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It’s comically easy to run away from the Olsens. Climb out the window, dig her sneakers into the seams between the bricks to shimmy down the wall, only almost fall twelve times, freedom. Eleven-year-old Mary Sue Poots has done this before. Not from the Olsens, they’re fairly new, but others. This family is fine. Not the worst she’s had. They’re predictable in their anger, they telegraph it to Mary Sue’s well-trained eyes.
Usually, anyway. Her wrists twinge with the results of Mrs. Olsen’s iron grip that Mary Sue had been slow to anticipate.
It’s less than a mile to the nearest subway station, and a pleasant day outside to boot, only mildly humid in comparison to the soup that the rest of summer has been. She swipes her metro card and slips onto the next train, destination: Queens.
While she’s been to the Hall of Science before, it was only for a few minutes. The Rykersons’ three-year-old had gotten fussy, making enough of a scene that his parents shuffled them all off to the park instead. That was six months ago, and Mary Sue has been wanting to finish the visit ever since. She stares up at the curved building, finesses her way through the entrance (“Oh, my mom and dad are just outside, ma’am, see? Those two there. They’ve got my little sister to get situated and told me to just go on ahead. I’m really excited, I’ve enrolled in the science fair at school and everything!”), and begins to absorb everything it has to offer.
Four exhibits in, Mary Sue’s attention is caught by a boy around her age animatedly talking to what she assumes are his parents. He takes after his father in appearance, she observes, all lanky and curly-haired, but he shares the laugh of his heavily pregnant mother, who has folded up one of the museum maps to use as a fan.
They look happy. They look like the sort of family Mary Sue’s always wished she had.
It’s not fair.
Even more unfair is how she’s too distracted to notice the Watch Your Step sign near her feet and promptly face-plants, hard.
Mary Sue considers lying where she is, forever. If she doesn’t look up from the carpet, she won’t be able to see what she knows is everyone making fun of her.
“Hey, you okay?”
Mary Sue sighs. Lying here will not, apparently, work out. Not that her plans ever do. If they did, she’d have found a home by now.
With a grunt, she moves into a sitting position and regards the speaker. It’s the boy that had captured her attention in the first place, his big brown eyes earnest. “I’m fine, thanks.”
The boy lets out a little gasp. “You’re bleeding.”
“What?” Mary Sue glances down at her hands, which, indeed, are scraped raw and welling with drops of blood.
“Mom!” the boy calls over his shoulder.
“No, don’t,” she pleads. The last thing she needs is more attention.
Too late.
“What’s your name, mija?” the boy’s mother asks as his father gently helps her to her feet.
“Mary Sue.”
“Are your parents nearby, Mary Sue?”
“Yeah, they’re … around. Back at the bubble part, I think.” The woman’s eyes are as big and brown as her son’s, and very kind. They make Mary Sue almost not want to lie.
“Berto,” the woman says to her husband, “see if you can find them. Take Robbie with you.”
He complies with an encouraging smile in Mary Sue’s direction and ushers along his son into the previous exhibit. Robbie gives her a little wave as he leaves. Mary Sue responds with half of one.
“I’m Juliana,” says the boy’s mother. “Why don’t we get you cleaned up a little?”
Mary Sue lets herself be all but manhandled to the nearest restroom. For being as far along as she is, Juliana is surprisingly agile. “I can take care of it myself,” Mary Sue says, trying not to sound rude.
Juliana assesses her as she wets a paper towel. “I’m sure you can. Hands, please.”
Grumpily, Mary Sue holds out her hands and lets Juliana daub away the blood and grit. She sucks in a sharp breath as Juliana inadvertently presses on a particularly tender part. “Ow.”
“I’m sorry. Almost done.”
From her purse, Juliana pulls out two band-aids and secures them over the scrapes. A quiet groan escapes her lips as she straightens, her hand pressing into her lower back. Mary Sue comments, “You look like you’re gonna pop.”
“Wish he’d hurry up,” Juliana laughs. “Still a couple more weeks yet.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gabriel.”
“Like the archangel? He was a messenger.” I am Gabriel, recites Sister Maggie’s voice in her head, that stand in the presence of God, and am sent to speak unto thee and to shew thee these glad tidings.
“Yes, that, but it was my father’s name. He passed not long ago.”
“Oh.”
“Many your age wouldn’t know who Gabriel is,” Juliana says. “Sunday school?”
“More like every day school.” Juliana tilts her head in question, and Mary Sue reluctantly elaborates, “I’m from St. Agnes’s. It’s an orphanage.”
