Free The Bread We Eat in Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente

anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.
    My national resources sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings , the Complete Keats , a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton, a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin, two shirts, also black, $10.16, and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on Planet Earth.
    I forgot my toothbrush.
     

     
    So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, I slept in libraries. If questioned, I pretended to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries always have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through Les Miserables , Madame Bovary , and Simulacra and Simulation before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something, and old French men usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.
    It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates: poof . Like dandelion seeds. I could say: don’t do drugs, don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.
    At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.
    See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theatre kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never got those pages, why they left them blank. I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. It’s naturally kind of blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back home,getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.
    Around 6 am, the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful. That’s all.
    And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for