Not Quite Oz

the girl and the ghost

When Ximena Santiago turned eleven, her parents took her to New York City for her birthday. She got to skip a couple days of school, and they were going to watch The Lion King on Broadway. She wished, now that she was about to turn thirteen and those military airships crashed into the Potomac and there's a ghost hiding in the back corner of her broken down warehouse, that they had gone to Disneyland instead.

He appeared, like many things in Ximena's life since New York, with no warning and little fanfare.

She had been out the day he showed up, bumping into people and emptying their pockets, stopping by corner stores with decoy security cameras and filling her bag with snacks and small cans of food. She had gotten good at it - not that she ever felt good about it, but it beat dumpster diving.

She learned that if she went out around the time schools let out, she could blend in with the kids making stops before heading home. No one ever really noticed that her clothes were a little more dirty, that her hair was a little greasier, a little more tangled.

No one ever noticed her. Not since New York. She liked it, usually.

She never stayed out too long, and when it was time to head back, she gave the straps of her - now fuller - backpack a secure tug and ducked from the busy street into a quiet alley. From there, she made her journey almost absentmindedly, jumping over murkey puddles from the April rain that fell earlier and wrinkling her nose at the rotting garbage that had yet to be picked up. Not many people took these alleys - not the "respectable" people at least. Not the groups of kids she pretended to be a part of, and not the adults that sent these kids to school.

The alleys were sketchy, which meant they were usually deserted, which meant they were Ximena's favorite way to move about the city.

Though, sometimes she'd come across a homeless person, another runaway, but never anyone as young as her. She wondered if maybe they usually stayed in another part of the city. She wondered if she had been left out on that too.

She passed a couple familiar faces - Helen and Marty, who had set up shop beneath an old fire escape. She didn't actually know if their names were Helen and Marty; she had never actually spoken to them before. But they looked like a Helen and Marty, and they had never felt wrong to Ximena. Oh, she'd sometimes feel their paranoia, their frustration, and their general exhaustion, but she never picked up on the telltale rage or malicious glee that told her to get the hell out of a place before things went very bad very quickly. So she would nod at them when she passed, and they would regard her warily.

They were the closest to friends she had. Which was sad for a twelve year old.

This time, however, when she passed them, Marty called out. Or rather, he had whistled, and Ximena was hit with a mix of nostalgia and annoyance. She didn't like getting whistled at. Her dad used to get her attention like that when she was younger, and she hadn't liked it then either. Still, it turned out that whatever pavlovian conditioning stuck around, even after two years, and she skid to a stop and turned to look at the pair.

Marty nudged Helen, and she spoke, her voice rasping and strained.

"You catch the news lately, nena?" she asked, and Ximena frowned. She hadn't, not really. Yeah, she knew about how the airships crashed last week; it was kinda hard to not to when it involved Captain America himself. Even a little girl that spent most of her time hidden away from the rest of the city was going to hear about that.

"Not really?" She gave a shrug. "No TV."

"Don't need no TV to read the newspaper."

"No money to buy newspaper," Ximena responded. It was a lie - just that day she pocketed at least fifty bucks in cash, not to mention what she had grabbed from the stores. And not that Helen had to know, but there really wasn't much to stop Ximena from just breaking into one of those newspaper box things. They were so flimsy.