Becoming Chloe Read online

  Becoming Chloe

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Copyright

  For D., because hearts can do no more

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Laura Rennert (a.k.a. Agent Extraordinaire) and Michelle Frey (a.k.a. Editor I Dreamed I’d Get When I Was Young and Not At All Jaded) for sharing my vision for Jordy and Chloe. Thanks also to the trusted readers whose feedback helped shape the work: Anne Lowenkopf, Jim Surges, Analia Lovato, and Jane Patmore. Finally, special thanks to Dorothy Buhrman for loving Jordy so sincerely, and for handing me the perfect title when I was too close to the work to see it myself.

  Becoming Chloe

  ONE

  * * *

  WINGS

  The cellar has five high windows that let out onto the alley between this building and the next. I’m trying to get some sleep, only there are people having sex out there. I can hear the guy grunting the way guys do. Some guys. Not all guys. I never made a sound like that.

  The girl is on her back on the hard concrete of that filthy alley, and I entertain the thought that maybe this was never her idea. That this is not a voluntary gig on her part. Because who gets turned on by lying in filth on cold concrete to do it? Then again, in this city, who knows? I’ve been in this city five days. Slept in this cellar three. Already I’ve seen people sink pretty low and not think twice about it. Lower than they probably thought they’d ever go. Too bad I’m one of them.

  There’s a streetlight out on the avenue, but not much light makes it down to the back of the alley. And even less makes it down here where I sleep. But at the street end of the alley there’s a little bit of light, and I look down that way, and I see about three more pairs of feet.

  I hear a guy say, “Someone’s coming.” He’s talking in that kind of hoarse whisper they call a stage whisper, but this is definitely not the stage. This is so real it’s starting to change me. Then he says, “No. Never mind. It’s okay.”

  By now my stomach is all cold and I realize this is rape going on up there. I realize that my inconvenience at being kept awake doesn’t stack up to much. I can think of at least one person in this direct vicinity who’s having a much worse night than I am.

  And I know I have to do something. I’m just not sure what.

  I have to find a place to hide. Because I think I’m going to have to yell, and I don’t want anyone to know where I’m yelling from. When I interrupt them, they’re not going to like that. And the last thing I want is for them to come take out their frustrations on me. There’s one cellar window that doesn’t lock. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be down here. I jump up from the mattress too fast, and it makes me dizzy and makes my head hurt. My head still hurts a lot. I try not to think about it, but it’s still pretty bad.

  There’s a kind of alcove created by mattresses stacked against the far wall. I hide behind those mattresses. And I try to decide what to do with my voice. Should I make it high, trying to pass for a woman? Or go deep, like a much bigger, much older guy than I am? Or just be me? I guess I’m looking to put on some authority.

  I go deep. “I called the police!” I yell. Praying they can’t track the direction of the sound. “I can see what’s going on out there. I already called the police.”

  For a moment the whole world goes quiet and still. I can almost hear my heart pounding.

  I peek around the mattresses. I still can’t see the back of the alley very well in the dark, but I can see well enough to know that the scene of the actual rape is motionless. Just a lump of two figures frozen. And I can see the feet at the end of the alley and they’re not moving, either.

  I realize I’ve probably done all it’s in my power to do, and it might not be nearly enough.

  Then something miraculous happens. Actually, I don’t guess it’s fair to call it a miracle when it happens dozens of times a night. I listen to sirens all night here. Fire trucks, ambulances, police cars. Always an emergency close by. Back-to-back disasters, all night long. But the timing of this one is something like heaven. Or at least mercy.

  The guys run away. All of them. And I come out of hiding.

  I watch to see if the girl is going to be okay. She takes a minute getting up. One of her shoes is knocked off, and she looks around for it. Her jeans are only on one ankle but she worries about the shoe first. She moves off toward the end of the alley looking for it, and I can see her as she bends down to retrieve it. She’s no older than I am. She’s tiny. I wonder if I should go out there and see if she’s okay.

  Before I can even move she comes in through the window that doesn’t lock. Drops right down into the cellar with me. Like she knew which one to go through all the time. Her jeans are still off except for that one leg, and her panties got ripped off, or she never had any, so she’s more or less naked from the waist down, just standing there in a hooded sweatshirt, staring at me. She doesn’t seem the least bit surprised that I’m here. She’s blond, with that long, perfectly straight hair that girls used to kill for in the sixties. Or so I’ve been told. A little younger than me, I think. She looks about sixteen but she’s small for her age, or younger than I think. Pretty, with good bones in her face. Like she belongs someplace better than this. Then again, who doesn’t?

  “Hi,” she says. She steps back into the other leg of her jeans and pulls them into place.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Oh. Me? Yeah. Sure. Sure. I’m fine.”

