YOUR FIRST night on the streets, you think of how you used to pee the bed every night when you originally came to live with your aunt and uncle. You slept on the damp sheets the first few times, the wetness chafing your skin. You wonder if even your aunt and uncle are thinking it: that you’ve turned out just like her, that something in you just soured, and you’ve started hitting the pipe, too. But you haven’t—you’ve never even smoked pot. Never even had a drink. You know it looks like ingratitude, but to you it’s the opposite. Lightening their burden, removing yourself from all the things you never could believe you deserved. The scholarship offer from University of Maryland. You’d gone online and looked up the tuition. Even with in-state rates you couldn’t believe all the money it represented. You couldn’t believe that you had earned it—it felt too much like a gift, and gifts scare you. Gifts always feel like they can be lost, reclaimed. You would rather get the loss over with, or else it will hang over you indefinitely, the good, beautiful things in your life just a debt you’ll never be able to pay back.

CLARA

AFTER LINING UP TWO MORE dates for me, Des was already having trouble finding men. Apparently she’d thought it would be easier to attract the ones who weren’t looking for more than dinner or drinks. Men who just wanted to look and spend. The man who had come in while Lily was in the shop took me to a steak house, where he talked at me as he sawed into a rare piece of meat. Speckles of blood on the white tablecloth, a pool of it on the white plate. The fat finger choked by a gold wedding ring. Still, I smiled at him, like he was some kind of prize, and asked him about his childhood dog, who I glimpsed in a vision before the bread was served. The second was a narrow, chain-smoking lawyer who only wanted me to sit next to him at the blackjack tables—the pit boss frowned at my ID, but he slid her a hundred bucks and I watched him lose $500 more. The vision I had when I was with him was more complicated: a classroom, a teacher bringing a ruler down on top of his desk, inches from his hands. He was terrified of being embarrassed, of being belittled, so I made sure to slip my arm into his, to lean close, ask him questions about how the game worked. And each one gave me a little extra on top of what he gave Des, so I was up to $450 pressed into the back of my book. Even so, I was relieved there wouldn’t be any more dates. But I should have known that, like the cool wind from the ocean, relief was always short-lived.