The 22 came up Clark at five past eleven with four people on it and the heat going like a furnace, and she got on at Wellington and paid her fare and had to stand on her toes to do it.
She was small. Not slim — small, the whole way down. Four eleven in the boots she had on, and the boots had a sole on them like a brick, which meant she knew exactly what she was and had gone to war with it.
Blonde, going dark at the roots. Pale the way some people are pale, white as the inside of a potato, with a flush across the cheeks that was not makeup because there was no makeup on her, and blue eyes with a lot of lash and no mascara, and a mouth that was too big for the rest of her face in a way that made you look twice.
A grey hoodie with the sleeves over her hands. A denim jacket over that, too big, men’s, with a patch on the shoulder. Black leggings and the boots. A canvas bag with a paperback in it and a name tag on a lanyard that said DANI.
She sat down across from me with her feet not quite reaching the floor and put the bag on her knees and stared at the window.
Her hands were tiny. That is the thing I noticed first and it is the thing that stayed with me all night: little white hands with the nails bitten down and a blue ink stain on the side of the middle finger from a pen.
The bus pulled out and she watched the street go by, and then she did the thing that people do at eleven o’clock on the 22, which is to look at everybody’s reflection in the glass and think nobody can see them doing it.
I was in the reflection. She caught my eye in it and looked away and went red from the neck up.
“Sorry,” she said. Quiet voice. A little hoarse, like she had been talking all night.
“For what?”
“For staring at you in the window. That’s weird. I know that’s weird.” She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “I’ve been up since six.”
“You work nights?”
“Laundromat. Clark and Barry. Eleven to seven, four nights a week.” She said it like a confession. “I’m the night guy. Girl. I’m the night.”
The bus stopped at Diversey and a man got on with a bike and stood over us and looked at her, and then looked at me, and then said, “Is your kid okay getting home this late?”
She went absolutely still.
“I’m eighteen,” she said.
“Sure,” the man said, and laughed, and got off at the next stop because it was not his stop.
She sat there with her jaw working and her eyes shiny.
“Sorry,” she said, to me, again. “Sorry. That happens like twice a week. I’m not — I don’t cry about it.”
“You’re crying about it.”
“I’m crying because I’m tired,” she said, and wiped her face with the sleeve of the hoodie. “And because I’ve been on my feet for nine hours and because I’m four foot eleven and I look like a freshman and everybody in this entire city thinks I’m somebody’s little sister.”
“How tall?”
“Four eleven.” She held up her hand flat, level with her own chin, which is a thing short people do. “And a half. I say four eleven and a half because I’m not a coward.”
“How old?”
“Eighteen. I’m from Rockford. I moved here in July because my boyfriend got a job at the port and then he moved back to Rockford in September and I stayed, because if I went back I’d be living in my mom’s house at eighteen with a curfew and a job at the Culver’s on State Street, and I would rather die.”
“That’s more than I get out of most people.”
“You asked my height,” she said. “Nobody asks my height. They just say it.”
She got off at Barry with me behind her, and on the sidewalk she came up to the middle of my chest.
“You don’t have to walk me,” she said. “It’s a hundred feet.”
“I’m walking.”
“Everybody’s gotta walk.” She pulled her bag up on her shoulder and it slid straight back down. “You know what the worst part is? Not the height. The height’s fine, I fit in airplane seats, I can sleep on a couch. It’s that people stop listening. I’ll be saying something at work and a guy will lean over my head to talk to somebody behind me, like I’m a lamp.”
“I’m listening.”
“Yeah.” She looked up at me — way up, chin out. “You are. That’s weird too.”
The laundromat was shut, gate down, one light on over the door and the machines going round in the dark inside like something breathing.
“My roommate’s up in Evanston till Sunday,” she said. “The flat’s empty and there’s half a pizza in it and I’m not tired, which is a lie, I’m exhausted, but I’m not going to be able to sleep.”
“Ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“You know what.”
She stood there under the light with her hands in her sleeves and her jaw going, and she was so small and so serious that it was like being asked something by a very determined child, except she was not a child and both of us knew it.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I want to say that first, so I can’t tell myself later that I had to.”
“I know.”
“I’m not good at this.” She started up the steps. “I’ve done it twice. Once with Tyler, in his car, in the parking lot behind the Culver’s. Once with a guy from Rockford who I didn’t even like. Both times I was still wearing my jacket.”
“Then take your jacket off this time.”
She stopped on the stairs with her back to me and her hand on the rail.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That was good. That was a good thing to say.”
Two rooms and a kitchen, one window, a radiator that clanked. There was a pizza box on the coffee table and a candle and a poster of a band taped up crooked, and a mattress in the corner of the front room with a duvet on it, because her roommate had the bedroom.
“Don’t look at the mattress,” she said.
“I’m not looking at the mattress.”
