warnings: references to past child abuse/neglect
Chapter 23: Nomi & the cluster
In which Nomi finds her place
Nomi wakes up in the late afternoon. She looks over to find Lito sitting on the mattress, flipping through a book, frowning.
"Hey," she says.
Lito looks up with a start. "You're awake," he says.
"Mostly," yawns Nomi, sitting up. "Where'd everyone go?"
"Felix and Wolfgang left to go work. But we didn't want you to wake up alone so I volunteered to stay back," Lito says. "I thought it would be fun to become acquainted, no? And also we need to go buy you your own sleeping bag."
"Oh." Nomi nods. "Okay, yeah. Thanks."
Lito smiles and closes the book. Advanced Placement Biology, Nomi reads on the cover. It's a test prep book. "Are you in AP Bio?" she asks.
"Oh, definitely not," laughs Lito. "This book isn't mine. It belongs to a girl named Kala who lives here." He sets it down on a purple sleeping bag.
"How many are there now? Who live here?" Nomi asks.
"There's me, Wolfgang, Felix," says Lito, counting on his fingers, "then Capheus and Will, Kala and Sun, Riley... so nine, including you."
Nomi nods slowly. "And all of you are— homeless?"
Lito raises his eyebrows.
"I'm sorry," Nomi says hastily. "That was a stupid question—"
"It's fine," laughs Lito. "We are all homeless, yes."
Nomi glances upward at the afternoon sky peeking through the church's gaping roof. "I guess I am too, now, huh?" she says after a moment. "Homeless."
"I guess you are," replies Lito. "But hey," he adds, and Nomi looks at him. Lito smiles. "You have us."
o - o - o
He asks about Amanita as they walk to Goodwill.
"She's in college," Nomi tells him stiffly. "In California. She's taking summer classes."
"Does she know you left home?"
"Yes," says Nomi. She glances at Lito. "She— she didn't want me to come back to you guys. She wanted me to stay with her mom. But I couldn't. Because— Well, like, my parents will definitely report me missing, and her mom's a police officer, and I'm sure it's against the law to, like... harbor a missing child. I couldn't just force her to hide me like I'm a fugitive or something."
"I understand," Lito says.
"I feel bad," Nomi mumbles. "I love Amanita. And I know she's worried about me. I feel bad putting her in this position."
"I'm sure Amanita will understand," says Lito. "You have to do what you have to do. And anyway, she doesn't need to worry." He nudges her in the arm. "We'll take care of you."
Nomi smiles. "I know."
o - o - o
The sleeping bag they buy is forest-green. Lito pays for it, and they're about to leave the store when suddenly Nomi pauses beside a rack marked "Shirts - Women."
"You alright?" Lito asks.
"Yeah, I just… Nothing," says Nomi. "It's nothing."
"Are you sure? I think it's something," Lito wheedles.
Nomi sighs. "It's just, someday I'd like to buy new clothes for myself. Like... girls' clothes." She glances down at the jeans and t-shirt she's currently wearing. "These are clothes my parents made me wear," she says. "I kind of hate them."
"Oh," says Lito quietly. "I see." Then, with conviction, "You should get new clothes," he tells her. "Right now. I brought enough money."
"What? No, it's your money, I don't want to—"
"It's money from the stash we all contribute to. For emergencies," Lito corrects her, as though that makes everything better.
"This isn't an emergency," Nomi says uncomfortably.
"If it's important to you then it's an emergency," Lito tells her.
Nomi gives him a look. "My clothes are perfectly good," she says. "You shouldn't waste emergency money buying me more. It's fine. Really. I'm just being stupid."
Lito frowns deeply. "Let me tell you a story," he says. "When Felix found me I only had one flip flop on."
"One?"
"Just one, yes. So of course he and Wolfgang said I needed new shoes. And I told them no, the other flip flop was back in an alley and I'd be able to find it. And I remember what Felix said: He looked me in straight the eye, and he said, 'You're a fucking idiot if you think we're about to let you go back to work in fucking flip flops.' And you know what they did? They took out money from the emergency stash and bought me brand new shoes." He lifts his foot slightly. "Nice shoes, no? I told them they shouldn't have spent so much money on me and they acted like I was crazy!"
Nomi smiles slightly, glancing over at the rack of women's clothes.
"Are you sure?" she asks.
"I'm positive," he says. "Go for it."
So she does.
She picks out a pair of dark skinny jeans, a plaid blouse, and a fleece-lined red jacket. She wears them out of the store, tags and all, and throws her old clothes in the first dumpster they pass. It feels damn good.
It feels like freedom.
o - o - o
Nomi learns a lot over the couple weeks.
She learns to accept the shame that comes with begging, learns not to avert her eyes from people's faces when they look at her with pity, but rather to gaze at them as sadly as possible, because those are the people who'll put money in her cup.
