by Chloe Garner
Magda shook her hand and started off after Paul. Lizzie watched her for a minute, then began her way back to the building.
At least now she had a little money.
***
Or so she thought.
She walked to a bank downtown to cash the check, and the woman asked for her account number.
“I don’t have one,” Lizzie said. The teller gave her a friendly smile.
“Would you like to open one? You could use the check as your first deposit. We don’t cash checks for non-customers.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said. “Let’s open an account.”
“Great,” the woman said, tapping on her keyboard. “I just need your ID and proof of address.”
Lizzie deflated.
“I don’t have proof of address.”
The woman gave her a bright smile.
“Not a problem. You just need a utility bill or something addressed to you at your address, and then we can open an account.”
She looked like that was supposed to be the end of the conversation.
“Let’s say I can’t get that,” Lizzie said. Same bright smile.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s federal law.”
Lizzie drew a long breath.
“So what would you recommend I do?”
There was a bit of a conspiratorial look.
“Let me take a look at that check. If the account holder happens to be a customer here, I can cash it against her account, no problem.”
Lizzie handed it to her, and she tapped on her keyboard cheerfully for another moment.
“Nope,” she said.
“So…?” Lizzie prompted.
“You could call her, if you wanted, and see where she banks,” the woman said. “Her phone number is on the check.”
“What are my other options?” Lizzie asked.
The woman rolled her eyes up and to the side.
“There’s a check-cashing place down the street, if you really have to do that, but all you need to open an account is a piece of mail…”
“Thank you,” Lizzie said, feeling humiliated and lost.
She’d opened her first bank account when she was six. Diligently saved into it until she was eighteen, at which point college had wiped out her savings, but she’d kept the account. It was at a west-coast bank, as far as she could tell, so she couldn’t use it here, but the idea that this would be hard… It had never occurred to her.
She started walking the direction the woman had indicated.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to her.
She had a degree.
She was homeless, eating out of dumpsters, and using payday lenders to cash checks.
Humiliated.
As she walked home with her $72.62, she at least had the cash to go into a convenience store and buy another loaf of bread and a five-pound bag of apples.
Soon.
She’d keep the rest of it if she could, and she’d save up for an apartment. She needed to start looking at rates and what she would need for a down-payment. The idea of saving up for a down-payment on an apartment on $70 a week was overwhelming enough that she nearly cried, but she would do it.
She had a plan, and it would work.
It was just going to take patience.
She braced herself for the abandoned building, going up to the roof to find the hooligans who were there and leaving the bag of apples next to the loaf of bread on a clean-ish spot away from the door, then taking an apple and going to stand at a corner, huddled against the breeze.
“Did you steal them?” Slug asked.
“No,” Lizzie said. “I bought them.”
“How?” he asked.
“I worked today,” Lizzie said.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Slug said.
“And yet, I’m going to,” Lizzie answered. “If you want an apple, you should go get one.”
He looked like there was an issue of honor at stake, but it didn’t last, and he darted away to get an apple and came back, standing against the half-wall with her.
It was standing there as the sun set that she realized things were glowing.
Buildings and people and cars and roads. Stronger and less and less and less, until the building where she stood glowed not at all. It was subtle, like something she wasn’t actually seeing with her eyes, but it was there, all the same. She thought about asking Slug about it, but she didn’t think he’d answer her. His eyes appeared to be rolled back in his head as he ate the apple.
She needed a cell phone. Even if it was just a pay-as-you-go event, she needed something she could use to stay in touch with Magda, if she was going to be presentable at all as a professional. She needed to wash her clothes - desperately - and her hair and her face, while she was at it. A whole shower would do her a universe of good.
She would get there.
For now, she needed to work on Slug and the rest of them. If they were going to ever feel safe, they were going to need to trust her.
And then, you know, she needed to not die.
“We’re supposed to be a team,” she said.
“What?” Slug asked. She looked at him.
“You can tell, can’t you? That we are?”
He shrugged, not answering. She nodded.
“There are two sides, and you and I are on the same team. I’m supposed to be the team leader, and you’re supposed to be the one who does the leadership while we’re in the middle of a battle, because I can’t. The same way Blister is supposed to lead the other side, because Zee and I have different jobs.”
“We’re all on the same side,” Slug said and Lizzie nodded.
“At the end, yeah, it’s us against the furlings. But the way we do it. You can tell, and I know you can.”
He shrugged.
“You know what you’re supposed to be doing,” Lizzie said. “I can tell that, too. But Zee just upsets the entire thing and it can’t work. It doesn’t mean you aren’t doing the right thing.”
“Not well enough,” he said.
“That’s Zee’s fault, not you,” Lizzie said.
“I hate them,” Slug said. “I hate them so much. They ruin everything.”
“What do they ruin?” Lizzie asked, and he tried to turn away, but she grabbed his shoulder.
“Talk to me, Slug. What do they ruin?”
