In Her Skin by Kim Savage
For my sparkler, Lila, who knows exactly who she is, and for Dad. I feel your sunshine on my shoulders, still.
PART I
VIVI
I was seven the first time Momma taught me how to be someone else.
Sitting cross-legged on the street holding a coffee can for change, I’d listen as she’d tell me to remember how in a past life, I was blind. Straightaway, my eyes would blur, and sure as rain that can would be stuffed with bills by the end of the day. Momma said I had a thousand experiences to tap, because I’d passed through this world many times before. It was just a case of remembering.
Momma taught me other things. Like how flipping the pillow helps you sleep cool when the electricity gets turned off. How pretending every visit to a soup kitchen is your first gets you an extra roll. How saying a thing three times makes it so. How Happy Meals from the trash always contain perfectly good fries. How the only safe people are women with babies. How if something bad ever happened to her, I should run as far away from Immokalee as I could.
So I did.
Looking back, I guess I was still in shock from Momma getting killed, though her boyfriends beating her was as regular as the sun rising. I wasn’t quite right in my head. On the bus from Florida, the only seat left was next to me. When a girl close to my age, about fourteen, took it, she put so much space between us you’d think I was day-old fish. She was clean around the fingernails where I wasn’t, and had a neat little suitcase that someone had packed for her, and hardware on her teeth that meant someone with money cared enough to fix them. She told the driver loud that she was headed back to her family in Boston. A momma and a daddy, and a sister so close in age they were called twins. The driver said he’d be sure to watch over her, be her family till he got her back there safe.
If I was feeling like myself, I would have taught that girl not to scoot away from me. Regular Jolene Chastain would have reached over and pinched that girl’s milk-thigh hard as she could. But I was in shock from seeing Momma the way a girl should never see her momma. So I went to a different place. I leaned back and pretended I was that girl, that her dimpled bare knees and the suitcase on the bus floor were mine, and that I was going back home to my momma, daddy, and a sister besides. It was a pretty thought. I started to think maybe it was a sign, me seeing that girl, and that my destiny in this life was to have that family.
Maybe if I hadn’t seen that girl, heard her plans and started imagining they were mine, I wouldn’t have had such a hard time on the street this last year. Living in Tent City is the closest I’ve come to having family, but Tent City is not my home. Here in the Boston Public Library I see lots of families, real ones that keep you clean and clothed and won’t steal your shoes if you leave them outside your tent at night. So it’s time to move on, and to that end, as they say, I have decided to mug you and become you.
You haven’t noticed me watching. Here, in the library, I look like any other girl our age, even though the children’s librarian with one brown tooth knows I’m homeless, performing my daily self-directed study: our private joke. A lot of us come here—the boy with the baby arm, the mutterer, the junkie in her stained hoodie—but I look the youngest. We’re not afraid of getting tossed because we know the librarian is an easy mark, like most people who work with children. The teachers, the shelter counselors, the parole officers: their fatal flaw is that they only want to trust and be trusted.
But back to you. Your earring sparkles under the lights every time you brush your hair behind your ear. Earrings are hard—there will be screams, blood—but I’ll come from behind, a quick yank on both ears at the same time: gone. Your earrings will be gone, and I’ll be gone, and you’ll never see me coming, you’re so lost in that copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson propped beside your silver laptop in your tiny carrel, and you keep smelling the spine, honey hair sweeping over, nose to the page. You have a pink mark where your knee folds and I can tell you wish you could live inside that carrel like I already do, walls blocking out everything not in that book.
For the record, I would like to be a book nerd. I pretend to be, among these books, but I could never read them all. In Immokalee, I’d steal books from the Books for Africa bin at the dump: little-kid Golden Books with hard spines; cheesy, shiny-covered mysteries; classics with USED stickers on them from college bookstores. Sometimes I’d find poetry books, coffee rings on the covers. Like you, poetry is my favorite, because poems are like magic spells, and Momma taught me that words set in certain ways bring luck. I know we’re connected, though anyone looking at us would say you are the un-me—a shiny girl who’s never felt her mother’s boyfriend brush up against her, never devoured a dirty lollipop dropped by a kid in the park, never slept in a bus terminal with a knife under her thigh for protection—you are me, just like me. So I wait until you go to the bathroom (with your computer, but not your wallet that fell off your lap the third time you crossed your overlong legs in that pleated skirt). I scan the room for Brown Tooth, and when I’m sure it’s clear, I snag my score.
To become you, I need your social security number and a birthday. All your wallet contains is one black credit card that reads Henry Lovecraft and a school ID. I tuck the credit card in my sock and lean into the carrel, cupping your ID in my hands, which stink like something bad inside me is seeping out. I try to stay clean. It’s easy not to look like a street kid if you’re halfway clean, but the soap dispenser in the girls’ room has been empty for days.