Instead of running back inside Mojo, I grabbed hold of the rim of the dumpster and pulled myself up to peek inside. It maybe wasn’t the smartest thing for a young woman in a dark alley all alone to do. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t in a hurry to crawl out.

“Hello?” I called. The sight of the nastiness inside the dumpster was enough to level me, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the smell. Toxic sludge. That was the only explanation. “Anyone in there?”

Right then, the bag I’d just flung inside of it flew back out at me. I dropped down from the dumpster to avoid taking a direct hit.

“Yes! Someone is in here,” a raspy female voice called out. “And where do you get off thinking you can just toss your garbage anywhere you want?”

With so many out-of-the-norm things coming at me all at once, I couldn’t decide what was the most odd. That someone was yelling at me from inside a dumpster, that someone had just used a bag of garbage as a weapon against me, or that I was accused of disposing of garbage in a . . . dumpster.

“Um, are you okay? Do you need a hand out or anything?” I wasn’t used to talking to people camped out in dumpsters. I wasn’t sure what common courtesies were customary.

“Since your hands are the ones that just dumped a sack of garbage on my head, no . . . no, I do not need a hand from you.” Finally, a head appeared over the edge of the dumpster. Even though the alley was barely lit, I could still see that the woman had not seen the inside of a shower in weeks. Possibly even months.

“Oh my god. Are you okay?” I’d just tossed a bag of garbage on a person. I’d had plenty of low points, but that was another one to chalk up on the list.

“Do you see anything about me or my situation that would lead you to believe I’m okay, Girlie?”

I wasn’t sure if she’d called me Girlie as a term of no-endearment, or because a few wires had been crossed and she thought that was the name on my name tag. That didn’t seem like the time to clarify. Or correct her. “Here, let me give you a hand.” I held up my hand and stepped closer.

“I don’t think so. You’ve done enough.” Then, in a not-so-graceful motion that had me biting my lower lip, she crawled up and over the lip of the dumpster. Her clothes were as dirty as she was, and they were really only hanging on by threads. Her canvas shoes were so worn her toes peeked through. Nothing about that woman, from her deep wrinkles to her emotionless eyes, said she’d lived anything but a hard life.

“Um . . . what were you doing in there?” My vocab skills were seriously lacking.

“Cleaning house,” was her clipped response.

My face fell as my stomach twisted. “That’s . . . that’s your . . . home?” I’d been tossing garbage in that dumpster the entire school year. The thought that I’d been depositing refuse onto the poor woman’s head for months did nothing to alleviate my upset stomach.

“Easy there, Girlie, before you pass out on me.” The woman stepped toward me. “That’s not my home; that was just my dinner reservation.”

“Dinner reservation?” I said to myself, but she answered by pulling a half-eaten granola bar, a brown banana, and an almost-empty bag of sunflower seeds from the pocket of her worn trench coat. On their own, the snacks would have turned my stomach, but knowing where they’d come from made me feel the burn of bile rising in my throat.

“Are you hungry?” I was asking and saying some super stupid things.

“If I wasn’t hungry, do you really think I’d be dumpster diving?”

“Probably not.” I don’t know if I was more bothered by her ironic tone or that I felt ashamed to have clean clothes and a full belly when people like her existed. My head dropped, and I noticed the box of marginally stale pastries between my hip and arm. “Here. Do you want these? They were made earlier this morning. I was just going to toss them.” I didn’t feel much better offering a hungry women a few dozen old doughnuts—what she needed was a balanced, nutritious meal—but it was all I had, and all of the fast food places within walking distance had closed a couple of hours earlier.

“What? Are those doughnuts?” The woman took a hesitant step forward, her eyes flicking my way every other blink. She almost reminded me of a feral cat, like she didn’t trust anything or anyone.

“Yep.” I held out the box.

Another careful step forward. “Are they . . . poisoned?”

The skin between my eyebrows creased. “No.”

“What’s wrong with them then?” The woman inspected them like every last doughnut was suspect.

I shrugged. “They’re almost twenty-four hours old.”

“That’s all?” She said it like she didn’t believe they were blemish free, but her hands were reaching for them.

“That’s all. I swear.”

When the box was about a foot from her hands, she lunged, snatched it right out of my hands, and dodged back toward the dumpster. She cradled the box like it was a baby and leaned into the dumpster. As she decided which doughnut to devour first, she kept one eye on me, watching, waiting, like it wasn’t a matter of if but when I’d do something underhanded to her. After settling on an apple fritter, she downed that sucker in three bites. She was on to her second fritter before I’d released the breath I’d been holding.

“If you’re going to stand there gaping at me all night, talk or something.” Chunks of doughnut shot out of her mouth.

“Talk about . . . what?” Dammit. I was seriously in the running for most moronic things to say to one person.