“Well, they’re going to kill you, for one,” he said, shaking his head.
“Haven’t yet,” Lizzie answered, sounding a lot more confident than she felt. “What else?”
He shrugged. Agitated. He was trying to get away. There had been that moment, like Robbie at the top of the gorge, feeling everything out, in a role that fit and was comfortable, but it didn’t last.
“I met a kid yesterday,” she said. “Named Paul. He can see them.”
Slug spun to look at her.
“You can’t bring him here.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lizzie said. “A high school kid’s got no business being here, and we both know it.”
Slug shook his head harder.
“You can’t let Zee know,” he whispered.
“I won’t,” Lizzie said, and Slug grabbed at her hands, missing.
“Don’t tell Zee,” he hissed.
“Why?” Lizzie asked. Slug looked around quickly, scrambling toward the far corner of the roof and beckoning for her to follow. She did, kneeling next to him as he sat.
“He loves new hooligans,” Slug whispered.
“What does that mean?” Lizzie asked. Slug shook his head, faster and faster.
“Loves them the way a dog loves a rat.”
“I don’t understand,” Lizzie said. Slug put his hand down on the roof and leaned out closer to her.
“Have you ever seen a dog play with a rat?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“They throw it in the air over and over again, and the rat tries to get away, but it can’t because the dog keeps throwing it and when it lands, it doesn’t know which way to
run. So the dog catches it and throws it again, just to listen to it squeak.”
Lizzie thought that a cat with a mouse might have done just as well, for an image, but she couldn’t fault Slug for associating Zee with dogs more than cats.
“I don’t want him here any more than you do,” Lizzie said. “I want him to have a life and a job and friends and a family.”
Slug leaned back against the wall, looking away.
“You had those, once, didn’t you? Friends? Family?”
He shook his head.
“I’ve always been Slug.”
“No,” she said. “I know better, and so do you.”
He rolled his head to look at her, eyes pained.
“Why do you ask?” he asked. “You know I can’t have them. I’m a hooligan. We don’t get nice things like that.”
“My brother did,” Lizzie said. “He married the angel. They lived in a house.”
“Your brother is a hooligan?” Slug asked, and she nodded.
“He is.”
Slug rubbed his pitifully skinny arms.
“I had a sister, once.”
“I bet you still do,” Lizzie answered.
He snorted.
“They kicked me out for drugs.”
“I think a lot of hooligans end up on drugs,” she said. “It doesn’t help.”
He looked at her with his very first sharp expression.
“What do you know?”
“I know that you lost your family over them,” she said. “But I also expect that they still love you, and they hope that you’re okay.”
He laughed bitterly.
“I’m not. I’m here. Waiting for Zee to kill me.”
“What if it could be different?” Lizzie asked. “What if you could call them and tell them you’re okay?”
He shook his head.
“Hooligans don’t have family. They have each other.”
She wrinkled her nose at that.
“I don’t believe that. I know that the furlings follow you and that you think that being around your family is dangerous, and maybe it is, but I think you could still stay in touch.”
He looked at her with a familiar sense of despair.
“How? I eat maybe every other day.”
“I’m going to fix that,” Lizzie said. Lara had managed it. Maybe she had had some help and maybe she hadn’t, but she’d done it. If Lara could do it, Lizzie could do it. “What would you do, if I could get you a cell phone that you could use? Just yours.”
He shook his head.
“You can’t do that.”
She shrugged.
“What if I could?”
He looked away, fingers playing over a very skinny apple core.
“I’d call,” he said, and she nodded.
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
He sighed without looking at her, and she stood, taking it as agreement.
Life was tough.
He couldn’t afford to believe she was going to make it any better.
She got that.
***
Over the next few days, Zee showed up and dragged them all to battles all but one of them. Lizzie was exhausted from not sleeping at night, but she put up the strongest defense she could, despite Zee’s overwhelming advantage. One by one, she watched him knock down glittering, glowing buildings full of order and promise and production like there was nothing she could do about it.
And all of the signs said he was right.
There was nothing she could do about it. He was stronger than her by such an avalanche of power that her own gains over the course of those days didn’t even bring her pride or hope. He was simply out of her league, and he was right - something was going to tip her over the edge of surviving versus not surviving long before she got strong enough to compete.
He nearly killed two more hooligans, and she started to realize that this was a common occurrence for them. They really were all just hanging out just waiting to die. When she was able to find a good, bright seam of power, she could pull them onto it and it apparently chased whatever furlings they’d absorbed out of them, but she realized after one day when she failed to rescue Rat that she was taking them on. That was the only night that week that she slept, and she slept next to a seizing, comatose woman, as Rat worked her way through the furlings.
Slug wouldn’t talk to her very much, anymore, and she tried reaching out to some of the other hooligans, but they were all cagey. The assumption that she would die long before she was of any use to them permeated every interaction. No one wanted to talk to her; no one even considered her plans or her promises. She spent more money on food, just because everything she bought disappeared so quickly, and she spent several more days out hunting dumpster fare with Rat, who at least didn’t appear to hate her.
