Silent (36 page)

From the fire in his eyes, it almost looked like he was ready to take a swing at me. I rocked back on my feet to get away from him, unsure if I should feel relieved that I had gotten to the root of the problem…or worse. Did he look down on me for my past?

“I…I wouldn’t use any, you know. I just wanted to get us some money so we can—”

No!
He slammed his hand against a stripper pole. The metal vibrated from the impact.
No drugs.

“Okay…I’m sorry…please don’t be mad. I didn’t realize that would bother you. I won’t do it. I’m sorry.”

His fury started to fade, but it wasn’t enough for me. I still felt like I’d been through a blender and my heart had wound up on the outside, sliced through and through.

“Seb, I didn’t mean to—”

He grabbed our backpack and shoved in the notebook, stomping to his feet.
It’s time to go
.

“Oh. Y-yeah.” I scrambled after him.

I wanted to know why he was so against the whole thing, but I was too afraid of another outburst to press him. Drugs
were
bad, after all. I knew that. Maybe Seb was just trying to make me a better person.

“Um, you wanna get some breakfast? Some Egg McMuffins? Or we could go down to the beach and get some funnel cake…or we could even go to Starbucks…”

He shook his head, rubbing his thumb against his other fingers.
We’re having money problems, remember?

“Oh. Right. I just thought…“

Thought what? That I’d buy his happiness?

Maybe I’d been doing that all along…maybe that’s why I’d decided it was a good idea to spend most of our money on carnival rides and fair food. Because how happy would he be with me when we were forced to dumpster dive or beg for our meals?

Seb stopped walking in front of the Arby’s on the corner. He unzipped the backpack and took out a couple of granola bars.

Here
. As he passed one to me, his hand slid along mine, giving it a gentle squeeze.

I looked up to see his smile back in its rightful place, and I stared at it for a few seconds, using it as a temporary bandage for my battered heart.

“Thanks. And I am gonna think of something. Something not illegal. I promise.”

I know.
He grinned and ripped open his bar to take a bite.

He had more faith in me than I did.

A rustling down the alley drew my attention to a homeless man in tattered sweats who was digging through the garbage. He yanked out a couple crushed bottles and shoved them into his duffle bag.

“Oh…well, there’s that.”

Words from the past echoed in my mind.
Pick up cans with the immigrant children
.

“I mean, it won’t be big money, but it’s something, right?”

Seb blinked.
Huh?

Guess he couldn’t read
my
thoughts. “Collecting recyclables. A lot of homeless people do it. You can look through trash cans…like at gas stations and convenience stores, especially…then you take the stuff in to get the redemption value.”

He nodded.
Oh, okay.

“It would take a little investment, though. We’d need to get some big bags, ’cause there’s not much room in the backpack, and we can’t really carry it all in our hands. Guess we could stop at the grocery store…”

Seb’s grin spread and he yanked at my hand.
Let’s do it.

It wasn’t much, but at least we had a plan.

~*~

“Fuck, we are awesome at this!” I jogged over to Seb to show him my latest score. A family of five had stopped to get gas, and they’d turned out to be thirsty people. I hadn’t even needed to dig for it—they’d simply handed over a bag of coke bottles once they saw me rummaging around.

Seb nodded, opening his tote full of cans so I could see he’d also added to the pile.

“Maybe ’cause we’re young and so good-looking.” I smirked. “Hell, if I’d known it was gonna be this easy, I’d have tried this ages ago.”

And how different my life might’ve been…but I didn’t dwell on that thought for long.

Is this enough?
Seb shook his bag, testing the weight as he looked at me questioningly.

“Nah. I mean, it’s a good start, but I think we need to get a whole lot. We should keep working till we have a few bags full and then see about finding a redemption place.”

Seb turned and glanced back up Lincoln Boulevard. We’d already gone three or four miles from our home base, and he was probably worried about getting so far away that we were late making it back.

“Well, new stuff is thrown away all the time, so we could backtrack…or we could just stick around here and wait for people to drive up…or we
could
go check out some of the apartment building dumpsters.”

