I hadn’t thought of that. “Somewhere better” is all I can come up with.
She rubs her eyes and wakes up more; then she looks over at Rob. “I don’t know,” she says.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? I’m getting you out of here. Come on.”
“But what about you,” she whispers back. “Rob told me you need the drugs. You’ll just come back without me later and keep everything for yourself.”
I can’t tell her it’s not true. It probably is. But I just know I have to get her out. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” I say. “Come on. You shouldn’t be here.”
She looks at me for another second that stretches on and on and on. Half of her is with me out the door; the other half’s stuck in a habit, poured into a groove, curled up here with Rob. I can practically see the line traced down the middle of her. I know if I say anything it could push her either way. I just stare back at her. I don’t look away.
Finally she whispers “Okay” and starts to lift herself up. My whole chest fills with relief.
I’m still crouched down, squatting, and she leans on my shoulder to stand. I lose my balance; the bottle drops out of my pocket and clinks on the concrete floor. I flinch. Rob’s up right away.
He doesn’t talk; just turns toward the noise and sees us. He can tell I didn’t come back here to work. He looks at Eeyore’s zipped-up backpack and the blankets thrown off, and heads right in our direction. Eeyore crouches down, knees tucked into her chest. I start to get up, moving slow so Rob won’t pounce. I squat on my heels, one hand back toward Eeyore and the other held out in front of me like Critter when he was trying to calm me down. I smile. “It’s cool, man,” I say.
He doesn’t care. “You’re not taking her,” he says.
I’ve had this hot feeling beneath the middle of my chest since Hollywood, right above the sick. Now it hammers like a heartbeat, hard enough to move my skin. I stop worrying about whether or not I’m going to turn around; I’m moving now, on a highway headed somewhere I can’t stop. I swallow hard. “Fuck you I’m not,” I say.
I’ve always kept up my end of the trade-off with Rob, known the rules and stayed inside them. With guys like him, as long as you do that you’re pretty much safe, and as soon as you stop it they snap. Eeyore’s foot moves away from my hand; I hear cloth scrape on concrete. I glance over my shoulder, see her huddled in the corner, as far away as she can get without running. I slide sideways in front of her, scoop the bottle up and slide it back into my pocket too fast for Rob to see.
He’s right above me now, breath sour: I can smell it even from down on the floor. Sweat rides his forehead like a wave; his face reddens. Eeyore presses back against the wall. She’s never seen him mad. I stand up, blocking him.
He pauses for a second, weighing whether to push me or tell me to move. I almost shove him to the side and run, but I stop: I don’t know what he keeps in his pocket, and by the time I could grab Eeyore he might hurt both of us. I have to do something, though, or else he’ll just push past me to Eeyore and that’ll be it.
Before he can move I reach my hand down, slip my finger in his belt loop, pull him toward me. I hold him there, his zipper pressed against my stomach; I blink my eyes up at him slow, turn them into magnets, curl my lip into a smirk. I’ve done it so many times I can slip it on like clothes. It always works: they never see the sick beneath that face, or the nauseous, or the hate. All I have to do is slide my tongue across my teeth and they think it’s the truth.
In my head I say to Eeyore, Run. I say it so loud it hurts inside my ears but she doesn’t hear me, just stays stuck to the concrete wall, curled in around herself, too scared to move. I pull Rob closer, finger locked in his jeans, buying time; his eyes dart back and forth from me to Eeyore, speeding up, and then they fix on me. I can tell he half knows what I’m doing and it makes him mad, but he still likes it. I lick my lips. He gets that lost-animal look I know from Critter and so many other guys, when they can’t tell whether to fuck you or hit you. Really they want both at once, but they think they have to choose. And the hit her wraps the fuck her like a rope, pulls tight enough to make their brains go red like tied-up flesh; they keep trying to untie that rope inside their heads when really all they want is it to pull until it cuts the circulation off. That’s what that look is. You usually wind up getting the punch in the face.
