Dreams Underfoot

But For The Grace Go I

I inherited Tommy the same way I did the dogs. Found him wandering lost and alone, so I took him home. I’ve always taken in strays—maybe because a long time ago I used to hope that someone’d take me in. I grew out of that idea pretty fast.

Tommy’s kind of like a pet, I guess, except he can talk. He doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then I don’t find what most people have to say makes much sense. At least Tommy’s honest. What you see is what you get. No games, no hidden agendas. He’s only Tommy, a big guy who wouldn’t hurt you even if you took a stick to him. Likes to smile, likes to laugh—a regular guy. He’s just a few bricks short of a load, is all. Hell, sometimes I figure all he’s got is bricks sitting back in there behind his eyes.

I know what you’re thinking. A guy like him should be in an institution, and I suppose you’re right, except they pronounced him cured at the Zeb when they needed his bed for somebody whose family had money to pay for the space he was taking up and they’re not exactly falling over themselves to get him back.

We live right in the middle of that part of Newford that some people call the Tombs and some call Squatland. It’s the dead part of the city—a jungle of empty lots filled with trash and abandoned cars, gutted buildings and rubble. I’ve seen it described in the papers as a blight, a disgrace, a breeding ground for criminals and racial strife, though we’ve got every color you can think of living in here and we get along pretty well together, mostly because we just leave each other alone. And we’re not so much criminals as losers.

Sitting in their fancy apartments and houses, with running water and electricity and no worry about where the next meal’s coming from, the good citizens of Newford have got a lot of names and ways to describe this place and us, but those of us who actually live here just call it home. I think of it as one of those outlaw roosts like they used to have in the Old West—some little ramshackle town, way back in the badlands, where only the outlaws lived. Of course those guys like L’Amour and Short who wrote about places like that probably just made them up. I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad.

I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rosecolored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago. Sometimes I pretend I’m here because I want to be, because it’s the only place I can be free, because I’m judged by who I am and what I can do, not by how screwed up my family is and how dirt poor looked pretty good from the position we were in.

I’m not saying this part of town’s pretty. I’m not even saying I like living here. We’re all just putting in time, trying to make do. Every time I hear about some kid ODing, somebody getting knifed, somebody taking that long step off a building or wrapping their belt around their neck, I figure that’s just one more of us who finally got out. It’s a war zone in here, and just like in Vietnam, they either carry you out in a box, or you leave under your own steam carrying a piece of the place with you—a kind of cold shadow that sits inside your soul and has you waking up in a cold sweat some nights, or feeling closed in and crazy in your new work place, home, social life, whatever, for no good reason except that it’s the Tombs calling to you, telling you that maybe you don’t deserve what you’ve got now, reminding you of all those people you left behind who didn’t get the break you did.

I don’t know why we bother. Let’s be honest. I don’t know why I bother. I just don’t know any better, I guess. Or maybe I’m just too damn stubborn to give up.

Angel—you know, the dogooder who runs that program out of her Grasso Street office to get kids like me off the streets? She tells me I’ve got a nihilistic attitude. Once she explained what that meant, all I could do was laugh.

“Look at where I’m coming from,” I told her. “What do you expect?”

“I can help you.”

I just shook my head. “You want a piece of me, that’s all, but I’ve got nothing left to give.”

That’s only partly true. See, I’ve got responsibilities, just like a regular citizen. I’ve got the dogs. And I’ve got Tommy. I was joking about calling him my pet. That’s just what the bikers who’re squatting down the street from us call him. I think of us all—me, the dogs and Tommy—as family. Or about as close to family as any of us are ever going to get. I can’t leave, because what would they do without me?

And who’d take the whole pack of us, which is the only way I’d go?

Tommy’s got this thing about magazines, though he can’t read a word. Me, I love to read. I’ve got thousands of books. I get them all from the dump bins in back of bookstores—you know, where they tear off the covers to get their money back for the ones they don’t sell and just throw the book away?

Never made any sense to me, but you won’t catch me complaining.

I’m not that particular about what I read. I just like the stories. Danielle Steel or Dostoyevsky, Somerset Maugham or King—doesn’t make much difference. Just so long as I can get away in the words.

But Tommy likes his magazines, and he likes them with his name on the cover—you know, the subscription sticker? There’s two words he can read: Thomas and Flood. I know his first name’s Tommy, because he knows that much and that’s what he told me. I made up the last name. The building we live in is on Flood Street.