  She says it in a kind of distracted tone, like she has to keep reminding herself what we’re talking about. I’m thinking maybe she’s loaded, but her motor skills seem fine. She’s putting her shoe back on now, a dirty white sneaker with the laces knotted and broken away.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Fine.”

  “Want me to walk you home?”

  “Home? I’m home now. I live here.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Do too.”

  “I’ve been here for three nights. I’d have known it. I’d have seen you.”

  “I saw you,” she says. She points to the little alcove behind the mattresses. “I saw you from there. I liked you. I already knew you were nice.”

  I spend about fifteen minutes trying to convince her that she should go to the hospital. Or the clinic. “They have to take you,” I tell her, “even if you don’t have money.”

  But she doesn’t understand why she needs to see a doctor. She doesn’t understand what the doctor would do. Actually, I’m beginning to see there’s a whole lot she doesn’t understand.

  “At least you should go to the health department. Make sure you didn’t catch anything.”

  “What can you catch?” she wants to know.

  “Like herpes or syphilis or AIDS.”

  “I never caught those before,” she says. “Guys do that all the time. At the state home it was, like, almost every day. I never caught anything.”

  “Did you ever say no or try to fight?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you say. They don’t ask. I never caught anything.”

  “You could have something and not know it. If you got a disease they could give you something for it.”

  “Well. Maybe in the morning,” she says.

  I can understand that she doesn’t want to go out into the night again.

  I still don’t believe she’s been living here. Not completely. But then I have to believe it, because she goes off into her little alcove and comes back with two
blankets. I haven’t had blankets since the money ran out. I’ve been looking for work but I’m not eighteen and nothing so far. I’m wishing I had a blanket. Maybe she’ll loan me one. Maybe she’ll be grateful to me. Right now she doesn’t seem to know I did anything to help her. Right now she doesn’t seem to know that she needed help. That something bad just happened.

  Maybe in the morning she’ll know more.

  I lie down on my mattress. A moment later she lies down next to me, right up behind me, and throws both blankets over both of us. I don’t say anything for a long time.

  Finally I say, “I’m not going to try to do anything to you.”

  But I don’t know why I bother to say that, because she obviously feels safe enough. I’m thinking that for three nights there was somebody here while I slept and I didn’t even know it. She’s feeling safer than I am.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I don’t even like girls.”

  “You don’t like me?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean I don’t like girls for sex.”

  “Who do you like for sex?”

  “There’s only two kinds of people. Girls and boys.”

  “I know.”

  “Let’s not talk tonight,” I say.

  I still haven’t figured out if she’s crazy, or completely stupid, or stoned out of her mind. I’m not sure I even want to know. I just want to sleep, but I know I won’t, because I’m still scared from what happened, and because there’s a stranger in bed with me, and because something about her definitely isn’t right.

  In the morning we take the bus down to the health department. I could have had breakfast if I hadn’t needed that bus fare. Now I haven’t eaten or slept. But it’s awful when you need a doctor and there’s nobody with you and nobody cares. Believe me, I know.

  I sit looking out the bus window and I realize I still don’t know her name, so I ask.

  “Wanda Johnston,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t like that name.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I could tell, though. I don’t like it, either, but I’m stuck with it now. What can I do?”

  “You can change your name.”

  “I can?”

  “Sure. People will call you whatever you say they should.”

  “What should they call me? What’s a good name?”

  I think about that for a while. While I’m thinking, the city blocks roll past the window.

  We pass by a public grade school and she says, “I used to go to school there. Before I went to the state home.”

  “Yeah? How old were you? Why did you have to go to a state home?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Did you think of a good name yet?”

  I cross “stoned” off the list of possibilities, because it doesn’t seem to be wearing off.

  “Maybe Kate or Jessica or Julie or Chloe.”

  “Chloe,” she says. “Is that really a name?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “C-h-l-o-e.”

  “You can’t hear the ‘h.’ ”

  “No, but it’s in there.”

  “Wow. A whole letter that it doesn’t even have to use. That makes it pretty fancy.”

  The morning sun is coming through the bus window and lighting up her face. She has this cute, short nose, like a cheerleader. She actually looks like she could have been a cheerleader. She looks like she could have been the popular girl. Like she’d open her mouth and say something to make it sound like the world should revolve around her because she’s pretty. But instead she keeps talking like she doesn’t even know there’s a world around her. Like she doesn’t know what world she’s in.

  She’s looking at my forehead, and it makes her look sad. “Who hurt you?” she asks.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it does,” she says. “It really does.”

  She goes in for the pelvic exam alone. After a while she comes out and sits with me again. Her shoulders seem tight, but maybe it’s my imagination.

  “Did it go okay?” I say. “Can we go?”

  “They have to do HIV. We have to wait. How do they do HIV?”

  “They have to draw some blood.”

