But guess what?
He didn’t have a license plate.
Isn’t that great? Cops will interrogate me for walking down the sidewalk, but they let a guy like him prowl around without a license plate. Maybe he has one that he props in the back window when he’s not in pervert mode, but there was no plate when I looked. So I went up to the driver’s-side window and shouted, “I’m telling the cops about you, buddy. You are one sick sucker and you’d better leave me alone!” Then I moved away quick, before he could snatch me.
He didn’t follow me out of the parking lot, and I didn’t see his car anymore, but I’ve been nervous about it all night. Right now I’m holed up in a Burger King, thinking how if he snatches me, no one will know. No one will care.
There’s not a single soul in this entire universe who will care.
August 19th, 1:30 a.m., still at Burger King
Remember that essay I wrote where you said I’d used neighborhood too many times in one paragraph? You showed me how to use your thesaurus and I told you that the thesaurus was stupid? I told you that if you meant neighborhood, you should say neighborhood and not use area or district or vicinity or some other lame word that didn’t quite mean neighborhood. Remember that?
What I didn’t tell you was that the thesaurus was lame when it came to finding another word for neighborhood, but it was actually an amazing book. I got totally sucked in by some other words on that page. The two I remember are nefarious and necropolis. Necropolis! What a word! (It means graveyard, you know that, right?) You get this whole feel from necropolis that you don’t get from graveyard. A graveyard seems small. A necropolis seems like an entire city of tombstones. It’s one of those words you just don’t forget.
Nefarious was good, too. Evil. Wicked. Villainous.
Not-fair-as-us. That’s how I remember that word.
That day I started making up little snippets of stories that put words I found in the thesaurus together. For example: (ahem) Camille, a nefarious backstabber, skipped through Necropolis, the City of Dead, torturing souls with her whiny voice. “I told on you, I told on you, nah-ne-nah, I told on you!”
Don’t you love that?
Well, you probably don’t, but I do, so what do I care? What I’m telling you is that I miss your thesaurus. I used to sneak it out to recess with me when I didn’t have a book to read, then sit in my secret corner of the playground and make up little stories to go with cool new words I found in it.
So why am I telling you all this?
Because I’m working on something, and I need a word for loose that rhymes with endured.
I need a thesaurus!
And believe me, it’s not something I’m going to find in this joint.
August 19th, 4:00 a.m.
Forget loose and endured. I changed it all around, anyway. I’m finally done (I think). I wanted to finish it before I found a safe place to sleep, but now it’s almost daybreak. (I told you poetry was a big waste of time. Ha!)
Anyway, I’m copying it over from the napkins I worked it out on.
Here goes:
NEON IS MY NIGHT-LIGHT
Can the North Star guide the way,
When eyes no longer see it?
Do constellations shine above?
My heart can’t quite believe it.
If the aurora borealis
Lights up the northern skies,
It’s lost on me,
On city streets,
Neon is my night-light.
Oozing up through sidewalk cracks
Come people of the night.
In black and red, the walking dead,
With ghostly skin and eyes.
Are they after peace or poison?
Will their souls ignite?
Freaks abound,
Tightly wound,
Neon is my night-light.
Blues and pinks and yellows glow,
Cutting through the sky.
Flicker, flutter, flash, and flare,
They eat the night alive.
No one’s here to tuck me in,
To ease my fears away.
I dread the dark,
Cold and stark,
But neon is my night-light.
August 19th, 4:00 p.m.
You’re not going to believe this!
I am finally, finally, finally AT THE BEACH!
Twelve hours ago I was trying to keep from being scared by writing a poem (was I desperate, or what?), and now I’m happy as a clam in sand, baking on the beach. It is awesome here! You should see the ocean. It goes on and on forever and ever. No wonder people used to think the world was flat. Or that there was a giant waterfall over the edge of it. It’s just hard to imagine all that water, curving on and on around the world clear to what? Australia? Japan? China?
And the sand! The sand is hot and soft…not gritty at all. It sifts between your toes, and it tickles! And if you dig down a little with your feet, it cools off quick. Wow! I wonder how far down sand goes. When does it become rock? (Or crust or magma or whatever the layers of the earth are.) Doesn’t matter. What matters is that right now my feet are covered all the way to my ankles and it feels fantastic. Fantabulous!
What a difference twelve hours can make!
Saturday, August 21st
Do you want to hear about my adventure trying to score a swimsuit?
No?
Well, tough. I’m telling you anyway:
Yesterday morning after I’d snagged a cranberry scone from a coffee joint, I sat on a wall looking out at the magnificent Pacific and faced the fact that getting in the water and swimming with dolphins (which I haven’t actually seen yet) was not something I could do in green corduroy jeans.
I needed a bathing suit.
So I took a little hike to scope out the possibilities and discovered that this is one ritzy neighborhood. Man! I found this area that I guess you’d call a boardwalk—it’s got people selling jewelry and souvenirs and Hawaiian clothes from carts and stalls—but there are also restaurants and office buildings and boutiques along both sides of it, and everything is so, so expensive!