He likes People and Us and Entertainment Weekly and Life and stuff like that. Lots of pictures, not too many words. He gets me to cut out the pictures of the people and animals and ads and stuff he likes and then he plays with them like they were paper dolls. That’s how he gets away, I guess. Whatever works.

Anyway, I’ve got a post office box down on Grasso Street near Angel’s office and that’s where I have the subscriptions sent. I go down once a week to pick them up—usually on Thursday afternoons.

It’s all a little more than I can afford—makes me work a little harder at my garbage picking, you know?—but what am I going to do? Cut him off from his only pleasure? People think I’m hard—when they don’t just think I’m crazy—and maybe I am, but I’m not mean.

The thing about having a post office box is that you get some pretty interesting junk mail—well at least Tommy finds it interesting. I used to throw it out, but he came down with me to the box one time and got all weirded out when he saw me throwing it out so I bring most of it back now. He calls them his surprises. First thing he asks when I get back is, “Were there any surprises?”

I went in the Thursday this all started and gave the clerk my usual glare, hoping that one day he’ll finally get the message, but he never does. He was the one who sicced Angel on me in the first place.

Thought nineteen was too young to be a bag lady, pretty girl like me. Thought he could help.

I didn’t bother to explain that I’d chosen to live this way. I’ve been living on my own since I was twelve. I don’t sell my bod’ and I don’t do drugs. My clothes may be worn down and patched, but they’re clean. I wash every day, which is more than I can say for some of the real citizens I pass by on the street. You can smell their B.O. a half block away. I look pretty regular except on garbage day when Tommy and I hit the streets with our shopping carts, the dogs all strung out around us like our own special honor guard.

There’s nothing wrong with garbage picking. Where do you think all those fancy antique shops get most of their highpriced merchandise?

I do okay, without either Angel’s help or his. He was probably just hard up for a girlfriend.

“How’s it going, Maisie?” he asked when I came in, all friendly, like we’re pals. I guess he got my name from the form I filled out when I rented the box.

I ignored him, like I always do, and gathered the week’s pile up. It was a fairly thick stack—lots of surprises for Tommy. I took it all outside where Rexy was waiting for me. He’s the smallest of the dogs, just a small little mutt with wiry brown hair and a real insecurity problem. He’s the only one who comes everywhere with me because he just falls apart if I leave him at home.

I gave Rexy a quick pat, then sat on the curb, sorting through Tommy’s surprises. If the junk mail doesn’t have pictures, I toss it. I only want to carry so much of this crap back with me.

It was while I was going through the stack that this envelope fell out. I just sat and stared at it for the longest time. It looked like one of those ornate invitations they’re always making a fuss over in the romance novels I read: almost square, the paper really thick and creamcolored, ornate lettering on the outside that was real highclass calligraphy, it was so pretty. But that wasn’t what had me staring at it, unwilling to pick it up.

The lettering spelled out my name. Not the one I use, but my real name. Margaret. Maisie’s just a diminutive of it that I read about in this book about Scotland. That was all that was there, just

“Margaret,” no surname. I never use one except for when the cops decide to roust the squatters in the Tombs, like they do from time to time—I think it’s like some kind of training exercise for them—and then I use Flood, same as I gave Tommy.

I shot a glance back in through the glass doors because I figured it had to be from the postal clerk—who else knew me?—but he wasn’t even looking at me. I sat and stared at it a little longer, but then I finally picked it up. I took out my pen knife and slit the envelope open, and carefully pulled out this card. All it said on it was, “Allow the darkrobed access tonight and they will kill you.”

I didn’t have a clue what it meant, but it gave me a royal case of the creeps. If it wasn’t a joke—which I figured it had to be—then who were these blackrobed and why would they want to kill me?

Every big city like this is really two worlds. You could say it’s divided up between the haves and the havenots, but it’s not that simple. It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist. They don’t know and they don’t care, except for Angel and the postal clerk, I guess.

But now someone did.

Unless it was a joke. I tried to laugh it off, but it just didn’t work. I looked at the envelope again, checking it out for a return address, and that’s when I realized something I should have noticed straightaway. The envelope didn’t have my box number on it, it didn’t have anything at all except for my name. So how the hell did it end up in my box? There was only one way.

I left Rexy guarding Tommy’s mail—just to keep him occu—

pied—and went back inside. When the clerk finished with the customer ahead of me, he gave me a big smile but I laid the envelope down on the counter between us and didn’t smile back.

Actually, he’s a pretty goodlooking guy. He’s got one of those flattop haircuts—shaved sides, kinky black hair standing straight up on top. His skin’s the color of coffee and he’s got dark eyes with the longest lashes I ever saw on a guy. I could like him just fine, but the trouble is he’s a regular citizen. It’d just never work out.

