Fiction.

My walk home from work at 4 a.m. most mornings is something that would have caused my mother to lie awake in barely-controlled hysteria until she heard me walk in the door. The twelve blocks between the bar where I work and my house is not the nicest stretch of road, what with the bums who are constantly either asking me for cigarettes or loose change and that particular night I needed some air on my face, which would hopefully make my heart rate finally slow down.

I’m not going to pretend that I had some sort of clairvoyant knowledge that something was just around the corner, something huge. Let’s face it, I took a job that completely kills any possibility of a social life for a reason. I don’t mind being alone. I’m not ambitious. I just want to make sure my dad is taken care of, but I don’t want to be awake during the day when he tries to talk to me. I’d rather get up at 2 p.m., do some grocery shopping, clean a bathroom or two, and head off to work while at the same time congratulating myself for yet again avoiding Dad’s defeated, blank stare of grief. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve looked him fully in the eye since my mom died.

I’d become so accustomed to this routine that I thought I enjoyed it, I guess. At any rate, I wasn’t prepared at all for how impossibly elated I would feel when I met a teenage freak of nature who cried on a, thankfully, deserted sidewalk when she couldn’t get into a bar.

It wasn’t something I had been expecting, it wasn’t anything I had been waiting for, but I knew as soon as I saw the first ordinary, copper penny slide out from between her swollen eyelids that she wasn’t just any freak of nature, she was a fellow freak of nature.

I’d hazard a guess that a girl who cries pennies (and yes, in case you’re wondering, it is painful to witness) would be completely caught off guard by someone who threw back her head and laughed as penny after penny landed in my hands. But I couldn’t help it. I recognized that agonized look on her face. I even shed a few tears of my own (the normal, salty kind) before I resumed the grip I had on the poor girl’s wrist to keep her from bolting.

“What’s your problem?” she spat, using her free hand to cover her eyes and pulling with all of her skinny high school girl’s might. “Let me go!”

At this point the laughter and tears had fused together into loud gasping hiccups that I’m sure made me sound completely insane. “You can’t…” I panted. “Please, just hang on and let me catch my breath.” I didn’t mean to scare the kid, but she wouldn’t stop wriggling, and I needed to just cut to the chase. So when she didn’t seem to notice the scattered coins on the sidewalk flashing like crazy, I directed my attention to the streetlight above our heads, and I guess I thought harder than I meant to because the burst of light it produced lit up the street. Even hiding her eyes behind her hand, she couldn’t help but notice that.

“What the hell was that? Lightning or something?” There was still some rancor in her words but at least she’d stopped struggling. When I didn’t answer, realization dawned. “Did you do that?”

I couldn’t stop smiling long enough to answer, so I just nodded.

“What are you, some kind of freak?” she asked, but I could hear her voice catch on the last word. At this moment, somebody shouted from inside.

“Amelia! What the fuck! Come on! People are waiting!”

I hugged the girl as hard as I could, without hardly realizing what I was doing. She stiffened at first (when have I ever been smooth at anything?) and was probably still in shock when I grabbed the pen out of my back pocket and scribbled my name and number on the back of her hand. I glimpsed her out on the sidewalk later, gazing up at the streetlight, but the next time I checked, she had gone.

I’m not sure why I left her my information. All I know is that I didn’t realize how alone I was until I saw those pennies and I saw in her face that this wasn’t new, that she’d been dealing with this her whole life. Even if I never see her again, I will know that she exists, and if she exists, maybe other people exist who also have things that they’re ashamed of or that set them apart. The idea is so liberating, I can barely describe it.

Green. Yellow. Dazzle.

That’s the game I play with myself when I walk home, usually at the expense of some poor tired clubber, escaping the jaws of another one night stand by quietly fleeing home before the sun rises. If they’re not paying attention, bam, that red light will go off like a firecracker, and you can bet they stop the car then. I also pretend to be shocked, as I’m walking down the sidewalk. “Goodness gracious, did the city spring for some extra-watt bulbs with strobe effects? I must write the mayor a letter!” I peek into their car windows when I can, and I laugh to myself if they’re pale and trembling. I feel bad startling them, but I have so few vices that I feel like it’s okay to get away with this one tiny prank.