Seb’s eyes twinkled, and I knew which one he was ready for. The adventure.

We headed down an alley and stopped in front of a building with a low brick wall enclosing its parking lot. Seb made a foothold with his hands and I climbed over first, then crouched at the top to pull him up.

The green dumpster sat in the shadows, beneath the first story of apartments.

“Well, I guess let’s have at it.”

We jumped down and approached it slowly. Crap, was that scurrying sounds coming from inside? I started to reconsider our decision—this wasn’t going to be very glamorous.

Seb propped open the cover, and a rancid sweet-and-rot scent confronted us.

“Yuck. We are so gonna need a shower after this.”

He was already up to his elbows in garbage bags before I realized that would be an issue. We didn’t exactly have access to any showering facilities.

“Or I guess we could just wash off in the ocean or something…but damn we need some swimsuits…or at least some more pants.”

Fuck. Why did everything have to involve money?

Got some!
Seb lifted out two large empty bottles of Gatorade and pumped his arms victoriously.

“Yeah, good work.” I shoved them into my bag of plastics.

Well don’t just stand there.
Seb waved me toward the piles of garbage.
Start looking.

I put aside my concerns for cleanliness and dug in. Ripping open bag after bag, I sifted through the mess of banana peels and coffee grinds and soggy paper towels for those few precious cans and bottles. But when I got to a bag full of dirty diapers, I had to take a break.

“Oh, Jesus.” I stumbled back and knocked my legs against the hood of a car. “That is fucking disgusting.”

The car proceeded to come to life, wailing and honking and blinking its lights like a demon possessed.

“Fuck.” I grumbled, turning to face the annoyance. “Shut the fuck up you stupid alarm.”

Seb kept digging for a few seconds, but then abruptly froze.

“Hey! You! What you do there?” An old man with wild white hair came barreling down the steps from the apartments, shaking his fist. “I call police!”

“Shit!” I bolted over to Seb and grabbed a handful of his t-shirt. “Let’s get outta here!”

We both turned and clumsily jogged away from the enraged man, our full bags banging at our sides.

“Why you come to mess our garbage?” He pursued us, spittle forming on the edge of his lips as he yelled. “I am apartment manager! I call police!”

“We’re leaving, you crazy old freak!” I frantically tied off our bags of loot and tossed them over the brick wall.

I didn’t want to go first and leave Seb cornered by this guy. He was obviously a nut, chasing after us like this when we were a quarter of his age and easily could’ve beaten him to a pulp if we’d tried.

I gave Seb a foothold and he scrambled up to the top of the wall, then reached down for me.

Fuck, he really was taller than me. I stood on my toes but still couldn’t get a good grip on his fingers. He had to bend down further, straddling the wall and leaning over toward me so I could finally grasp his hand.

The man was still yelling, but he’d slipped into some other language. Russian, maybe. He’d also taken out a cell phone, and I didn’t really doubt that he was calling for the cops.

“Pull!” I screamed at Seb, and he did. Pulled too hard, though, because instead of regaining our balance at the top, we toppled straight over the other side and landed in a bed of plastic bottles and crushed cans.

“Ow.” I coughed and rolled over. Seb was lying on his back a few inches away and I quickly crawled to him, holding myself up over his body. “Shit, are you okay? Does anything feel broken?”

He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek, and he reeked like the garbage we’d been knee-deep in just a few moments ago.

Squinting up at me, his lips stretched into a lopsided grin.
That was sorta fun.

I smacked his chest and then kissed him, holding my breath so I didn’t have to inhale our scent.

When the need for air finally forced us apart, I stood and dusted myself off. “Come on. Let’s get our stuff and go…those cops might be on their way.”

~*~

We held off on the bathing we so desperately needed in order to take our findings to the nearest recycling center. Thankfully it was back in the direction we’d come from, but it still took us over an hour and a half to walk out to the facility. Sweaty and surrounded in clouds of our own toxic fumes, we trudged in through the open gates.

