Squat

We’d moved into our apartment in East Harlem about a year ago. I was a waitress, Christina was a bartender and Brittany was a cashier at the ABC down the street. We were the only white girls in our building, and we learned pretty soon after we got there not to go out by ourselves at night. Between the gang violence, the drive-bys, the large number of sexually deprived homeless men and all the leering men who walk the streets, you’d have to be stupid not to move in groups, preferably with two or three guys along.

We’d made friends with some of the squat punks who were staying up the street from us, and while they certainly didn’t have a phone to be reached by, we could walk up the street and would usually see at least one or two of them panhandling on the corner, happy to walk us to wherever we were going.

Tonight I was the only one at home and I needed to go out to buy some more cigarettes, so I walked down the four flights of stairs leading down from our walk-up, hoping to see a friendly face once I reached ground level.

I smiled when I saw Sean walking up the street. With his beat up boots duct-taped together where the heels had started to peel away, his jacket covered in rips held together by safety pins and too large pants held up by homemade suspenders made of tied together shoelaces, he looked like a bum, and he knew it.

“I don’t care what I look like,” he’d told me once. “I am a bum. When you panhandle to feed yourself, clothing doesn’t really matter so long as you have it.”

But with his dreadlocked hair, the tattoos on his neck that ran down the length of his arms, his deep, soulful dark eyes and his wide, smirking grin, I still found myself attracted to him, and he knew it.

“Hey, beautiful!” he called to me. “Walk with me.”

I walked down the street towards him. I hugged Sean when I reached him, and he kissed my cheek. “Where to, gorgeous?” he said.

I shoved him lightly. “Get out of here. You are so fake,” I said. “If you want to get laid, just say so.”

He laughed and winked at me. “Keep it in your pants, baby,” he said. “Maybe later, if you’re lucky.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “If you’re lucky, you mean,” I told him. We walked together down the street to the 7-11. I went in and bought a pack of Newports, lit one up once I got back outside and gave one to Sean.

We headed back towards my apartment together, but when we passed Sean’s building he stopped. “Come on in,” he said, gesturing to the door. “Hang out for a little while. You’ll be lonely at home all by yourself.”

I shrugged and followed him in. I’d been inside the building before, for parties, but now Sean and I were the only ones there. I sat down next to him on a blanket covering the concrete floor. The graffiti-decorated walls looked somehow different, the silence eerie and out of place.

“So,” Sean said, breaking the silence, “Tell me about yourself, Ava. How’d three nice white girls like you and your friends end up in a shitty apartment in East Harlem, working dead end jobs?”

I shook my head. “It’s a long story,” I said. “Not important.”

He placed his index finger on my jawbone and gently turned my face to meet his eyes. “I want to hear it,” he said. “Have you ever had anyone to tell it to?”

Tears welled up in my eyes as I met the warmth in his gaze. The darkness of his eyes seemed to reach down into my soul. He put an arm around me, drew me close and squeezed my shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly, wiping a droplet that had spilled down my cheek. “You can tell me.”

I cleared my throat. “A year ago,” I began, “If you’d told me that I’d be living here, in a one bedroom fourth floor walk-up with a bathroom the size of a broom closet and waiting tables to barely make enough money to cover rent, I’d have told you that you were crazy. I used to have such bigger dreams. I wanted to study business, to head my own corporation, to travel the world. I had so much potential, I had the world ahead of me. I’d already received acceptances from several good colleges.”

I paused to take a breath. Sean looked at me, his forehead crinkled with confusion and his eyes studying me with concern. “And now you’re here,” he said. “So something must’ve changed, something big.”

I nodded. “Brittany and Christina and I have all been friends since we were in kindergarten,” I said. “We’ve known each other our whole lives, practically, and we care about each other more than we do anyone else. But,” my voice cracked, and I sniffled, unable to stifle the tears streaming down my cheeks.

“But we had another friend back in kindergarten. Her name was Emily, and she was the most beautiful, vibrant person in the world.” I paused, and Sean pushed back my hair and kissed my forehead, didn’t say anything, waited for me to continue.

“Just about a year ago,” I whispered, “Right after we’d all gotten our college acceptance letters, and she got into Harvard and Princeton, she was so smart, Emily killed herself.” I shivered as I remembered the day I’d been told.

She’d shot herself in the mouth. I never did get to see her body, but it shows up in my nightmares. I see her delicate hands picking up the gun, turning it over in her fingers, putting the tip of the barrel into her dainty pink mouth, her manicured fingernails finding the trigger, drawing it back.