I cruised between the buildings, scoping things out, trying to look like I belonged. What a joke, huh? Me with my greasy hair and cap, overloaded backpack, and filthy shoes, looking like I belonged? At least I wasn’t wearing my jacket like the bums I saw. Or pushing a whole shopping cart of junk. I’m never going to be one of those bag ladies with a whole shopping cart of junk, you hear me? Never-never-never!
But back to what I was telling you: The people who shop this boardwalk have serious bucks, which is why stores can charge seventy-five dollars for a cruddy bathing suit. Do you know how many days I could eat off of seventy-five bucks?
The price didn’t really matter, I guess. I wasn’t planning to pay for it anyhow. It was just the idea of people actually spending that much on a bathing suit that shocked me. I made myself get over it, though, and started scoping out the stalls. I didn’t stay too long at any of them. I just tried to zero in on the suits that would fit me, then moved on before someone shooed me away.
I felt really self-conscious. Like everyone was looking at me, thinking, Is she a punk? A hood? Is she…homeless?
One thing punks and hoods and homeless never do is smile. So I always force myself to do just that whenever someone’s scoping me out, wondering if I’m trying to lift something. It really throws them off.
So that’s what I did on the boardwalk. I even asked some of the hawk-eyed vendors, “How are you today?” like it was perfectly normal for a person in my condition to be pawing through their pricy merchandise.
It didn’t make me feel any better, though. You should see the people here. I’m not talking about the homeless people (which there are quite a lot of, actually). I’m talking about everybody else. They’re not beach bums or surfers or even “California girls.” Everybody looks like they’re right out of a fashion magazine. Hair. Makeup. Nails. Clothes. I felt like a mangy mutt trotting through a party of poodl
es.
Not that poodles are bad dogs. Poodles are actually great dogs. They’re smart and they’re friendly and they’ve got the most amazing eyelashes ever. Did you know a poodle’s eyelashes have to be clipped or they get in their eyes? It’s like regular hair that just keeps growing and growing.
What’s stupid about poodles is not the poodle, it’s the people who get ahold of the poodle. All the grooming and fussing and nail painting and adornments…they turn a dog into a doll. It’s ridiculous.
And I kept telling myself that these highly groomed people I was seeing were, in fact, just people. But I didn’t feel it inside me. I felt like no matter what I did, I could never fit in. They’d been born with pedigree papers. I was a runaway mutt from the pound.
And, stupid as this is, when you’re a mangy mutt rubbing shoulders with prissy poodles, you’re the one who feels ridiculous.
Man, I feel bummed out now. How’d I get on all that, anyway? I was trying to tell you a funny story that doesn’t have anything to do with dogs.
It actually has to do with cats.
And I’m going to try to get in a better mood by powering through and telling you about it. Here goes:
On this ritzy boardwalk they’ve got all sorts of decorations like flags and metal art and fountains and stuff. They’ve also got entertainment. I saw my first-ever real mariachi band. You know, guys wearing big sombreros and sparkly gaucho outfits, strumming guitars and singing Mexican songs? It was like something out of a movie.
I also saw a man slapping bongos, another man playing some weird drum-shaker things, a woman playing guitar…lots of musicians. They had jars out for tips, but they weren’t beggars or anything. They seemed to be working together, too, because every once in a while they’d all pick up their stuff and rotate to a new place. It was weird, but they seemed to know where to go and what to do.
Not all of them were musicians. I saw an artist who draws cartoony faces, a juggler, a puppeteer, and a couple of magicians. (One of them was more like a clown with a top hat. He did this stupid trick where he pushed a blue scarf into a tube, did abracadabra over it, then pulled out a red scarf. That’s all he seemed to know how to do. That, and honk a bike horn.)
So the entertainment wasn’t great or anything except for this one gypsy-looking dude who had psychic kitties.
Psychic kitties!
Isn’t that wild?
They’re fortune-telling cats, and this is how it works:
You roll up two dollars and hold them out to one of the cats. The cat takes your money, puts it down behind the booth wall, then hands you a rolled-up piece of paper that has your fortune on it. The cats weren’t puppets, either. I watched them pad all around the booth.
That gypsy dude made a lot of money. Way more than the musicians. Hey, maybe I should start a booth of my own! My sign could read:
AMAZING!
STUPENDOUS!
EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD!
Come See the One and Only…
GYPSY GIRL
and her
SPECTACULAR
PSYCHIC DOGGIES!
Nah. Forget it. It’s lame compared to psychic kitties. People expect a dog to be able to retrieve things. Seeing a cat do it is what’s weird.
Anyway, that was the funny thing I wanted to tell you. Now back to the bathing suit:
After scoping out the whole boardwalk (and watching psychic kitties in action), I decided to forget trying to score a suit from a cart vendor. They watch like a hawk.
I thought a better plan would be to snag one from a rack that was parked outside one of the boardwalk’s surf shops. You know how stores sometimes roll a rack or two outside their front door so you can see the kind of stuff they’re selling inside their front door? One of those kinds of racks.
I’d passed by this one store about four times and no one was ever out front. So I looked through the bathing suits on the rack and found one that I thought would fit. I spent a long time doing it, too, and no one came out to shoo me away.
