New Story! "Hunger," Part 1

“I am not afraid. I was born to do this” –Joan of Arc

It was raining when the bus arrived at the LA depot. The monochrome sky pressed down on the city, hastening the dusk into a premature night. Rain splattered on the roof loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the engine and sluiced down the windows, making the fuzzy glow of the just-lit streetlights waver and streak. The sheath of water insulated the dim and musty-smelling cabin from the outside world, as if its few passengers had been cut off from it during their long, enclosed voyage.

            Amber liked the feeling. Let the world and its ugly truths fade away. She stared out at the hulk of the bus garage emerging out of the blur, and turned up the volume on her ipod, blocking out the driver’s announcement.

In a few moments, the bus had rolled to a stop at the curb, and the passengers were filing off. Amber turned off her ipod and followed after them. Inside, the depot was just like the one in Waco, or El Paso, or Albuquerque, or any of the other stops that ran together in her memory of the last thirty-six hours. Fluorescent light illuminated every crack and grime spot on the concrete floor, which spread out around an island of blue plastic chairs. These were mostly empty, although here and there the odd passenger, on some leg of a journey between Nowhere You Want to Be and Somewhere Else Entirely, slumped amid a pile of threadbare luggage.

Amber’s legs were stiff from the hours of sitting, and she flexed them one at a time, rising up on her tiptoes despite her sneakers. She wandered over and stood indecisively before the vending machine, eyeing the forbidden junk foods in their Mylar wrappers, before finding an isolated chair at the end of a row.

The depot was over-air-conditioned, and the plastic was cold against her bare arms, so she wrestled a sweatshirt out of her bag and pulled it over her head. It was an old one that she had bought three years ago during her first summer at school, worn soft and comfortable with many washings. Property of Houston Ballet Academy, Professional Division, it read.

Yeah, right. Amber felt a stab that almost penetrated the numbness. She should have left the sweatshirt—but it was amazing how few clothes she had left once she had stuffed her regulation leotards and tights into an abandoned locker in the school dressing room and dropped the many pairs of toeshoes into the dumpster. Without the practice clothes she had sweated into for so many hours a week, her worldly possessions just fit into one large and ungainly duffle bag.

Amber wrapped her arms around the purse on her lap, clutching the hard boniness of her elbow joints for comfort. The hunger monster was beginning to stick in his claws, but in a way she welcomed the familiar discomfort. At least she was strong enough to best something.

She needed something to distract her; the depot’s interior was too quiet. Every so often the door would swing open, letting in the hum of Los Angeles traffic, as another traveler came in to buy a ticket or one of those waiting went out to have a cigarette. Amber wished that she smoked; it would give her something to do and a way to hide the hunger pangs, but she had never quite gotten up the nerve. It was a combination of bravery and fright, a kind of masochism, but an act of ego as well, the way the dancers lived within the rules of their world. They tried to outlast each other in the long hours they stretched and exercised, divided their plates of food in half, congratulated themselves on their suffering as they sucked in the bitter smoke on their lunch breaks. Amber had played by the rules, bought into the ideals, but she had not—it turned out—given up enough of herself. Perhaps she did not have enough to give.

She had a lighter in her jeans pocket even now, but she had never used it for anything more than to seal the fraying ends on her shoe ribbons. Now it was just another relic. She pulled it out now and clicked it on, staring at the thin flame. Click—light. Click—off. Just like that.

If she sat in the near-silence much longer, she would begin to think about what had happened, begin to see Westford’s goateed face as he had watched her across his desk, hear his nasal and domineering voice. “I’m sorry to inform you, Amber, but the assessment scores for your performance this year were very weak. You haven’t really delivered on your potential…Lack of strength is an issue…I don’t think we can offer you a place here for another year…”

Fuck him. Amber shoved the lighter back in her pocket and unwound the coil of her headphones again, jamming the buds back into her ears. She scrolled through her playlists, searching for something that would hold off the roaring emptiness.

The bus finally pull up to the boarding gate at half-past nine, at which point the driver followed the arriving passengers off board and ambled away towards the restrooms, leaving the doors open. Amber was one of the first onboard, and she made her way to the far back, settling herself in a row where the light-panel over the seats was cracked and dark. She hoped that she would at least be able to nap through the small hours. The bus was scheduled to get in to the San Francisco terminal at five thirty the next morning, and she would need enough stamina at that point to get herself home on city transit. No one was expecting her.