Play dead

TWENTY-SIX

The first thing she noticed was that there were a lot of foreign people. Foreign people as in Asian, Middle Eastern, African. Not foreign as in folks from three counties over.

The second thing she noticed was that this was, by far, the biggest room she had ever been in. It might have even been too big to classify as a room. It was more like a cathedral. The coffered ceilings had to be fifty feet high, maybe more, offering a dozen or so enormous hanging chandeliers, ringed by the tallest windows she had ever seen. The floors were marble, the hand railings looked like they were made of brass. At one end was a huge bronze statue called the Angel of the Resurrection.

As train stations went, she thought, this was probably the Taj Mahal.

She sat on one of the long wooden benches for a while, watching the crowds come and go, listening to the announcements, to the variety of accents and languages, reading-but not really reading-one of the free newspapers. Politics, opinion, reviews, sex ads. Blah, blah, blah. Even the columns on music and movies bored the shit out of her. Which was rare.

Around two o'clock she walked the edges of the huge room a few times, passing by the shops, the ticket machines, the escalators down to the trains. She was still stunned by the scale of the place, still glancing upward every so often. She didn't want to look like a tourist-or even worse, some hick runaway-but she couldn't seem to help herself. The place was that amazing.

At one point she glanced over her shoulder. Three small Mennon- ite children, perhaps just off the train from Berks County, were looking at the ceiling, too. At least she wasn't alone, she thought. Although, with her tight jeans, Ugg boots, and heavy eye makeup, she was just about the furthest thing from Mennonite she could imagine.

In her experience, the only other place she had ever been that compared to this train station was the King of Prussia mall, the place that had every single store you could imagine, along with a few extra. Burberry, Coach, Eddie Bauer, Louis Vuitton, Hermes. She had visited the mall once when she was about ten. Her aunt had taken her there as a birthday present, but she only came away with a pair of Gap jeans (she preferred Lucky Brand these days) and a bad stomach from something crappy they had eaten at the Ho-Lee Chow or Super Wok or Shang- High or whatever they called the fast-food Chinese restaurant. It was okay, though. Her family was far from rich. Gap was cool back then. Before they left the mall she had found a small discarded shopping bag from Versace and walked around with it at school for three weeks, carrying it like a funky purse. The haters hated, but she didn't care.

According to the brochure she found on the train, the Thirtieth Street station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was 562,000 square feet. Located on Market Street, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth, it was one of the busiest intercity passenger facilities in the United States, the brochure went on to say, and it ranked behind only New York's Penn Station and Washington's Union Station in its yearly volume of passengers. In the three previous years there had been 4.4 million people boarding trains in the Thirtieth Street terminal.

Millions, she thought. You'd think there'd be one cute guy. She laughed. She didn't feel like it-there was the rough equivalent of a ball of hot barbed wire in her stomach-but she laughed anyway. The last thing she was doing here was trying to meet cute guys. She was here for something else.

She sat at one of the tables in the food court, beneath a bright yellow Au Bon Pain umbrella. She tapped her pocket. She was almost broke. When she left the house she'd had sixty-one dollars and change. It seemed like enough money to get through at least a few days on the road.

Knock knock. Reality calling.

She dreamed about food. An eight-slice pizza with onions, mushrooms, and red peppers. A double veggie-burger with onion rings. Her taste buds recalled a dish her aunt once made: potato gnocchi with pesto and roasted red potatoes. God, she was hungry. But out here there was a well-known equation: runaway = hungry.

It was a truth she had better get used to.

In addition to her rumbling stomach, there was something else she realized that she had better get ready to address. She was on the street, and she needed a street name. She glanced around the room, at the stalls near the doors that led to Thirtieth Street. She watched the people come and go. Every one of them had a name.

Everyone in the world was known by something, she thought. A name, a nickname, an epithet. An identity. What were you if you didn't have a name?

Nothing.

Even worse, a number. A Social Security number. A prison number. You couldn't sink much lower than that.

No one knew her here. That was both the good news and the bad news. The good news because she was completely anonymous. The bad news because there was no one she could rely upon, no one to call. She was on her own, a fallen pine cone in a lonely forest.

She watched the ebb and flow of humanity. It did not stop. Tall, fat, short, black, white, scary, normal. She remembered every face. She always had. When she was five years old, the doctors said she had an ei- detic memory-the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects with extreme accuracy-and ever since she had never forgotten a face, or place, or photograph.

She noticed a guy at the end of the bench, a sailor with a canvas gym bag bursting at the seams sitting next to him like a dutiful beagle. Every so often he would look over at her, then look away, a flash of hot red guilt on his face. He could not have been more than twenty-kind of cute in his buzz cut and uniform-but she was younger, still bona fide jailbait. She smiled at him anyway, just to make it worse. After that, he got up and walked over to the food court. God, what a bitch she could be.

She glanced at the doors leading to the street. There was a booth selling gifts and flowers. An older couple, perhaps in their thirties, debated over a basket intended for a funeral ceremony. It seemed that the woman wanted to spend a lot of money, seeing as how the dearly departed was her cousin or second cousin, and how they had come all the way from Rochester. The man-a fat guy, a heart attack on a stick, as her aunt used to say-wanted to forget the whole thing. It seemed he was not a big fan of the deceased.

She watched them argue for a while, her eyes roaming the florist's wares. Mylar balloons, ceramic knickknacks, crappy vases, a nice selection of flowers. And it came to her. Just like that. All things considered, as she perused the floral displays, she might have called herself Dahlia or Fern or Iris. Maybe even Daisy.

In the end it became a no-brainer. She may have been a runaway, but now she had a name.

She decided to call herself Lilly.