Florida(46)

* * *



—

She thought of her mother, what it must be like for her to have a vanished daughter. The police must have found the abandoned station wagon and traced it; someone must have called. Her mother would think of murder or abduction, would wonder what she had done to make her daughter so ungrateful. Maybe, the girl thought with a pulse of spite, fear had finally awakened her mother. Maybe she was scouring the state for her, even now.



* * *



—

She slept for two days under her tarp in her former neighbor’s bamboo thicket. The nights were warmer in May, but she still shivered. Once, she woke to find the bright green eyes of a cat staring at her and called out her old pet’s name, but the animal ran off.

She walked all the way to the university, remembering that it was graduation weekend, which meant that many of the students were moving out. Perhaps she could get some food or another sleeping bag, she thought. In college, she had watched boys open a fifth-floor fraternity window and dump their perfectly good computers to the ground. She herself had emptied her mini fridge of its still-fresh yogurts and apples and frozen pizzas, and tossed them into the garbage. She felt ratlike on campus, scuttling from shadow to shadow. If anyone she knew saw her. If anyone smelled her. There was a tent in one quad, and she could just perceive in the dawn that a buffet was being set up. She waited until the caterers went behind their van for a break, and swiftly filled up a plate with hot eggs and potatoes and sausage. She looked up to see one of the caterers staring at her, a crate of glasses in his hands. She smiled at him, and he, grimly, waved her off.



* * *



—

Outside the senior dorms, she noticed a great metal truck into which people were heaving mattresses, coffee makers, chairs. She saw an office chair levitate above the lip of a dumpster, but the boy who was supposed to catch it had already seized a crate of electrical wires and turned away. The arms holding it began to shake. Without thinking, she stepped forward and grasped the chair above her head. The man who was passing it peeked out at her, smiling. He had black hair tied back in a ponytail and crow’s-feet pressed into the skin beside his eyes. You helping? he said.

She was surprised into saying, Sure.

He winked and passed over a rolled-up rug.

She carried boxes of books, a headboard, a coffee table. The truck suddenly started up and someone muttered, Come on. She ran as the others began to run and leapt with them into the truck. A security car pulled up just as the doors clanged shut and the truck moved off. It was dark, the engine roaring, so crowded she felt as if she were suffocating. But someone touched her arm, lightly traced it to her hand, and put something paper-covered into her palm. It was a candy bar.

At last, the truck stopped and the engine shut off. There was a clicking, and the doors opened to impossible brightness. They were at the edge of a long rolling expanse of grass. She heaved her backpack down and jumped out onto the sandy ground.

A girl with a smudged face and long braid turned to her and said, It’s breakfast time.

She trailed the other girl up the dirt drive to a sprawling ramshackle building. What is this? she said, and the other girl laughed. It’s the Prairie House, she said. It’s a squat. Do you normally just follow people without knowing where you’re going?

Recently, yes, she said. The girl looked carefully at her, then said, Whoa. You don’t look so good, sweetie, and led her to a bed that she sank into even though the sheets smelled strongly of someone else and she couldn’t find the energy to take off her boots.



* * *



—

She slept through the day, the night, the next day, and woke light-headed with hunger. She crept down to the kitchen, passing bodies sprawled on cots and mattresses. The refrigerator was nauseating, overstuffed and sending off a garlicky rotten odor, but she found a pot of stew that was still warm shoved in among wrinkled apples.

The moon had risen over the prairie and shot the hummocks with shadow. A small creature was moving at the edge of the lawn, and in the house, she could hear the others sleeping, their movements and breath. She was alert, as she hadn’t been in years. She turned on the light over the stove and looked at it in horror: it was caked with old meals, stinking of grease. She would begin now, she thought, and found a cleaner under the sink, a mismatched pair of rubber gloves, some steel wool. She began inch by inch and worked as quietly as she could. She avoided the windows, sensing that if she looked out, she would see Eugene’s hungry spirits massing up from the prairie, the Crackers with their whips, the malarial conquistadores on their little ponies. Or Jane’s children, their faces pressed to the glass.

By morning, the stove shone, the refrigerator was clean and the rotten food tossed, the dishes in the sink scoured and the sink again its natural stainless-steel color. She had reordered the cabinets, cleaning them of mouse droppings and dead cockroaches.

Her body felt vague with fatigue, but the clarity in her head remained. When she turned around, the man from the dumpster was sitting at the table watching her. Wowzers, he said. Can’t remember the last time somebody made this kitchen so shiny.

I still have a lot to do, she said, and he said, Sit down a minute and talk.

He told her the rules: No fighting, no drugs, sleep where you find a place. People were in and out all the time and nobody knew everyone, so if she had valuables, she’d need to keep them close.