It goes off with a shot loud enough to wake the dead. The blood, so much blood, explodes out everywhere. She crumples to the floor, the light knocked out of her eyes.

I always wake up screaming.

“Come here,” said Sean, jolting me out of my stupor and holding me tight, rocking me back and forth as I sob.

He straightened me up to face him when I was done crying. “But you haven’t told me the rest,” he said. “What brought you here?”

“Me and Brittany and Christina, we tried to go on, but we couldn’t do it,” I said. “School, our social lives, everything just seemed like such a big waste. We couldn’t see the point in continuing. We were so numb, we never would’ve passed any of our classes anyway.

“And then it struck us, that where we were, it was the place we’d all grown up together, the place we’d made so many memories together. Emily’s spirit haunted the entire town, and we needed to get away from it, cause we couldn’t handle it.

“So we dropped out in the middle of our senior year, and we ran. We didn’t tell anyone where we were going, we just left one day, skipped school and went back home in the middle of the day when no one was gone, and got on the next train out.”

Sean ran his fingers down the side of my face. “And you ended up here,” he whispered.

I looked at him, sorrow in my eyes. “And we ended up here,” I said.

Sean reached around behind him and grabbed a bottle of tequila, took a long sip. He handed me the bottle. “Helps with the hurt,” he said with a small smile.

I took a sip and handed it back to him. And there we sat, no words passing between us, only passing the bottle back and forth, both lost in our thoughts.

I’d never been a heavy drinker, so I was surprised when we reached the end of the bottle. But Sean had been right, my sadness was gone, and inside I felt pleasantly light and carefree. I turned to look at him, his face beautiful in the moonlight streaming through the windows.

“Do you know how lovely you are?” I tried to ask, but I stumbled over my words, slurring, and they didn’t come out right. At the time, it seemed to me that the only thing to do was to show him what I meant.

I put one hand on either side of his face and pulled him towards me, kissing him deep and long. Our bodies curved into each other in all the right ways, and I wrapped one leg around him in my drunken lust. I guided his hands to my breasts, and before I knew it, we were naked.

He lay on top of me, his breathing heavy, sweat beading on his forehead. “Are you sure you want to do this now?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, only pulled him towards me, guided his actions.

I don’t remember the sex too clearly, and I remember only in vague intervals him helping me into my clothes, half walking me and half carrying me down the street and up the stairs back to my apartment, handing me off to Christina, all the tequila I’d drank finally catching up with me as I vomited for half of the night.

The one instance of that night I do remember clearly is right after we’d finished having sex. I ran my hands over Sean’s face, through his dreads, down his chest, his arms. “I love you,” I said.

“Shh, Ava, baby, you’re drunk,” he said.

I woke up the next morning with my cheek resting on the toilet seat, my clothes on crooked, my hair ratty and tangled, the smell of vomit surrounding me. I sat up, and groaned at the headache that came rushing in with the minute movement. Thinking I might fall down if I tried to stand up, I remained sitting and rested my back against the wall.

I saw on the floor beside the toilet a glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen that Christina or Brittany had left for me. Gulping back the water, I swallowed six pills and rested my head on my knees as I waited for them to kick in.

After about fifteen minutes, it occurred to me that the sunlight streaming in through the window was that of early afternoon, and I was scheduled to work at three. Knowing that staying on my feet, taking orders and balancing trays of food for eight hours wouldn’t be possible, I called in sick.

I don’t know how long I sat for, an indefinite period, until the roaring in my head subsided enough for me to stand up and get into the shower, the hot water pouring over my body waking me up. I dried my hair with a towel and dressed, then wandered out into the living room. We all worked as many hours as possible to make rent, so again I was the only one home.

I sat down and picked up a magazine, flipped through the pages and set it down again. I turned the television on and then off again. Restless, I began to pace. I didn’t want to be home by myself, feeling sick. I opened the window.

“Hey, Sean?” I called, but there was no answer. Figuring he was out panhandling or with friends somewhere else, I closed the window, and too tired to go out to look for him, I curled up on the couch and drifted off to sleep.

I passed through the next few days in a stupor of confusion and upset. Sean and I hadn’t spoken since the night we’d had drunken sex, and I couldn’t forget the words I had said to him, had told him that I loved him. I needed some closure, and in a way, I wanted him to care about me. And since he hadn’t come to see me since we’d had sex, I had a feeling of emptiness to do with the thought that sex may have been all he wanted from me.

