Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow Page B

Minnesota, Arrival: Tucson, Arizona. I flip through the rest of it, the names of the cities we’ll stop in blurring in front of my eyes. The desert. When I asked Mikey to save me, he didn’t say anything for a while, then he finally typed,
On it,
and logged off.
    I’m going to the desert. I’m going to ride a bus alone across God-knows-how-many-states to be with Mikey when I’ve never been anywhere my entire life. And how am I supposed to get to the bus station? What time is it? I look back at the hospital and wonder if I should go back in, but then realize I can’t. They think I left with my mother. And what am I going to do when I get there? How long will Mikey be gone? How long will I be alone down there?
    Things are moving too quickly and I can’t breathe. I’m too hot in the peacoat.
    “Need a ride, tough girl?”
    I turn, the white van with the hospital logo idling next to me. Vinnie throws his cigarette out the window. “Get in.”
    In the van, he says, “All I know is, right now I’m on my way to pick up some anorexics on Day Pass at Mall of America, got it? I am not transporting a minor, away from her legal guardian, to an undisclosed location.” He guns the van. “Buckle up! I don’t need any dead girls in this piece of crap. Where we headed?”
    I tell him. We don’t say anything until we get to the Greyhound station. There are a few people inside, surrounded by suitcases and boxes, paper bags and plastic sacks. He fishes in the pocket of his black coat and pushes some bills into my hand.
    “I don’t ever wanna see you here again, Charlie-girl.”
    I nod, my eyes blurring with tears.
    “Everything and everybody that’s busted can be fixed. That’s what I think.” He glances at the bus station. “Now, you go in there, girlfriend, and when you get on that bus, you sit in the goddamn front, not the back. The back is badsville. Stay away. Don’t take nobody’s cigarettes if they offer, don’t take a drink unless it’s from a machine. You stay like this. Tight.” He hugs himself. “And when you get to where you going, it’s gonna be sunshine and sunny days forever, yeah? Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. I got my ways of knowing things about you girls. Now, go.” He reaches across me and nudges the door open.
    He smells like strawberry Swisher Sweets and warmed milk, like the streets and like a home.
    I breathe him in deeply, in case he is the last kind thing I will know for days, and then I get out of the van, dragging Louisa’s suitcase and my backpack behind me.

TWO

Well I’ll do anything in this godalmighty world
    If you just let me follow you down.
    —Bob Dylan, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”

The bus is a giant, lumbering monster filled with sadness and stale air. In each town, it shits us out for twenty minutes, two hours, three, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same: a diner, a convenience store, trash in the restrooms, trash in the gutters. I hide the money Vinnie gave me deep in my pockets and use it only for chocolate bars and sodas and salty chips and once an egg salad sandwich with the expiration date blacked out. The taste of chocolate in my mouth is like an explosion of bliss.
    I don’t talk to the people who sit next to me. They drift in, smelling like smoke or dirt, and then drift off at the next stop. In Kansas the bus breaks down in the middle of the night in a town where Christmas is still happening in mid-May: faded wreaths on darkened storefronts, fat lights twinkling in the window of a gas station. The woman next to me drops her chin inside the thick shell of her fake fur coat and mumbles
Blessed be
as we lurch off the bus and stand awkwardly in the lot of a boarded-up diner. The men in the back of the bus simply move their shell game outside to an alley while the driver paces and waits for help. I sit on a curb away from everyone else, still too warm in the peacoat. My ticket says we’ll drive through six states before we reach Arizona and that it