He yanks away and hits me. For a second everything is black and sharp and wide and I almost fall backward, but my hand stays in my pocket on the glass.
I stagger forward, squinting through the spots in my eyes; when I get close enough I raise my arm and bring the bottle down across his cheek. It opens like a faucet. It’s amazing how much faces bleed. He clutches his hand to the cut and blood pours through his fingers, soaking the floor. Now I say it out loud. “Run,” I yell at Eeyore. “Get the fuck out of here.”
She’s still standing there, holding on to her backpack like it’s her only friend. “Are you coming?” she says. “I’m only going if you come with me.”
I don’t answer. I just grab her by the hand and drag her out.
Outside we run until we’re winded, past beige houses and the minivans. The whole time I keep her hand in mine, tight around her little fingers, afraid of where I’ll end up if I let go. When we cross the 101 and come up to Cahuenga she looks south toward Hollywood, all the places that we know. She slows down for a second, not knowing anyplace else to go, but I pull her arm and steer us past the turn and we keep moving east.
The roads start to slant up and curve, and we end up in those hills I always watch from the smog-cloaked highway, thick with palm trees and juniper, bougainvillea and figs. It’s green here and we wind up through the hairpin streets, passing signs for roads I’ve never heard of, dodging too-big cars snapped fast around corners, stumbling to the curb just in time. Where the hills get really steep the houses stop: the ground’s too sharp to build anything solid on, too rough to pour foundations, settle in. It’s just wild, the way that it’s supposed to be, snake vines strangling the cottonwoods, orange sand and gravel, broken glass. We turn off the street and scramble over wire fence and up the hill, tearing through the yucca like some kind of desert jungle, watching for poison ivy and burglar alarms, and the dust washes up on our jeans and turns us brown, and the hill’s so steep it’s almost like a mountain, and we climb, Eeyore and me, scraping our palms on the rocks and staying together.
When we get to the top we finally stop, panting, and the city spills out, water below us. The sun’s hot enough to burn off the smog and you can see between the branches all the way to the ocean, mountains ringed around the city like a moat, cars pulsing through highways like blood. Eeyore’s palm sweats into the lines in mine, and I can feel how soft the skin of her hand still is. I look at her; she doesn’t notice. Still catching her breath, she’s watching the canyon, her eyes little-kid wide at the hugeness of it.
“I used to come up here,” she says. “Before Brian . . . moved in. My dad would bring me up here after school and teach me the names of all the flowers. We used to live right down”—she squints and points with her free hand— “there.” I follow her finger down the other side of the hill to the house we broke into six months ago, white with a rust-colored roof, so close you can almost make out the doorway. “Or I mean, I used to. They still live there. I’m the only one that’s gone.”
The brand-new street-kid shell she’s grown is still fragile as a robin’s egg, too thin to hold the wet that’s welling up behind it. When she breathes out it starts streaking down her face and then she doubles over, fast, like someone knocked the wind from her. Suddenly she’s sobbing: tears hitting the orange dirt, turning it brown.
I crouch down next to her, breathe into her dirty purple hair. It’s weird to see a person cry—I can’t remember when the last time was—and even weirder to hold them while they do it. Her bones knock up against mine. She’s tiny beneath her sweatshirt. I don’t think I was ever that small.
After a minut
e the sobs slow down; she stops jerking in my arms so I don’t have to hold on so tight. All of a sudden my hands feel sharp and clumsy on her little body. She looks up at me, eyes shot through with red, chest caved in with the kind of tired that’s so huge you can’t let yourself feel it or else you’ll collapse. She’s so tiny. And I see it: it’s not just Rob she needs to get away from. She can’t do this.
“You’re going home,” I tell her.
Her eyes flash fast and hot with fear, but there’s something else behind them: a thing sort of like hope, or relief, or some other feeling I don’t really know the name of. Blood floods my face. “Listen.”
