White Oleander

The second envelope held a comic strip story of a prison break, three boys blasting their way out through steel doors with rocket launchers. They steal a car, the signs say Leaving L.A. They tear across the desert in the night. Next there's a street sign in broken mosaic, it says St. Marks Place. Angular hipsters in black pass a doorway, 143. The Statue of Liberty in the background wears shades, it's reading a comic book.

 

I folded the drawings, slipped them back into the envelope decorated with lightning bolts, stars, and a girl on a white horse in a comic book sky. Hold for Astrid Magnussen. If only I'd known that he would.

 

And now it was too late. I looked at Sergei across the table in Rena's kitchen. He could care less about my boyfriend in 'New York. He didn't even care about his girlfriend in the next room. He was just like one of Rena's white cats — eat, sleep, and fornicate. Since the night I'd seen them together on the couch, he was always watching me with his hint of a grin, as if there were some secret we shared. "So how is your boyfriend?" he asked. "Big? Is he big?"

 

Niki laughed. "He's huge, Sergei. Haven't you heard of him? Moby Dick."

 

Olivia had told me all about men like Sergei. Hard men with blue veins in their sculpted white arms, heavy-lidded blue eyes and narrow waists. You could make a deal with a man like that. A man who knew what he wanted. I kept my eyes on my broccoli and cheese.

 

"You get tired of waiting," he said. "You come see me."

 

"What if you're no good?" I said, making the other girls laugh.

 

"Only worry you fall in love Sergei," he said, his voice like a hand between my legs. >

 

MY LATEST CASEWORKER, Mrs. Luanne Davis, was a middle-aged black woman in a white blouse tied in a bow at the neck and relaxed hair in a pageboy. I spotted her right off when I arrived at the McDonald's on Sunset after school. I ordered a burger and fries and a Coke, and for once, the screaming of children in the ball pit didn't bother me. I'd gone to Playland the night before with Niki, where she sang with one of Werner's bands, Freeze. I carried her microphone stand, which made me a roadie, so I didn't need an ID. Niki was the only one who could sing. She had a purring, ironical voice, she sang the way Anne Sexton read poetry. But everyone else screamed, and nobody could play, and I was still half-deaf from it.

 

The social worker passed a wad of letters across the sticky table to me. Such potential for damage, I didn't even want to pick them up. I hated the sight of them, my mother's handwriting, the crabbed lines I could see through the blue airmail envelopes. She could get seven pages per stamp, and each thin sheet weighed more than the night. They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown. I had not written to her since Claire died.

 

Sipping her black coffee with Sweet'n Low, Mrs. Luanne Davis spoke slowly, overenunciating in light of my temporary deafness. "You really should write her. She's in segregation. It can't be easy."

 

"I didn't put her there," I said, still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.

 

She frowned. She had lines between her eyebrows from frowning at girls like me, girls who didn't believe anybody could love them, least of all their dangerous parents. "I can't tell you how few children I have whose parents write. They'd be thrilled to death."

 

"Yeah, I'm super lucky," I said, but I dutifully put them in my pack.

 

I finished my food, watching the kids jump off the net onto one small boy who couldn't find his feet in the ball pit. Over and over they jumped onto him, laughing while he screamed. His teenaged mother was too busy talking to her friend to help him. Finally, she yelled something at the other kids, but she didn't get up or do anything to protect her son. When she turned back to her friend, our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside.

 

When I got home, Yvonne was in front of the TV on the figured green velvet couch, watching a talk show for teenagers. "This is the mother," she told me, not taking her eyes from the screen. "She gave up the daughter when she was sixteen. They never saw each other before this second." Big child's tears dripped down her face.