Mind of My Mind Read Free Page B

"What's that you got in your
    hand?"
     
    I didn't say anything else. I had done my bit for nonviolence.
     
    "I said what the hell you got in your—"
     
    He lunged toward me. I side-stepped him and bashed his stupid head in. I left him
    lying where he fell, got my purse, and went out. Let Rina or Emma see to him.
     
    I didn't know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from the house. I had a
    headache, and every now and then I would hear voices—a word, a scream, somebody
    crying. Hear them inside my head. Doro said that meant I was close to my change, my
    transition. Doro said that was good. I wished I could give him some of the pain and the
    craziness of it and let him see how good it was. I felt like hell all the time, and he came
    around grinning.
     
    I walked over to Maple Avenue and there was a bus coming. A Los Angeles bus. On
    impulse, I got on. Not that there was anything for me in L.A. There wasn't anything for
    me anywhere except maybe wherever Doro was. If I was lucky, when Rina and Emma
    found that idiot lying in our living room, they would call Doro. They called him
    whenever they thought I was about to blow. The way things were now, I was always
     

 
    about to blow.
     
    I got off the bus in downtown L.A. and went to a drugstore. I didn't remember until I
    was inside that the only money I had was bus fare. So I slipped a bottle of aspirin into my
    purse and walked out with it. Doro told me a few years ago that he'd beat the hell out of
    me if I ever got picked up for stealing. I had been stealing since I was seven years old,
    and I had never been caught. I used to steal presents for Rina back when I was still trying
    to pretend it meant something that she was my mother. Anyway, now I knew what I was
    going to do in L.A. I was going "shopping."
     
    I didn't try very hard, but I got a few things. Got a nice little Sony portable radio—
    one of the tiny ones. I just walked out of a discount store with it while the salesman who
    had been showing it to me went to stop some kid from pulling down a display of plastic
    dishes. Got some perfume. I didn't like the way it smelled though, so I threw it away. I
    took four aspirins and my headache kind of dulled down a little. I got a blouse and a
    halter and some junky costume jewelry. I threw the jewelry away, too, after I got a better
    look at it. Trash. And I got a couple of paperbacks. Always some books. If I didn't have
    anything to read, I'd really go crazy.
     
    On my way back to Forsyth, somebody screamed bloody murder inside my head.
    Along with that, I felt like I was being hit in the face. Sometimes I got things mixed up. I
    couldn't tell what was really happening to me and what I was picking up accidentally
    from other people's minds. This time, I was getting onto a bus when it happened, and I
    just froze. I had enough control to hold myself there, to not scream or fall on the ground
    from the beating I felt like I was taking. But you don't stop half on and half off a bus at
    Seventh and Broadway at five in the evening. You could get killed.
     
    I wasn't exactly trampled. I just kept getting shoved out of the way. Somebody
    shoved me away from the door of the bus. Other people pushed me out of their way. I
    couldn't react. All I could do was hang on, wait it out.
     
    And then it was over. I was barely able to get on the bus before it pulled away. I had
    to stand up all the way to Forsyth. I did my best to knock a couple of people down when I
    got off.
     
    I didn't want to go home. Even if Rina and Emma had called Doro, he couldn't have
    gotten there yet. I didn't want to hear Rina's mouth. But then I started to wonder about the
    john—how bad I had hurt him, if maybe he was dead. I decided to go home to see.
     
    There was nothing else to do, anyway. Forsyth is a dead town. Rich people, old
    people, mostly white people. Even the southwest side, where we lived, wasn't a ghetto—
    or at least not a racial ghetto. It was full of poor bastards