I wasn’t feeling well physically, either. My hangover seemed to have left some aftereffects, and I was having headaches, backaches and threw up a few more times. I always seemed to be tired, which I attributed to my sadness, and I vowed to alleviate it by finding Sean to talk things through.

Christina, Brittany and I walked down the street, thinking we’d see Sean or his friends walking or standing on the street corner, but no one was around. We approached the door of their squat building. I knocked, but no one answered, so I pushed the door open.

The inside of the building looked surprisingly undisturbed, and no one was inside. The graffiti still decorated the walls, the beat up salvaged furniture still sat in the corners, and there were several empty bottles littering the floor, but the blankets and pillows, the lamp and floor fan, the posters that had hung on the wall, Sean’s beat up old guitar case covered in stickers, were gone, and a layer of dust had settled over the room, like no one had been there for awhile.

Brittany and Christina turned to me. “Where do you think everyone is?” Brittany asked. I shrugged, still believing they had to be around somewhere close. I walked out again, sat down on the front steps for a minute so I could think of where to look for him.

A guy leaned out of his window and called down to me, “You looking for Sean?”

I nodded. “He’s gone, man,” he said. “He and his friends went hopping trains a few days ago. Could be halfway across the country by now. Can’t imagine they’d be coming back.”

I frowned. “What?” I said, because it seemed so implausible. Sean couldn’t have just left, after what had happened between us. Or maybe it had just been quick sex to him, with our conversation only as a prelude to make me think he cared about me. I felt my eyes prick with tears.

“Hey, don’t cry,” the guy leaning out his window said. “Are you a good friend of his?”

I swallowed, blinked away the tears. “I guess not,” I mumbled. I felt Christina and Brittany’s arms around me, leading me back to the apartment that had never been home, only the memorial grounds for a lost friend.

I took to my bed. I tried to brush away the hurt, tried to tell myself that we hadn’t really known each other too well anyway, but the fact of the matter was that since we had gotten to Harlem, we three had taken an unspoken vow not to bring up Emily. Sean had been the only person I’d met in Harlem that I’d told about how I got there, and it had been the first time I’d talked about Emily in almost a year. I had opened my heart to him, let myself get close to him emotionally and physically, and the next day he was gone forever, a stowaway on a train to nowhere.

The days and nights passed in short bursts and long passages. I slept a lot. I only got up when I had to pee or when the urge to vomit would strike me again. I never looked at a clock, didn’t want to see how many minutes, hours, days away from me Sean was, so I only had a vague perception of time passing, my days split into sunrise, morning light, afternoon light, sunset and night.

Brittany and Christina brought me food and drinks, tried to coax me out of bed, if only to shower, but I refused to move. I was a recluse, bound to my bed, my appearance growing grimier by the day.

The restaurant I worked at called to fire me for missing my shifts for some string of days in a row, I didn’t know how many.

The irony struck me how much like Sean I was becoming, not bathing, not working for a living, hiding away in the corner of a building, hoping my presence would go unnoticed.

It was this thought that finally propelled me to get up, to make myself look respectable, to at least put on a mask of being okay for Christina and Brittany.

I wasn’t leaving the house much and wasn’t really keeping track of the days that were slipping away, but at some point in my disconnected state of being, I realized that it had been quite a while since I’d had my period, that I’d been throwing up and peeing a lot, that my chronic headaches and backaches and tiredness weren’t going away.

I took a test just to be sure, but when I saw the little plus sign on that plastic stick, I can’t say I was surprised.

In my state of numbness, I was composed and reasonable. After I’d seen my test results, I calmly called a clinic and scheduled an abortion for the next day. The next day, I calmly walked in, lay still and tranquil as I put my feet into the stirrups and heard the whir of the machine. I calmly went back to the apartment, and didn’t mention to anyone where I’d been.

But later that night, when I woke up from a dream, my pillow soaked with tears, all the calm had drained out of me. In my dream, I see Emily, her pretty fingers wrapped around the trigger. But she’s not the only one in the room this time. I’m standing next to her, holding an infant. I hand the baby to her, and she places the child in front of her heart. She brings up the tip of the gun barrel to rest against the baby’s chest. Her manicured fingernails find the trigger, drawing it back.

