Free Anonymity by Janna McMahan

mouth. The taste brought a flood of school memories.
    She should be a junior now, excited about prom.
    Instead her days would be filled with the relentless search for food and a safe place to sleep. And boredom. Long days with nothing to do, no one worth talking to. She had thought when she left home that she would get to see the world. And in the beginning she'd had a fun group to hang with in Oregon. She'd seen some pretty phenomenal natural spots in the Pacific Northwest—massive sequoia, redwoods and rocky beaches strewn with giant elephant seals. She'd been to music festivals all down the California coast where she'd met hippies and performance artists and people dressed in Renaissance garb. She'd slept in a barn on an organic farm and once woke up on a freezing beach with pebbles pressed into her cheek.
    It had been an adventure, but along the way she'd been hungry and tired and scared. Travel companions flowed in and out of her life, so she'd learned to keep to cities with youth services. At one point, she realized that she rarely saw the pretty parts of town. Shelters were never in nice areas; nobody wanted transients hanging around their neighborhood, gumming up their pretty views.
    While she waited for her clothes to dry, Lorelei used the drop-in's computer. She had long ago stopped checking her Gmail. The few old friends who did know her e-mail address had stopped responding. She was left with only junk mail.
    Instead, Lorelei checked her Facebook page. She always smiled when she saw the redheaded superheroine she used as her profile pic. All her Facebook friends were travelers like herself, nobody who was a risk to her anonymity. She kept up with a dozen travelers who posted sporadically. Sometimes she was able to reconnect with a friend lost to her, but nobody had posted anything to Lorelei's wall and she had no messages.
    She posted, Anybody in Austin?
    A hefty girl asked her how long she was going to be on the computer, so Lorelei logged off.
    Next, she picked through the deteriorating boxes of board games. She would have enjoyed a game of Monopoly or Risk, but there was nobody around to play. Every Monday after dinner, her family had gathered to eat dessert and play board games. It was a Latter-day Saints’ tradition called Family Home Evening. The sad, torn boxes of Scrabble and Yahtzee made her remember the laughter, the happiness before things spun so out of control. She used to hate Family Home Evening, but now she couldn't really remember why.
    She checked out the shabby selection of paperbacks on the drop-in's shelves.
    David walked by on his way out, and she stopped him.
    “Dude,” she said. “Your books are all bodice rippers and lawyer stories. Where do you keep the good books?”
    “That's just what people donate,” David said. “The library is a short walk from here. You can use the drop-in's address and telephone to apply for a library card.”
    “Really?”
    “Sure,” he said. “Have a party.”
    The Austin Public Library was a beige-concrete four-story building with a couple of metal benches outside. Lorelei knew that its austere exterior was a way to discourage the homeless from hanging around, but it hadn't worked. There was an older lady sitting on a pile of backpacks and bedrolls gumming a cigarette. The woman looked up at Lorelei and held out her hand.
    “Sorry, ma'am,” she said and shrugged as if to say, we're in the same boat.
    Lorelei's mother used to take her to their local library. She remembered seeing a few homeless men sleeping in the lobby. Her mother called them “the unfortunates.” She never fully explained their presence, so Lorelei didn't understand homelessness. She thought that it would be the coolest thing in the world to live in a library. To her, that was the opposite of unfortunate.
    At the entrance, Lorelei was confronted by a large sign that read No Bedrolls. She couldn't leave her new sleeping bag outside to be stolen.
    “Would you like to leave some