Free Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian

sweet. She really was. I loved that girl.
    Anyway, she showed up at the class that day to try and get aMasterCard, but she was kind of strung out and the staff was so on to her by that point. Even I could see she was in serious need of something that afternoon. She was pretty much busted before she had even sat down and started to cry. The woman who was teaching the class—it was about how to dress for an interview and what to say and what not to say and how to behave—knew Andrea and I could see her heart was breaking. The staff person’s name was Edith, which is a completely awful name, especially because the woman kind of had it going on: she was thirty with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes behind those nerd glasses that beautiful women can somehow pull off. She had us call her Edie, and she was, like me, tiny. My second day at the shelter, when I was still shell-shocked and thought this shelter thing might work, she suggested we check out a bunch of the petite clothes that some preppy store had just donated so that I would have some interview threads. It was a nice idea, but it never happened. I kind of let her down. (Obviously I kind of let a lot of people down. But I think often about letting down Edie because she was so frigging well intentioned.)
    Andrea was tall and gangly, and her hair fell flat down the sides of her head like a greasy waterfall. It was naturally black, but it had streaks of purple and pink. She was wearing a beater T-shirt the white and brown of two-day-old snow by the side of the road, and blue jeans that were ripped everywhere. Knees. Thighs. Pockets. And she was pretty anxious. Back then I was so naïve I was thinking it was heroin. Nope. Just painkillers. Lots of painkillers. But she was needy and over time had probably violated every rule the shelter had. She was also pretty goth. Pierced nose. Pierced eyebrow. Lots of black mascara—which, as you’ll see, months later would start one of those event cascades that are only bad news.
    As I said, I wasn’t giving people my real name; I’d learned my lesson. So, I was calling myself Abby Bliss, because that was the name of one of Emily Dickinson’s friends (yes, she had friends) and it’s pretty unforgettable. I came up with it on the spot in a bread truck, and I kind of liked it. In hindsight, unforgettable was amistake. I should have chosen Susan Huntington, Emily’s sister-in-law. Or I should have stuck with Abby, which was the name that first came to me, but used her last name before she got married: Wood. Abby Wood is a name that does not draw attention to itself.
    After Edie told Andrea that she wasn’t going to get the MasterCard, she sat down on the couch next to me. Actually, she sort of collapsed. Her big long body was like a marionette’s after you snip the strings. It just goes limp. And that’s when I wondered how old she really was. I guess because she was pierced and four or five inches taller than me, I’d pegged her for nineteen or twenty. But maybe she had been lying all along about her age, too. When she sat on the couch, she brought her knees up to her chest, and I saw the ivy tattoo on her ankle. She was wearing flip-flops, but the bottoms of her feet were so dirty it was like she’d stepped in a fireplace after the logs were nothing but ash. She was pretty jittery: her legs were almost vibrating, and she kept playing with her earrings and her earlobes.
    “I’m Andrea,” she said, and I answered with my made-up name. There were nine or ten other kids there, some actually interested in getting help with job interview skills and some just after the fifty-buck MasterCard. Me? I was probably somewhere in between. I mean, I was seriously stressed out. And I was living this lie, and not just about who my parents were or what my name was. If the counselors had known I was a walker from the Kingdom, they would have turned me in to the Red Cross or one of the groups that was trying to help with the refugees from