Sharmini spent her formative years in California before pursuing life as a folk punk nomad. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in great weather for Media, Gnu Journal, and others, and recently commended in Ambit’s short story awards.
Her novel follows the journey of a university girl who runs away to live on the streets after an encounter with an alcoholic musician. The novel explores the precariousness of class, love, and mental health, and the culture of traveling youth in modern America. The following is an excerpt.
Contact: sharmini.wijeyesekera@gmail.com
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One
My parents took the call. Not me. I found out almost a day later when they came to sit around me at the oval dining table. I could tell from the way they kept their hands out in front of them, visibly laid out on the table between my textbooks and notes, from how they kept their chairs a distance too far from the table, that they had bad news they wanted to bring me into. “Hella,” my dad said slowly. “Hella,” my mom, her voice stretched and flattened. “There’s something you need to know.”
I could have told you. Not that exactly, but that something was coming. The last time I’d heard from him was almost a month ago, and it hadn’t been good. But Jesus. Honey Brown totaled, smashed into a parked car around a bend off the 1 just south of Santa Barbara, a pile of empties on the passenger seat, crushed cans under the pedals, the half-intact inside of the van looking like a squat house hotboxed with vodka and cigarettes. They didn’t have to say Ben. I didn’t have to say Ben. “We explained,” my parents told me, “that you live here with us, were in school all day yesterday.” But I could see their minds calculating as they said this, adding up the hours it would take to fly out to California, get wasted, drive drunk down the 1 into a family sedan, then fly back home again and transform back into good Hella in time for dinner. “We explained,” my dad said, “but you’re still going to have to talk to someone.” I knew they were waiting for me to confess, to deliver an impassioned apology. “I didn’t know,” was all I could say. How was I supposed to know?
“Hella,” my mom said. She was trying hard not to cry as she sat there with her eyes cast down on my homework. “Dad and I talked about this.” The sound of the neighbor’s dog barking furiously at the fence. The click of the fridge turning on, that faint hum of energy running through the house. “How long is this going to go on for? You need to start taking some responsibility.”
“I didn’t ask you to bail me out of anything,” I insisted. My dad had to tap his palm lightly on the table to prevent us all from getting worked up. What I wanted to do was ask what had happened to Ben, but they didn’t volunteer and I wasn’t stupid enough to bring him up. We agreed on a time to take me down to the police station tomorrow so I could explain about how the van had been stolen—that was the word we agreed. My mom looked sturdier when it was all over. But later, when I went to get a glass of water, I noticed she’d thrown out the jug of table wine she kept in the back of the cupboard, and that the car keys were not in the kitchen drawer where they usually lived.
My parents were up late past their bedtime. I spotted them in the living room. The two of them sat together on the stained, 10-year-old carpet, leaned up against the soft front of the recliner. The TV was on. The channel long defaulted to telesales programming, but the volume inaudible so they couldn’t have been watching it. They were holding hands. I had to sneak quietly to get to the bathroom, avoid the squeaky board two steps outside of my bedroom door, straight down their line of sight if they had looked up. I slid along the wall, stepped on the sturdy edges of the floorboard, paused as my dad whispered it’s going to be okay to my mom, as he reached over and patted her on the knee. More affection than I’d seen them show each other in years, more affection than I’d seen them show maybe ever. There was once when we were kids on vacation. Dad kissed her in the doorway of the Super 8 Motel room while me and my sister, unwatched for a moment, jumped and sank into the thin double mattress of the motel bed. It couldn’t have lasted long. Whatever we had done—stopped and stared, or just simply turned in their direction—what we saw was only a flash before my mom pushed him away. “Not in front of the kids,” she told him. And then they didn’t touch for years.
I locked the bathroom door and quietly lowered the toilet lid. My heels peeled squeaky off the linoleum floor. If they heard they didn’t come for me. But I sat there for a long time anyway—five, ten, fifteen minutes, my legs resting on my toes, my knees pointed up, elbows stuck in to the muscle above my knees, head held up by the brace of my hands, heart beating so fast I could feel it in my ears, in my jaw.
What a bastard, what a stupid, dumbass bastard. I’d been saving, had close to five thousand now. I’d been practicing. I believed him about Oregon—about his friend and the recording studio. I believed him about the tour. I knew better than to believe. But hadn’t he said he’d been working? What had knowing better got me except living back at my parents’ house in Indiana, life dull with repetition and repentance. And how was he going to contact me now?
An image of Ben from the last time we were together—naked, beer can in hand, body stark and bright against the thick, wooded hills of the Columbia River; feet in the sand, nose raised towards the sun, the red hues of his pubic hair reflective and shiny. I tried to push it away. Sit down, asshole, this is serious, I told him. But he just shook his hips at me, balls flopped against his thigh. It’s not so serious, lady hobo, not so serious.
