At Foothill Boulevard, Mama reaches for my hand again. I wrench my arm away from her and then let it slowly trickle back down to my side. Mama tries again, this time looping her hand around my fist so hers is like my fist’s shell. I don’t bother trying to move it, let Mama shuffle us forward toward where the streetlights go hazy. It ain’t no shock that Camila is standing there, that she is so easy to see in her silver flash, arm looped with a girl who I know is at least twenty years younger than her simply from the way she walks: zigzagged and tender.
The intersection runs wild with cars that are so beat-up they don’t even have speedometers. Camila doesn’t see me, probably because I blend into the night. I tell Mama to hold up and she releases her grip on my hand tentatively, like she’s worried I’m gonna run.
Camila has her friend half jogging to keep up with the stride of her legs, their length amplified by heels I couldn’t dream of walking in without tripping. She reaches up into the air in front of her and swats, closing her fist around some invisible fly or bit of fuzz that only she can see.
I run across the street, Mama quick-walking to keep up with me, and shout out Camila’s name. She spins, her smile already telling me she knows exactly who’s calling her. Her arm is unlooped and springing toward me in seconds, wrapping around my waist in the tightest hug.
“Mija.” She’s got silver hair to match, with bangs that flutter right toward her eyelashes, adorned in glitter flakes.
I ask her how she’s been and she ignores the question. “Seen you all over the news. My baby ho didn’t tell me she got a whole ring out here, shit.” I don’t know if she’s proud or impressed or jealous, but I don’t think it matters with Camila. She don’t really give a shit if it ain’t hurting her, gonna help you till she can’t no more and she doesn’t mind leaving after that. Never met someone who could love you that hard and leave you without a second thought.
I shrug. “Didn’t mean to or nothing.”
She looks me up and down, at my sweatpants and sneakers. “You really ain’t about to get none tonight looking like that.”
“Not doing that no more,” I say, nodding my head toward Mama. “My mama and I just taking a walk.”
“In that? Girl, I always knew you was crazy.”
I glance toward the other girl, who is fidgeting with her necklace and bending her knees like an old woman trying to regain mobility. I scan the area for one of the cars always nearby Camila: tinted windows. I don’t see anything even close to that nice out here, look back at Camila, and ask her again, “How you been?”
“Things been a little rough since Demond got taken in. Lot of the girls got put in group homes and some of us got locked up too. I spent two days in one of them cells, but they fined me and let me go, prob’ly ’cause I’m old as shit and it ain’t no waste having me out here.” She laughs, combs her fingers through her wig. “Lost most of the regulars so I’m back to escorting. I ain’t mind but hard to keep ’em from getting too handsy, you know?” She tugs at her skirt. “Been a little rough.”
I hadn’t even noticed the bruising until she started pulling at her skirt, trying to cover up the blue that spots her thighs: the constellations of finger to finger pressed deep. I don’t feel or think much of anything besides oh. Of course this is the way it plays out. Of course Camila is silver and bruised. Of course.
I nod and Camila smiles through her ache. I lean in to hug her again. “You be good, okay?”
She touches my cheek and nods. “See you soon.”
This time, I am the one to give a pat on the back and walk in the other direction. And we both know there will be no soon, no running into each other on the streets in a week or a month or a year. Maybe there will be a sideways glance from a bus window, a could that be her behind the wrinkles, but there will never be another seeing, another embrace. When I walk back to Mama, I take her hand voluntarily and she lights up from the chest outward.
She takes us beyond Foothill, beyond International, down the hill toward the underpass.
“You lost?” I ask Mama.
She shakes her head once and keeps us moving down until we are encompassed in black, the only sound coming from the occasional whoosh of a car on the freeway in front of us. Mama pulls us to the right and I stop in my tracks. “This ain’t a road, Mama.”
She tugs a little harder and keeps me moving. “Trust me.” And I don’t, could never, but I want to, so bad, more than anything, so my feet move heel to toe, heel to toe. The ramp is an illusion of emptiness, a stream of black that looks like it only leads to more black until, suddenly, it doesn’t and we’re in the rush of cars, barely over the line that separates freeway from debris.