Juliana’s face morphs into one Mary Sue is all too familiar with: pity. “So when you say your parents …?”
“Met ’em a couple weeks ago.”
Mary Sue reaches up to fix her mussed hair, which proves to be a mistake. As her sleeves fall down past her forearms, Juliana sucks in a breath. The bruises. Crap.
“Fight at school,” Mary Sue says by rote. She’s got this routine down to a science.
Voice carefully measured, Juliana asks, “Get into a lot of fights, do you? Some of those look old.”
“I can be a brat. People don’t usually like that.”
“A brat?”
“Thanks for the band-aids,” Mary Sue sidesteps quickly. “I’ve gotta go.”
“To your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, let’s go see if Alberto’s tracked them down yet. Maybe we can all get some lunch together.”
Mary Sue knows that tone. The fakeness of it. Juliana has no interest in making nice, and Mary Sue would get the blowback. No thanks.
“I think we have plans already. Mom mentioned something. I’ll find them, you guys don’t have to wait around.”
“Oh. Okay, well …” Juliana reaches again into her purse and scrounges up a pen and a crumpled receipt. She jots down her name and a pager number. “Here. In case you want to meet us later. We saw a Korean barbecue place not too far from here that looked good.”
Mary Sue obediently, impatiently, pockets the receipt.
Unfazed, Juliana’s eyes search Mary Sue’s. She implores, “We’ll be in the city for another week.”
Mary Sue doesn’t plan on using the number or Juliana’s hospitality. The woman probably hadn’t meant it. But later that night as she lies in bed listening to the Olsens discuss what to do with her ungrateful self, she fiddles with the edges of the band-aids. Juliana and her family would have finished their barbecue long ago. Mary Sue’s stomach growls at the thought. The Olsens had skipped her dinner.
“— send her back.”
“Garth, no, of course not. We need her.”
“If this is a habit, though … Cheryl, neither of us have the patience for all that.”
“Let’s sleep on it. No reason to rush to a decision.”
Mary Sue grits her teeth at the conversation. Maybe Garth and Cheryl wouldn’t call up St. Agnes’s immediately, maybe they would even wait a week or two. But it always ends up the same: Mary Sue on the steps of the orphanage, her worldly possessions tucked tight into a backpack.
Glad that at least the Olsens had thought their volatile reaction would dissuade her from doing anything rash, she once more pries up the window, shimmies down the wall, and leaves the cul-de-sac. She comes to a stop outside the corner bodega; or, more accurately, the bodega’s payphone. Carefully, for she doesn’t have a whole lot of extra change, she punches in the numbers Juliana had written down. At the prompt, she inputs the number of the payphone, and waits.
It takes only seconds for the phone to ring, as though Juliana had been waiting for it. And she had, as Mary Sue is greeted not with a confused hello but, “Mary Sue?”
“I lied to you, Mrs. Reyes,” Mary Sue says.
“What did you lie about?”
Mary Sue shuts her eyes. The idea of confessing to someone, to someone she barely knows no less, makes her heart race. But what is the alternative? She will never get such an opportunity again, of that she is sure.
“What you saw earlier … I mean, my parents, they … um …”
“Tell me where you are.”
She does, and fifteen minutes later a solemn-faced Alberto ushers her into a cab. From Juliana’s endless purse she gets a travel pack of tissues to dry her tears.
The rest happens in a blur. Mary Sue doesn’t quite understand how it’s accomplished, only that before she knows it, she and the Reyeses are sitting in Sister Maggie’s office and Juliana asks, “Would you like to come with us, mija?”
Mary Sue agrees before the question is even finished, much to Sister Maggie’s bewilderment.
She sleeps the entire plane ride west, then finds herself following Robbie up the steps of a modest but well-kept home in east Los Angeles.
Which is exactly what it is, she realizes: a home. At last, she has a home.
It doesn’t happen like that, of course. Mr. Olsen yells, Mrs. Olsen’s backhand cuts a gash in Mary Sue’s cheek, and first thing the next morning, they send her straight back to the orphanage. Sister Maggie asks about the gash. Mary Sue says she fell off her bike. What use would there be in telling the truth, after all? The nuns wouldn’t care, not when they themselves regularly wield rulers that leave fat, bleeding welts on Mary Sue’s knuckles.
She dreams about it, though. Juliana with her mija and her bandages, Alberto with his kind smile, Robbie who’d called over his parents with worry for a mere stranger. Baby Gabriel, soon, wailing and wanted. The family she could have.
Could have, but won’t. Mary Sue can wail, but she will never be wanted.