Chapter 5 - The Maple Street Sanctuary
By 1:30 AM, the rain had turned into a steady, miserable downpour that coated the windshield of my Honda Civic in a shimmering sheet of grey water.
Grace was sitting in the passenger seat, wrapped in three layers of blankets we’d scavenged from my trunk boxes, sniffling and blowing her nose into a crumpled receipt from CVS.
“I can’t believe them,” she muttered for the fourteenth time. “I literally cannot believe them. Your mom was offering me a slice of cake four hours ago while her husband was finalizing your eviction notice. That’s not normal, Maya. That’s straight-up sociopathic behavior.”
“It’s not sociopathic,” I said quietly, keeping my hands glued to the steering wheel even though the engine was off. “It’s just... accounting. To them, I wasn’t a person anymore once I turned eighteen. I was an expense line that needed to be zeroed out.”
“Well, you can’t stay in my house,” Grace said, turning to look at me with genuine distress in her eyes. “You know my parents. My dad has a stroke every time I leave a light on in the hallway. If I show up at one in the morning with my best friend and two trunks of clothes because her parents threw her out on her birthday, my dad will call the cops just to establish a paper trail.”
“I know. I’m not going to your house.”
“Then where are we going? We can’t sit in a Kroger parking lot all night.”
I reached into the glove compartment, pulled out my spare brass key, and held it up in the dim amber glow of the dashboard lights.
“Maple Street Books,” I said.
Grace stared at me. “Are you out of your mind? Mr. Henderson will fire you on the spot if he finds out we’re sleeping in the historical fiction section.”
“Mr. Henderson loves me. And more importantly, he has a lumpy velvet sofa in the breakroom that smells like old pipe tobacco and peppermint tea, and a key that fits the back deadbolt.” I put the key into the ignition and turned the engine over. The heater hissed to life, blowing lukewarm air across our knees. “Besides, nobody ever looks for an eighteen-year-old homeless person inside an independent bookstore at two in the morning.”
Ten minutes later, we pulled into the gravel alley behind Maple Street Books. The neon sign hanging in the front window—MAPLE STREET BOOKS: OPEN LATE FOR TRUE BOOK LOVERS—was dark, but the greenpainted back door offered a discreet, rain-sheltered entrance.
Getting inside took two minutes. The lumpy velvet sofa lived up to every expectation: it was stained, sagging in the middle, and smelled faintly of Mr. Henderson’s favorite wintergreen lozenges.
Grace curled up on one end with her boots off, while I sat on the other end, staring out the high, narrow basement-level window at the wet alley pavement. My blue suitcase sat right beside the battered microwave in the corner, its bent zipper glinting under the harsh fluorescent tube of the breakroom ceiling.
“Maya?” Grace whispered from the dark.
“Yeah?”
“What are you going to do tomorrow?”
May you like
I looked down at my hands—hands that had spent the last two months scrubbing bookstore shelves, ringing up paperback thrillers, and saving every single dollar in a high-yield savings account that my parents didn’t know existed because I’d opened it under my grandmother’s maiden name.
“I’m going to go to work,” I said softly. “And then I’m going to find a real apartment. A small one. With a door that locks from the inside.”
