Juice knew he would have been better off if he had just left Stockton too - left his bike in the impound lot and just moved the hell on. He'd left everything else after all, hadn't he? But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Every man had his limits, he decided, and this was it. He'd been relegated to being a bum on the streets of Stockton with one duffel bag of belongings, and cash in his wallet that he could hardly spend because a bum with hundred dollar bills practically called the police on himself around here.
He'd had it alright, shacked up at Wendy's place. He might even have been safe there for a while. It was too hot there now. There wasn't much of anything left to do, even if he'd wanted to stay in Charming.
Food had been a problem. Water had been a problem. Juice had already come to feel pretty lightheaded when he made his way to a bus stop and decided to wait. He'd take any bus that showed up, as long as it accepted that he was about sixty cents short of his fare and got him to a different place besides the overpass he'd slept under last night. He stepped out into the bike lane, however, with his forearm held up against his forehead to block the glare from the sun, and in that moment, and large SUV went practically flying by, knocking him off of his feet. He let out a noise when he felt his head hit the pavement - enough to stun him, but not to knock him out.
"Fuck!"
"Oh my God…"
Juice forced his eyes open in time to hear footsteps, and a female voice coming closer. She was young - tiny, Asian, practically a toothpick - and dressed in a pair of skinny jeans and a flowery crop top under a beige pleather jacket. Pleather. Juice was in no position to be picky about her choice of clothing, however, seeing as she was the only one among the handful of people around who had crouched down to help him. She grabbed his hand, pulling him up gently as he touched the back of his own head and realized he was bleeding.
"Oh my God," she repeated. "I'm gonna call an ambu-"
"No!" Juice interrupted, causing the girl to flinch. He groaned slightly, his forehead wrinkled in pain. "No, I don't want an ambulance, I'm fine."
"Well - can I take you somewhere?"
"No."
"I live close by, at least wash that off - sit and put an ice pack on it," the girl insisted. Juice felt strangely about someone showing him kindness, and he blinked at her with a slight sneer on his face, causing her to lean away slightly. She had no reason to help him, no benefit to be had, and because of that, he had no reason to trust her. She seemed genuine, however, and his head did indeed hurt like a bitch. Unsure of what exactly possessed him to do so, he followed the girl to her car and got in, leaning forward and holding his hand onto the sparsely bleeding cut on his head. The blood was probably only from a scratch, but he could feel the bump practically forming under his hand.
He realized that the girl lived in Brookside, one of the few parts of Stockton that a person could at say was somewhat nice without feeling like they needed to go to confession for telling such a plain-faced lie. She led him into one of the small, townhouse like structures and hurriedly yanked a first aid kit out of her kitchen. Juice snatched it from her hands and, however messily, cleaned himself up. The girl nodded for him to take a seat on the couch before handing him a blanket.
Juice took the object from her hands, but as it rolled open, he realized that the purple fuzzy material had sleeves. "This is a Snuggie," he pointed out in mild confusion. The girl emerged from the kitchen with an ice pack and an expression that screamed, 'so what?'. Juice cleared his throat and pulled it over him. In this new autumn weather, it was honestly the warmest he'd been. "I mean, thank you. I'm J-"
He paused. Was he really going to still call himself Juice? He almost felt like he had no right to use the nickname anymore, and in any case, it was better to bury his tracks. He cleared his throat, shaking his head gently. "Juan. My name's Juan."
"Denise," the girl replied - Juice was fairly sure he caught a smile on her face, but couldn't be sure as she turned on her heel and left the room yet again, this time returning with an unopened container of Advil. "I - I'm only here during the week for school, so I have a lot of unused stuff," she shrugged, noting his gaze on the still-sealed bottle of medicine. "But you're gonna need that pretty soon."
"Where are you from, then?" Juice asked, partially out of caution about the girl whose house he had just waltzed into. She'd brought up that she wasn't always here - so where did she go off to? The suspicion felt misplaced, but a part of him refused to believe there was such a thing as too careful.
"Burlingame," she said, starting to mill about the room and pick up a few books scattered on the dining table, the coffee table, and kitchen counter. "You look like - let me guess. San Jose?"
"Queens," he corrected. He couldn't say he was from Charming, after all. Denise paused and looked at him with a surprised expression, nodding as though she was actually impressed by the answer.
"Well, you're pretty far from home," she pointed out. Juice gave a look somewhat between a sneer and a smile. "Look," she sighed, looking slightly disappointed as she stood with her books in her arms, approaching so that she was on the other side of the coffee table from Juice. "I'm sure you've got places to be and all, but you hit your head pretty hard back there."
"No. I mean, yeah," Juice stammered, shaking his head and realizing that he did feel somewhat disoriented at this point. "I mean, no, I have no place to be. Yes, I hit my head pretty hard."
