“Henry.”
“I need to.”
“No.”
“I won’t tell anyone you were involved—”
“No. You promised.”
“Cynthia says it’s breaking me. She said I need to get this off my conscience.”
“Cynthia.”
He points weakly to the booth.
Shaila shakes her head, faster and faster.
“Cynthia said if I just go to the police and tell them about the—”
“Cynthia,” she hisses. “Cynthia.”
“You’ll be fine, Shaila—”
“They’ll know, Henry! They’ll know I was there!”
Diners begin to turn to the noise. A manager stomps toward us. That’s when I leap from her pocket and run. They see me. They all see me. A lady screams. Feet everywhere, scraping chairs, mayhem. I escape through the door and scoot behind a telephone poll, my chest pounding.
Shaila finds me. The street is quiet again, but for a man standing in the café doorway, growling and cursing. “What were you doing?” she asks me.
“Creating a diversion.”
“You could have been killed!”
A rat’s heart, on average, beats four hundred times a minute. This sort of excitement is no good for me. My heart isn’t used to such things.
Henry Wheeler came into our lives the night Shaila found some chickens in a supermarket dumpster. On Telegraph Avenue, the surge of feet had calmed for the night. Only the odd clutch of sneakers passed by, all of them talking at once, none bothering to look down, none willing to part with a dollar bill or food still warm in restaurant doggie bags. I was fine. There’s always food for a rat on Telegraph. But from inside her jacket pocket, I could hear Shaila’s belly rumble.
I poked my head out. “Let’s find you something to eat,” I said. She looked down at me, her brown eyes glazed with hunger. The neon lights of the smoke shop lit her skin a pale blue. I tugged at her pocket. She rose on unsteady knees. If I could have carried her myself, I would have. If I could have brought her a feast, I would have. The best I could do was keep her moving.
The supermarket on Shattuck threw out its fresh food at ten p.m., and she’d learned to dive in, sift through the salad-bar detritus, and find the packaged foods. I had only to skim the surface of the trash heap to find a good plump tomato, a heel of stale bread, a few cheese cubes. She sifted and sighed and I nibbled. She gagged and cursed and I swallowed. Finally, she struck gold. “Look at this!” she called.
She held aloft a black plastic container. “Roasted chicken!” She pried open the lid, stood right in the dumpster, and tore at the meat with her nails. She held out a morsel for me, salty and fatty with some kind of red peppery paste rubbed into the skin.
“Look!” Shaila pointed. In the dumpster behind her sat four more packaged chickens.
She returned to Telegraph triumphant, a tower of chickens tucked into her elbow: “Motherfuckers! I bring you chickens!” A few men sat in a tight clutch and passed something around. You’d think they’d have jumped up for the food, but no one budged. It wasn’t food they were looking for.
One man did get up. I hadn’t seen him before. The shop lights gleamed off his hair as he lit a cigarette. He nodded at Shaila, plucked a chicken from her stack, and sank to the curb.
Never have I seen a human eat so fast. One minute the chicken was there, whole and plump and orange brown. The next, she was nothing but rib cage and ankles.
He looked at Shaila and she stared back. “Are you not hungry?” he asked.
“Who are you?” she replied.
He tore off the wishbone and held it out to her. “Henry Wheeler.”
She snatched it. “Why’re you out here?” she asked.
He blinked. “I don’t understand the question.”
The man was well dressed in a thick turtleneck and denim jacket. He had the sort of strong jaw and square chin that humans are known for. I don’t trust a strong jaw. I don’t trust a square chin.
From his belt he unhooked a metallic mug. “You want to know why I’m on the street?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you out here?”
“Stepdad.”
He nodded. “I hear that a lot. Out here.”
“Oh yeah? You talk to a lot of people? Out here?”
He picked at his front teeth.
“Who are you really?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve never seen you before, but you roll up today in your nice jeans and your jacket looking all clean, and you talk like you know what it’s like to be out here, but you don’t look like you know what it’s like. You look like you took a shower this morning.”
“Fucking stepdads,” was all he said. He reached up. She held out the wishbone. They both pulled. Shaila won.
He lit a fresh cigarette and we watched the ash grow until it dropped and scattered in a gray shower. “You sleeping out tonight?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s gonna be a cold one.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. “Yeah.”
Shaila jumped to her feet and nearly sent me flying. She backed away and I could smell her alarm. “It’s making sense now,” she whispered. And yes, all at once, it was. The clothes, the shave, the jaw line. Henry Wheeler stood up.
She took her knife from her back pocket and held it out. “You’re a pimp.” He walked toward her. “Get the fuck away.” She jabbed her knife at the air. He stopped, raised both hands.
“I’m not a pimp,” he said. His hands dropped to his sides. “Do I look like a pimp?”
She kept her knife raised. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the fuck you’re doing here.”
He raised his arms to the sky again. “I’m a grad student. Okay? I’m a grad student.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and we meant it.
Henry the grad student took us back to his apartment that night. We walked from Telegraph up through campus, its buildings lit from the ground like old monuments. We walked past the big clocktower as it chimed midnight. We got on a bus that took us high up into the hills, to a neighborhood of steeply sloped driveways and houses with fairy-tale turrets. I watched Shaila strip off her clothes and get in the shower. “Oh my god,” she said, letting the hot water flatten her hair to her shoulders in great black sheets. I scooted into an open cabinet and relieved myself. Henry lived in what he called an in-law. A house in which humans keep their elders.
What kept Shaila from running? Back to the group, back to what she knew? I’d like to say it was intuition — I know my own had settled. I didn’t like the man, but he didn’t have the predator in him. Most likely, it was the thought of one more night on Telegraph, waking at every footfall, fingers wrapped around her knife. She might have gone anywhere that night. She might have trusted anyone.
Out of the shower, Shaila stood before the mirror, gazing into it as the steam cleared. Droplets of water poured from her hair down her naked legs. I’m not sure what she was looking for when she slid a finger over her clavicle, traced circles over the round knob of her shoulder. I’d started to fall asleep in the warm womb of that room when we heard a knock on the door.
“Hey.” The grad student. “You all right in there?” A pause. “No drugs. Okay?”
Shaila did not answer. Slowly, she put on her old dirty clothes, covering that hot, clean skin with the filth of Telegraph Avenue.
When she opened the bathroom door again, Henry had gone. On the floor were a pair of soft gray pants and a plaid shirt, neatly folded. Shaila tore her old clothes off for the new. She scooped me up and placed me in her flannel chest pocket. Through its cloth I could feel the shower’s residual warmth, the small mountain of her nipple.