I don’t get it. I believe in you. I believe in—
Ah, but you don’t understand. Nobody understands me. I just can’t catch a break.
Ben. Benny.
He sat down on the sand bank, rested the can of beer up against his beard. He scratched at the tin can. It crackled and popped, empty. A cool breeze of air come down river from the gorge, the burn of sun on goosebumped skin.
It’s okay, lady hobo. We gonna be fine. Don’t worry.
I shook my head.
And the last words I’d said to him had been fuck off. Just fuck off and then silence and that was a month ago. His horrible drunk typing: I nkow you r happy now. Seeing mei fail;. You get your shaudenfrreude. Then a stream of emojis. Then silence. Then: you don’t love me?
He typed it from the back of Honey Brown, face droopy, bent over the blue light of the screen—there was a crack on that screen, a tiny fissure in the bottom right corner from where I had pressed it too forcefully into a bag of uncooked rice. A whole week the laptop had sat in that bag of rice after we’d left it in the rain too long in Portland—and the K key that was all rubbed out, just a small speck of white, and the grimy track pad. He would be wearing shorts. If he was in the Southwest like he said, out in the desert of Albuquerque or Santa Fe—no, maybe pants. It does get cold at night in the desert, although Ben was rarely cold. So shorts. He would be wearing shorts and his knees would be out, and he would be cross-legged, laptop rested on the V of his calves, base of it up against his stomach, hunched over, eyes going black from drunkenness. All around him would be the flat black asphalt of a Walmart parking lot, and beyond that desert everywhere—spread out and constant and free of charge. He would know it was there, feel it in the lightness of the air and the distinctness of the sun, but he wouldn’t be able to see the vastness of it from where he was in the back of the van. To drink, to type—it was comfy and cozy back there, on the yellowing pile of memory foam gifted to us in Santa Barbara, the black stack of milk crates securely fastened behind him with bungee cords. But if he turned his eyes up through the rectangular window of the side door, then he would be able to see the sharp peaks of the Sandia Mountains, backlit by a hazy purple light. Ben, fingers raised, mischievous, slowly smashing down on the keys one pointer finger at a time and then pressing send—
Ha, ha, ha, you can’t do it on your own, bitch. You know you can’t.
Fuck off, I typed. And then I closed my laptop down on him, pressed my palms into the top of the laptop, pressed the whole thing into my lap and curled over the top of it to prevent myself from opening the screen and saying anything more at all. I just wished. Just for once he would bother to admit he was an asshole and then everything could continue as it—
But you love it when I fail, lady hobo. Look at you now.
A month ago now—the last time I talked to him. Part of me wondered. But, nah. It was carelessness, what happened. I knew that. I tried to relax my breath. In on the count of five, out again five, four, three, two. I heard my parents getting up. Whispers, the rustling of fabric against upholstery, the cracks of their joints growing louder as they reached the bathroom door. There was a silence, a pause. A sigh, my mom unable to contain it. But they didn’t stop, and in a minute, I heard the click of the lock in their doorjamb and then nothing. There was no one else up now except the house and its high-pitched whine. My heart, though, would not shut up. I got up and packed my bag.
It’s difficult for me to think of the person I was before I met Ben. I wish I never had to. Others do, though. Kat, for instance. But luckily, most of the people who knew me from then have fallen out of my life so it is rare I have to be that Hella. Only Kat remains, though vaguely, peripherally—busy with her school and her jobs and her solo world traveling, barely enough time to turn around and look behind her. The last time I’d seen her she’d carelessly said, “Ben was so good for you.” Since then even she has become more of a memory. Ben was so good for you! And what does that mean? So in the end he will always get the credit, and I will always be the me before Ben, the quiet college girl in her room in Massachusetts, living out of a computer screen on the mattress on the floor, ignored, forgotten, waiting—god, I thought I was badass for living on a mattress on the floor, as if that was some sort of bohemian benchmark. I thought I was strong for the room, for finding it on my own on Craigslist as if somehow moving off campus set me apart from my classmates and made me worldly. But it was nothing. Just a room in a shared house with a bunch of ex-college students and dropouts who hadn’t yet left the Pioneer Valley, who were working as movie ticket collectors and baristas and didn’t look like they would ever leave. That whole year was nothing. And the year before, and the years before that going all the way back to—
It’s not completely true. I went to class. I read the selections. I said things. Just enough. And every now and then more. And if my advisor had once looked over my work and told me that yes, I was doing well on paper but there was clearly something lacking in my engagement, that maybe this study wasn’t for me, well fuck off to her! Disengaged!—I smiled. I nodded. I pretended to take it in. I would never have given her the satisfaction of seeing me react. What did she know about my intellect? If I was so disengaged then maybe she was the one being disengaging. But it stung. That’s the problem with ambition, you see. If you have too much, all you can do is watch other people in class, sit and watch them tongue-tied and resentful and let them talk to you as if you don’t belong there. It was always the ones I admired the most who wanted to tear me down. Maria, my anthropology advisor who studied religion in Haiti, who’d written books, even poetry. It was a cliché, honestly; and when I came to know Ben and travel more I would discover there was really nothing unique or individual about her, just an archetype of a certain liberal arts woman. But at the time I admired her secretly and intensely so of course she disliked me. Just like Mrs. Connolly, my fourth grade teacher, who was young and energetic, full of high fives and praise for most of her students. I remember her as beautiful and kind, gelled curls and her bright colored eyes. Yet that was the year my gifted and talented enrollment got canceled. And at the end of the year, when she passed out awards for our writing—most adventurous, most imaginative, most artistic, best dialogue, best characters—I was given a third best most realistic. Third best! The categories were made up, flexible, and I was the only one who’d been placed all the way down in third. Of course, I never talked about these things, never admitted that they happened or that they ever popped up in my mind—never to anybody except Ben. Ben understood how important those kinds of experiences could be.