“Something. Anything. I don’t care. I don’t have conversations with a person on the other side that often, you know.” Two doughnuts down, on to the third.

“A person on the other side?” I might as well keep with the moron-trend. “What other side?”

“Disillusionment.” She actually stopped chewing to issue that show-stopper.

I thought over my response—I really thought it over—but one question kept sliding to the tip of my tongue. “And who’s the one on the side of disillusionment?”

“The one who’s convinced life can be a fairy tale.”

I was silent for a few moments. Maybe she mistook that as me deciding how to form my rebuttal.

“In case you’re trying to work out which one of us believes in fairy tales, let me tell you something, Girlie. Fairy tales have been dead to me since before you were even born.”

“I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in making my own damn tale.”

The woman laughed manically between bites. “You and every one of us at some time. It doesn’t last.”

“What doesn’t last? The idea or the reality?”

“Both.”

I suppose if our roles were reversed and I was rolling around in a dumpster for dinner, I might have been just as doom and gloom. Hell, I’d been a numb version of doom and gloom a year ago. I wasn’t that person anymore though, and I wouldn’t go back.

“And don’t get to kiddin’ yourself that because you’ve found a little patch of perfect that life’s going to keep on keepin’ on in the same way.” I’d lost track of her doughnut count, but it certainly didn’t look like she was slowing down. “Perfect isn’t real.”

“I’ve known that for a while. Perfect’s fake.” That wasn’t a revelation.

“Not fake.” For the first time, she lowered her doughnut and leveled me with a wild look in her eyes. “Just not of our world.”

That was probably the point when I should have smiled, waved good-bye, and left the woman to her doughnuts. As time proved, I rarely went with what I “probably” should have done. “Perfect’s not of . . . our world?”

She shook her head once, her eyes going up a notch on the wild scale.

“Then what world is perfect of?” It was official. I sounded like the newest member of the head-case club.

Clutching the doughnut box with one arm, she used her other to point at the ground. Her hand trembled.

“The asphalt? Perfect comes from the asphalt?” Yeah, I realized how stupid that sounded.

The woman’s head shook as she pointed more firmly at the ground.

“The dirt?” One quick shake of her head. “The seismic plates?” Another shake. “The molten core of the earth?”

I knew with each guess I was getting farther and farther off my rocker, but I wasn’t sure where she was going. For being such a chatty thing earlier, she wasn’t saying much anymore.

She stuck her finger at the ground one last time before letting out a long sigh. I was obviously hopeless. “The dark place. The place of eternal damnation.”

“Hell? Are you talking about hell?”

A nod. It was about time.

“Do you mean that in the figurative or literal sense?” I was almost afraid to have that question answered.

“Both.”

And that was my crazy tolerance point. I didn’t do the whole heaven and hell, saved and damned song and dance. She could keep up the conversation with the dozen doughnuts I guessed she had left. I was just about back inside Mojo when she spoke again.

“Just because you refuse to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“And just because you think you see something doesn’t mean it’s real either.” I wasn’t racking up points in the let-crazy-be department, but something about her last words had unsettled me.

“At last, we agree, Girlie.” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore. In fact, if I hadn’t seen her before, with my back to her, I would have guessed she was a sweater-set wearing mom of three. “Just because you’ve convinced you love and are loved in a way that seems like it will go on forever doesn’t mean it will. That’s not real either. There’s no such thing as expiration-free love.”

I was really regretting not escaping when I’d gone for it. Why did crazy people have to make so much sense?

Oh, yeah. Because the world was one sick, crazy f**k most of the time.

Chapter Nine

I WOULD HAVE thought each twelve-hour trek on the good ol’ Greyhound would get easier, or less traumatic at least, but the opposite seemed to be true. When I lumbered off the bus, I was half tempted to buy one of those reliable, five-hundred-thousand miles to the gallon cars Jesse had encouraged me to pick up at the beginning of the year. Anything to keep from cramming in between a couple of linebacker-sized guys who thought eau de funk was that season’s scent.

I wasn’t last off the bus, but I still received my share of stares. I didn’t get nearly as many sideways glances when I was getting off in Seattle, but out there . . . well, my funky, dark style hadn’t made its way east yet.

In honor of Montana, I had on the cowgirl boots Jesse had gotten me last summer. Since, wonder of wonders, the weather was almost summer-like, I had on a purple shift dress, the beat-to-shit motorcycle jacket I’d found at the Salvation Army last fall, and the denim ass purse (as I’d endearingly named it). After enduring two quarters of my natural hair color, I’d colored it darker again. Not black like before and not because I was trying to hide behind it. Because . . . well, I wanted to and I could. Jesse didn’t care what color hair I had so long as I had some. Actually, he probably wouldn’t have cared if my hair fell out. He was all noble like that.