We went to Los Jarritos (since Chava’s burned down, they’re accepting all former Chava’s clients) and I thought we could share dinner since she only had 12 bucks. I didn’t think she’d pay for food but I also didn’t want to pay for her stuff. Sharing seemed OK. I figured I should have some editorial distance. I’m just making that up because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do anything but record her story. I mean, you’re just supposed to get the story right? I want this girl to feel the true pain of homelessness and subsidizing her would blow my juicy story. (I’m fucking kidding, ok?) When I mentioned that I couldn’t possibly eat a whole diner she said “I hardly eat. No, really.” and she ordered a milk.

I wanted to know why she felt so comfortable going out alone into the San Francisco night. I wanted to know if being a proto-social worker made her look at that lifestyle differently. I wanted to know if she was really fucked or if she was just playing.

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What happened was, I was watching my sister Ariel all week, who’s 11, because she didn’t want to go to summer camp this year. She splits time between my mom and my dad, and she had all this dirty laundry and Linda, my dad’s girlfriend comes down the stairs as she was leaving and says to me “You have to do that laundry” and it wasn’t really in an evil way or anything, just, you have to do the laundry and I was like, ok, whatever. And keep in mind that she irritates me in the first place and has been irritating me ever since she came into the picture eight months ago.

So my dad called later and he asked me what I was going to be doing that day and I said “I’ll be going to a movie, and hanging out with my little sister, but that’s later.” and he said, “What are you gonna do this morning?” and I said, “well, Linda made a big point of me doing Ariel’s laundry before she walked out the door” and he FLIPPED. He just gets so defensive whenever anything with Linda happens. See, he wants us all to just be a big happy family it’s just not going to work like that. And he says, “I do the laundry when I come home” and I said I already was doing it and that’s not the point. I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way and he just got totally defensive was like, “You know you have to respect her” and I think he’s confusing the idea of respecting her with liking her.

I was like, “You just crossed the line and totally overreacted” and we hung up and twenty minutes later he walked in the door and he said he wanted to talk to me about it and I was like, “I’m not gonna talk to you right now. I will talk to you later about it but not right now when you’re in this mood.” (we’ve been through years of therapy together to take us to this point where we can say this to each other and not, like, give each other a black eyes) and I was like, “I’m done” but then he followed me into the other room because he’s not done until he’s done and I was like, “I’m leavin” and I left. I was like, “I’m tired of being put second place to your girlfriend”, ‘Cause me and Ariel were talking about it that day during lunch. We get blamed for everything; it doesn’t matter if Linda couldn’t have possibly done it. It’s automatically either me or Ariel. And I was like, you know what, I’m cool, I’m out. Too much drama.