White Oleander

"You like breakfast?" Nidia said, putting on her baseball jacket in the front hall. "It's in the fridge. We saved it for you."

 

Una and Kiki Torrez laughed.

 

I walked back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was padlocked.

 

When I went out into the hall again, they were still standing there. "Was it good?" Nidia asked. Her eyes glittered under her moon-scar like a hawk's, amber-centered.

 

"Where's the key?" I asked.

 

Kiki Torrez, a petite girl with long glossy hair, laughed out loud. "With our lady of the keys. Your friend, the noblewoman."

 

"She's at work now," said Lina, a tiny Central American with a broad Mayan face. "She '11 be home by six."

 

"Adios, Blondie," Nidia said, holding the door open for them all to go out.

 

IT DIDN'T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time. On the weekends, when Amelia was home, we got fed, but during the week, we only had dinner. She kept a lock on the refrigerator, and had the phone and the TV in her room. You had to ask permission to use the phone. Her son, Cesar, lived in a room over the garage. He had AIDS and smoked pot all day. He felt sorry for us, knew how hungry we were, but on the other hand, he didn't pay rent, so he felt there was nothing he could do.

 

I sat in my tenth-grade health class at Hollywood High with a searing headache. I couldn't tell you whether we were studying VD or TB. Words buzzed like flies that would not land, words drifted across the pages of my book like columns of ants. All I could think of was the macaroni and cheese I would make that night for dinner, how I would devour as much of the cheese as I could without getting caught.

 

While I made the white sauce for the macaroni and cheese, I hid a stick of margarine behind a stack of plates. The girls told me right off that whoever had kitchen duty stole food for everybody, and if I didn't, they could make life hell for me. After the dishes, I carried it up to my room inside my shirt. Once we could hear Amelia in her room talking on the phone to a friend, they all came into our room and we ate the whole stick. I divided it into cubes with my knife. We ate it slowly, licking it, like candy. I could feel the calories enter my bloodstream, undiluted, making me high.

 

"Eighteen and out," Nidia said as she licked her fingers. "If I don't kill that bitch first."

 

But Amelia liked me. She had me sit next to her and finish the food on her plate when she was done eating. If I was really lucky, she invited me into the sitting room after dinner to talk about decorating, look at her fabric swatches and wallpaper patterns. I nodded to her endless anecdotes about aristocratic Argentina while scarfing down tea and butter cookies. The girls resented my collaborating with the enemy, and I didn't blame them. They didn't speak to me at school or on the street in the long hungry lockout afternoons before she got home. Nobody had a key — we might steal something, break into her room, use the phone.

 

WHAT CAN I tell you about that time in my life? Hunger dominated every moment, hunger and its silent twin, the constant urge to sleep. School passed in a dream. I couldn't think. Logic fled, and memory drained away like motor oil. My stomach ached, my period stopped. I rose above the sidewalks, I was smoke. The rains came and I was sick and after school I had nowhere to go.

 

I drifted the streets of Hollywood. Everywhere were homeless kids, huddled in doorways, asking for dope, change, a cigarette, a kiss. I looked into their faces and saw my own. On Las Palmas, a girl with half her hair shaved started following me, calling me Wendy. "Don't you walk away from me, Wendy," she yelled after me. I opened my knife in my pocket, and when she grabbed the back of my jacket, I turned and stuck it under her chin.

 

"I'm not Wendy," I said.

 

Her face was streaked with tears. "Wendy," she whispered.

 

Another day I found myself walking west instead of east, then north, zigzagging through wet side streets, drinking the resinous smells of eucalyptus and pittosporum and leftover oranges on the trees. Water squished in my shoes, my face burned with fever. I knew vaguely I should get out of the rain, dry my feet, prevent pneumonia, but I felt a strange pull to go north and west. I picked an orange from somebody's tree, it was sour as vinegar, but I needed the vitamin C.

 

It was not until I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard that I realized where I was going. I stood in front of our old apartment house, dingy white streaked with rain, water dripping from the bananas and the palms and the glossy oleanders. This was where our plane had crashed. I saw our windows, the ones that Barry had broken. Michael's windows. There was a light on in his apartment.