Free Almost Home by Jessica Blank Page B

down and Jim is smaller inside me, and far away. My own skin goes back to my own size finally and is tight enough to hold me; the space beside me is full of air and ocean and I’m all one piece. My cheeks are hot with tears, which run under my chin making it sticky, and I try to sniffle them up but they just keep coming, and I don’t even know why, and Tracy takes my hand and holds it in the sand and we both watch the waves break, spreading out and getting sucked back into the sea.
    We stay there all night, watching the red lights from the oil drills blink way out toward the sky. When the sun first starts to lift the curtain of black we finally fall asleep, just a little while before the cars start their early morning roar.
    I wake up before Tracy does and lie there, watching. Everything looks different in daylight. I have this funny feeling in my chest, half light and half nervous, like I changed something big last night, even though all I did was talk.
    I know Tracy didn’t get the stuff I said about jigsaw puzzles and fitting together and love. But when I talked about the other stuff, the secret stuff—being stretched out past your edges, split in half, and the feeling you could fall and fall and nobody will ever let you tell—that was when she held my hand.
    Something happened then: part of me that’s been knotted up for a year came loose when I started telling all those things and Tracy heard me. Her fingers locked in mine, our palms pressed tight; we were together, but I could feel where she ended and I began. I never had that with a person ever: being close and whole at the same time. And I told her all the secret scary things, and the whole time she kept holding on to me.
    I haven’t showered in a month almost, but I feel clean. I lie there breathing and watch the nannies show up at the beach, all black and brown with other people’s shiny white Malibu babies on their backs. They look at each other and laugh and are bored with the children and really, really tired. For some reason they make me think of me and Tracy working.
    All of a sudden I want to get out of here. The beach is softer than the sidewalk in Hollywood and Tracy is my friend but our friendship is too much in the backs of guys’ cars. I want to go back where no one knows that part of me.
    Squid bought me a burrito just because he liked me. He didn’t want anything back. My head fills up with his face and I need to get back to him.
    I shake Tracy’s shoulder. “Tracy,” I whisper.
    She rubs her eyes and looks up at me, bleary and soft. “Hey,” she goes.
    “I’m gonna catch the bus back in to Hollywood,” I tell her. “You want anything before I go?”
    She sits up and looks a way I’ve never seen her look: sad. “You’re leaving?”
    “Yeah, I gotta, uh—” and I don’t know how to finish that sentence so I just scratch my head and look at the sand.
    “Okay,” she goes, louder, in her normal voice: sharp like broken glass, rough like cigarettes. “That’s cool, man.”
    “Okay,” I go.
    “Okay,” she goes again. I keep expecting her to say something more, but she doesn’t; she just puts on her boots and starts lacing them up.
    I stand up. “So I’ll see ya.” I don’t want to say when, because I’m hoping to not have to come back.
    “Okay,” she goes. I walk over the hill of sand.
    Staring out the gray-streaked bus window as the city rolls by, I realize I’ve been awake for two hours and haven’t thought about Jim once. It’s weird: I’ve been with Jim the whole time I’ve been a person; before that I was just a kid. And it’s always been like in order to keep being myself I have to be with him, or wait for him, or imagine him at least. And now I’m not. Instead I’m thinking about Tracy’s face, and how it changes back and forth from hard to laughing, like she’s going someplace else and coming back, and how I kind of recognize that back and forth even though I don’t know why. I’m thinking that I