“You’re looking at the mattress.” She kicked her boots off — two of them, one after the other, and the sound they made on the floor was the sound of a person getting shorter — and she stood there in her socks and lost three inches and looked, for a second, like she might cry again.
“Now I’m four foot eight,” she said.
“Come here.”
“I hate my socks.”
“Come here anyway.”
She came, and the top of her head came to the middle of my chest, and she put her hands flat on me and looked up, and her chin was up and her eyes were wet and she said, “If you pick me up I’ll kill you.”
“Then I won’t.”
“Unless you want to,” she said. “Maybe you should.”
I picked her up. She weighed nothing, and she made a sound like she had been dropped, and her legs came around my waist and her hands went into my hair, and her face was level with mine for the first time in her life.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, this is what it’s like.”
“This is what what’s like?”
“Everybody.” Her voice was thick. “Everybody’s face. All the time. That’s what it’s like.”
She kissed me with her eyes open, badly, and then with them shut, and then she got the hang of it, and I carried her to the mattress in the corner and put her down on it.
“I’m going to be bad at this,” she said.
“You said that on the stairs.”
“I’m going to say it a few more times.” She pulled the hoodie over her head and it took the name tag with it and she threw it all on the floor. “It’s a thing I do.”
Her body under the clothes was pale all over, the white of a person who works nights and never sees the sun, with a soft little belly and small breasts in a grey sports bra and a birthmark the size of a thumbprint on her hip. She was narrow everywhere, and her ribs showed when she breathed, and her arms were thin and the muscle in them was the muscle of lifting wet towels, not of a gym.
“I know,” she said, watching me look. “There’s not much of me.”
“There’s all of you.”
“That’s a line.”
“It’s true, though.”
She undid the bra herself and let it go and put her hands over her chest and then made herself take them away — the same gesture, the same stubbornness — and her nipples were small and pink and hard in the cold room, on those little white breasts, and she was breathing through her mouth.
“Don’t be nice about it,” she said. “Nice is worse. Nice is what people are when they’re being polite about your body.”
She was wet before I got her leggings off, which she was embarrassed about, and I told her not to be, and she said, “I know, I know, it’s just — nobody’s ever been down there long enough to find out.”
I made it long. That was the whole idea. I put her on her back with her knees up and her feet flat and I went down on her and stayed there, and she talked the entire time.
“What are you — oh. Oh, okay. Okay.” Her hand came down and then went away again. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m talking.”
“Talk.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I’m going to — ” She grabbed a fistful of the duvet. “Nobody’s ever — Tyler used to just, like, put his hand there for a second and then — oh my god —”
She came with her palm flat over her mouth, her heels heels hammering the mattress and her back bent up off it, and it went on and on, and when it stopped she lay there with an arm thrown over her eyes, chest heaving and said, “That’s not fair. That’s not fair, I’m eighteen, I’ve been missing that this whole time.”
“You’ve got time.”
“I’ve been missing that this whole time,” she said again, and then she laughed and it cracked in the middle.
I got my belt undone and she sat up on her elbows to watch, and her eyes went wide and stayed wide.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That’s — you know I’m four eleven, right?”
“I noticed.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a lot of me that’s small.” She lay back down. “Go slow. Like, actually slow. Not the way guys say slow.”
I went slow. She was tight and hot and she made a sound like a stuck door and then her hands came up and grabbed my forearms and she said, “Wait. Wait — okay. Okay, keep going, keep going, oh —”
“Still all right?”
“Do not ask me that, it makes me feel like a child.” Her nails were in my arms. “I’m not a child. I’m a woman who’s small. There’s a difference and nobody in this city knows it but me.”
I got all the way in and she went quiet, and her eyes were on the ceiling and her mouth was open, not blinking.
“You okay?”
“I’m full,” she said, in a completely different voice. “I’m full and I’m four eleven and I’m in Chicago and I’m not going back to Rockford.”
I moved and she said “oh” like it had been pulled out of her, and then again, and then she went quiet except a small sound on every push, and her hands came off my arms and went over her head and held the edge of the mattress.
The radiator clanked. Somebody’s television went through the wall. She put her arm over her mouth and bit it and then took it away and said, “no, no, I want to hear it,” and did not cover her mouth again.
She came the second time with her legs locked around my back and her hands in my hair, and this time she said my name, which I had not told her, and then she said, “sorry, sorry, I don’t know your name,” and laughed so hard she had to stop and put her forehead against my collarbone.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, I just had — ” She waved a hand. “That. With a man whose name I don’t know. My mom would bury me in the yard.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dani. Danielle. Dani.” She kissed my jaw. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
Then she wanted to be picked up again.
She got her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and I stood up off the mattress with her, and she went white-knuckled on my shoulders and then laughed, and then stopped laughing when I started moving, and her head went back and hit the wall gently and she said, “ow — don’t stop — ow — don’t stop.”
“You’re going to hurt your head.”
“I don’t care about my head.” Her mouth was at my ear. “I’ve never been this high up in my life.”