She misses daily showers, because hand soap and paper towels in public bathrooms just don't quite do the trick. After a week her skin feels almost sticky with built-up grime, and her hair hangs lank and greasy no matter how many sinks she washes it in. But she learns to live with it, gets used to feeling dirty all the time.
She learns to be grateful for fast food, which is cheap and warm and better than nothing, even if it does get slightly nauseating when eaten for every meal.
She learns about the others, too. She doesn't ask about their pasts, and they don't ask about hers, but things come up.
Wolfgang returns home one morning with a sprained wrist and says it's nothing, he'll be fine, his dad used to break his bones.
Felix laughs about the burns he has on his hands from trying to use the stove when he was four and hungry and his mom wasn't home.
Sun mentions that her foster father used to lock her in the bathroom overnight for starting fights at school. "There are worse punishments," she shrugs, like it's no big deal, and Nomi's stomach drops.
Kala talks about the time her mother kicked her sister out of the house for the night, then flushed her cell phone down the toilet the next day for "staying out late."
(Nomi shares things about own parents sometimes, when she's out with Kala and Sun. She tells them about how they cut off her hair when she came home after running away, how they shipped her off to a school where she didn't belong, how they called her the wrong name and used the wrong pronouns and never said I love you.
Kala and Sun listen, and for once, Nomi feels truly heard.)
o - o - o
It's been two weeks since she ran away, and it's not that she wants to go home (because she doesn't, she wouldn't, not for all the money in the world).
It's just that it's colder tonight than it has been the past few days, and she misses her house. Misses her pajamas, her pillow, her bed. It's silly, she thinks, to crave such superficial things. She knows, knows, that she's lucky to have a safe place to sleep and food in her stomach and clothes on her back, knows it could be so much worse.
But still.
She flips over in her sleeping bag and adjusts her arms under her head. Her hands are cold. She tries not to care.
She tries to be like the others, who never seem bothered by stupid things like cold hands and a lack of pillows.
It doesn't work, and suddenly she's crying.
She turns onto her stomach, pressing her hands to her face to muffle the noise of her sobs.
"Nomi?" whispers someone. Will.
Nomi sniffles.
"Hey, what's wrong?" Will asks softly. She hears him sit up. "Something happen?"
"No," Nomi mumbles into her hands. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I can't sleep." She's crying in earnest now, probably loud enough to wake the others, but she can't seem to stop. "I'm sorry," she repeats. "I'm— I'm just scared. And uncomfortable. And I don't like b-being homeless," she chokes out through sobs.
"Hey. It's okay." Will scoots closer to her. "No one likes being homeless," he says gently.
"No, I know, of course, I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I'm being so weird," says Nomi.
The others are stirring now, sitting up; she can make out their silhouettes in the darkness. What's happening, someone asks. Who's crying? Nomi? What's the matter, what is it?
"Sometimes I just feel like an intruder," she confesses quietly, speaking more to herself than to any of the others. "Like you guys all know what you're doing and I'm just a burden who showed up and now you have to like, take care of me, because I'm so useless and—"
"Nomi," says Kala. "You are not a burden. And you are not an intruder. Please never feel like that."
"Technically you were here before any of us," Riley points out.
"And we all take care of each other, not just you," says Sun. "We all need each other."
Nomi wipes her eyes, the knot in her chest beginning to loosen. She draws a shuddering breath. "I'm sorry for waking you guys up; I didn't mean to start crying, I just—"
"Nomi. Don't apologize," says Capheus. Then, after a moment's pause: "Let me ask you something," he says. "When is your birthday?"
"I— my birthday? August 8th," sniffles Nomi, bewildered.
"Shit," says Will.
"Incredible," whispers Kala.
"Wait, what? Why?" Nomi asks.
"Would you believe me," Capheus says, "if I told you that we were all born on August 8th too?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we all have the same birthday," he says. "You, me, Will, Kala, Sun, Riley, Lito, Wolfgang. Everyone but Felix."
Felix snorts.
"You're joking," says Nomi.
"I am not."
Nomi just sits there for a moment, half expecting them all to burst out laughing and tell her they're just joking. They don't. She frowns. She's heard of the birthday paradox, but she wonders what the chances are that eight strangers would meet each other and end up being born on the same day. "That's... that's kind of creepy, don't you think?" she says at last, unsure how else to describe it.
"It is, a bit," laughs Riley. "But I think it's beautiful, too. Like we were meant to find each other."
"I agree," says Capheus warmly. "It is a beautiful thing. We belong together, all of us."
And Nomi nods in the darkness, suddenly choked up. She digs the heels of her palms into her eyes and all she can say is, "Thank you."
"Of course," Riley tells her.
"Any time," says Will.
"You're okay?" asks Capheus.
Nomi smiles. "I'm okay."
And she is.