It goes off with a shot loud enough to wake the dead. The blood, so much blood, explodes out everywhere. They both crumple to the floor, but this time, their eyes are closed, and it’s my eyes I see, the light drained out of them.

I don’t know how long it had been since I’d been fired, but apparently it had been too long. Christina and Brittany reminded me that rent was coming due, but I didn’t have a paycheck and I’d spent all the money I’d had saved on the abortion. I didn’t want to tell them that, so I just shrugged.

“Ava,” Christina said. “We understand that you’re upset. But these things happen, and you have to move past it. You’ve moped around for long enough. Brittany and I can only afford a third of the rent check each, and you know that. If you can’t manage to pay your share, we’re going to have to find a new roommate.”

I didn’t know what to say to that either, so I just shrugged again. I didn’t have the money, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have the energy to look for a new job. Christina and Brittany didn’t even know the extent of what had happened. It seemed like a great divide was coming down between me and my two best friends, the people who I thought would always be there for me, no matter what. But then, I guess I thought Emily would always be there too.

Quietly, I gathered up all my things that could fit into my shoulder bag. I moved towards the door, lingering in the doorway. I looked at Brittany and Christina, saw the determinedness in their eyes, and realized that things had changed between us too. Emily’s death had torn us apart, and like it or not, it was time to let go of the past.

And just like that, just like Sean, without a single word, no goodbyes, no embraces, I walked away, and I’ve never seen them again.

On the street by myself, I didn’t know where to go, so I just started to walk, and I heard the rumble of a train going past as I approached the train tracks. The train stopped, just like it was stopping for me, like a sign. And I walked up to the ladder on the side of one of the cars and held on tight as the train started to move again.

I rode for a while, and when the scenery looked nice, I hopped off and started walking again. I saw a cardboard cup sticking out of the top of a garbage can, and I fished it out. I made my way to the street corner and stood, holding out the cup, asking all the people who passed by if they could spare a little bit.

I sleep where I can find a place to, on benches, in train stations, in parks. I move from place to place pretty quickly, and sometimes I can find an abandoned building to stay in for a few weeks or months. I brought a blanket in my shoulder bag, so I can be as comfortable and warm as I need to be. With the money I obtain from pedestrians and the food and clothes I can scrounge out of dumpsters, I’m fed and clothed and can even afford cigarettes, every once in a while.

And so I became a squatter, a panhandler, a train hopper, a bum. Maybe it’s better this way. I travel alone, keep to myself, don’t have any friends, so there’s no one around who can leave me or hurt me. I just am, and I just live, taking it day to day, making it through life however I can, however I need to.

But sometimes I see children playing in the street, and I remember my kindergarten days, so carefree, playing with Christina and Brittany and Emily, not a worry in the world, thinking things would never go wrong for us. And now one is dead and gone forever, and I am gone, and I couldn’t tell you if Christina and Brittany are still as good friends as we all were back when we were five.

I miss those days of childhood innocence, when our biggest concerns were who to trade with at lunch, whether we should skip rope or play hopscotch at recess. I miss the days of being sure of ourselves, in our togetherness. When our five-year-old selves had promised to be friends forever, I don’t think we could have ever predicted how hard that would turn out to be.

And then I rattle the change in my cup and remember that there’s no going back in life, no do-overs, and that I am not a child anymore. I’ve lost a best friend to death, lost two best friends to an inability to reach each other, lost a baby to my own selfish fear, lost the concept of trust to the man who inadvertently contributed to my turning out just like him. And I wonder when life got so hard.

Youth is wasted on the young, they say. But the children I see are so vibrant, so full of life and energy, radiating from their wide grins. Children are the people we all wish we could be, not yet jaded by the ways of the world, always honest, always trusting, so easy to please, so eager to set out into the life ahead of them.

As I sit, wrapped in my blanket, watching children running, playing, giggling, I wish I could go back to the days when I knew how to trust, how to laugh, how to play, how to enjoy myself. I wish I could go back to the days when I could love someone to my fullest extent without doubt or worry. But now I’ve grown up and fear has taken over, and the past holds me back. And so all I can do is sit silent and rattle my cup, mourning my dead, lamenting my losses, wishing I could be a part of the groups of children I see.

Maybe Christina and Brittany will pass me on the street one day. Maybe Sean and I will end up squatting in the same place one day. But no matter what happens, who I run into, it will never be the same, because I’m not the same. They might not even recognize me. And now I’m nothing but a bum, always running away from the places I belong and the people who love me, until I am irrevocably alone.