a burn in my stomach, because I expected her to be grateful for what I’d done and she wasn’t. She’d already decided she didn’t like me, just like everybody else always did.
So that sucked.
“How’d she check out?” the lady cop called down the hall to her.
And the mom gave her a thumbs-up as an answer.
She walked off into a room with the uniformed cop and I followed the lady cop back to her desk so she could ask me more questions and hopefully feed me pizza before too long.
So that was my first experience with the lady, that baby girl’s mom, and it wasn’t good.
“I hope you like anchovies,” the lady cop said, “because I got double anchovies.”
I guess I had a weird look on my face. I’d never tried anchovies but I figured I wouldn’t like them because, so far as I could tell, nobody did. I wasn’t even sure why they existed if everybody hated them.
I lifted the lid on the box, sort of slow and careful, like anchovies might bite.
“Well, you said anything but pineapple,” she said, and she was smiling too much.
I