I should just have snagged it right then, but I put it at the end of the rack and left, just in case someone was watching me through the tinted store windows.
Over the next couple of hours I passed by that rack at least four more times. The suit was just waiting for me to snag it, and the more I saw it, the more I wanted it. It was blue and sparkly and seemed to be the perfect suit to wear while swimming with dolphins.
This probably won’t make sense to you, but I was really nervous about lifting that suit. I don’t like stealing stuff, believe it or not. I do it, and I’m good at it, but that doesn’t mean I like it. And normally I don’t feel bad about it because I steal for survival, not for fun. Usually I’m just so hungry or cold or whatever that I can’t be distracted by thinking that what I’m doing is wrong.
But this sparkly blue swimsuit was not something I needed for survival.
It was just something I wanted.
I told myself that I’d come a long way to swim with dolphins, that I couldn’t exactly do it in my underwear, that there must be a HUGE markup on these bathing suits, and that come on—how much would it actually hurt the store if one went missing?
But it still felt wrong.
That didn’t stop me from wanting it, though.
And it didn’t stop me from trying to steal it.
It was four o’clock when I finally decided to do it. Everything seemed to be lining up for me: The mariachi band had moved right across the way (and was making a lot of noise with their singing and strumming), I knew a shortcut out of the boardwalk (in case I got chased), and a big group of women had just gone into the store (which meant that people would be busy on the inside and not thinking about the racks outside).
I checked for cops (they walk up and down the boardwalk).
I strolled over to the rack.
But my heart started racing like crazy and I…chickened out. I just walked by.
What’s the matter with you? I asked myself. It’s easy! Just grab it and go!
So I went down about six stores, circled back to where I’d started, and looked for cops again.
I strolled over to the rack again.
I reached for the suit….
But at the last second I decided to pull the suit off the hanger, and the next thing I knew, hangers were tangled and clanking to the ground, suits were tangled and caught on each other, and people were coming out of the shop.
I panicked. I don’t even remember seeing what I was doing. I just grabbed the suit and ran.
I could hear people shouting, and I think someone chased me. I remember stuffing the suit up my shirt to hide it, but other than that, it’s all a blur. A weird, dreamlike blur.
When I was sure I was in the clear, I stopped running and caught my breath on the curb between two parked cars. I didn’t feel like ha ha, I got away with it. I felt bad. Like I’d crossed the line from survival to crime.
I told myself I was being stupid. Who draws the line? Why is it drawn there? Why isn’t it drawn, you know, over here? I didn’t feel that way when I stole food. Or clothes. Or books. Why was I freaking out about a bathing suit?
I sat on the curb for a long time, trying to figure it out. And when I finally pulled the swimsuit down out of my shirt, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
It wasn’t the pretty, sparkly blue suit.
It was an ugly green-and-brown one!
With a skirt.
And it was way too big!
I felt like that lame magician at the boardwalk. Shove in one color, pull out another.
I got mad. So, so mad. It had taken me the whole day to lift a lousy swimsuit, and I’d stolen one that wouldn’t even come close to fitting.
I shoved it inside my backpack. It was getting late. I was hungry. I couldn’t go swimming with dolphins. I had to find something to eat.
Crud.
I had to steal something to eat.
After that I had a real lousy night, which I’m not even going to get into. What I am
going to tell you is that this morning I finally broke down and put that stupid suit on. I had to tie the shoulder straps together in back with a piece of string so it wouldn’t fall off, and I felt like a giant piece of ugly seaweed in it, but I put it on and I parked my stuff on the beach like everyone else does. Then I hiked across the sand to the sea.
And you know what?
The water is COLD.
And SO salty.
And full of sand and foam and seaweed.
And, as far as I could see, no dolphins.
Saturday, August 21st, 5:30 p.m.
I was tired of writing. I wrote way too much. All those details. What do they matter? All I had to say was: I met some psychic kitties, I stole a suit, I went swimming.
See? That’s all you needed to know.
But the good thing about being sick of writing was that I got up and went back into the water. And now I have one more thing that I want to tell you:
I learned how to bodysurf!
There were some other kids doing it, and I just copied them. Once you get used to the temperature of the water, it’s fun. Really fun. My suit filled up like a fishbowl with every wave I caught (no fish, just sand and pebbles and bits of seaweed), but it drained right out (or if there was lots of sand, I dumped it out and went back for more).
I want to go again tomorrow, but I’m through for today. I’ve got to get completely dry before the sun goes down or I’ll be shivering cold tonight.
Monday evening, August 23rd
I am fried! Oh, man, am I fried. Burnt to a crisp. “Ow, ooh, eech.” That’s what I’ve been saying all day long. My shoulders and my back hurt the worst, but my knees and the tops of my feet are bad, too. They feel like road rash splashed with Tabasco sauce.
Man, am I fried.
7:45 p.m.
Have you ever watched the sun set from the beach? I hate to use this word because you used it WAY too much. (Every time you got excited about something, you’d use this word, and I thought it was really, REALLY corny.)