“How’d this get in my box?” I asked him. “All it’s got is my name on it, no box number, no address, nothing.”

He looked down at the envelope. “You found it in your box?” I nodded.

“I didn’t put it in there and I’m the one who sorts all the mail for the boxes.”

“I still found it in there.”

He picked it up and turned it over in his hands.

“This is really weird,” he said.

“You into occult shit?” I asked him.

I was thinking of dark robes. The only people I ever saw wear them were priests or people dabbling in the occult.

He blinked with surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

I grabbed the envelope back and headed back to where Rexy was waiting for me.

“Maisie!” the clerk called after me, but I just ignored him.

Great, I thought as I collected the mail Rexy’d been guarding for me. First Joe postal clerk’s got a good Samaritan complex over me—probably fueled by his dick—now he’s going downright weird. I wondered if he knew where I lived. I wondered if he knew about the dogs. I wondered about magicians in dark robes and whether he thought he had some kind of magic that was going to deal with the dogs and make me go all gooshy for him—just before he killed me.

The more I thought about it, the more screwed up I got. I wasn’t so much scared as confused. And angry. How was I supposed to keep coming back to get Tommy’s mail, knowing he was there? What would he put in the box next? A dead rat? It wasn’t like I could complain to anybody. People like me, we don’t have any rights.

Finally I just started for home, but I paused as I passed the door to Angel’s office.

Angel’s a little cool with me these days. She still says she wanted to help me, but she doesn’t quite trust me anymore. It’s not really her fault.

She had me in her office one time—I finally went, just to get her off my back—and we sat there for awhile, looking at each other, drinking this crappy coffee from the machine that someone donated to her a few years ago. I wouldn’t have picked it up on a dare if I’d come across it on my rounds.

“What do you want from me?” I finally asked her.

“I’m just trying to understand you.”

“There’s nothing to understand. What you see is what I am. No more, no less.”

“But why do you live the way you do?”

Understand, I admire what Angel does. She’s helped a lot of kids that were in a really bad way and that’s a good thing. Some people need help because they can’t help themselves.

She’s an attractive woman with a heartshaped face, the kind of eyes that always look really warm and caring and long dark hair that seems to go on forever down her back. I always figured something really bad must have happened to her as a kid, for her to do what she does. It’s not like she makes much of a living. I think the only thing she really and honestly cares about is helping people through this sponsorship program she’s developed where straights put up money and time to help the downand-outers get a second chance.

I don’t need that kind of help. I’m never going to be much more than what I am, but that’s okay. It beats what I had before I hit the streets.

I’ve told Angel all of this a dozen times, but she sat there behind her desk, looking at me with those sad eyes of hers, and I knew she wanted a piece of me, so I gave her one. I figured maybe she’d leave me alone then.

“I was in high school,” I told her, “and there was this girl who wanted to get back at one of the teachers—a really nice guy named Mr. Hammond. He taught math. So she made up this story about how he’d molested her and the shit really hit the van. He got suspended while the cops and the school board looked into the matter and all the time this girl’s laughing her head off behind everybody’s back, but looking real sad and screwed up whenever the cops and the social workers are talking to her.

“But I knew he didn’t do it. I knew where she was, the night she said it happened, and it wasn’t with Mr. Hammond. Now I wasn’t exactly the bestliked kid in that school, and I knew what this girl’s gang was going to do to me, but I went ahead and told the truth anyway.

“Things worked out pretty much the way I expected. I got the cold shoulder from everybody, but at least Mr. Hammond got his name cleared and his job back.

“One afternoon he asks me to see him after school and I figure it’s to thank me for what I’ve done, so I go to his classroom. The building’s pretty well empty and the scuff of my shoes in the hallway is the only sound I hear as I go to see him. I get to the math room and he takes me back into his office. Then he locks the door and he rapes me. Not just once, but over and over again. And you know what he says to me while he’s doing it?

“‘Nobody’s going to believe a thing you say,’ he says. ‘You try to talk about this and they’re just going to laugh in your face.’”

I looked over at Angel and there were tears swimming in her eyes.

“And you know what?” I said. “I knew he was right. I was the one that cleared his name. There was nobody going to believe me and I didn’t even try.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Angel said. “You poor kid.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” I told her. “It’s past history. Besides, it never really happened. I just made it up because I figured it was the kind of thing you wanted to hear.”

