Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow Read Free Book Online Page B

old clothes, left over from her Deadhead phase: tie-dyed shirts and flimsy, whispery skirts, hemp sandals and grandma shawls. There were some old sweaters, though, too, and I’m wearing the best one: blue argyle cardigan with silver buttons in the shape of acorns. I didn’t get to talk to Mikey’s mom. If you aren’t on a visitor list, you can’t get in, and I don’t have a visitor list, since I broke the rules. I don’t know who would come, anyway, except for Mikey, but that’s weeks away. Casper promised she’d put him on my list. Otherwise I know there’s just one name on it: my mother. But I don’t expect her to come, and Casper doesn’t mention it.
    When the phone in Rec rings, everyone looks around for Barbero. The phone only rings up here after a caller has been approved downstairs against a master list. Callers have to be checked against a list approved by your doctor, and only at the doctor’s discretion.
    Still, we aren’t supposed to answer the phone by ourselves. “He must have gone to the shitter,” Blue says, shrugging.
    The phone keeps ringing. Francie nudges Sasha. “Get it.”
    “
You
get it.” Sasha resumes Connect 4. No one likes to play with her; she cheats.
    Blue heaves herself up from the couch. “Wimpy Bloody Cupcakes,” she says to us. That’s what she calls us, every once in a while: Bloody Cupcakes.
We could all be so cute, don’t you think,
she said one day in Group.
If we didn’t look like fucking zombies!
She raised her arms. Her scars made her look like a rag doll horribly resewn.
    “Crazy Hut. Who is calling, please?” She twists the phone cord in her fingers.
    She drops the phone so that it hits the wall,
ka-thunk,
and dangles, helpless, on its white cord. “It’s your mother, Silent Sue.” She returns to her paperback, wedging herself into the stiff green couch.
    I stop breathing. Isis is pushing tiles and muttering under her breath. Francie is busy watching a movie.
    My mother. Why would she call? She hasn’t even come to see me.
    Slowly, I walk to the phone. I press the receiver to my ear and turn away from the girls, to the wall, my heart beating like fucking crazy in my chest. “Mom?” I whisper, hopeful.
    The breathing is thick, raspy. “Noooo, Charlie. Guess!” The voice threads through my body.
    Evan.
    “I pretended to be your mom! Her name was in some stuff in your backpack.” He pauses, giggling, and suddenly switches to a honeyed, high-pitched voice. “Hello, I need to speak with my daughter, please, Miss Charlotte Davis.”
    I don’t say anything. I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed.
    “We had to take your money, Charlie.” He coughs, a splatter of mucus. “You know how it is.”
    The empty film canisters in my backpack, the one he and Dump dropped off. The canisters I kept what little money I could scrounge in.
    Evan is asthmatic and the drugs and the street do nothing for him. I’ve watched him curl up into a ball, wheezing until his face is purple, pissing his pants from the effort to not pass out. The free clinic only gives inhalers with medical exams and they won’t look at you if you’re high and Evan’s life is about being high. He’s from Atlanta. I don’t know how he got all the way up here.
    I keep close to the wall so the girls can’t hear me. Hearing Evan’s voice is taking me back to a dark place. I try to breathe evenly to keep in the moment, like Casper says.
    Carefully, I say, “I know.”
    I say, “It’s okay.”
    I say, “Thanks for bringing my backpack.”
    He coughs again. “You were pretty messed up in the attic, you know? I thought me and Dump was gonna shit our pants. All that, like, blood.”
    I say, “Yeah.”
    He’s so quiet that I almost don’t hear him. “Was it Fucking Frank? Did he…did he finally come after you? Is that why you did it?”
    I scrape the wall with what little nails I have left. Fucking Frank and his black eyes and those rings. Seed House and the red door where girls