Almost Home by Jessica Blank Page A

is hot and prickly but I say “Nothing.”
    He finishes with the dog and goes “I bet Critter and Eeyore are at Winchell’s. Let’s get some donuts,” and gets up. Just like that. The whole way to Winchell’s he doesn’t say anything, and I feel like I’m keeping a big secret from him even though we both know the same things.
    Since that night it’s been different and almost exactly the same. Eeyore hangs on Critter’s neck, and we four sleep back in the alleys and eat two-day-old donuts, and Squid sits with me to spange, and grins and buys me food when he’s got cash. But he doesn’t touch me again, and he never says anything about that night. I guess I feel like I can’t either. Every day I spend beside Squid on the sidewalk I can feel my insides lock more into place with his, fitting up perfect like a brand-new puzzle, and so my secrets stretch out past my skin, out there unarmored in the hot air of Hollywood, and I don’t want to point them out to him if he can’t already see. I’m pretty sure it’s not the same for him. Which means that there are lots of things I’ll always have to never say.
    But I still don’t get how you can touch someone and act afterward like it didn’t ever happen, like you’re still just two separate people, the same safe pocket of air swelled up between you. When Squid and I are waiting for our food to come up at Benito’s I watch him watch it cook and I think: I know what your breath feels like. I wonder if he ever thinks that about me.

squid
    i don’t know how the fuck it got so noisy around here. The last few weeks it seemed so quiet: with Critter here, plus Eeyore and Rusty, I finally was sleeping every night. Critter’d mumble stoned and drunk, Eeyore’d babble through her dreams, Rusty breathed out through his skinny chest and all of it was like a lullaby. But Critter and Eeyore left two days ago to unload junk, and when I came back today with breakfast Rusty wasn’t there.
    So tonight they’re gone and I’m alone again and the less people there are around me the louder it all seems to get. Trucks drag by sounding like whole factories, creeping up then peaking and fading away, and I try to imagine they’re waves crashing but the metal grinds against itself too hard for me to believe it’s water. The hookers scream at each other half in Spanish, voices screechy like a girl’s but loud and deep like guys. You can never tell if they’re laughing or about to stab each other.
    The sounds don’t come and go; they add up, and closing my eyes just makes it worse. In the inside of my head they turn into a million-petaled metal flower, or a herd of butterflies beating at the inside of my skull. I can feel every single cell of skin and hair on me, crawling. After a while the noise from outside doesn’t even matter anymore: it’s all inside. I count the stars to calm down, but they double up, start multiplying too. There’s too many of everything everywhere and I can’t keep track.
    I get this feeling when I’m by myself too much.
    Ever since I was a kid I had it. As far back as I can remember once my mom got too tweaked out to keep on running from my dad, and I started getting passed around to strangers. The feeling’s like a rash. Right at the edge of my skin, except inside my mind.
    Annabelle made it go away for a while, in Arizona and all the way out here. The quiet came from a place I didn’t even know I remembered. I met her when we were both fifteen. I’d been floating around in foster homes for seven years and dropped out of school for two. She was reading fucking Beowulf for English. I fell right in love with her chopped-up hair and inky hands and faded bruises and made her skip class every day. It took ten months to get her to realize that if she ran away from her asshole dad and the leaky roof he kept above her head the world wouldn’t end, it might even get better, but finally I did, and we took off on the trains. It was me and her and Germ in the