Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow Page A

behind the window of the fourth floor, assembled like dolls, watching me, Blue’s hands against the glass.
    My mother rounds the corner.
    I have to run to catch up with her. I start to say what Casper and I rehearsed. I try to make it sound believable, because I know what the alternative is. “I’m going to follow rules, Ma. Whatever you want. Get a job and stuff, okay?”
    She stops so abruptly I crash into her shoulder. I’m almost as tall as she is now, which isn’t saying much. We’re both small.
    She holds out the envelope. “Here, this is your stuff, bus ticket, birth certificate, all that shit.”
    I don’t understand. “What?”
    I don’t take the envelope, so she grabs my hand and curls my fingers around the edges. “This is as far as I go, Charlotte. You’ve got everything you need in there, okay?”
    “I thought…I thought I was going home. With you.”
    As she smokes, I see how dry her hands are, how chapped. She takes a last pull from her cigarette, crushes it under her sneakers.
    I sneak a look at her, at the slight bump on the bridge of her nose. The nose I broke with a pan. Her mouth wobbles as she watches the cars slip past in the street. She won’t look at me and I can’t look at her for too long.
    There is so much broken between us. My eyes blur.
    “Your friend Mike came by late last night. We all know it’s not gonna work out, you with me, or you in some freaking teen halfway house. That’s not you, Charlotte. I don’t know what
is
you, but
I’m
not it, and I’m pretty sure some curfewed house isn’t it. Mike’s mom bought you a bus ticket to Arizona. You’ll stay in his apartment down there. He says he’ll help you.”
    She roots for another cigarette in her pocket. “He left a letter for you. You’ll be alone for a little bit, until he gets back from his trip. I guess he roadies for some band? Mike’s the good kind, Charlotte. Try not to fuck anything up.”
    So Mikey did do something after he got my message. I’m not going to live with my mother. I’m getting on a goddamn bus. To the goddamn desert. Far, far away from Fucking Frank, from the goddamn river, from all of this.
    I’m so happy and so scared and so confused I don’t know what to do.
    Slowly, my hands trembling, I open the envelope and rifle through the bus ticket, my old ID, my birth certificate. There’s a folded-up letter—that must be from Mikey—and something that makes my heart jump.
    A rubber-banded stack of cash wrapped in Saran wrap. I stare at the cash, gradually realizing what it is. “How…how did you get this?”
    My mother inhales deeply on her cigarette. “Eleanor’s mother found it a while ago. They’re selling the house and moving out west. To be closer to her. She’s in Idaho, you know.”
    Paris, London, Iceland. Just, anywhere. Ellis and I mowed people’s lawns, we helped Mrs. Hampl over on Sherburne clean out her garage. That was hard and took a long time. She was some sort of writer and had all kinds of files with news clippings and old magazines. We tried anything to earn money.
    “Judy thought you should have it.”
    I slide it into the pocket of the peacoat and quickly swipe at my eyes. I don’t want her to see me cry.
    Something catches in my throat—
sorrysorrysorrysorryImissyou
—but it stays there, tucked and quiet. My mother says, “I have to go now, Charlotte. I have to be somewhere.”
    She starts to walk away but turns suddenly, wrapping her arms around me so tight I can’t breathe and so tight I see red rings around the puffy clouds, and then she presses her mouth against my ear.
    She whispers, “Don’t you think this isn’t freaking breaking my heart.”
    Then she’s gone, and my body grows cold, cold, as I stand there, on the corner of Riverside and Twenty-Second, the emptiness of the world so large, and so small, all at once. The Greyhound station is a long walk. I don’t even know what time it is.
    I stare down at the ticket. Departure: Minneapolis,