Maria Popadic I thought of all winter, procrastinating my reading, procrastinating plans for the summer, procrastinating thoughts of a dissertation, procrastinating everything but TV. Then came April—and this was what I was about to tell you about. The winter was brutal. At home in Indiana my sister was poised to be salutatorian and her and my parents were smug with it. Back at school in Massachusetts there was a frozen puddle outside my front door and the silence of everyone’s hibernation. Even Kat stayed away. She was doing some arts internship, or maybe she was volunteering with students I can’t remember exactly. Whatever it was, she stayed away and most of my winter was spent on that floor mattress eating uncooked ramen out of the packet and playing solitaire or watching TV off my laptop in bed—endless hours of Law and Order or CSI. I saw crimes as I walked to class, expected poisonings or back stabbings, conspiracies whispered about me and around me. Once or twice, there was one of those nothing parties we used to go to where students got drunk and bragged about vague philosophical ideas they half understood: oh yes, and if I really wanted to learn I wouldn’t be in school because knowing can’t happen from within the system. They were all entitled, ungrateful. They thought they had superior knowledge they’d spent a month WOOFing, or their parents had taken them to Greece or Mexico or Vancouver—only Kat seemed to understand this Midwest heritage we shared. FIFO, Kat went around telling people, Fucking Idiot From Ohio. So I became a Fucking Idiot From Indiana and we bonded over the flat, un-sophisticated cities of our upbringing, even though perhaps we were the ones who should have been celebrating our difference in the face of their East Coast money.
Northampton, April. It was a Tuesday night. Kat called me up begging me to come out with her because she needed to escape her hallmates, needed someone to talk to about the drama going on all around her. That was very Kat, always getting involved in other people’s affairs, and then passing on the news. She always said they were my friends, too—you get along, don’t you? But when she wasn’t around I never spoke to a single one of those girls and they never would have called me up or invited me out if I was on my own. It was just me and Kat. So when she called, I was up and dressed within 30 minutes. I’d eaten a bowl of cold mac and cheese. I’d drunk a shot of amaretto I found in the cabinet, a bottle that had been there so long I doubted the owner would miss any of it.
We walked through the town, underdressed for the weather and oblivious to the idea of being cold. We were on our way to the Cellar. Kat had a huge crush on the door guy there. She liked him as much because he was middle aged and going nowhere as she did because he always let us in without second-guessing our IDs. He was the kind of man who would be stuck in the Pioneer Valley forever—who knows what it was about that Kat found attractive. As we walked, she shared one of her cigarettes and told me the story of her hallmate Jema. Somehow over spring term break Jema had gotten in a car with this complete stranger of a circus guy. He’d driven her upstate, then down to the Poconos, then over to New York where he’d abandoned her after an all-night party in his friend’s apartment. Which was when Kat got involved, taking the bus all the way down to collect Jema, shoeless, from Port Authority.
“But where did she meet him, there isn’t any circus around here?” I asked, and all Kat could say was, “I don’t know. On a bench, I think.”
“But how did she lose her shoes? Like, you don’t just lose your shoes? And why did she make you come get her?”
“Jem’s my adventure buddy. She knew I’d be up for it. You’re my drinking buddy—okay well, I guess drinking can be an adventure sometimes. What I mean is that some friends are friends that if they called you up from a heroin den you’d drop what you were doing and go collect them—not that you’d ever wind up in a heroin den. Jema, maybe.”
It didn’t make sense. Nobody ends up shoeless in a bus stop in the middle of a city just like that—college students don’t end up shoeless in a bus stop in the middle of a city like that. And now—and this was the real drama—now Jema was thinking about running away to Mexico with this guy who had left her—
“I don’t know. Is it wrong that I think it might be a good thing? I mean, Mexico. And circus guy. It sounds kinda romantic. And then I could go visit her.”
“If it even lasts long enough for you to—”
“Oh hey! I love this song!”
That’s when we bumped into Ben.