“Damn, I’m exhausted,” I muttered. This really didn’t measure up to riding on the Ferris wheel all day long, or sharing foot-long hot dogs with our toes stuck in the sand.

Seb didn’t reply, but I knew he was thinking the same thing.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting to find—maybe some sort of clean, white building where I could see bottles and cans carried away on a conveyer belt and stomped flat by a big machine. It was probably that word
facility
that did it…guess I needed to find a dictionary to look up its real meaning.

The money-making part of the recycling center was outdoors, on a floor of dirt and asphalt. A tin roof covered the scales, and the payout shack had a wooden storefront that had been spray-painted a hideous green.

And just like us, the place smelled awful.

Homeless, hippies and the poor huddled around blue bins, unloading bags and shopping carts full of recyclables. Most of the people were of the black and brown variety, but I was surprised to see a few white and Asian faces mixed into the crowd.

Following their lead, I dumped out everything we’d found and frowned when it seemed so small inside the big bins.

“Kinda thought we had more than that,” I mumbled to Seb.

“It always seems like that,” chimed in a guy in a torn Lakers jacket. “But we keep on breakin’ our backs anyhow.”

I gave him a hollow, half-hearted chuckle as Seb and I got in line for the weighing station.

A man with rubber gloves took our bins and hefted them up on the scale. I didn’t bother looking at the numbers. Everyone before and after us had a lot more to recycle, and none of them looked like they were enjoying a very rich life.

He handed us a receipt and waved us on to the cashier across the way.

“Here you are,” the older woman said cheerily from behind her barred window. The winds picked up, wafting more garbage-smell and dirt into the air than I could handle breathing. “Six dollars and forty-one cents.”

I coughed into my elbow, trying not to suck in more polluted air.

Six dollars and forty-one cents. For a day’s worth of hard labor.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.

I crouched down to shove the money into my shoe. While my head was lowered I summoned every bit of strength and concentration I possessed, so that by the time I rocketed back up, there was an unshakeable smile on my face.

“Hey, that’s not too bad, huh. Maybe we should treat ourselves to a dollar sundae later.”

Seb smiled back.

And now it was all on me.

Chapter 25: Broken

We trudged back toward home as the sun closed on yet another day. I’d already started to come up with a plan, but I still had a lot of details to work out. Details I didn’t like.

I was going to have to leave Seb alone. I’d make up an excuse…maybe tell him I’d be scouring another area for recyclables. Now that we’d seen how easy the whole process was, I figured he could do it by himself. We’d just set a time to meet up later, by the empty strip mall, and he wouldn’t have to know where I’d actually be spending the day.

Which would be back in the ghetto I’d just run from.

I knew damn well six dollars a day wasn’t going to support us for long. What if one of us got sick? What if the dance studio closed, and we were out on the street in the wintertime? What if I got carried away and let Seb’s magical almond eyes coax me into buying yet another thing we didn’t really need?

I’d gotten us into this situation, and it was my responsibility to take care of us. And that meant going home and figuring out a way into the old business. I’d burned my bridge with Angel, but there was still Diego and all his connections to explore. There had to be
something
I could do.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make. I didn’t want to lie to Seb, or betray his trust. And I really, really didn’t want to leave him alone. But I
had
to do it. Had to do whatever it took so we could survive.

Just like Mimi had.

Fuck.

Seb’s fingers wiggled against mine right as a stabbing pain hit me between the eyes.

Thankful for the distraction, I looked up and noticed we’d drifted a few blocks west of the studio. The persistent roar of the surf could be heard close by.

“Hey, where are you taking us? It’s a little late for the beach.”

Seb shook his head and kept on going, crossing Ocean Avenue and zipping down the ramp that led to the sand. He hopped around on one foot and yanked off a shoe before I could stop him.

“You don’t think we’re actually going in, do you? ’Cause we’re not.”

He sniffed at me dramatically and then pinched his nose.
But you stink.