I make my eyes focused and straight, steady them on her. If I pause it’ll open up a hole she could fall into, so I talk fast. “You have to tell. Here’s what you do: you bring your dad up here and tell him what Brian did and that he has to make him leave. You just say it, just like that. Fuck Linda. Okay? Fuck Brian too. You don’t have to be out here anymore. You can go back home. You have to. It’s not safe out here for you.”
She looks up at me like some kind of baby animal waiting to get fed. She’s been hungry for too long, though; she’s not sure there’s food. She doesn’t talk.
“It’s hard out here, right?” I pick it back up, pull her along. I have to or she’ll fall. “Really fucking hard.” Her face answers yes. I nod. “Yeah. It’s too hard for you. You’re not like me; you don’t belong out here.”
It’s funny: the tougher she fights, the younger she sounds. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You don’t know what’s back there.”
“Yes. I do.” It comes out soft and still. “And there’s a million Brians out here. Down there, there’s only one.”
She breaks my gaze and glues her eyeballs to the dust. Shakes her head. “I can’t do it. I can’t.” Her chest hitches and her voice turns wet. “I can’t go back. They’re not gonna believe me.” There’s no question mark, but she’s asking.
“How do you know that? Have you tried?” It comes out hard. As soon as it’s out of my mouth I almost laugh—not like I tried. Not like I told. Not like I took my sister with me. I push it away. Eeyore’s different.
“I already know! Squid and I broke in. Linda caught us and he told her. She said he was lying.”
All of a sudden my breath goes shallow, panic flashes through. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m lying and they won’t believe her. Maybe I should have left her where at least she had a roof. The thought burrows like a drill into my chest but I think It’s too late now. I’ve brought her halfway; I can’t leave her out here. And I can’t let her go back there. If it’s a lie I have to tell it. “But what about your dad? You never told him, right?” I say it with a question mark, but I’m not asking.
She opens her mouth to argue. I steel myself to fight back. It glints in my eyes, and when she sees it she folds in a flash. I’m so much harder than her, so much further down, and she is so, so tired. She breathes out and starts to cry again and shakes her head No. Now she’s in my hands. I run with it.
“Okay, listen,” I say, breathing in, making myself believe I’m pointing her the right way. Like hope, or faith or something, where you don’t really know it’s true but you reach for it anyway: you have to, just keep reaching out till your hands close around it. It’s so long since I’ve believed anything I can hardly remember how. “You have to try. I mean it. If you don’t, you’re gonna die out here.” That part I know.
“Come on.” I make my voice as solid as I can and stand up, holding out my hand. She’s clutching that backpack for dear life, face streaked, cheeks hot, eyes shining. Wind and traffic rustle through the bougainvillea. My lungs swell to hold the whole city, ten tons of purple smog, freeways reaching out like veins, like branches, like my hand stretching toward hers, waiting to see if she’ll reach back and take it.
She does.
I pull her up, brush the dust from her jeans, wipe her face with the bottom of my tank top. I pry the backpack from her grip and put it on her shoulders. Then I hold them hard and look into her face.
“Can you do it?” The sun stretches out between us, hot, sticking our shirts to our skins and our skins to each other.
She nods. “Yeah,” she says.
I wrap her hand in mine as we make our way down the other side of the hill, through the flowers she knows all the names of. “Tell me the names,” I tell her. “It’ll make you braver,” and she does. Agave, jimsonweed, jacaranda. Hibiscus, matilija poppy, phlox. Remembering the things she knows. Laurel sumac. Sage. She names them all as we skid down the steep dirt, keep each other from falling, past the heaped-up dangling jade plants, through the cactus and the thorns.
When we get to the asphalt she leads the way.
Fifty yards from the green-painted doorway I stop and turn to her, sweat and blood streaking my cheeks, and then pull her in, press my lips to her forehead, smooth like mine might’ve been some time I can only almost remember. I want to keep her here, with me, but more than that I want to keep her safe, and I know that those are two separate places, as close and far apart from one another as this sidewalk and that house. I spin her around, turn her back to me and push her forward, and she walks, pulling the key out of her pocket, and when she puts it in the lock and cracks the door my sick gets swallowed up by something bigger, and this place I’ve never been before feels more like home than anything I’ve ever known.
