I step down from the couch. Going to Havoc isn't that big of a deal for most people. I get that. But this is my life now, has been for the last year. Sometimes going somewhere new-somewhere that'll let people like Dizzy and me in-is everything. It's a shiny penny fresh off the press, a black swan among white. It's nothing groundbreaking. But it is.
I wash my hair and body as best I can using the bottles of water and bar of soap Dizzy stole from the gas station. The drain slurps it down and sighs as I massage my scalp. Next to me on a rusted towel hook, my pink wig waves hello. She's ready to go, she tells me. She can't wait to be worn like the crown she is.
I tell her to hold her damn horses because I'm washing my hair in a sink.
Wrapping a towel that's seen better days around my head, I step out of the bathroom and into what's been my room for the last ten months. Ten months. I've lived with Dizzy for nearly a year, and I could count the things I know about him on my pencil-thin fingers.
When he was sixteen, his mom put him and his older brother on a plane from Iran bound for America. The pair landed in Philadelphia, and eventually Dizzy ended up here. He never talks about his brother, and I don't ask. I know he enjoys Twizzlers and blue ballpoint pens and crisp, white shoelaces. I know because he steals those things most often.
I've never seen anyone steal something the way Dizzy does. Once before, when I was at a department store, I spotted a pair of kids working together to pinch a yellow Nike hoodie. One kid distracted the associate, asking for help to get something down off the wall, while the other slipped the hoodie inside his leather jacket. They got away with it. I remember wanting to follow them. See what they did next.
Dizzy doesn't work that way. He doesn't distract or scheme. He just slips by what he wants like a ghost, and it's gone. Anything he wants, gone. Dizzy never takes more than he needs, but he needs a lot.
I met him at an arcade. I was playing Pac-Man when I saw him across the room. He was almost as thin as I was, and his nails told me everything I needed to know. He was like me-homeless. I've met homeless people who try to scrub away the streets. It never works. The human body has too many crevices, too many places for grime to settle. You can see it in the small lines of their faces and in their palms and elbows. And you can see it in their nails.
Dizzy's nails were atrocious. He didn't try to scrub away the street. He embraced it. I needed someone like that. As I watched, the long-legged, dark-skinned man-boy swiped a red can of soda from the bar. The soda was there. The soda was gone. If I hadn't been watching closely, I might have believed he was made of magic-Dracula strikes Detroit.
That day in the arcade, Dizzy met my stare with a boldness I admired. I eyed the place where the soda had been, and he smiled. Then he turned and swept out the door. With the rang-tanging of arcade games behind me, I followed him. I followed him then, and I follow him now. He's my person. Not that I need one.
I startle when I spot my person standing in the bedroom doorway.
His eyes widen as if he just remembered I'm a girl. Tugging the towel around my body tighter, I avert my gaze. "What are you looking at?"
"I forget sometimes," he says softly. "What you look like."
He means without my makeup. Without my rainbow wigs and chains and piercings. He means me as I am right now: Domino, in the nude. "Stop staring at me, perv."
"I know you hate it when I-"
"Stop," I say. "Just don't."
He holds up his hands in defeat. "I'm ready to go when you are."
I move to my closet-a pile of clothes on the floor that Dizzy stole for me-and bend to dig through it. Behind me, I hear him turn to leave.
"You are so beautiful," he says under his breath before he's gone.
I almost charge after him. I almost beat his chest and scratch his face with my dirtied nails. Anything to make him regret what he said. But I just tighten my hands into fists and I count-one, two, three … ten.
Now my blood is even Steven, and everything's going to be okay. It's just Dizzy. His words are easy enough to forget. I smile like I mean it and lay a hand against the wall. It's solid, real. If this wall is treated right, it'll stand straight as the stars long after I'm dead. This particular wall is white with blotches of gray from God knows what.
But my wall, the one in my future house, will be blue.
I walk back into my bathroom, the one uglied by water stains and years of neglect, and pull on a black skirt and tee, lace-up heels, and green-and-black-striped tights like I'm the Wicked Witch of the West. Then I hook in my piercings-lip, ears, eyebrow, tongue-and swipe on enough eyeliner and shadow to cause anyone's mama to shiver. Finally … hello, darling … I slip on my pink wig.