She was so light that it was easy, and she was so loud that the neighbour knocked on the wall twice, and she said, “sorry!” at the wall and then put her face in my neck and shook, and I could not tell if she was laughing or crying.
Afterwards she did not want to be put down. She stayed up there with her legs around me and her face in my neck and her breath slowing down, and said, “One more minute. I’ve never been tall before.”
Then she got down and got on her knees on the mattress and looked up at me with her hair everywhere and her eyes still wet.
“Now I want to do something,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to.” She pushed her hair back. “That’s the whole thing tonight, isn’t it. Nobody’s made me do anything and I’ve done all of it.”
She took it in her hand first and looked at it, and then up at my face, and said, “Tell me if I’m bad at it, and don’t be nice about it.”
She was bad at it at first. She was enthusiastic and her mouth was too small and she came off it twice to cough and apologise, and then she got the angle and her hand and her mouth together and figured it out in about a minute, and after that she was not bad at it at all.
“Look at me,” she said, with her mouth full, and then took it out to say it properly. “No — look at me. I want to see you looking at me. That’s the whole thing. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
So I looked at her. Four foot eight on her knees on a mattress in a flat on Barry, with her hair all over and her name tag on the floor and the pizza going cold on the table, and her looking up at me like she had won something.
“Are you close?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She did not look away. “Don’t warn me. Just do it.”
I came in her mouth and she stayed for most of it and then coughed and pulled off and it went over her chin and her hand, and she sat back on her heels with her eyes streaming and her hand up at her mouth, and laughed.
“Okay,” she said. “That was a lot. Nobody tells you it’s a lot.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m great.” She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist. “I’m great. I’m going to be so embarrassed in about ten minutes, but right now I’m great.”
She was embarrassed in about four minutes, not ten. It came over her all at once while she was in the bathroom, and she came out with her hair wet and her face washed and her arms folded, and stood in the doorway.
“I need you to know,” she said, “that I have never done anything like that. Ever. Not the talking. Not the — saying what I wanted. I don’t know where that came from.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.” She thought about it. “No. I don’t know. Ask me in the morning.”
It was already morning. The window was going grey and the radiator had stopped clanking and somewhere down the block a truck was backing up.
She got into the mattress with me and put her cold feet on my shins and her head on my arm, and lay there looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her chest like a person in a coffin.
“I’m five foot nothing in the morning,” she said. “That’s the real number. Four eleven and a half is a lie I tell in the afternoon.”
“I like the real number.”
“Everybody says that and then they pat me on the head.” She turned her face. “You didn’t pat me on the head.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
“You’d better.” She yawned enormously, like a cat, and her whole face went out of shape with it. “I’m going to sleep for two hours and then I’ve got to go back and unload the dryers.”
“Sleep.”
“Don’t leave before I wake up,” she said, and was asleep inside two minutes, with her mouth open and one hand still holding my arm.
I left at eight, when she was still out, and I put the pizza in the fridge and the boots by the door where she would see them, and on the back of the receipt from my pocket I wrote: THE REAL NUMBER IS GOOD. SEE YOU ON THE 22.
She texted me in the afternoon, which meant she had taken the receipt with her.
you wrote on a receipt. who does that
Me. Did you get home okay.
i’m at work. i’m standing on a stool to reach the top dryer and i thought about you and fell off the stool
Are you all right?
yes. it’s a two foot fall. i’m four eleven. i’m basically always two feet from the ground
Then, a minute later:
i’m not going to be weird about this. i’ve decided. i’m going to be normal about it and see you on the bus like a normal person who does not fall off stools
And then, after that:
but i looked at the receipt like nine times today
I saw her on the 22 on Thursday at five past eleven, and she was standing by the door in the boots with the brick soles on them, holding the pole with both hands like a kid on a ride, and when she saw me she did not wave.
She had her chin up. She had her name tag on. She had her sleeves over her hands and her hair going dark at the roots and she looked at me down the length of a crowded bus, and then she said, loud enough, “There he is,” and everybody turned around, and her face went red and she did not take it back.
I sat down and she sat opposite with her feet not quite touching the floor.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I’ve been practising that all day.” She pulled her knees up under her chin, which she could do, being built the way she was. “The saying it out loud thing. I’m going to keep doing it. I’m going to be terrible at it for a while.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, it’s Thursday,” she said, and then she grinned, and it was the same grin from the mattress at four in the morning, and the bus went north with both of us in it and the laundromat lights coming up on the left like a harbour.
She got off at Barry at a quarter past eleven and turned around on the sidewalk and looked up at me through the door.
“Same time,” she said. “And don’t pat me on the head.”
My Bus Adventures #14: The Debt
My Bus Adventures #13: The Discipline
My Bus Adventures #12: Unopened
My Bus Adventures #11: Deep Clean
My Bus Adventures #10: Close Quarters
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #12: Unopened
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #13: The Discipline
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #14: The Debt
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck