Black Feathers (6 page)

A quick shower, and hopefully he wouldn’t wake Alice: she needed her sleep.

“You’re going to be late,” her mother said as she bustled into the kitchen. She was dressed for work, her hair back, a little bit of makeup on her face.

“We’re fine,” Cassandra said, leaning against the counter as she ate a banana. She had just put her cereal bowl into the sink. Heather was still at the table, lifting a spoonful to her mouth as she stared at the back of the cereal box.

“Not if you don’t get out of here,” she said, setting her handbag on one of the kitchen chairs. “Heather, please.”

“I’m done, Mom,” she said, tilting her bowl sideways to show only a faint residue of milk.

“All right, brush your teeth and I’ll do your hair. Come on,” she urged when Heather was slow at standing up.

Heather started toward the stairs, but stopped when their mother cleared her throat.

Mom nodded toward the table, where Heather had left her cereal bowl and the box, and lifted her eyebrows.

Heather sighed heavily and set the bowl in the sink, tucked the box back into the cupboard.

Cassie smirked. Heather scowled.

“Heather, come on,” their mother urged again, fumbling with an earring.

Heather hustled out of the kitchen, turned toward the stairs.

“Whoa, slow down,” came a voice from the other room. “Where’s the fire?”

Cassandra’s right hand, holding the limp banana peel, fell to her side as her father came around the corner, shaking his head, smiling.

“You’ve got her on the run this morning,” he said to their mother, leaning toward her to kiss her cheek. “Good morning.” His voice was a warm near-whisper.

“They’re going to be late,” she said, giving up on her earring and turning to kiss him on the mouth.

“No, they’re not,” he said, grinning broadly. He looked at the clock above the sink. “They’ve got plenty of time.”

Then he turned to Cassandra. “Good morning, Miss Cassie. How’d you sleep?”

Her words seemed to die in her throat, crushed by the surging of her heart. Her daddy.

“Good,” she managed in a gulp. “Good.”

Cassie woke with a jerk, her heart snapping and racing. The world was a blur of distorted colours and shapes: a flat, brownred surface, a silver mist, a light that burned her eyes.

And a face, looking down at her.

Skylark put her hand on Cassie’s arm. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Everything else slipped into focus—the brick wall looming above her, the silver cloud of her breath hanging in the still air, the orange lights in the ceiling high above her.

She nodded uncertainly.

God, it was cold. Her face was on fire. She’d have to start sleeping with her scarf wrapped around her head, the way she’d seen other people do.

“Cassie?”

“I’m okay,” she said.

Skylark reached over and Cassie closed her eyes and fought the instinct to flinch as she felt the other girl’s fingertips brush across her eyebrows.

“Look,” Skylark said.

When Cassie opened her eyes, Skylark was extending her index finger toward her. There were ice crystals on the tip of her finger, glinting in the light even as they melted against her heat. “Your eyebrows are frosty.”

It was impossible for Cassie not to smile too.

The camp was awake and packed before the sun was even up.

“Most of us go our own way during the day,” Skylark explained as the two girls sat again at the edge of the empty fountain, sipping the bitter, barely hot coffee that the Outreach van had brought, along with the bagels and toast they had
already eaten. “It gives people less to complain about. Less for the cops to hold against us.”

Cassie nodded, both hands wrapped tightly around the Styrofoam cup. She watched Skylark as she spoke: it was like nothing fazed her, like there was nothing she couldn’t handle. “I’m not sure where to go,” Cassie said.

Then it all came out in a gush. “I thought I had found a good place yesterday, but this guy came after me with a knife.” She shook her head. “That was after the cops—”

Something seemed to flare in Skylark’s face. “What about the cops?”

“They were okay, I guess,” Cassie said. “I was sleeping on the steps in front of a bookstore, and they woke me up, made me leave. But I guess that’s what they have to do, right?” She shrugged her shoulders.

“They didn’t bring you in?” Skylark’s voice rose in surprise.

“No,” Cassie said slowly, uncertainly.

“You don’t have a record?”

“What? No. Why?”

Skylark’s smile broadened and she bounced to her feet. “Come on,” she said, tugging at Cassie’s sleeve, practically hauling her back toward the camp.