I’ll give her this: she took it well. Didn’t yell at me, didn’t pitch me out onto the street. But you can see why maybe I’m not on her list of favorite people these days. On the other hand, she doesn’t hold a grudge—I know that too.

I felt like a hypocrite going in to see her with this problem, but I didn’t have anyone else to turn to.

It’s not like Tommy or the dogs could give me any advice. I hesitated for the longest moment in the doorway, but then she looked up and saw me standing there, so I went ahead in.

I took off my hat—it’s this fedora that I actually bought new because it was just too cool to pass up.

I wear it all the time, my light brown hair hanging down from it, long and straight, though not as long as Angel’s. I like the way it looks with my jeans and sneakers and this cotton shirt I found at a rummage sale that only needed a tear fixed on one of its shirttails.

I know what you’re thinking, but hey, I never said I wasn’t vain. I may be a squatter, but I like to look my best. It gets me into places where they don’t let in bums.

Anyway I took off my hat and slouched in the chair on this side of Angel’s desk.

“Which one’s that?” she asked, pointing to Rexy who was sitting outside by the door like the good little dog he is.

“He can come in if you’d like.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not staying long. I just had this thing I wanted to ask you about. It’s ...”

I didn’t know where to begin, but finally I just started in with finding the envelope. It got easier as I went along. That’s one thing you got to hand to Angel—there’s nobody can listen like she does. You take up all of her attention when you’re talking to her. You never get the feeling she’s thinking of something else, or of what she’s going to say back to you, or anything like that.

Angel didn’t speak for a long time after I was done. When I stopped talking, she looked past me, out at the traffic going by on Grasso Street.

“Maisie,” she said finally. “Have you ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?”

“Sure, but what’s that got to do with—oh, I get it.” I took out the envelope and slid it across the desk to her. “I didn’t have to come in here,” I added.

And I was wishing I hadn’t, but Angel seemed to give herself a kind of mental shake. She opened the envelope and read the message, then her gaze came back to me.

“No,” she said. “I’m glad you did. Do you want me to have a talk with Franklin?”

“Who’s that?”

“The fellow behind the counter at the post office. I don’t mind doing it, although I have to admit that it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he’d do.”

So that was his name. Franklin. Franklin the creep.

I shrugged. “What good would that do? Even if he did do it—” and the odds looked good so far as I was concerned “—he’s not going to admit to it.”

“Maybe we can talk to his supervisor.” She looked at her watch. “I think it’s too late to do it today, but I can try first thing tomorrow morning.”

Great. In the meantime, I could be dead.

Angel must have guessed what I was thinking, because she added, “Do you need a place to stay for tonight? Some place where you’ll feel safe?”

I thought of Tommy and the dogs and shook my head.

“No, I’ll be okay,” I said as I collected my envelope and stuck it back in with Tommy’s mail.

“Thanks for, you know, listening and everything.”

I waited for her to roll into some spiel about how she could do more, could get me off the street, that kind of thing, but it was like she was tuned right into my wavelength because she didn’t say a word about any of that. She just knew, I guess, that I’d never come back if every time I talked to her that was all I could look forward to.

“Come see me tomorrow,” was all she said as I got to my feet. “And Maisie?”

I paused in the doorway where Rexy was ready to start bouncing off my legs as if he hadn’t seen me in weeks.

“Be careful,” Angel added.

“I will.”

I took a long route back to the squat, watching my back the whole time, but I never saw anybody that looked like he was following me, and not a single person in a dark robe. I almost laughed at myself by the time I got back. There were Tommy and the dogs, all sprawled out on the steps of our building until Rexy yelped and then the whole pack of them were racing down the street towards me.

Okay, big as he was, Tommy still couldn’t hurt a flea even if his life depended on it and the dogs were all small and old and pretty well used up, but Franklin would still have to be crazy to think he could mess with us. He didn’t know my family. You get a guy as big as Tommy and all those dogs ... well, they just looked dangerous. What did I have to worry about?

The dogs were all over me then with Tommy right behind them. He grinned from ear to ear as I handed him his mail.

“Surprises!” he cried happily, in that weird high voice of his. “Maisie bring surprises!”

We went inside to our place up on the second floor. It’s got this big open space that we use in the summer when we want the air to have a chance to move around. There’s books everywhere. Tommy’s got his own corner with his magazines and all the little cutout people and stuff that he plays with. There’s a couple of mismatched kitchen chairs and a card table. A kind of old cabinet that some hoboes helped me move up the one flight from the street holds our food and the Coleman stove I use for cooking.

