White Oleander - Janet Fitch [81]
youre frend
Lydia Guzman
Why make it harder, Lydia? Because it was her fault I was there. I would spare her nothing.
My mother’s reply was more practical. She ordered me to call Children’s Services every day and yell my head off until they changed my placement. Her writing was big and dark and emphatic. I could feel her rage, I warmed myself by it. I needed her strength, her fire. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said.
But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.
AS I HAD NO MONEY, I panhandled in the liquor store parking lot and the supermarket, asking men for change so I could call social services. Men always took pity on me. A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. They were nice men who smelled good, men from offices who looked like they’d have been good for a fifty. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. I’d just buy a bunch of food and then be hungry again and also a whore. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
AMELIA FOUND OUT I’d been asking for a new placement. I cringed on the uncomfortable wooden-edged sofa in the sitting room as she paced back and forth, ranting, her hands cutting the air. “How dare you tell such outrageous lies about my house! I treat you like my own daughter, and this is how you repay me? With these lies?” The whites of her eyes showed all around the black irises, and spittle accumulated in the corners of her thin lips. “You don’t like my house? I send you to Mac. See how well you eat there. You’re lucky I allow you to sit at the table with the other girls, with that hideous face. In Argentina you would not be allowed to walk through the front door.” My face. I felt my scars throb along my jaw.
“What do you know about a noble home? Just a common piece of street garbage. Mother in prison. You know, you stink like garbage. When you come into a room, the girls hold their breath. You soil my home. Your presence insults me. I don’t want to look at you.” She turned away, pointed to the polished stairway. “Go to your room and stay there.”
I stood but hesitated. “What about dinner?”
She turned on her patent leather heel, and laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
I lay on my bed in the beautiful bedroom smelling of cedar, my stomach clawing inside me like a cat in a sack. During the day, all I wanted to do was sleep, but at night, images of my days returned like a slide show. Did I really smell? Was I garbage, hideous?
I heard Silvana come in, settle on her bed. “You thought you were something special, eh? Some hot shit. Now you see, you’re no better than us. You better shut up, or you’ll end up at Mac.” She tossed a dinner roll onto my blanket.
I ate it in two bites. It was so good, I almost cried. “What’s Mac?” I asked.
I heard her exasperated sigh. “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.”
“Least they get breakfast,” I said.
Silvana chuckled in the dark.
A car went by outside, its headlights painting the ceiling in moving shadows. “Were you ever there?” I asked.
“Nidia,” she said. “Even she said it was tough, and she ’s a loca. Better shut up and take it like everybody else. Remember, eighteen and out.”
But I was only fifteen.
NOW KIKI TORREZ was the pet, the one who sat on Amelia’s right and ate scraps off her plate like a dog. I was both envious and disgusted. It was Kiki who turned the pages of the Argentine scrapbooks and ate butter cookies, while I washed Amelia’s dirty underwear by hand in the sink, scrubbed her bathtub, ironed her clothes and her lace-edged linens, and if I got any idea to ruin anything out of spite, then no dinner.
She played us off one another. I stole a can of yams one night, and she made Kiki tell her who did it. I lost more weight, my ribs stuck out like the staves of