Acknowledgments
Almost Home began as an entirely private pursuit, written bit by bit, in secret, between acting and playwriting jobs—simply because these kids took up residence in my head and heart and decided to stay. It could never have become an actual book without the help and support of many wonderful people.
I’d like to thank Margaret Cardillo, my fabulous editor, for taking a risk and helping bring these kids to life with such enormous enthusiasm, commitment, and skill; and Joe Veltre, my agent, for being thoroughly lovely to work with, and for guiding me through the process of getting my first novel out into the world with great insight, intelligence, and a reassuringly steady hand. Everyone at Hyperion has been a joy to work with; I am enormously grateful for all their expertise and support. I’d also like to thank several people who helped shepherd this book through various stages of its development: Greer Hendricks at Atria, for reading some of these stories in a very young form and doing me the enormous favor of helping them to find representation; Michelle Tessler, for believing in the stories early on and offering the invaluable suggestion that they should weave together into a novel; Les Plesko at UCLA, for bringing it into the present tense; Allison Heiny, for generously helping me to navigate the YA universe; and Sarah Self at Gersh, for seeing the possibilities in this story and helping it develop into whatever form it might take next.
Leslie Garis read the manuscript deeply and closely; her input and willingness to engage so fully were indispensable and inspiring. Natasha Blank—with her precocious intelligence and big heart—helped me stay true to these kids’ young yet wise voices; April Yvette Thompson provided her customary unfailing barometer of emotional truth. Nick Hallett and Casey Kait, my two oldest closest artist friends, have shaped this book and all the other work I’ve made in ways far too many to count. I’m so grateful to have had their brilliant, specific, and hilarious sensibilities around to inform, intertwine with, and influence mine for the last almost-fifteen years. Jason Helm, my writing soulmate and emotional twin, has guided, grounded, expanded, developed, and deepened these characters, their stories, and each and every sentence that helps tell them. I never knew I could share a language with someone the way I do with him; my process and work wouldn’t be what they are without his writing, his spirit, and his friendship.
I cannot say enough times how incredibly grateful I am to my parents, Art and Donna Blank. I feel so blessed to have been raised lovingly in a creative household by cool and interesting and conscious parents, and I owe the fact that I am even able to do things like write books in
the first place largely to them. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
And finally, I want to thank my amazing husband, Erik Jensen. Making work with him taught me how to tell a story; living with him teaches me, every day, how to love. I am continually astonished that I get not only a hilarious, kind, inspiring best friend whom I’m madly in love with, but a brave, brilliant, and truth-telling artist who collaborates with me, supports me in my own work, is constantly spilling over with a gazillion ideas, and always helps me to do better. Thank you, Erik, for being my home.
Author’s Note
The kids in Almost Home are fictional, but unfortunately, their situation isn’t. More than 1.5 million teens in America run away each year—joined by at least a million “throwaways,” kids who are kicked out or abandoned by their parents. Teens often wind up homeless after years of abuse, neglect, and/or family struggles with addiction; many bounce around in foster homes for years before winding up on the streets. And once they’re out there, they are incredibly vulnerable. If you’re homeless and a kid, it can be very difficult to do the things—like go to school and get a job—that will enable you to survive. Many homeless kids are too young to work a job legally, and often wind up being forced to sell drugs, or to exchange sex for food, clothes, or shelter.
Living on the streets is hard. Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are three times as high among runaway youth; at least sixty percent of homeless kids are believed to be victims of serious physical or sexual abuse. Forty-one percent of teens on the street have been abandoned by their parents or guardians. Thirty-five to fifty percent of homeless youth identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; the vast majority of these kids have been kicked out of their homes just for being who they are.
There are dedicated people out there committed to helping homeless teens survive—but the problem is huge and resources are few. If this issue is something you care about, please consider volunteering at a shelter or drop-in center, or working to raise awareness about the struggles of homeless teens. Write to your representatives, or get active in your area.
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