  “How?”

  “They just draw some out with a needle.”

  She jumps up and runs out of the waiting room, down the hall, and out onto the street. I run after her, but she’s fast. I don’t catch up until she hits the corner and has to yield to traffic.

  “Hey, it’s gonna be okay,” I say. “Come back in.”

  “Not if there’s needles.”

  “It won’t hurt much. I’ll go in with you. You can close your eyes. You’ll never know.”

  I have my arm around her, and I’m leading her back in the direction of the health department. Her body feels stiff, but she isn’t literally fighting me. I don’t know her well enough to force her to do anything, but she seems like somebody who could get into a lot of trouble unless somebody cared enough to try. We go back inside and sit down again in the waiting room.

  “You promise I won’t even know?” Her eyes look glassy, like a wild animal about to be spooked into flight.

  “I’ll stay right with you. It hardly hurts.”

  When they call her number, a big black man in medical whites leads us into a small room and sits her down on an examining table.

  “You can wait outside,” he says.

  “No, I can’t,” I say. “I promised her I’d come in. She’s terrified of needles.”

  “Great,” he says. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  He ties off her arm with a rubber tube, rubs and pats at a vein until he likes what he sees. Then he turns around and breaks the cap off a sterile needle and she screams and rolls off the table. Lands in a ball between the table and the wall, yelling.

  The big guy looks exasperated. “The point of this is not to draw blood against her will,” he says. “There has to be some voluntary cooperation involved.”

  “Look, she got raped last night and she’s scared of needles. Can you cut her some slack?”

  “Can you get her back on the table?”

  I have to literally lift her and put her back on the table. She’s still curled up in a ball, and her arm is still tied off.

  “I’m going to hold you,” I tell her. “I’m not holding you like forcing you. I’m just holding real tight so you don’t get scared, okay?”

  I pin her body down with the weight of my own. I also put one hand over her eyes because I promised her she wouldn’t have to see. The guy manages to get the tied-off arm out from underneath her, and he quickly and expertly slides the needle home. Blood jumps into the tube. Then her head moves sideways, away from my hand, and she opens her eyes and screams. She tries to jump off the table but I hold her down hard because I’m scared she’ll break off the needle in her arm or something.

  “Could you hurry?” I say to the guy, because I know I can’t hold her for long. She’s in this adrenaline-fueled state that’s very hard to overpower.

  Before I can even finish the sentence she sinks her teeth into my arm. The fleshy part of my left arm just below the elbow. She locks on like a pit bull and just keeps sinking in. I yell out loud, and I let go, but she doesn’t.

  The guy pulls the needle free, and I’m screaming, and she’s really in deep now. I have a sick, horrible sense that she’s about to hit bone. She has this jaw that just won’t quit and the pain is incredible and I don’t know how to make her let go. I think maybe I’ll have to slap her, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. The clinic guy holds up the needle so she can see that he’s done and way over on the other side of the room with it. He holds up both hands, like a surrender, and she opens her jaws and lets me go. A stream of blood runs down my arm and I sit down hard on the floor and wonder why she didn’t have all that fight last night in the alley. Why I had to be the one to bring that out in her.

 
She rolls off the table again and balls up by the wall, shivering.

  The clinic guy looks closely at my arm and whistles. “You’ll have to get that looked at. I wish I could help you here, but we’re only equipped for these certain types of medicine.”

  “Right.” I’m surprised I say anything at all. I think I might be in a little bit of shock.

  “You should have that head wound looked at, too. How old are those stitches?”

  “Nine days, I think. Or ten.” I’m not sure how long I was in the hospital. That time is mostly a blur.

  “It’s not healing very well. It looks infected. It looks like you didn’t keep it clean enough. I wouldn’t take chances with a head wound like that one.”

  “Right,” I say. And think how badly I want to go home. I wish I had one.

  “You’re not getting out of here without a tetanus shot,” he says.

  So I sit up on the table and he gives me a tetanus shot. I look down at the little pit bull and she’s sitting up now, pretty calm, watching me.

  “You’re much better at that than I am,” she says.

  I’ll be damned if I’m spending my pitiful lunch money on getting us home. Especially her. I’m going to need to eat something. So I set off walking, even though it’s three or four miles.

  I keep looking over my shoulder and she keeps being back there. Following me.

  “I’m really sorry I bit you,” she says.

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Jordan.”

  “I’m really sorry I bit you, Jordan.”

  “Leave me alone,” I say. “Stop following me.”

  I’m crossing against traffic, walking right out in front of cabs and making them stop for me. Because I’m pissed. My arm is throbbing, with this intense shot of pain on every throb like somebody’s hammering a sharp wedge of metal into it with a big sledgehammer. I’m trying to think if my head even hurt this much.

  “But we live in the same place,” she says.