Free Skylark by Sara Cassidy

Backseat Dreams
    That was when we were living in the Buick Skylark, and Mom still managed to look like a million bucks every day. I’d get to school early, sneak through a side door, hustle into a bathroom and wash my hair in freezing water, neck bent hard so I could fit my head under the short tap. I’d have a headache afterward, the water was so cold.
    Mom slept across the front seats—every night she laid a small cutting board and a folded towel over the plastic console. Clem and I stretched out in the back, side by side, trading off who would cling to the edge of the seat and who would spend the night squashed against the rough upholstery.
    Mom was always neat. She kept her clothes in a small suitcase tucked into the footwell of the front passenger seat. The glove compartment was for toiletries and important documents. My “closet” was a backpack behind the driver’s seat, Clem’s a sports bag behind the front passenger’s. In the outside pockets of our packs we each kept a toothbrush, library card and current two books.
    The library was our savior. The librarians never asked questions and answered every one of ours. We’d spend long evenings in the library, moving between the city’s seven branches so no one would suspect. Not that there was anything to suspect, Mom would remind us even as we snuck around guiltily. We weren’t doing anything wrong, only going somewhere warm, with solid surfaces to do our homework on.
    Mom always loved us and looked after us. It wasn’t her fault that rent was two grand a month and the waiting time for public housing at least half a year, so we were told. When I tried to fall asleep at night, Clem’s bony knee hard in my back, I’d visualize our family name, hand-printed in blue ink—KILPATRICK—inching up a list at the public-housing office, ticking upward to the top spot. Then shining keys lowering from on high. The three of us climbing the last few stairs to a freshly painted door, fumbling with the lock and arguing—the best kind of arguing, the kind you do to pass the time, the kind that is tangy with teasing; come on, butterfingers! My goodness, Angie, didn’t I teach you how to unlock a door?
    I’d drift into sleep with that picture in my head—Mom, Clem and me on the top step, fighting for the keys to our subsidized palace. But the keys always shrunk in my hand, and I’d wake to the rough seat beneath me, my neck crooked against the door, Clem’s heavy arm over me. I’d frown into the dark. Lie there in that black soup. Until I heard Mom purring in the front. She refused to let the bare-knuckle hours of our days get in the way of a good sleep. I’d join her in the forgetting place. We always slept well in that car.

Through-Line
    Actually, some nights we slept less well in the Buick Skylark. One time, four teenagers rocked the car, and we opened our eyes to their squashed faces at the windows. To them, we must have been like fish in an aquarium—blurry, bleary, unwary, swimming in our sleep. One of them licked the glass. Mom made a move to open her door, and they ran down the street, whooping.
    At least they weren’t the police, who had rapped on the windshield once or twice, stung our eyes with their flashlights, told us to move along. But they stopped. Got used to us, got to know Mom and understand that we were neither lazy nor criminal, only unlucky. One cop even dropped things off for us, tucked them under the car if we weren’t “home”—a twenty-pack of Timbits, scratchy blankets, pairs of black acrylic socks and, at the start of September, two binders and a five-hundred-sheet pack of loose-leaf paper.
    I was embarrassed by my binder. First of all, it matched Clem’s—close as we are, that wasn’t cool, not when we went to the same school. And the binder felt brutally clean somehow. Righteous. I walked down the hallway my first day back at