The day before her second appointment with Paul, she started visiting apartment buildings and asking for their lease terms. Several of them turned her away, but she did get quotes at a few others. Rent was much, much lower than she’d expected, but still hopelessly out of reach. She needed new clothes, if just to have ones that would be warm enough to survive the winter, and she was down to twenty dollars of last week’s money, after what she’d spent on food.
She washed up for her appointment with Paul as best she could, hoping that Magda would continue to be understanding, given Lizzie’s explanation of how she spent her time, but, looking in the mirror, Lizzie would have been completely understanding if the woman had taken her son and turned around and left.
Makeup only helped so much.
She sat on the same bench at the park, and Paul showed up first, at a run, sitting down next to her.
“Tell me how to make the visions stop,” he said.
“I can’t,” Lizzie answered. “Those you can’t fix.”
He frowned.
“It’s not so bad, when you know it’s real. I asked a girl out to Homecoming and she said yes.”
Lizzie smiled.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“And my therapist says that I’m in a much better frame of mind this week.”
“Are you?” Lizzie asked, and he laughed.
“That’s what she would say,” he said. “Oh, Mom has a question for you.”
“Oh?” Lizzie said, turning her head to follow Paul’s look. Magda approached and handed Lizzie a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” Lizzie asked, looking at it.
“That’s a list of the people in Paul’s group session who want to meet you,” Magda said. Paul laughed.
“She’s been selling you. Says you did what six months of pills couldn’t.”
“I didn’t do anything magic,” Lizzie said.
“You gave him hope,” Magda said, giving Paul a slightly-dark look. “I didn’t know you could hear me.”
“Sometimes, I listen,” he said in a sort of teasing tone. Lizzie looked at the list, overwhelmed.
“I’m not a therapist, Magda,” she said. “I have a special understanding of what’s going on with Paul, but I can’t help, outside of that.”
“Just meet them,” Magda said. “You only took a minute in the elevator to know you could help Paul. I saw it. Just meet them, and maybe you can help some of them, too.”
Paul was watching her hard, and she sighed.
“They’ll pay you, of course,” Magda said. “And they all agreed to meet you here based on your availability.”
Lizzie bit her lip.
“I won’t meet with anyone that I don’t think I can help,” she said. Magda shrugged.
“Paul is a new kid, this week. Doing things and talking to people. He hasn’t been like that in months. I don’t care if he gets any better from here at all. I have my son back. These parents are willing to try anything to get that. Just meet with them.”
Lizzie sighed again.
“Okay. But I’m not making any promises.”
Magda gave her a patronizing look.
“No one ever does.”
>
***
She met with more than a dozen families over the next two weeks. She wouldn’t let anyone pay her unless she could help, and she sent most of them away, sad that she wasn’t actually offering a treatment for a mental disease and she couldn’t help them, but she discovered that two other members of Paul’s circle of treatment were able to see furlings. Giselle was quiet and withdrawn, but she seemed to be that way by nature. Han was loud and outspoken and opinionated and told her that she was wrong most every time she said anything. Lizzie had much better success with Giselle than Han, but on a Saturday afternoon, she met all three of them at the park at once, with their parents having coffee about a block away, and she let the three of them sit and talk about the world in the real context of furlings running around in it.
“I mean, he was seriously on my gym teacher’s back, just… sitting there,” Han said. “And I wanted to throw something at him, but I’ve done that before and I got suspended, so I didn’t, but… man.”
“I see them all the time,” Giselle murmured. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You ignore them,” Paul said. By virtue of being three weeks ahead of either of them, he’d taken a sort of paternal role that Lizzie had to try very hard not to smile about. “No one else knows they’re there, so you can’t look at them, and you can’t do anything about them. It takes practice, but I’m getting better.”
“That’s stupid,” Han said. “I can do whatever I want.”
“Everything you do has consequences,” Lizzie said, not wanting to interrupt but also not wanting to put the burden of negative feedback on Paul.
“Whatever,” Han said.
Lizzie didn’t fight with him. Giselle was happier, Paul was happy, and Han was doing something other than making vague threats, and they’d only met with her a few times apiece. This was beyond her wildest expectations. They talked for a while longer, then Paul looked at her.
“When can we meet the rest of them?”
“The rest of who?” Han asked, and Giselle straightened slightly.
“Not yet,” Lizzie said. That was a lot less of a positive part of her life, right now. Zee was still trying to kill her, and the hooligans still didn’t expect her to live. The battles were getting worse, if anything, because her power expansion just pushed Zee to punish her more for it, and then yell at her for how worthless she was. She didn’t think it was bothering her, yet, but she could feel that, even if the barrage didn’t manage to kill her, she was going to have a hard time staying positive for very long, around him. Nothing she’d done to help the hooligans get some space had worked, though they were eating a little better, now.
