hidden by Tomas Mournian Page A

Maybe the safe house is also a nudist colony. Hammer poses, flexing. His melon-sized biceps pop, tiny waist cocks to the side, abs rippling the gold happy trail. My eyeballs are stuck on his tiny blue running shorts. Hecould be the model on an enormous Times Square billboard. Hammer, oh ye of the spandex boxer briefs, here’s my heart. Smash it.
    Hammer rolls his head, neck muscles doing the sexy man dance. His mouth falls open and gives me a wide angle view: perfect, straight white teeth and deep throat. Done, he looks at me and … winks.
    Hidden behind Hammer’s stunning stray (straight-gay: no one
that
good-looking could be gay), there’s a girl.
    “Hi, I’m Alice,” she whispers. “I mean, Nadya.”
    Alice / Nadya has pink hair and creamy white skin. Light catches the Star of David hung on a gold chain. Little Miss Identity Crisis looks like a Popsicle.
    “J.D.?” Marci asks. I wonder if J.D. is (a) male (queer, potential boyfriend), (b) female (dyke, B.F.F. material), (c) Trans, or (d) gender indeterminate (Peanuts).
    “Hiding under the bottom bunk,” Anita says.
    “No, smoking,” Kidd says.
    Marci walks toward me. She holds up a plate. On it, a muffin.
    I shake my head. Just the
idea
of food makes me ill. A second girl steps out the kitchen doorway. She could be Alice / Nadya’s sister: She’s also pale with bleached blond hair. But unlike Alice / Nadya, there’s nothing shy about her. She walks to the bunk and holds up a coffee cup. Another temple offering. Am I the fifteenth Dalai Lama?
    “I figured you for one cream and no sugar except—that’s my name. So I gave you one blue.”
    Sugar’s Riottt Girrlll punk ’do is at odds with her free love, Rasta hippy chick vibe. Large breasts dance, bra-free, under a sheer blouse. Smiling, she looks up at me, expectant. They all do. They expect me to speak.
    “Later?”
    Peanuts jumps off the ladder and “runs”—two steps—to-ward a dresser. “I have the bottom drawer ’cuz
I
have the top bunk.” Oh,
now
I grasp Peanuts’s interest in my sleeping patterns.The sooner I get up, the sooner s / he can reclaim the top bunk.
    “The window,” Marci says, “displaying” the tarp with arm gliding, baby dyke, game show hostess savoire faire. “There’s a fire escape outside—in case you need to leave.”
    “Run hella
fast,
” Peanuts adds, “‘cuz the cops bust in. Wolf! Wolf! With Dawgs! The bitey breed.”
    “Great,” I think. “Or, the Blue-Eyed Bathroom Rapist finds us and picks the lock.” I should get up and leave. I hate dogs, especially the bitey breeds. Absentmindedly, my hand drops down and feels the bite marks. OMG, I bet it looks like I’m touching myself. I jerk my hand out.
    “The only time I go outside is the roof,” Alice / Nadya says, speaking in a barely audible, little girl voice. She steps back, a visible disappearing act.
    “That’s about half of us.” Sugar sips my coffee and makes a face. Eww. Later, I’ll tell her: I hate the Blue, too. “The other half stay here until we turn eighteen. Like me.”
    The group gaze is stuck on moi. I guess they expect me to say something. I should confess: I’m not the Great and Powerful Oz. I can’t think much less speak. T.M.I. Cops? Windows? Bitey breeds? Eighteen? Then it occurs to me. If Nadya is an Alice stuck in the alternate universe
anti
-Wonderland, then I’m a friend of Dorothy. Close my eyes, click my heels thrice and say, “I feel kind of dumb asking this but, um, people get to go home? Sometimes? Never?”
    “If—
if
—your parents don’t have cause or, more typically, the funds for another involuntary committal,” Sugar says, eighteen going on forty, the safe house’s Mini-Magistrate. “But, yes, definitely, you can go back.”
    “Or, you’ve been gone such a long time they forget about you,” Kidd says. “But why would you want to?”
    “How long is a long time?” I ask. I need a time line. Some idea of how long I should plan to bunk down in da