Skylark walked so quickly that Cassie almost had to run to keep up.

“Where are we going?” she asked finally as they passed the McDonald’s next to the huge bookstore.

“I figured it out,” Skylark said. “Everybody else has their turf already, right? And some of them are really protective of
it. They’ve been there for years. But you don’t have a police record.”

“What does that—”

“It means you’ve never been there.” She gestured at the building at the end of the block, a squat, brown, almost windowless rectangle surrounded by concrete and stairs.

“What’s that?” Cassie asked as they walked toward it.

“It’s the courthouse,” Skylark explained, waiting a beat for Cassie’s reaction.

She had none.

Skylark sighed. “If you’ve got any sort of record at all, you’re going to want to avoid the cops, right? Yeah, well, take it from me, the last thing you’re going to do is to go where the cops are. So you’re not going to go anywhere near the police station, and you’re sure as hell not going to put your hat down outside the courthouse, right?”

Cassie smiled.

“It’s all yours,” Skylark said.

A warm surge of relief rose through her, buttressing her against the cold.

“Come on,” Skylark said, taking her arm again. “Let’s find you a place to set up.”

They walked slowly around the building as Skylark scanned the area. She kept up a steady stream of observations—“There might be all right.” “Too far from the doors.” “Too windy.” “You’ll freeze to death there.”—and it took Cassie a while to realize that Skylark was nervous. The way she was looking at the building and over her shoulder: she didn’t like being there.

Cassie wondered what sort of police record she had.

And she stopped in her tracks.

“What is it?” Skylark asked.

“I don’t …” She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. “I don’t have a record, I don’t think. But … I’m not …”

“You ran away.”

Cassie nodded.

“And your parents reported you missing.”

Cassie swallowed. “My mom.”

Something flashed across Skylark’s face, there and gone. She squeezed Cassie’s arm. “You don’t have to worry about that. If the cops were going to take you in, they’d have done it yesterday. I think you’re fine.”

The cold wind cut into Cassie’s cheeks like a thousand tiny blades on the back of a slap.

“Here, this looks good,” Skylark said, pointing to a spot on the sidewalk. “Good traffic from Blanshard, close to the doors, should be out of the wind, but you’re not hidden.”

Cassie was overwhelmed. There were so many things to consider, so many variables, and Skylark could just rattle them off.

“What do you think?”

“Thank you,” Cassie murmured. The words seemed wildly insufficient. “That looks good.”

“And look, you’ve even got something to read.” She pointed at the crumpled newspaper on top of the garbage can a short distance away. “Everything a girl could want.”

“It’s a dream come true.”

Skylark smiled. “I’ll be back later, all right?” She glanced up at the building. “I’ve gotta go.”

Then the girl was gone, hurrying down the block toward downtown without even a backward glance.

Cassie spread out the blanket from her bag, then double-folded it to give herself a soft cushion and to protect her from the cold concrete.

It didn’t make any difference.

With a heavy sigh, she laid out the second knit hat from her bag on the sidewalk, seeded it with a few coins and waited.

And waited.

It was early when she sat down, still well before the morning rush. She figured that once more people were around, on their way to work …

But she was wrong. The sidewalks filled with people as the time ticked by, but people rushing to work weren’t inclined to stop. Most of them didn’t even seem to notice her.

Many of those who did looked at her with such scorn that she wanted to slip between the bars behind her and disappear.

One woman, with tightly styled blond hair and a long red coat, actually stopped and fumbled in her purse, looking at Cassie like something she wanted to scrape off the bottom of her shoe. She dropped a few coins into the hat with an air of imperturbable self-righteousness, and continued along the sidewalk with her nose high in the air.

Cassie checked the hat. The woman had left forty-one cents.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One man in a brown suit actually slowed down, bent a bit at the waist to drop a toonie gently into the toque. When Cassie smiled at him, he smiled back, sadly. He shook his head slightly as he turned away.

By late morning, after the coffee breaks and smoke runs, there wasn’t even ten dollars in her hat. She had spent a little at McDonald’s for a hot chocolate and a breakfast sandwich, and at the drugstore for a new toothbrush and toothpaste, but even with that it wasn’t much of a morning.