New Girl in Town

Chapter 3

So here's the thing: I'm not supposed to be here. Not like I've ever felt like I'm supposed to be anywhere. I'm never white enough. Never Asian enough.

Never ... enough.

But here I am in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon. There are more trees than people around.

I miss the sounds of life, you know? People on the streets. Sirens. Honking and talking and the lights and the buzz that come with a bunch of homes crammed into a tiny space.

But here, it's quiet and spread out, and crickets chirp—like, actually chirp. The shadows the trees cast everywhere make it all even greener, until you're so soaked in the palette you might as well be a leprechaun.

I'm not supposed to be here, yet I am. Flung into the middle of the Oregon wilderness with my not-so-long-lost-just-deadbeat father. But I guess some things force some deadbeats to rise to the occasion—the occasion here being there was no one else left.

Mom was gone. And that felt so real and so fake at the same time.

I didn't want to move here. I told him as much. Once I realized who he was—which took a full ten seconds after I opened the door and stared at this frayed man, with gray in his hair, trying to place him.

I guess he was lost in a way. Lost inside fuzzy memories that don't go past three years old. It's kind of hard to remember that distant a memory.

And now I don't just get to remember. I get to live with it. With him. In the land of green and silence and no public transportation.

It's, as they say, fucked.

I know I should be glad Marco didn't abandon me completely. He could've let me go into the system. I think I'm supposed to be glad he didn't.

Pretty low bar, if you ask me. But that's kind of my life lately. All I've got is crumbs, and I keep scrambling for them because there's nothing else.

Marco doesn't know how to be a dad. And even if he does figure it out, I certainly don't know how to have a father, and I learned the hard way that the only person you can need without getting hurt is yourself. So I think we're pretty much screwed, both of us secretly counting down until I'm eighteen and I can get out and he can be rid of me.

Such a low bar. Is this what Mom wanted for me? God ... who am I kidding?

She wasn't thinking about me. I have to tell myself that she wasn't thinking about me. That if she had been—if my name or eyes or smile or any part of me had broken through the fog that'd settled over her—she wouldn't have done it.

The thought of me would've stopped her. (Because I wasn't there to stop her.) Told you I was scrambling for crumbs.

I'm awake before my alarm, so I turn it off and pull the covers back over my head, even though it's already hot at nine in the morning. I hear Marco in the kitchen, rustling around getting ready to leave for work as I hide in my blankets. He's restless. A restless soul. She used to call him that, the times I got her to talk about him, when I was younger and interested. When I was younger and thought Maybe he'll come back.

She'd smile when she said it, but it was a strange mix of bitter and sweet. Like she could never figure out which way to feel about him. I wonder if she ever did. Figure it out.

Was there clarity at the end?

Regret?

Did anything break through the gray-thick fog that had cloaked her and our apartment and our lives for those months before...?