The Vagabond

Your hometown always had a constant fog over it, a quiet unease that never went away. Now you were in a city, still on the East Coast, so not far from where you came from, probably. You wished you had remembered how you had gotten here. Every building was old, juxtaposed by the neon signs of nightlife. Nightlife that you really could do without, but you could do with some central heating. You found yourself in line for a small sports bar, the scent of alcohol and buffalo sauce choking your senses. On autopilot, you handed the bouncer an ID from your wallet. You weren’t even aware you had a wallet, lest an ID. Am I even 21? Is this a fake ID? Does he even care? You weren’t even sure if the photo on the ID was you. Slipping into the doorway, it was dark, but the noise and movement felt blinding.

You immediately regretted your decision to come in. After all, there was probably a diner somewhere near where all the quiet, hungover people would be.

Before you could even take a step, a crowd of girls bumped you to the side. You squirmed to find somewhere to sit, to catch your breath. It occurred to you that these people were all probably around your age; 18-20-year-olds spending their days studying and their nights partying, perpetuating a cycle of indulgence before moving onto true adulthood. This is what your life should have been, but instead, you'd been a walking corpse since you were 15. Never fully awake, never really there since you first left home.

After just five minutes of being in the crowd, your head already felt like it was splitting open. The noise pierced your skull like a lobotomy, and you felt concerned eyes on you. A figure slithered towards you- an angel, complete with a shiny, LED halo. Great, you thought, I'm hallucinating now. The angel came into your line of sight and was revealed to be just a girl. A tall, broad-shouldered girl, probably an athlete, in a short white sequined dress and long reddish-brown hair. The halo was a plastic headband, and two plastic wings sat on her shoulders. The plastic angel leaned down in front of you; the light dancing around her sequined dress made you dizzy. She tapped your shoulder and yelled in a very un-angelic way: "ARE YOU OKAY? YOU LOOK KINDA SICK"

"I'm-fine," you mustered in the loudest voice you could manage, which probably wasn't very loud.

"Do you want something to drink?" She asked. "Vodka soda?" "Maybe a cigarette?" You nodded at the second option.

"Let's go into the back." She grabbed your hand and you were too overstimulated to be uncomfortable by this. She led you out a back door into the alley behind the bar, where a couple of stragglers hung out.

"Sorry for being so blunt, you just looked kinda.... blah. Are you from around here? I've never seen you before. Most of the people who party here are students, but I've never seen you around." She lit your cigarette. "I'm Millie.”

"I'm um, new. Just transferred this semester. Bio major." You mumbled, not sure why you were lying. Biology is what you would've done if you had finished school and gone to college, like a normal person. "um, Genevieve." You haven’t given anyone your real name in a long time. You hated your name, but for some reason, you felt compelled to give it- you were surprised you even still remembered it.

"Genevieve, ooh la la, comme c’est chic." Millie twirled her hair around her finger. Her face illuminated in the streetlights revealed whiskey-colored eyes, slightly smeared baby pink lipstick, and clumpy mascara. She reminded you of the girls you hated in high school, but you weren't sure how you felt about her now; your teenage cynicism had simply turned into apathy. "You seemed uncomfortable in there. Don't like parties?"

"Too many people," you looked at your shoes as you spoke, focusing intently on the small cracks in the pavement. "I dunno. Crowds." You heard something growl. Was it your stomach?

"Are you hungry?" Millie asked. She must have heard it too. "There's a diner a block away. Let's go!" She prompted, walking away before you could respond. You found yourself following her, although all you wanted was to find a motel and not have any more interaction with people. Especially not Cher Horowitz over here, probably seeing you as some charity case to take under her wing like a little doll. But you were hungry.

At the diner, You hadn't realized exactly how hungry you were until you smelled the medium rare burger on your plate. Millie had sugary French toast and a hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream. She had offered to pay which you were fine with as you didn't have any money left anyway. "Why are you being so nice to me?" You asked with a mouthful of burger.

Millie took a sip of her chocolate, whipped cream adorning her lip. "You seemed lonely," she mused. "You were kind of just sitting there, like a sad little puppy.

You narrowed your eyes at the sad puppy comment. "You don't think it's weird to just go up to people you don't know and invite them to a diner? What if I'm a serial killer?" Millie laughed at this, a chunk of half-chewed French toast flying from her mouth. Gross.

"Well you don't look like a serial killer, you look like a sad girl who just got dumped or something. Did you just get dumped? Is that what's wrong with you?" Based on this, you assumed Millie had zero sense of self-preservation.

"I didn't get dumped, I was just tired. I've been traveling all night." You hissed, feeling your teeth bare. Oops.

"Ok, ok, sorry, geez" Millie waved her arms in surrender. "Also, it's not weird to offer random acts of kindness to strangers. Girl code, y'know?" You didn't. "Anyways," she continued, "I know you're not a transfer student. If you were, I would've seen you in class already. The semester started three weeks ago and I'm also a bio major, dummy. Something's up with you. No offense, but you kind of smell homeless. Are you?"

"No." That was a lie. "I have somewhere to stay. I'm just on my own right now." You wiped ketchup from your cheek. "It's none of your business."

"Are you running away from something? Do you owe someone money? A drug dealer? A loan shark? An ex-boyfriend? An ex-girlfriend?" If she asks me one more question I am going to throw her hot chocolate on her face, you thought. But you didn't say that. Instead, you stared and continued shoving the rest of your burger in your mouth.

