Excerpt: Calico

I wake up. I hear tapping on the car window, I see a flashlight, and I think I hear, “Open up, police.” I’m parked behind a strip mall near the two dollar theater they shut down last year. I used to go running on the trail behind here. A long time ago, in the days of dreams and health food stores and daily showers. My life was not supposed to end up like this.
I shiver as I open the car door. I don’t completely crawl out of the clothes I curled myself up in, because I don’t want the officers to see that I’m wearing star and moon footy pajamas. I can already see the curiousness in their faces. The white officer, I think he starts talking first. He asks what I’m doing out here. The black officer, he seems pretty nice. I almost answer them. I hold myself back. I would have to start at the beginning. And it’s all so crazy and so complicated, and what good would it do? They can’t help me.
I guess I should start before this, so you can know I’m not crazy or lazy or whatever you think about the unlucky. Sometimes I curse my stars, sometimes I try to find some reason for all of this. Mostly I just try to survive and find things to smile about. I know my life contains a lot of fortune compared to so many.
So let me start with that first semester of college. I think that’s me at my most amazing. My next few semesters, before I had to drop out, that’s me at my most heroic. But let me show you Calico Starshine at her most wonderful, most spectacular. Calico’s what you can call me for now. I change my name sometimes.
My first semester of college, right after the homelessness, and right when I’m full of hope and the world looks full of promise. I’m young and still holding onto my ridiculous optimism, despite all the unlucky things that happened in my life. I lie. That’s something you should definitely know about me. I lie a lot. It started when I moved away from one of the cities by the sea I lived in, and to Llama Land, the first place that I couldn’t walk to the ocean from. That’s when I started telling people my father was a dead Venezuelan pirate and I had Amish relatives in Pennsylvania. Llama Land is where I went to college, but on the other side of the state, away from the llamas and in the mountains.
At first, the mountains scared me. I’m scared a lot, really, if you want to know the truth. And they scared me for a long time, until I saw that they became magical when autumn speckled the leaves of their trees. That’s when they danced, and made music with their colors, and I wasn’t so afraid. But I did panic a little, because the cold scared me. I’ll always be scared of the cold, I think. After sleeping in that alley, after the pain of freezing and thinking the cold had cut into me and tried to freeze me to death… after that, the cold never really left my bones. Nothing scares me more than the cold. Every time I shiver with the chill, that night comes back to me. You don’t know suffering until you’ve shivered in the night, alone, and you have absolutely nowhere that’s warm and safe and home.
Anyhow, I’m at college, right? Yes, let’s go there. The mountain college. The first night I sleep alone, and I’m scared because it’s dark and new and anything could happen. But I’m in a real bed, and I took a real shower, and I’m happy. The next day I meet my roommate, and she tells me her name is Sally Patsy Lindheimer III. She’s a size zero in her jeans, and she has pictures of herself all over her side of the room. She puts up curtains of pink and orange. Her bedspread follows suit. Sally Patsy Lindheimer has a 4.0 GPA, she tells me. She’s going to be a rich chemist, she tells me. She’s going to go to Africa on weekends and cure AIDS, she tells me. She works out for two hours every day, she tells me. Did I drink a whole quart of soy chocolate milk, she asks me. I can tell that Sally Patsy Lindheimer and I are not going to be best friends.
I don’t tell Sally about sleeping in alley ways, or about the toothless man who groped me. When Sally compares the dorm mattress to her queen sized memory foam at home, I don’t tell her how wonderful it feels to me compared to sleeping in a dumpster. When Sally complains that her dad didn’t buy her the I-pod that you can watch videos on, and that he didn’t upgrade her phone until after she graduated high school, I don’t tell her that I would give anything just to have my mother let me live in her house again, or even just to talk to me again. When Sally talks about how her father’s having a house built and is giving her mother a whole room just for her jewelry, I don’t tell her that I would give anything just to have a room of my own, even if I have to share the place with strangers. I don’t tell Sally these things, because I know she couldn’t possibly understand. Sally’s world consists of money and the boyfriend and Jesus. She doesn’t have room to comprehend that there are people in the world who have to struggle to survive every single day.