Prettiest Doll

by Gina Willner-Pardo

  “Run! ” Dan said.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” I asked, panting, thinking the word run in my head over and over, as if just thinking it would be enough to keep me going.

  More crowds. Thank God the policeman was so fat. It was probably harder for him to get around all the people. Most of them didn’t pay any attention to us, except for a lady in a bright green hat who held my gaze and asked in a loud voice, “Is this really necessary?” and a woman with a stroller who gave us a dirty look, like because we were running we had to have done something wrong and she didn’t even want us on the same sidewalk as her baby.

  Another block behind us. A bus pulled up to the curb; people grumbled and sighed, trying to board. Dan looked over his shoulder, past me, and then pulled me into the ragged line. “Pull up your hood,” he whispered. My hand felt light and empty without his in it.

  We climbed onto the bus and paid our fares. All the seats were taken. I held on to a pole and looked out the back window as we lurched into traffic. No policeman in sight. My heartbeat started to slow.

  I looked at Dan. “Oh, my Lord,” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” he whispered back.

  The bus stopped and started, taking on more passengers than it let off. I began to feel sick and told Dan. “We can’t get off yet,” he said. “Think of something else.”

  “Like what?” I asked. People who don’t get carsick never understand that nothing helps except getting back on the ground again.

  Just when I thought that I couldn’t bear it for another minute, the bus jolted still and Dan grabbed my hand again. “Excuse us, please,” he said politely, shoving us firmly toward the back door, and then we were out on the street. It was dark now, and colder, but I didn’t mind. The wind, when it blew, felt like heaven, a relief.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. The crowds were still thick, and I was tired and also hungry, the way I always am after I get over being carsick.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said. “Maybe a movie. Someplace we can hide.”

  “I have to call Uncle Bread, though,” I said. “It’s almost six. He’s going to be worried sick.”

  “We should get back to Uncle Bread’s,” I said. “It’s almost six. We said we’d be back by five.” The relief of the cold air was beginning to wear off; I was shivering.

  He pulled me out of the stream of people, over to the metal security gate in front of a closed locksmith shop. He put his hands high on my arms, holding me still so I would look at him.

  “Look,” he said. “Your uncle thought we’d be back by five. He’s probably called the police by now, which means if we go back to the apartment, he’ll have to tell them we’re there.”

  I nodded, realizing.

  “They’ll send us home,” he said. “And I can’t go back. There’s stuff I have to do.”

  I shrugged enough so he had to move his hands.

  “I don’t want to go back either,” I said.

  We stood there, staring each other down. It was the longest I’d ever looked at anyone who was looking back. I thought maybe he was going to kiss me, and while I waited I thought how there are a few moments in your life when you are one person on one side of them and another person after you’ve crossed over, and how knowing that a moment like that is about to happen makes three seconds feel like three hours. I’d had only one moment like that before: the moment when Mama woke me up early one Sunday morning and held me in her arms while she told me about Daddy crashing his semi on the 475. This moment with Dan was different because I knew ahead of time that it was happening. And also because it was a happy moment, even with running away and the policeman and feeling carsick and cold, and now I was going to get to feel how I was different before and after something happy for a change.

  But he didn’t kiss me. He let go of my arms and said, “Okay, then,” and I was still the same, still me, only a little different from what I was before: sad, let down, but not a-whole-different-person different.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” he said. “Come on. There’s Chinese across the street.”

  twelve

  AFTER we ate—lemon chicken that tasted like chicken nuggets if you order the sauce on the side, and broccoli beef for Dan—we paid for tickets to a movie I’d never heard of, just to get out of the cold. Dan paid for everything, which was a little exciting, as though it was a date. The theater was wedged in between a sneaker store and a passport-photo developer, all part of a faded brick building that was the length of the whole block. The marquee was red with faded white letters running up to down, spelling park, lit up with twinkly white lights, the whole thing looking old, from another time. Some of the twinkly lights had burned out. Inside, the lobby smelled like buttered popcorn, but we didn’t buy any because of all the Chinese food.

  We sat in the middle of a row, close to the front, even though there were only a few other people in the theater. The seats were threadbare red velvet and not very comfortable, but I could tell as the previews started that I was almost asleep. It was so good to be warm and not moving, out of the wind, full of rice and chicken, with Dan, looking up in the dark.

  I came half-awake a couple of times, once to music, once to the sound of movie gunfire. Usually I love movies in a theater: I almost never get to go, because of how expensive it is. Mama says TV is just as good and cheaper. But now I didn’t even want to follow along with the story, which seemed to be about men shooting each other, running from someone. I closed my eyes and it reminded me of sleeping in my room back home, hearing the TV out in the living room, turned to the Food Network so Mama could watch cooking shows. It was comforting to fall asleep and know someone close by was still awake.

  Something jolted my eyes open: the janitors were cleaning the theater and one of them had rolled the plastic trash barrel into the aisle and let it thump to a stop. I nudged Dan awake. “What time is it?” I whispered.

