Read Online Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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lightning-bolt thought that is completely inappropriate:
I’m in a James Bond movie
. But the thought passed, and there was really nothing crazy dangerous about what I was doing. The fire engine was going about five or ten miles an hour most of the time, and in fact I sat down on the corner of the back step and curled up against the rain and waited to see where we would go. I used a column of those orange traffic cones as a cushion. I had a feeling this staging area would be pretty close to Cape Abenaki or the village, and soon enough I would find out what had happened to my parents and what had happened at the plant.
I was right about the proximity of the staging area to the power plant, but I was wrong about everything else.
The way the teen shelter worked was pretty simple: If you were under eighteen, you had to have your parents’ permission to be there. Otherwise, the staff had to call family services, and you’d probably wind up in a foster home. So, I had been lying from the second I arrived. My name was Abby Bliss, I was eighteen, I was from Briarcliff, New York. When I showed up, I told them I’d lost my wallet with my driver’s license the night before when I’d been mugged. Given what I’d experienced on my way in from the Kingdom and the things people were saying about my family, the last person I wanted to be was me.
In the morning, they kicked you out, usually by eight a.m. You couldn’t hang out there during the day, because they wanted you going to school or getting a GED or volunteering someplace where you could get job skills. They wanted you meeting with your counselors. They wanted you doing something.
But they did have what they called the drop-in, which I don’t think was supposed to be some snarky reference to the reality that all of us were dropouts. But you could just “drop in” and chill for awhile. Sit on the couches, which were kind of grungy and smelled like feet, or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (My favorite place to crash was one of these two big easy chairs that were covered in plastic so they were easy to clean.) The drop-in was on the first floor of the building beside the shelter and only about a block from the northern end of Church Street. You can bet your ass the visiting leaf peepers gave that corner of Burlington a
very
wide berth.
There were rules to hanging out there, the main ones being no drugs and no alcohol. And there were classes, which were important because they paid us to go to them. I am not shitting you. They paid us. For showing up for a week of classes we would get a MasterCard with fifty dollars on it. The card wouldn’t work if you tried to buy beer or cigarettes, but otherwise it was as good as cash. And the classes were on things like how to write a résumé or how to rent an apartment or how to open a bank account. The classes were about “life skills.” They usually lasted an hour, and other than fucking Montreal truckers, there’s not a whole lot a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl can do that pays that kind of scratch. So before I left the shelter, I went to them. Altogether, I went to five.
And that’s where I met Andrea. She wasn’t living in the shelter by then. She wasn’t even welcome in the classes. The counselors had decided that she was kind of a lost cause. For a time she’d done okay. But by the time I met her she’d concluded that it was easier to sleep and do drugs and turn tricks than to stop and try something else. She had sort of given up on herself. She told me that once upon a time the shelter’s plan was to give her a shot at moving into one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Make her quasi-independent. But that never happened. She relapsed, and I guess it was easier to stay “relapsed.” At first the staff tried to get her back, but it didn’t work. So finally they gave her bed at the shelter to another girl. You can’t save everybody, right? Andrea was built for
I’m in a James Bond movie
. But the thought passed, and there was really nothing crazy dangerous about what I was doing. The fire engine was going about five or ten miles an hour most of the time, and in fact I sat down on the corner of the back step and curled up against the rain and waited to see where we would go. I used a column of those orange traffic cones as a cushion. I had a feeling this staging area would be pretty close to Cape Abenaki or the village, and soon enough I would find out what had happened to my parents and what had happened at the plant.
I was right about the proximity of the staging area to the power plant, but I was wrong about everything else.
The way the teen shelter worked was pretty simple: If you were under eighteen, you had to have your parents’ permission to be there. Otherwise, the staff had to call family services, and you’d probably wind up in a foster home. So, I had been lying from the second I arrived. My name was Abby Bliss, I was eighteen, I was from Briarcliff, New York. When I showed up, I told them I’d lost my wallet with my driver’s license the night before when I’d been mugged. Given what I’d experienced on my way in from the Kingdom and the things people were saying about my family, the last person I wanted to be was me.
In the morning, they kicked you out, usually by eight a.m. You couldn’t hang out there during the day, because they wanted you going to school or getting a GED or volunteering someplace where you could get job skills. They wanted you meeting with your counselors. They wanted you doing something.
But they did have what they called the drop-in, which I don’t think was supposed to be some snarky reference to the reality that all of us were dropouts. But you could just “drop in” and chill for awhile. Sit on the couches, which were kind of grungy and smelled like feet, or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (My favorite place to crash was one of these two big easy chairs that were covered in plastic so they were easy to clean.) The drop-in was on the first floor of the building beside the shelter and only about a block from the northern end of Church Street. You can bet your ass the visiting leaf peepers gave that corner of Burlington a
very
wide berth.
There were rules to hanging out there, the main ones being no drugs and no alcohol. And there were classes, which were important because they paid us to go to them. I am not shitting you. They paid us. For showing up for a week of classes we would get a MasterCard with fifty dollars on it. The card wouldn’t work if you tried to buy beer or cigarettes, but otherwise it was as good as cash. And the classes were on things like how to write a résumé or how to rent an apartment or how to open a bank account. The classes were about “life skills.” They usually lasted an hour, and other than fucking Montreal truckers, there’s not a whole lot a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl can do that pays that kind of scratch. So before I left the shelter, I went to them. Altogether, I went to five.
And that’s where I met Andrea. She wasn’t living in the shelter by then. She wasn’t even welcome in the classes. The counselors had decided that she was kind of a lost cause. For a time she’d done okay. But by the time I met her she’d concluded that it was easier to sleep and do drugs and turn tricks than to stop and try something else. She had sort of given up on herself. She told me that once upon a time the shelter’s plan was to give her a shot at moving into one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Make her quasi-independent. But that never happened. She relapsed, and I guess it was easier to stay “relapsed.” At first the staff tried to get her back, but it didn’t work. So finally they gave her bed at the shelter to another girl. You can’t save everybody, right? Andrea was built for
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