“You met him in here?” I asked.
“Yup. He got out yesterday and I might get out in three weeks even though that would be an early release, and then we’re going. So that’s why I felt so much better that you had this Brooke person. I really think you might be fine with Brooke. Give it another try.”
I just sat a minute, still feeling like I was falling. Or maybe I was feeling it again—it was hard to tell the difference. I wasn’t thinking about falling while he was talking, but if I’d been doing it that whole time, then that was one deep-ass well, let me tell you.
“What’s in Kentucky?” I asked after a while.
“His uncle has a horse farm there and we can go work. And there are apartments over the barns. And the air is really clean and the grass is greener than anything you ever see in LA.”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
Then we just sat for a really long time. I mean, seriously, it might have been three or four whole minutes. We were mostly looking away from each other, like down at the table, and it was starting to get awkward.
“So where’ve you been sleeping for the last couple of weeks?”
I was so not thinking he was about to talk again, and so when he did I jumped out of my seat. Only a couple of inches, but I actually jumped, like enough that anybody could see it, and that was pretty embarrassing.
“Oh. That. I found a camp. There’s like a whole big camp of homeless people between the freeway and the river. Well, you know, what they call the river but really it’s just a big concrete trench. Some people have tents, but I don’t have a tent, but there are some older ladies there and they sort of look after me, and one of them gave me a tarp. And I strung it up so it’s sort of like a tent.”
“You never told me who stole our spot.”
“That old guy with the superlong beard who used to live on the other side of the hole in the freeway fence.”
“Oh,” he said. “Edward.”
And that was a pretty Bodhi-like thing, too. We both lived in that neighborhood the same amount of time—or actually I was there a few days longer after he got arrested and went to jail—and he knew the names of all the other people who lived there and I just knew stuff like their beards and where they slept.
I didn’t answer, because I was busy thinking about that, and how different it made us. Maybe we were always too different all along, and maybe I should have seen this coming.
I hadn’t, though.
“You don’t want his spot,” he said.
“No. I don’t. I don’t know how he managed with all that noise and all those exhaust fumes, and anyway it’s better at the camp. A couple of the older ladies look after me.”
I know I’d said that already, but I said it again. I have no idea why.
“You should go see that Brooke lady. Tell her you’re okay at least. See what she has in mind to help you.”
“But once you let somebody get started helping you like that, you kind of get thrown into a situation, and then you just lose control of the whole thing. You know, because you’re a kid and all. I learned that already.” I learned it from you, I thought, but I didn’t say that. “And then it can be a bad situation and you can’t back out again. And that lady, she just wants to feel like she’s a good person, but once they send me off she’ll forget all about me. I tried to think once that she would actually care about me but I’m not getting let down again.”
He raised one eyebrow, and that was also a very Bodhi thing to do. Which made me sad, because if the real Bodhi was here now, then I knew how much I would miss him when he was gone.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She came into a jail to find you. Twice. You know how much people hate to go into jails? If there’s any chance she cares enough to help you, then I think you need to at least go see for sure.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I will.” But it was making me sick to my stomach to think about it. “I need to go now,” I said.
Which was a really stupid thing to say, because what did I want him to think? That I had an important appointment or something? But it was just too hard to be there with him, and that was what I was really trying to say.
I stood up and he stood up, and he looked really sad, so I stopped looking.
“We okay?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
But we weren’t, and he wasn’t a stupid guy, so I’m sure he knew it.
“Come see me one more time before I go?”
“Yeah, okay.”
But I didn’t really mean it and I didn’t plan to do it.
“Promise,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, like “Do you promise?” It was more like an order, like “I want you to make me that promise right now.”
I sighed. Because now I would have to do it.
But maybe I had to anyway, I don’t know, because after all it was Bodhi, and even though we were coming apart now, we had a lot of friend history from while we were together.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come one more time. I promise.”
But I still wasn’t sure. On the one hand, it wasn’t like me to promise a thing if I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. But then this other part of me was like, Everybody lets everybody down, so why can’t I?
It was changing me, getting let down
