The bus window reveals so many people living inside their music. A group of boys biking in circles, stereo balanced on one of their shoulders, heads nodding. At a red light close to the library, two kids—maybe twelve or thirteen—walk together. The boy has his arm around the girl’s shoulder and her hips are too wide for them to be pressed that close together and still move comfortably. She leans into him and he kisses her forehead, and it looks halfway like a choke hold too, but they’re so young and so happy, street-dazed, bag full of books on her arm.
I think I must have missed that moment when you stumble into the tug-of-war with your happy. A couple weeks before Demond’s party, I ran into Camila again before dark and she bought me dinner at the taco truck off High Street, where we sat on the curb eating together. I asked her how she was always so content with this life, why she even started walking these streets in the first place.
Camila’s face twisted into a tense stitch before flushing in calm.
“Don’t help me to fight a life I’m stuck in.” In that moment, I saw just a glimpse of the truth I didn’t want to see. Camila is not a glowing woman walking free, walking godly. She is a woman who survives, even if that survival means tricking herself into believing this world is something it is not, that her life is all glory.
I don’t know why, but that night by the taco truck, Camila kept on talking, told me about parts of her life I’m not sure she’s talked about since she lived them. So much of her started to make sense. All she ever wanted was to live in her body however she damn pleased, twist her hips, and strut around in neon.
Camila started out answering ads on Craigslist when the site was still new, the internet sparse.
“My specialty was answering to ‘Man Looking to Dominate Young Tranny.’ All them fuckers was nasty, but I was young and I was just happy someone wanted to fuck me and pay for my rent at the same time. Ended up getting all the shit I wanted from that money, got my face done, paid for hormones. Eventually got hired as an escort at a real agency, but they took a good cut of my money and I wasn’t even getting no good gigs. That’s when Demond found me.
“I couldn’t have dreamed of any of the shit I got now when I was your age.” Camila tapped her green acrylics on the curb. “It ain’t perfect, but it’s better than what I used to have.”
There was something about the way she talked about it that night that was different. It was like she was jealous of me, like she wished she could reverse time. She told me about how she used to get beaten up a lot more, had men bring knives to their meetups and start trying to mutilate her.
“Demond makes sure I don’t get hurt as long as I keep bringing in new girls. I only got johns who won’t fuck me up now and Demond makes sure most people don’t even know about me.”
After that, Camila finished her taco and stood up, brushing my cheek with her finger, and returning to the next car ready to pick her up.
Camila found a way to survive and Marcus found something to live for even if it failed and, hell, Trevor even found his own thing, always galloping toward the nearest hoop. And I am still waiting to be hit by some universe-halting love that will turn me inside out and remove all the rotting parts of me. Or at least something to make life bearable that isn’t another person who will leave.
The bus is nearing Eastmont and I pull the wire to let me off at the next stop. The streets are flat here, but the potholes only get deeper. The sandwich woman still sits beside me, murmuring, and I wonder if the sandwich is real because there ain’t no more restaurants the way this bus is going and she doesn’t look like she’s getting off anytime soon, head bent down nearly touching her lap.
I stand and think about waving goodbye to her, but I don’t think she ever registered that we were sitting beside each other in the first place, so I exit without glancing back, without ever knowing whether or not she got that sandwich.
Just because I know where I’m going doesn’t mean I wanna be heading in its direction, her direction. In my pre-streets lifetime, I would have said I’d never step foot in no trap house like this one. Today, I don’t even knock on the front door, just go around to the side door and open it like it might as well be my second home. Scariest thing about this kind of place is how quiet it is. There’s thumping from the bass of some music, but it sounds distant, muffled. Everything is dark and some whispers float through the room, some groans and teeth chattering.
Number one rule about entering somewhere you not supposed to enter is don’t never question none of it. Don’t ask nothing and don’t act like you don’t know what you doing because that’ll land you right where you don’t wanna be. It’s all wood, floorboards splintering. When Mama gave me the address, I knew exactly where she was talking about, the place where one of her friends lived, from back when Mama wasn’t sure what side of grieving to be on. I climb the stairs and knock on the door of the apartment with a large C on it.