We sleep on the mattresses over in another corner, the whole pack together, except for Chuckie.

He’s this old lab that likes to guard the doorway. I usually think he’s crazy for doing so, but I wouldn’t mind tonight. Chuckie can look real fierce when he wants to. There’s a couple of chests by the bed area.

I keep our clothes in one and dry kibbles for the dogs in another. They’re pretty good scavengers, but I like to see that they’re eating the right kind of food. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to them. One thing I can’t afford is vet bills.

First off I fed the dogs, then I made supper for Tommy and me—lentil soup with dayold buns I’d picked up behind a bakery in Crowsea. We’d been eating the soup for a few days, but we had to use it up because, with the spring finally here, it was getting too warm for food to keep. In the winter we’ve got smaller quarters down the hall, complete with a castiron stove that I salvaged from this place they were wrecking over in Foxville. Tommy and I pretty near killed ourselves hauling it back. One of the bikers helped us bring it upstairs.

We fell into our usual Thursday night ritual once we’d finished supper. After hauling down tomorrow’s water from the tank I’d set up on the roof to catch rainwater, I lit the oil lamp, then Tommy and I sat down at the table and went through his new magazines and ads. Every time he’d point out something that he liked in a picture, I’d cut it out for him. I do a pretty tidy job, if I say so myself. Getting to be an old hand at it. By the time we finished, he had a big stack of new cutout people and stuff for his games that he just had to go try out right away. I went and got the book I’d started this morning and brought it back to the table, but I couldn’t read.

I could hear Tommy talking to his new little friends. The dogs shifting and moving about the way they do. Down the street a Harley kicked over and I listened to it go through the Tombs until it faded in the distance. Then there was only the sound of the wind outside the window.

I’d been able to keep that stupid envelope with its message out of my head just by staying busy, but now it was all I could think about. I looked out the window. It was barely eight, but it was dark already.

The real long days of summer were still to come.

So is Franklin out there? I asked myself. Is he watching the building, scoping things out, getting ready to make his move? Maybe dressed up in some black robe, him and a bunch of his pals?

I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t know him, but like Angel had said, it didn’t seem like him and I could believe it. He might bug me, being all friendly and wanting to play Pygmalion to my Eliza Doolittle, but I didn’t think he had a mean streak in him.

So where did the damn message come from? What was it supposed to mean? And, here was the scary part: if it wasn’t a joke, and if Franklin wasn’t responsible for it, then who was?

I kept turning that around and around in my mind until my head felt like it was spinning. Everybody started picking up on my mood. The dogs became all anxious and when I walked near them got to whining and shrinking away like I was going to hit them. Tommy got the shakes and his little people started tearing and then he was crying and the dogs started in howling and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

But I didn’t. It took me a couple of hours to calm Tommy down and finally get him to fall asleep. I told him the story he likes the best, the one where this count from some place far away shows up and tells us that we’re really his kids and he takes us away, dogs and all, to our real home where we all live happily ever after. Sometimes I use his little cutouts to tell the story, but I didn’t do that tonight. I didn’t want to remind him of how a bunch’d gotten torn.

By the time Tommy was sleeping, the dogs had calmed down again and were sleeping too. I couldn’t. I sat up all night worrying about that damned message, about what would happen to Tommy and the dogs if anything ever did happen to me, about all kinds of crap that I usually don’t let myself think about.

Come the morning, I felt like I’d crawled up out of a sewer. You know what it’s like when you pull an allnighter? Your eyes have this burning behind them, you’d kill for a shower and everything seems a little on edge? I saw about getting breakfast for everyone, let the dogs out for a run, then I told Tommy I had to go back downtown.

“You don’t go out today,” I told him. “You understand? You don’t go out and you don’t let anybody in. You and the dogs play inside today, okay? Can you do that for Maisie?”

“Sure,” Tommy said, like I was the one with bricks for brains. “No problem, Maisie.”

God I love him.

I gave him a big hug and a kiss, patted each of the dogs, then headed back down to Grasso Street with Rexy. I was about half a block from Angel’s office when the headlines of a newspaper outside a drugstore caught my eye. I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared at it. The words swam in my sight, headlines blurring with the subheadings. I picked up the paper and unfolded it so that I could see the whole front page, then I started reading from the top.

GRIERSON SLAIN BY SATANISTS.

DIRECTOR OF THE CITY’S NEW AIDS CLINIC FOUND DEAD IN FERRYSIDE

GRAVEYARD AMID OCCULT PARAPHERNALIA.

POLICE BAFFLED.

MAYOR SAYS, ‘THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.’

“Hey, this isn’t a library, kid.”

Rexy growled and I looked up to find the drugstore owner standing over me. I dug in my pocket until it coughed up a quarter, then handed it over to him. I took the paper over to the curb and sat down.

It was the picture that got to me. It looked like one of the buildings in the Tombs in which kids had been playing at ritual magic a few years ago. All the same kinds of candles and inverted pentacles and weird graffiti. Nobody squatted in that building anymore, though the kids hadn’t been back for over a year. There was still something wrong about the place, like the miasma of whatever the hell it was that they’d been doing was still there, hanging on.

It was a place to give you the creeps. But this picture had something worse. It had a body, covered up by a blanket, right in the middle of it. The tombstones around it were all scorched and in pieces, like someone had set off a bomb. The police couldn’t explain what had happened, except they did say it hadn’t been a bomb, because no one nearby had heard a thing.

Pinpricks of dread went crawling up my spine as I reread the first paragraph. The victim, Grierson.

Her first name was Margaret.

I folded the paper and got up, heading for the post office. Franklin was alone behind the counter when I got inside.

“The woman who died last night,” I said before he had a chance to even say hello. “Margaret Grierson. The Director of the AIDS Clinic. Did she have a box here?”

Franklin nodded. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? One of my friends says the whole clinic’s going to fall apart without her there to run it. God, I hope it doesn’t change anything. I know a halfdozen people that are going to it.”

I gave him a considering look. A half dozen friends? He had this real sad look in his eyes, like ...

Jesus, I thought. Was Franklin gay? Had he really been just making nice and not trying to jump my bones?

I reached across the counter and put my hand on his arm. “They won’t let this screw it up,” I told him. “The clinic’s too important.”

The look of surprise in his face had me backing out the door fast. What the hell was I doing?

“Maisie!” he cried.

I guess I felt like a bit of a shit for having misjudged him, but all the same, I couldn’t stick around. I followed my usual rule of thumb when things get heavy or weird: I fled.

I just started wandering aimlessly, thinking about what I’d learned. That message hadn’t been for me, it had been for Grierson. Margaret, yeah, but Margaret Grierson, not Flood. Not me. Somehow it had gotten in the wrong box. I don’t know who put it there, or how he knew what was going to happen last night before it happened, but whoever he was, he’d screwed up royally.

Better it had been me, I thought. Better a loser from the Tombs, than someone like Grierson who was really doing something worthwhile.

When I thought that, I realized something that I guess I’d always known, but I just didn’t ever let myself think about. You get called a loser often enough and you start to believe it. I know I did. But it didn’t have to be true.

I guess I had what they call an epiphany in some of the older books I’ve read. Everything came together and made sense—except for what I was doing with myself.

I unfolded the paper again. There was a picture of Grierson near the bottom—one of those shots they keep on file for important people and run whenever they haven’t got anything else. It was cropped down from one that had been taken when she cut the ribbon at the new clinic a few months back. I remembered seeing it when they ran coverage of the ceremony.

“This isn’t going to mean a whole lot to you,” I told her picture, “but I’m sorry about what happened to you. Maybe it should’ve been me, but it wasn’t. There’s not much I can do about that. But I can do something about the rest of my life.”

I left the paper on a bench near a bus stop and walked back to Grasso Street to Angel’s office. I sat down in the chair across from her desk, holding Rexy on my lap to give me courage, and I told her about Tommy and the dogs, about how they needed me and that was why I’d never wanted to take her up on her offers to help.

She shook her head sadly when I was done. She was looking a little weepy again—like she had when I told her that story before—but I was feeling a little weepy myself this time.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I guess I thought you’d take them away from me.” I surprised myself. I hadn’t lied, or made a joke. Instead I’d told her the truth. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“Oh, Maisie,” she said. “We can work something out.”

She came around the desk and I let her hold me. It’s funny. I didn’t mean to cry, but I did. And so did she. It felt good, having someone else be strong for a change. I haven’t had someone be there for me since my grandma died in 1971, the year I turned eight. I hung in for a long time, all things considered, but the day that Mr.

Hammond asked me to come see him after school was the day I finally gave up my nice little regulated slot as a citizen of the day and became a part of the night world instead.

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, trying to fit into the day world—I’d probably never fit in completely, and I don’t think I’d want to. I also knew that I was going to have a lot of crap to go through and to put up with in the days to come, and maybe I’d regret the decision I’d made today, but right now it felt good to be back.