She’s got some kind of issue with Mira, Morgan had told me all those weeks ago. I don’t know what it is.
But there didn’t have to be a reason.
I moved to the other side of the table, watching her, and pretended to check the price on a bent hamster wheel.
“I’m surprised she wasn’t the first one here,” Bea was saying, as the baby toddled past her legs and started around a table covered with plastic placemats. “I half expected her to camp out last night to get the best bargains.”
“Oh, Bea,” said one of the other women—a clone, in blue and white, same hairstyle. “You’re terrible.”
“It’s just awful,” Bea said, fluffing her hair. “Whenever I see her, it practically turns my stomach.”
I thought of Caroline again, the way her nose wrinkled when she’d seen me at the Last Chance. And I glanced back at Mira, knowing this wasn’t my fight, that if she acted like she didn’t care, I should too.
But enough was enough.
I found myself walking around that table, right up to Bea Williamson. I stepped between her and the blue clone, and she stepped back, surprised, then remembered who I was: her eyes went right to my lip ring. The flush was still burning my skin, as I stood there ready to do for Mira what she’d never done for herself.
I took a deep breath, not even sure what words I would say, how I would begin. But I didn’t even get a chance.
“Colie?”
It was Mira. She was standing right beside me, with her bike; there was a shiny chrome toaster—priced to sell at four dollars—wedged in the basket. She didn’t even seem to notice Bea Williamson and her friend.
“Are you ready to go?” she asked, putting a hand on my arm.
I looked at Bea Williamson, all the words I wanted to say about to spill out. But Mira had already started to push her bike, oblivious, the toaster rattling, and I had to let her lead me away.
We walked together along the road toward the Last Chance, her bike between us. The toaster clanged each time we hit a bump. The rest of her purchases—two old hatboxes, a leaking beanbag chair, and a set of socket wrenches—had been left for Norman to pick up later.
The further we walked, the more what had just happened bothered me, until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Mira,” I asked her suddenly, as a car blew past, “how do you stand it?”
She looked up at me, dodging a pothole. The toaster clanked. “Stand what?”
“Being here,” I said, waving a hand at the Last Chance, the Quik Stop, everything. “How can you stand the way they treat you?”
She turned her head. “How do they treat me?” she asked. I wondered if she was joking.
“You know what I mean, Mira.” It wasn’t like I wanted to start listing things, adding insult to injury. Still, I had to make my point. “The things they say, about your bike, or your clothes. The way they look at you and laugh. I just—I just don’t see how you can take it, day after day. It’s got to hurt so much.”
She stopped walking and leaned against the bike, looking at me with those wide, blue eyes, so much like my mother’s. “They don’t hurt me, Colie,” she said. “They never have.”
“Mira, come on,” I said. “I’ve spent this whole summer seeing it. I mean, what about Bea Williamson? You can’t tell me—”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head, “It’s not about Bea Williamson. It’s not about anyone. I’m a lucky person, Colie. I’m an artist, I have my health, and I have friends who fill my life and make me happy. I have no complaints.”
“But it has to hurt you,” I said. “You just hide it so well.”
“No.” And then she smiled at me, as if this wasn’t as complicated as I was making it. “Look at me, Colie,” she said, gesturing down at her big yellow shirt and leggings, her little purple high-tops. “I’ve always known who I am. I might not work perfectly, or be like them, but that’s okay. I know I work in my own way.”
All this time I’d thought we had everything in common, but I’d been wrong.
I stood there, at the side of the road, and watched as she got on her bike, beginning to pedal slowly downhill toward home. She turned back to wave at me, and then started to coast, the wind picking up behind her. Her hair streamed out and her yellow shirt began to flap wildly, billowing out like crazy wings as, before my eyes, she began to fly.
Around the end of the rush that day, the phone rang and I reached for it, drawing a ticket out of my pocket and my pen from my hair.
“Last Chance,” I said. “Can I help you?”
“Is Colie there?”
It was a boy. I glanced back at Norman—the only boy who might logically call me—to see him sitting by the grill reading a book about Salvador Dali and eating french fries.
“This is she,” I said. Morgan looked up from her salt shakers.
“Hey,” the boy said, relieved. “It’s Josh. From last night?”
“Oh, right,” I said, leaning back against the coffee machine. “Hi.”
“Hi. So, we’re getting ready to leave here, but, uh . . .” I could hear noises in the background, people talking and car doors slamming. “But I wondered if maybe I could call you when you got home. I mean, I live in Charlotte too.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
Isabel came down the hallway, her hair up, ready for work. “Take-out order?” she asked Morgan, nodding at me.