"Ok, it's clear whatever is going on with you don't wanna say. That's fine. But I'm not gonna be friends with someone who's running from a drug dealer, I don't wanna be roped into that shit. You gonna eat those?" Millie talked rather loudly, causing other patrons of the diner to look your way. You shoved your fries towards her.

"Who said we were friends?" you pressed, in a near-growl that surprised even you.

"I'm paying for your food, Genevieve. It's in your best interests that I am your friend" Millie shot back. It seemed she wasn't exactly what you thought. "I also don't believe that you have anywhere to stay. I live in a single dorm, so you can stay with me until the RA finds out and kicks you out. Or until I kick you out." Her sparkly white dress was stained with chocolate and syrup, and you noticed a tattoo on her sternum- a dove.

"Fine." A shitty dorm room was probably better than a shitty motel room anyways, in the morning you would leave and take the first bus to the next city, maybe looking for work.

"But you're sleeping on the floor," Millie said as she half-haphazardly plopped around 30 dollars on the table. "Let's go."

Were you ready to sleep on some stranger's floor? No. Were you ready to continue living as you had been for two years, a nomad hopping from motel to motel doing odd jobs and spreading out what little money you had taken from your house for as long as possible? Also no. But this was your life so far. You got up to follow your new friend out of the diner, but she was stopped. "What's the holdup?" You asked.

Millie stood a few steps away from you, looking like she had just seen a ghost. “Huh, oh, it’s just.. never mind. I forget…. The campus is only a few blocks away.” She hurriedly skipped ahead of you, keeping her eyes on the sidewalk. You shrugged and walked after her, figuring she might have for a second realized bringing a stranger into her dorm was a bad idea. Secretly, you were glad she was kind of stupid.

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The sun hit your face the next morning, and for a second you had forgotten where you were. Last night Millie had placed an air mattress on the floor next to her bed and you had passed out the moment she turned the lights out. You remembered drifting in and out of sleep while the sounds of sirens and general nightlife invaded your dreams. You sat up abruptly in the now deflated mattress, shoving the zebra print blanket out of your way as it was suffocatingly hot.

Since you had returned to the dorm so late last night, you didn’t have time to see what it looked like. It was disgustingly gaudy: cheap fairy lights strung about the popcorn walls, hot pink and peace signs everywhere, and posters for the types of girly, asinine romcoms you hated. The Heathers poster stood out to you, though- you wondered if she had seen that movie or just thought the poster was cute. As you tried to stand, you stumbled down onto the pink shag rug. Your legs felt like they had been put through a meat tenderizer, weak and numb and needly. You had also noticed you had sweated nearly completely through your clothes despite the air conditioning. I’m getting sicker, you thought. You grabbed your tattered flannel and slipped out the door, trying to seem like a normal student as you looked for the exit. You felt eyes on your back; it was two girls loitering near a water fountain, looking right at you

“Omg, look at what just came out of Millie’s room. That is not the type of girl she usually takes home,” said the girl with Zooey Deschanel bangs.

“She looks homeless. Did Millie sleep with a homeless chick? I wouldn’t put it past her too, she’s fucking crazy. Remember how she was drunk in, like, the middle of the morning at Orientation? Sure made a good impression on the RAs,” replied the girl in a tight ponytail. You pretended you didn’t hear and meekly slipped down the stairs. You felt you had heard more than you needed to.

Navigating your way around the campus was easy since it was fairly small. Eventually, you managed to leave the campus grounds and found yourself on a busy street, once again overwhelmed by the bright daylight and the amount of people rushing to wherever they needed to be. Amidst the rows of bodegas, restaurants, and brownstones, you found yourself in a quaint little used bookstore. Like a zombie, you brushed your hands gently over the rows of dusty books, all tattered and worn from years of belonging to different hands. It reminded you of the bookstore in your hometown you would go to with your sister after school, picking out disgustingly pulpy horror novels, underground comics, and Victorian scientific books about lycanthropy and bloodletting. My sister. What was her name? You thought to yourself. Why couldn’t you remember her name? Was it Genevieve? No, that’s my name. For some reason, it bothered you that you couldn’t remember her. It hadn’t been long since you’d last seen her, even though she left home before you did.

“There’s no point in remembering, anyways,” you say to yourself out loud in the near-empty bookstore. The older woman behind the checkout table jumped as if she hadn’t noticed you were there. You gave an awkward nod of apology and darted out the door, no longer interested in reliving your childhood love of weird books. Outside it had started to rain again; the cold rain and harsh wind cut through you like a knife as city-goers frantically scrambled for their umbrellas. You found refuge in a convenience store a block away and bought a sandwich, a canned coffee, and a pack of cigarettes with a crumpled 10-dollar bill you had taken from Millie’s room earlier that morning. You thought about her, and whether or not she was actually expecting you to leave. You briefly considered finding your way back to her dorm room to see if she was there before being disgusted with the possibility of even thinking that.

You ignored how the cashier looked at you the same way Millie did last night; a look of slight bewilderment and concern. Maybe you had something in your teeth. You ducked back outside into the rain and set yourself up under an awning to eat your lunch, and checked your reflection in the window to see what everyone else was seeing. What you saw was a gaunt, vampiric figure, with deep purple eye bags, greasy oil-slick hair, sickly blue veins permeating her forehead, and her face littered with scars from anxious picking. Her eyes were glassy and corpselike, her lips were chapped and cracking, and her crooked teeth were a vomit-brown. And the strangest thing at all, you recognized her.

It wasn’t a stranger this time.

It was you.

“I remember, I remember now.”