The night I met Lauren, I was playing the game with a little extra verve, adding some glimmering streetlights to the mix. I felt like skipping. Up ahead, a couple of dark figures sat on a low wall next to the sidewalk. Instead of pulling my bag closer to my body and hunching my shoulders like I usually do, I squared up and started fishing around for my pack of cigarettes. Tonight is cause for celebration, I thought. Ease up on the bums and give them a smoke if that’s all they want.

“Whoa, whoa, it’s the blonde that was in such a hurry to get rid of us!”

I slowed down a little and subtly cast more light in their direction from a nearby streetlight. Shit, it’s those two drunk assholes that we basically had to push out of the bar at closing, during which one of them had the grace to mention to me, yet again, that I could use a specific kind of plastic surgery.

I ducked my head down and tried to just ignore them. The dark one, the one who liked to comment on other people’s tits, got up and stood directly in front of me, and I noticed that the frat boy in the orange Tech shirt had been leaning on him, too wasted to sit up on his own. He slumped over sideways.

“Where are you going?” the dark one said.

“Home, if that’s all right with you.”

“What if it isn’t?”

Let me say one thing, I am really, really good at not making eye contact, but this guy looked at me with such hatred that it was impossible to look away even as I squirmed under his gaze.

The frat boy burst out laughing. I could tell from my lengthy experience with drunks that he was about just moments away from puking all over my feet. “James,” he said without opening his eyes. “That is not the way to talk to a honey.”

James flared his nostrils but didn’t get out of the way. There was complete silence until the frat boy burped so loud that I dropped the lighter I’d forgotten I was holding. He laughed again, and when I knelt to pick it up, he swung out his arm clumsily and brushed my shoulder.

“Amelia. February 4, 1998.”

I backed away and lit up the sidewalk with the streetlight even more. What in the world was going on here.

James’s jaw was set and the light made his eyes flash. The frat boy kept laughing and mumbling at the same time “His name was Ben and he took pictures of you.” What the fuck. “He took pictures of you while you were sleeping and showed them to all of his friends.” What the fuck what the fuck. The frat boy, still slumped over with his eyes closed and beginning to hiccup through his laughter was really pleased with himself now. “You thought he loved you and he fucking took pictures of you!! That is…classic!”

James’s mouth curved slightly upward and he finally stepped aside, but not in enough time for the frat boy’s inevitable vomit to miss my only comfortable work shoes. I was too angry to care. The stoplights began to show green, yellow, and red at the same time, and the streetlights flickered so violently that I barely noticed that James’s face was now illuminated by flashing blue. It wasn’t until I heard a car door slam that I realized a police car had pulled up.

“Are these guys bothering you, Amelia?” Oh thank God, it was the cop that comes in and hovers for us some nights when we have a particularly shady crowd.

“Oh, hi, yes…well, I’m just trying to go home.” How do I describe to him what just happened? A guy looked at me funny and another guy pulled one of my most humiliating memories out of nowhere? I don’t think so. “They’re just drunk and I just need to get by, my dad will be worried.”

The officer sighed and patted me on the back.

“You want a ride in the cruiser? Let me just see what these gentlemen have to say for themselves and I can take you straight home.”

That’s the last thing Dad needs, me pulling up in a cop car. “Oh, thanks, but no, I’m fine, really, I’ll just walk from here, it’s not too much farther.” It took me a few minutes to assure him that this was true, but finally he let me go with a worried look. I heard more vomiting behind me as I turned the corner, and I knelt down and untied my shoes and pitched them under a parked car. I’d rather let the penny in my pocket remind me of this evening, not the stench of a drunk asshole’s half-digested lager.