Almost Home by Jessica Blank Read Free Book Online Page A

together.
    It wasn’t much of a choice: Jim and I are in love. He’s the only person who knows who I am in the places that you can’t put into words, those places that are alive and raw and secret, and bigger than your regular life. We all have those places, I think, but we almost never see or touch them in each other because everyone is always scared. But Jim’s not scared: he’s big enough to hold every single part of me, and brave enough to show me himself. We had sex for the first time at the end of ninth grade in the choir room and afterward he held me on the brown carpet and told me he was all I’d ever need and I breathed in the rough smell of his neck and knew that it was true.
    So the fact that he hasn’t answered his phone since the day after I got here is weird, and I’m worried that something happened to him. Every night I call Jim on the pay phone and let it ring twenty times till the operator comes on and says “Your party is not answering. Please try your call again later.” Every time I pray while it’s ringing that Jim will pick up, but I guess I haven’t learned how to pray well enough yet, because it keeps just being the operator.
    It’s been a month now since I left and we were only planning for a week, so the money Jim gave me ran out a while ago. I’m too young to get a job, so I was getting really hungry till one night in Hollywood by the hostel a guy asked me if I needed cash and I said yes. It was scary getting in his car, but he parked nearby beneath some trees and all he wanted was to touch me. I closed my eyes and thought about the apartment Jim was going to get us when he got here and the bed we’d have. At the end I told Jim I was sorry in my head, but I knew he’d understand I was just waiting for him.
    The second guy brought me over to his place in Santa Monica. I watched the ocean from his window and afterward I walked out his door and toward the sea and down the beach till I got to Venice. The sun setting turned the sky orange and the ocean black. The air was open in my lungs and there were seagulls and I thought maybe I could make some money over here instead of Hollywood, where the air was thick and close and way too hot. I walked the boardwalk while the hippies packed up their bad paintings into RVs and the T-shirt stores closed, then I crisscrossed the alleys in the dark till I saw people standing around who looked kind of like me.
    So here’s where I’ve been the last couple weeks: on Pacific and Navy by the liquor store, or else in the parks by the boardwalk. It’s not too bad sleeping outside, not like Hollywood where it’s hard and dirty and every place you go is full of trash. Here at least there’s grass and sand: every night I feel the ground against my cheek and imagine it’s the brown rug in the choir room.
    I’ve never gone so long without talking to anyone, though. To the guys I never say more than my name and what do they want and that I’m eighteen, which is a lie, and none of that really counts as conversation. I miss Jim so much it feels like a clamp twisting inside my chest. Closing my eyes to think of him when I’m working helped at first, but now it’s starting to make it worse. So even though I don’t really know what Tracy’s doing here in the car, taking up so much of the seat that I’m straddling the hump and paranoid my bony knees will knock the gearshift, I’m kind of glad she’s sitting next to me.
    I keep looking at my lap. I’m embarrassed to talk to the guy with Tracy here, which is weird because I can tell she does the same things I do. The silence gets dense and the guy drives and finally Tracy leans forward and goes “So don’t you want to know where we’re from?” He looks relieved that somebody’s talking to him and he says “Yeah,” so Tracy goes into this whole story about Fresno and how we slept in the same bed growing up and came to L.A. together for adventures. I guess I can see the resemblance— we’re both