  He checked his watch. I could see it said 10:20. “There’s one more show,” he whispered, “but we can’t stay here. They don’t let you stay without paying again.”

  We had sunk low in our seats so the janitors wouldn’t notice us. “I have an idea,” I said. “Just follow me out.”

  I sat up and made a big show of stretching and yawning. One of the janitors looked up from where he was vacuuming and said, “Movie’s over. You gotta leave.”

  “Yeah, we know,” I said. As we walked past him, I smiled my best pageant smile and said, “Thank you.” I wasn’t thanking him for anything in particular, but janitors like to be thanked, and old people like it when kids are polite.

  “You’re welcome, young lady,” he said.

  Out in the red-carpeted hallway, Dan whispered, “Unbelievable.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see? How people are nice to you because of the way you look?”

  “Yeah, I see.” But something about his saying it pissed me off.

  “So what’s this big idea?” Dan asked, pulling up the collar of his jacket, getting ready for the cold.

  “Go see when the last show plays,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The women’s restroom had two stalls and two sinks set in a marble-topped counter. No cupboards underneath, just bare pipes. There was a straight-backed chair with a ripped leather seat in the corner by the paper towel dispenser. I pushed open the stall doors. The toilets were the old-fashioned kind with lids and tanks. The bathroom was empty.

  I went back out into the hallway. Dan was studying a framed movie poster. “The last showing just started,” he said.

  “Come here,” I whispered, grabbing his arm and pulling him into the women’s bathroom.

  “Hey! ” He yanked his arm away. “What the hell! I can’t be in here!”

  “Shhh! Whisper! ”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I saw it in a movie once. We climb up on a toilet so our feet don’t show under the door. And stay quiet. Maybe when they close up the theater, they w
on’t know we’re in here. We can sleep here.”

  He looked as though he wanted to argue. I quickly said, “It’ll be warm.”

  “What if we get caught?”

  “They’ll give us a lecture and make us leave.”

  “What if they call the police?”

  “Nobody’s going to want to wait around for the police after midnight. It’ll be easier just to kick us out.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and I could tell he was the kind of guy who wasn’t used to doing anything wrong.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked.

  “I was thinking about riding the trains all night. Or maybe going back to the bus station.”

  “The trains will be noisy. And I don’t think bus stations are safe. Plus, we’ll stick out like sore thumbs. Someone might call the police.”

  He looked around, noticing for the first time the flowery pink wallpaper, the empty trash container.

  “Is this what all women’s bathrooms are like? Men’s rooms aren’t this clean. There are usually paper towels all over the floor.”

  “In women’s bathrooms, too. Maybe this one’s already been cleaned. Maybe no one will come back in.”

  “We should hide anyway. In case someone watching the movie wants to use it,” he said. He pushed open the door of the second stall. “We should lock ourselves in this one.”

  “It’s pretty small for both of us.”

  “Well, but we should leave one of them open. So if someone comes in, she can still use it.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. Privately, I wondered if he wanted to be close to me, or if he was really just being logical.

  It was pretty unromantic. Dan sat on the toilet tank and I sat below him on the closed lid, between his spread-apart legs. We locked the stall door. And then it just felt silly, and kind of embarrassing, being so close on a toilet.

  “It smells better in here than in men’s rooms, at least,” Dan said.

  It was embarrassing to talk about smells in a bathroom with a boy.

  “We don’t have to stay here very long. Just until the last show lets out,” I said. “It’s only another forty minutes.”

  “You know, I have to tell you,” he said, and then stopped.

  “What?”

  “Just ... you don’t seem like the kind of girl who figures out how to get locked in a movie theater for the night.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Or I wasn’t.”

  “It’s cool,” he said, “the way you figured out what to do.”

  I smiled.

  Then he said, “I thought you were the kind of girl who always got your way, on account of how you look.”

  It was a compliment, I knew. But I couldn’t help saying, “I can’t help it if I’m nice to look at. I can’t help it if I make people smile. Why is that a bad thing?”

  “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

  “Maybe it’s because I know how to look people in the eye when I talk to them. Maybe it’s because I know how to smile. Which, by the way, I learned in pageants.”

  “People should be nice to you even if you don’t know how to smile.”

  “But they’re not. Not always.”

  “Lots of people don’t like the way their teeth look. Or are shy.”

  “People can be hateful,” I said.

  We were quiet. After a bit, I heard the roar of the vacuum cleaner, first loud, then a little softer, then loud, then soft from being pushed and pulled back on the hallway carpeting. I knew we were both thinking the same thing: that if the janitors hadn’t already cleaned the women’s bathroom, we were screwed.

  “You don’t know about hateful from personal experience,” Dan said.

  “My mama is r eally fat,” I said. “I know about hateful.”

  The vacuum vroomed loud outside the bathroom door. I pulled my feet off the floor and hugged my knees close under my chin. We sat without moving, every inch of us stiff, afraid. The roaring stopped, and we heard a creak. Through the crack between the stall door and the stall, I saw the janitor poke his head into the bathroom and take a look around. I held my breath. Then, suddenly, it was dark. Not regular dark. Pitchblack, inside-of-a-closet dark.

