“Too bad you ain’t willing to strip.  You’d make a killing with that tight little body.”  My boss at the liquor store said that to me just about every day as I pulled on the black tank top and shorts to get ready to leave for my other shift.  Her name was Aggie and she was old enough to be my grandma – maybe even my grandma’s grandma – but she kept pushing me to be a stripper, which I found hilarious because it was better than finding it irritating and adding to my increasing list of things to be depressed about.

By eight months in, I confirmed that Trish was using a lot of the money I gave her for drugs.  So was Hunt, but from what I gathered, he sold more than he used.  I knew it was bad when I was trying to use that to reason that Hunt was an okay guy.  I questioned how far my standards had dropped when I appreciated the fact that Hunt at least cleaned up his mess of needles.  I practically admired that he could remember to do that in whatever state he’d just shot himself up into.  I wasn’t sure anyone did that but him.  But I’d seen surprising things in him from the beginning.  He always tried to balance out whatever grief Trish or Dean was giving me.  He spoke only a bit more often than Dean did, but what little words he used were often a means of trying to make me laugh or feel better.  Every time he did it successfully with some one-liner, I’d wish he had more for me.  I’d ache to hear something else funny from his mouth.  But he’d have reached his speaking quota for the day and I’d find myself straining comfort from the fact that I enjoyed what he had to say enough to actually want more of it.  And that in itself was something to celebrate.

At least it was at Sunstone.

I took what I could get, especially as Trish starting spending whole days, sometimes two or three, completely strung out.  I used that time to open up a personal bank account in secret.  But I still came home with enough money for her that she didn’t make my life a complete living hell.  Not that random things wouldn’t still set her unpredictably off.  We were eating outside on the plastic table one night, just her, me and Hunt.  I didn’t want dressing on my salad and she went completely berserk.  She accused me of looking down on her, thinking she had bad taste or bad judgment and lived a bad lifestyle.  She threw her salad in my face and stormed so hard through the door of the trailer that it fell further off its hinge.  I stared at it and almost yelped when I saw her howling face appear suddenly through the screen door again.  She jabbed her finger into her chest and then into the cheap mesh.

“I’m trash? You’re trash.  You are trash, Lake DePalma! Trash!”

Her vocabulary wasn’t extensive yet I always let her remarks get to me.  Hunt tossed me some napkins to wipe the dressing off my shirt.  “You ain’t,” he said with a nod at the door.  “She’s the one whose name is a letter from trash.”  The joke went over my head for a good five seconds but then I looked up at him with pure surprise and he broke into a grin.  “Shit, I knew you didn’t think I could spell.”  I rolled my eyes but laughed.  Thank God someone could still make me laugh.

I didn’t particularly like Hunt most of the time.  He was friends with guys from the park that I thought were disgusting and he never so much as flinched when they said or did something revolting to me.  He’d just look away and drink his beer.  I hated the way he yelled, “Fuck!” out of nowhere with volume that electroshocked my heart.  It was always over something little, like dropping a fork or being unable to find his lighter.  Most of all, I hated that he swaggered around like a zombie when he was on his benders, and once, in a haze of delirious, drugged-up glory, whipped his floppy dick out and told me to put my mouth on it.  He’d called me by another girl’s name though, so that was my excuse to give him.  He thought I was someone else.  He’d never do that to me.

It was pathetic but I needed to hold onto the sliver of me that enjoyed him.  I was so miserable I lived for the moments I had with Hunt that were okay to good.  I had nothing else to look forward to.  In the beginning, I told myself it would be easy for me save up in my secret bank account and eventually run in the night.  But we lived in the middle of nowhere and the placed I worked made barely any money, so neither did I.  I had to give most of that money to Trish and Dean so she wouldn’t start talking crazy about him going to hurt my friends in New York, and when the car I used to get to work broke down, my savings were almost fully depleted and I was back to square one.

I told myself I could always just take a bus away after work and leave forever.  But I also told myself that I could just jailbreak Trish and Hunt from Sunstone, cover my bases and then return to Callum in New York.  To me, that felt like more of a complete solution.  I told myself that at that point, Dean would focus his anger on his wife and son who’d left him, not on the stepdaughter he hardly knew, whose money he only felt entitled to because some of it was going to his wife.  I was convinced he’d leave me alone after his family left him.  And if he tried anything again, we’d call the cops on him and he’d get arrested without me having to feel bad about Trish or Hunt getting dragged into the mess.

I told myself a lot of things.  Including that I deserved to stay there.  For God’s sake, I was starting to fit in.  By the time I surpassed the half year mark at Sunstone, I had a tradition of making watermelon margaritas with Shanna Temple on Fridays, and was babysitting the two youngest Schroeder kids every Sunday and Tuesday.  Shanna lived right next to us and was a big, boisterous divorcee with boobs the size of my head and the length of my forearm.  She proudly showed them off in braless camis that I judged hard when I first moved in, but I grew to love Shanna so much that I eventually didn’t care what clothes anyone wore.  I stopped being fazed by most of the questionable outfits people at Sunstone walked around in.  It was hot out and they were their own community there, really, so they made their own rules.

I was sipping the Kool-Aid.  Not full on drinking it but just giving myself enough of a taste so that my every day wasn’t completely joyless.  It was a give and take I never reconciled.  I needed to stay alive enough to stave off complete depression because if I didn’t, I’d never fight my way back to Callum.  But if I let myself smile and laugh too often, that meant I was enjoying myself at Sunstone and the Lake that Callum knew and loved would never be nice to people who were essentially holding her hostage.  That would mean I was a fool.  Or that I belonged.

I didn’t get myself after awhile.  I questioned who I was, where I really belonged and the daily tug of war in my head was so exhausting that it made me wonder if I’d just lost it completely.  Maybe it wasn’t even safe for me to go back to New York because maybe I wasn’t even sane or making sense anymore.  I’d be unrecognizable and the only reason I hadn’t known it was happening was because I lived every day among people like Trish and Hunt, who spent most of their time bumbling, drugged up and strung out.  Even Shanna was kind of crazy with the hoarding thing.  I just didn’t pay attention to her downfalls because she was the only person who was guaranteed relaxation for me every time we hung out.  She usually came over and we’d stream shows and movies on Trish’s computer and look at each other like, “Wouldn’t it be nice?” every time a hot guy walked on screen.  A part of me itched to show her pictures of Callum but I never let myself do it.

On Callum’s twenty-second birthday, Shanna’s pitbull had puppies so I sat outside with her all day, watching them and distracting myself from wondering what Callum was doing.  We had an old classmate in high school named Cass Vaughn that was always obsessed with him and was always the first to wish him happy birthday every year.  I figured she probably popped by his apartment with some sort of gift and then forced herself into whatever his plans were for the day, till she was in the running to sleep with him at some point.  The thought made my lip twitch.  Crossing my arms, I ran my fingers over my side and the rib tattoo I’d had finished in my first few months at Sunstone.  Callum had dared me to finish that lonely “C” on my birthday and though I had been away from him, I’d still been happy to honor the promise.  I’d made sure to find a good shop to do the ink, too, because it was Callum’s name and I didn’t want it to wind up looking off, like Hunt’s big, weird squid.