I looked up at the guy behind the counter, who made me nervous. I sort of knew him, but not in a good way, because he used to offer me food and say he would trade me. I kept saying I had nothing to trade and he would only laugh this creepy laugh and he would never tell me straight out what he meant.
After a while it was my friend Bodhi who told me what it meant. Bodhi wanted to help me so he went in and told the guy he was my boyfriend and threatened to beat him up, and after that the guy was mostly just mean and rude to me.
Bodhi was not my boyfriend. He just said that to try to help.
Anyway, the corner store guy still made me nervous. He was old and bald—literally old not just old compared to me like everybody is—seventy, maybe, so it was extra creepy when you thought about it.
On the counter in front of him was a plastic container of bananas. They had never been there before—at least, not that I’d ever noticed. They actually looked kind of disgusting, because they were completely green, but all of a sudden none of the other food in that place looked like food to me at all. It all sounded salty and dry and old and not fresh and not something I wanted. Not even anything I could bring myself to choke down.
I think I hadn’t had a single fruit or vegetable since I left Utah with Bodhi.
I walked up to the counter but I never took my eyes off the guy because he made me nervous. And he never took his eyes off me—believe me when I tell you that—but for different reasons.
“How much?” I said, and pointed at the green bananas.
“Dollar fifty.”
“A dollar fifty? For one banana? It’s too much!”
“Then don’t buy one.”
But by then I wanted one so bad that it was more like I needed it. You know how that can happen? How all of a sudden a thing gets to be more than just the thing it is, and then all of a sudden it feels like everything that’s wrong in your life? Not having bananas felt like everything that’d gone wrong in my life since I had to leave home, and, let me tell you, that’s a whole big bag of wrong.
He opened his mouth to say more and I knew what he was going to say so I walked out before he could. I have to be worth more than the price of a banana, even a too-expensive one, and the day I lose that I think I’d rather just be gone from this world.
I decided to walk to the all-night market.
Problem was, it was kind of a stupid idea, because all of a sudden I was feeling it in every cell of my body how I’d been eating nothing but junk food—empty calories, my mom would say—and feeling like I needed actual nutrition that my body could use for actual health. Full calories. But at the same time I knew it was a long walk to the all-night market and by the time I got there and back I would’ve walked off the calories two or three times over. But by then it was a thing I couldn’t let go of in my head. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.
So I got into the market and right off the bat this older lady in a company polo shirt and apron started following me around, and not on the sly, either. Real obvious, like “Here I am, you little punk kid, and I’m watching everything you do.” But I wasn’t doing anything, so it made me mad—I was just walking over to the produce section to look at their bananas, and there’s no law against doing that as far as I know.
I found the bananas and looked at them, and they looked really nice—nice and yellow and ripe but not with brown spots yet—but I wasn’t sure if it was okay to take one off the bunch. I turned around and that lady was still staring at me with her hands on her hips, her face set hard like she hated me. How can you do that to a person? Hate them when they haven’t even done anything to you?
“I’m not going to steal,” I said to her, real nice and loud. There was nobody else in the store to crane their necks around and wonder what we were fighting about—at least, not that I could see. “It really sucks that you’ve already decided I’m going to steal and you don’t even know me. That sucks, you know? I would never do that to you—or, actually, I’d never do it to anybody.”
She didn’t bother to answer, just stared at me with her hands on her hips, which also sucked.
They do this to you when they can tell you’re on the street. The younger and dirtier you are, the more you get this everywhere you go. And I’m always thinking, Damn it, I’m the same person I was when I lived at home with my parents like a regular kid, like everybody else, but I can’t show them that, and they’ll never see it, and the whole thing just sucks.
And, by the way, I didn’t ever steal. Bodhi stole when he needed to, but I never ate anything he stole, because it wouldn’t have been right.
I took my money out of my pocket, the dollar bill, and the forty-two cents in change, and I held it out for her to see, even though she was a pretty long way away.
“I have enough for a banana,” I said, “and I’m going to buy it, I’m not going to steal it, and I just need to know if it’s okay to take one off the bunch and just buy the one.”
I probably should have gone ahead and done it and not even stopped to ask, because I couldn’t afford a whole bunch, and if she said no I would’ve walked all that way for nothing.
“There are some loose ones there in the corner,” she said, and pointed over to the left-hand side of the bin where the bananas were sitting.
I found a real nice one, and weighed it, and looked at the price per pound, and did the math in my head, and figured out I could afford an apple, too, and picked one out. And the whole time she never stopped staring at me. I got a Fuji, because that’s my favorite kind. I hadn’t had a Fuji apple since I left Utah with Bodhi.
I took them both to the checkout counter, and the woman took my money and asked me if I wanted a bag, but I said no because I figured they wouldn’t last that long and it was just another thing to throw away. Just more trash on the street in LA, and I felt like I was living in a world overflowing with trash.
Just as she handed me back my eighteen cents change, kind of dropping it into my hand so her clean hand didn’t touch my dirty one, she said, “Sorry, hon.”
Which I guess was nice.
I said, “That’s okay,” but it wasn’t completely true. I mean, it was and it wasn’t, but I figured it was better than if she hadn’t said that.
I ate the banana on the long walk back. I could never bring myself to call that place Bodhi and I had been living “home” because that would’ve been ridiculous. It was never anybody’s home and never could be. It was just a place to hide at night. It was good—the banana, I mean—but it didn’t last long enough, and when it was gone I wasn’t sure it had been worth everything I’d gone through to get it.
I dropped the peel into a trash bin on a corner because I don’t like to litter. Not that one more piece of trash would make much difference around where we’d been living, but it was just a thing that mattered to me.
I decided to save the apple, so I put it in the pocket of my pants, which was sort of a weird and bad thing, because there shouldn’t have been room for an apple in my pants pocket. When I left Utah I would’ve had to mash an apple up into applesauce to get it to fit in the pocket of those pants.
Then I looked up, and on the sidewalk on the next block I saw something, but I didn’t know what kind of a thing it was. It was under the streetlight, and it didn’t look like trash.