"Well, if you have nowhere else to go, then you could hand around here while I'm in class," she suggested. He looked at her now with a look of confusion and inexplicable 'what the hell?'.
"You are either really dumb, or have no valuables - I could rob you blind," he groaned through his throbbing headache, still somehow managing to inject the statement with a matter-of-fact tone. Denise, however, just chuckled in response.
"Well, thanks for the heads up. You're probably the most considerate burglar in Stockton," she smirked. "The most valuable thing in here is that TV I got on Black Friday, if you'd like to try and steal it on foot. Maybe you can figure out to hook up all of that stuff," she chuckled, gesturing vaguely to the old video game consoles littering the ground in front of the very large television screen - they were old enough to be thrift store old, even practically vintage. Denise laughed again, shaking her head and moving towards the door. "Make yourself at home, but - don't go anywhere because I'm not leaving you a key. We're not that close," she joked.
Juice felt like he'd just been thrown into an alternate universe - since when could a person be so nice, in a place like Stockton?
Denise, however, dropped the bright smile the instant she stepped foot out of the door and started heading back to her car, pulling out her cellphone and sending him a simple, coded text message. Picked up the groceries.
The nice girl on the street act, of course, had been a lie. Charles had been driving the SUV that had knocked Juice over - Denise hadn't expected Juice to fall as hard as he did, but there seemed to be no harm done anyway, and the act probably worked better when it hurt worse anyway. One thing that was not a lie, however, was that she had to go to class. Physics - which she didn't know why she was taking. Perhaps, she sometimes mused in her classes, she was lost in more ways than one, but being a directionless college student was certainly a way to kill time. She actually wondered why she hadn't done it sooner.
When she returned home, however, she opened the door to see that her houseguest was no longer on the couch. But the door had been locked - he hadn't left. "Juan?" she called out, using the name he'd introduced himself with. His real name. Still no answer. "Juan?" she repeated, moving elsewhere in the house. It was then that she saw the bathroom door open, and Juice sitting on the ground against the wall opposite the toilet, a small amount of vomit on the front of his shirt. Denise groaned slightly, but hurried over and crouched in front of him again. He groaned quietly, and she gave a sigh of relief that he wasn't dead.
Admittedly grossed out a bit by the smell despite having worked a short while as a nurse aide, Denise pulled off his shirt and tossed it into the nearby bathtub before tilting his head up, eliciting another disoriented groan. Denise realized he had probably been dehydrated after being out on the streets, and then had subsequently puked his brains out because of his concussion. She ran to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge, then returned to bathroom and practically pinched Juice's face to position his mouth open.
"What are you doing?" he slurred. Denise rolled her eyes.
"C'mon. It's Gatorade. Down the hatch," she said, attempting to continue the bright-eyed girl facade from earlier. Thankfully, he did manage to swallow a mouthful of the Gatorade, then reach out and take the bottle for himself. Good thing, Denise noted, because she certainly hadn't signed on to be a babysitter or a caregiver.
She still had to help him back on his feet to get back to her couch, and she sat on the arm of the couch next to him while he drank the Gatorade and seemed to get his wits about him again, at least slightly.
"So," Denise said slowly after a good while of silence as Juice simply stared forward into space. "Are you… homeless or something?" she asked, as though she didn't know anything about him. He turned to her with a slight glare, with annoyance, actually.
"Yeah. Right now, I am," he snapped. "Why? You never seen a homeless vet before?"
There was a tense silence, and Denise looked away as well - partially to hide the fact that she honestly couldn't feign hurt feelings as well as she'd have liked, partially because she couldn't parse out if the response contained truth or not. "Well," she said, clearing her throat. "You could crash here. I didn't buy a couch that folds out into a sofa bed just to have nobody sleeping on it."
"I don't have money to pay you -"
"But you have money to pay a motel or something? Or are you going back to that bus stop I found you at?" Denise asked, raising an eyebrow quizzically. "Look, I made a New Year's Resolution to do a good deed for somebody this year - like, something really good. It's already fall, and I haven't done it. I've never failed on a New Year's Resolution in my life," she explained emphatically - Juice looked simultaneously enthralled and puzzled by her rant. "So, really, you're kind of helping me out," Denise concluded brightly.
At first, Juice had nothing to say in response to the girl - what kind of world did she come from that she somehow got to the age that she was and still was so bright-eyed and fucking-bushy-tailed about everything? But he needed a place to stay, and she was the only one who was presenting that to him right now. Sure, he was a danger to her. Sure, people wanted him dead. But - he'd lost enough thinking about other people at this point, hadn't he? He nodded, more to himself than anything else, before looking up at Denise looking almost defeated. "Alright," he shrugged. "I'll crash here."
