Free Chloe Doe by Suzanne Phillips

become realistic about our efforts. We know they’re unsuccessful, that they point us in no clear direction without the belief to back them, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. They’re nice to read, and to hold on to for a moment, but they’re not to be believed.

Vons Grocery
    D r. Dearborn wonders if any of us have worked a real job.
    I tell him, I tried it your way.
    “I worked at Vons, unpacking boxes in the middle of the night.” I stocked toilet paper, tampons, and Colgate toothpaste. They gave me the hygiene aisle.
    “The checks were enough for rent, period.”
    I gave up my livelihood to starve to death? No way. When it came time to feed my stomach, I stole from the shelves. I’m not ashamed of it. There’s more shame in begging on the street, or in giving up.
    “I was fired for it.” Not the first time. The first time they caught me they were nice. They cared about me wasting away in my apartment. They asked me, “Chloe, is there no way you can pay for these things?” And I explained my life to them. How the money they paid me goes only so far. So they told me they’d feed me while I was on the job.
    But what about my days off? Do I pay my electric bill or do I eat? Enough time goes by with me sitting in the dark, eating soup straight from the can, that I start feeling less than human.
    So I started doing some of the guys in the back, behind the boxes, on delivery nights.
    “It wasn’t a bad arrangement,” I say, but the memory sticks in my throat, makes my words thin, unbelievable. I try to push through it. “I didn’t have to go look for it.”
    “But it bothered you,” he says.
    The truth is I hated every minute of it. Especially the way they looked at me after, sometimes like I wasn’t even there, sometimes like they wanted to wipe me off their shoes. I stopped being Chloe who stocked the girlie items and was just someone they wanted to forget.
    That hurt.
    “Vons paid for the extras,” I tell him. “You know, the
tesoros.
The pretty things. What I have to have. Like these earrings. They cost me twelve dollars, but they’re real silver.”
    He doesn’t look at them. He’s waiting, but that’s all I have. Vons was it and there’s no happy ending there.
    “So that was my one great attempt at the good life,” I say. “That’s why I know it doesn’t work. Not for me.”
    “Are you saying you’ll go back to the street?”
    I’ll go back because it’s all I know.
    Because I’m good at it.
    Because it pays the bills.
    “It’s a vicious cycle,” I tell him. “I need to eat. I need to know I won’t come home to an eviction notice. The only thing that gives me that is my job. You see, Doc? Like my sister always said, it’s a matter of survival.
    “Soon after, the
policía
will pick me up. I’m underage. They’ll say, ‘Why not Madeline Parker? Give this girl a chance to change.’ Then I’ll be back here, looking at your smiling face.”
    Isn’t that nice?
    “You want to come back?” he asks. “Once isn’t enough?”
    He doesn’t understand King of the Mountain. He doesn’t know how I can feel like I have the world in the palm of my hand when I’m selling myself at the going rate.
    He says as much. My
doctor.
He wants me to make sense of it for him.
    I tell him there’s no way he’ll ever understand.
    “Guys don’t get it,” I say. “Especially when they had a mom baking them pies and checking their homework. Did you have a mom like that, Doc?”
    He says she was something like that. He got paid for good grades.
    “Then maybe you do understand, just a little.”
    We were both paid for a good performance.
    Let’s try it, he says. Give him a chance.
    “It’s like I’m not even there,” I tell him. It’s a mindless occupation. I can go over my grocery list while I’m working.
    This is how I try to explain:
    It’s better than doing it to a husband you’ve come to hate. Strangers are always a better trick.
    “I bet you’ve had women complain