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wrong besides that though: I go through them in my head picking them up and looking at them like different-colored rocks, trying to find one I can put in my pocket and keep, but that one reason I’m scared of is underneath all of them rotting into the dirt and every time I pick another one up I can see it.
    I feel like a big asshole even though nothing’s even happened; it sort of reminds me of school, except worse. I pick at my shoelace and get really involved in it. Tracy picks at her scalp. After a minute I think we must look pretty weird, both sitting on the curb in front of Tang’s picking at things and not talking, but then I realize nobody’s looking at us.
    The rest of the day is a mixture of picking at shoelaces and sitting on curbs, and in between Tracy is dragging me like it’s really important to all these places where she thinks someone might be. She doesn’t say who. I hope it might be those guys from the 7-Eleven with the pit bull but I think she’d tell me if it was. We go to Jack in the Box up on Sunset and then back to Winchell’s and Del Taco; she’s looking for something but she won’t explain what. At Benito’s she walks right up to this transvestite hooker from before. I can’t stop looking at her face. She’s wearing leopard print and purple high heels. Also she’s about seven feet tall. Her name’s Bianca. She tilts her face down and asks, in a Spanish accent, what a little sweetie like me is doing out here and then she sort of glares at Tracy. Tracy shoves in front of me and starts talking to Bianca half in Spanish so I can’t understand, and then she grabs my sleeve and marches me away, and then we go and stand outside Goodwill for like half an hour. No one comes.
    Every time she says we’re going to find some person and it’s like she really needs to see them but there isn’t ever anybody there. There’s no talking, just a big swollen-up embarrassed silence in the air between us. My stomach is nervous and sick at the same time, like butterflies and throw-up, and I wish I could get in bed and stay home from school, but there’s nothing to stay home from and no home to stay in either.
    After a while she doesn’t even seem mad anymore, just like some other person in some place that isn’t here. I’m still here though, out on the asphalt, and without her I don’t know where here is or where to put my feet. For the first time since she led me out of the parking lot at school I feel really scared. Tracy’s always had a reason or a kind of knowing, and even when I can’t tell what it is it wraps around me like her arms last night and leads me to the next right thing. But today I can’t find it. All morning I tried talking and it just made her weirder so now I’ve been trying to find her just by feeling it, like if I breathe the right way our breaths will touch and I can pull her close again. But my stomach hurts too bad for me to breathe in deep enough to make it work, so I just wait at each place she takes me and then follow her to the next one even though I can tell we’re not really going anywhere.
    Finally the sky gets halfway dark and we head back to Whole Foods. My stomach starts to calm down: that’s our place, we go there every night; there’s not ever anyone there but us. I hate today. The whole day just blended into itself, different in a way I can’t say the name of, and I want something back that I don’t even know what it is. Whole Foods makes me feel better though. When we’re sleeping I won’t have to think of anything to say and then tomorrow morning the cars will come and the light before the sun comes up and it’ll be like today just didn’t happen.
    For dinner we get muffins from the trash bags: tonight it’s cranberry almond. It’s weird how much food they just throw away and I’m glad there’s somebody hungry like us to eat it, otherwise it’d just turn into trash. Linda always shops here and I wonder if she knows we’re back by the Dumpsters