  “He turned off the light,” Dan whispered. “Maybe everyone’s going home.”

  But we were afraid to move, in case we were wrong. “Let’s just sit awhile longer,” I said. “Just to be sure.”

  In the dark, I was suddenly aware of Dan’s legs on either side of me, his breathing above my head. It was weird to be sitting on a toilet in the dark, terrified to make a sound, terrified even to breathe, yet feeling so safe.

  I think I fell asleep. I don’t know for how long. The next thing I remember was his hand gently shaking my shoulder and him saying, “I think we’re alone. I think I heard them locking the front doors.”

  I stood up, unfolding myself like a metal card table. Dan climbed down off the toilet tank and unlocked the stall door. We tiptoed into the hallway. All the lights were out, but dim light from the street trickled in through the glass doors: we could see shadows in the front lobby.

  We looked at each other. I felt the worry drop away, like a heavy, wet coat I’d had to wear. No one would think to look for us here.

  “This is better than the bus station,” Dan said. “Free popcorn! ”

  I smiled, because it’s every kid’s dream, to be locked in somewhere you want to be anyway: an ice cream parlor, a toy store. But I knew we wouldn’t gorge ourselves on candy or popcorn. I was too tired to be hungry, and Dan was too honorable to take something that wasn’t his.

  “We should stay away from the front doors. Someone might see in,” I said. “I wonder if there are any blankets in this place.”

  We poked around a little behind the candy counter. No blankets, but there was a lost-and-found box with a couple of sweatshirts and a heavy winter parka in it. We carried the box to the auditorium and spread the sweatshirts on the carpeting at the wide spot in the aisle where people in wheelchairs could sit. We sat on the sweatshirts and Dan pulled the parka open and over us both. “To stay warm,” he said. “They probably turned the heat off. It’ll probably get cold later on.”

  We lay down under the coat, which smelled like someone else at first, and then stopped smelling like anything and was just something warm that covered us both. I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, which I knew was flat but which, in the darkness, began to look like an arched, black sky. I stared into it, imagining stars, the smudgy, faraway redness of Mars, a crescent of moon. And then I wasn’t imagining it: I saw galaxies of stars, and smelled wet grass, and could just make out the shadowy shapes of trees, their leaves shielding all the birds from view. They would wait until dawn to sing.

  It was still dark when I woke up, achy from the hard floor. Dan was on his side facing me, his arm thrown over me. I just lay there, wondering if his arm lying like that was an accident or not, and, after a while, I knew without looking that he was awake, too, watching me.

  “Did I snore?” I whispered.

  “No,” he said, without moving his arm.

  “Should we get up?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  I slept some more. The next time I woke, I knew it was close to morning. I was alone. He was probably in the bathroom. I stretched and felt the muscles in my back twist tight, like a towel being wrung out.

  He came back with two Milky Ways and a medium Coke. Lowering himself to the floor, he said, “I left some money on the counter.”

  I tore open one of the candy bars. “What time is it?”

  “Five thirty. I figure the theater opens around ten. The first show starts at eleven.”

  So we had a few more hours. “I don’t even want to think about going back out there,” I said. “I don’t like that feeling of being looked for.”

  I didn’t mind being looked at. Being looked for was different.

  “Do you ever think about your mama? If she’s missing you?” I asked.r />
  “I know she’s missing me,” he said. “I don’t let myself think about it.”

  “Do you think it would be different if you went back? If maybe she’s learned her lesson? If she’s ready to forget about the shots?”

  “The thing is,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe I might get the shots after all.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just a few shots,” he said.

  “After everything you’ve been through?”

  I imagined us holding hands, me looking up at him, him pulling me close as we walked, my head snuggled against his chest.

  “I haven’t decided,” he said. “It’s just something I’ve been thinking. What?” he said, seeing my face, which I knew looked disappointed.

  “I don’t know. I just think it’s weird, you changing your mind like this.”

  “I’m not allowed to change my mind?”

  I knew I wasn’t being fair. “It’s just an awful lot of trouble to put everyone through for nothing,” I said.

  “I told you to go home if you wanted. I told you! ”

  “I don’t want to go home. I want...”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want all this to be for nothing,” I said.

  “It’s my decision,” he said, crumpling the empty candy wrapper into a ball.

  I couldn’t think of an answer. It occurred to me that I really didn’t know him very well.

  “You know, that exit door probably just opens from the inside,” he said. “We don’t have to stay here. Maybe it would be safer to leave before anybody shows up.”

  “But where are we going to go?”

  “There’s something I have to do,” he said. “You can come if you want.”

  In the bathroom, washing my face, I looked in the mirror and was surprised to realize that I hadn’t looked at myself for two days. I leaned close in, really looking. I looked almost the same, just a little different in ways I wasn’t sure anyone else would notice. Maybe from being in a strange city, or running away from a policeman, or spending the night somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, or not knowing what was going to happen next. It made me think that being born a certain way is only part of how you look, that everything leaves a trace.