“They really thought we was about to do something to them”, Valina said to me as we walked off.

     “Yeah, they was trippin”, I replied.

          I heard what sounded like the roar of a grizzly bear in my stomach, which reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything since early that morning. I also had to keep in mind that I only had a few dollars left. I knew Valina didn’t have that much money either because we each started the day off with 10 dollars.

“I’m hungry, are you?” I asked Valina

“Yeah, all I had was a bowl of cereal this morning.”

“Well it’s going to have to be something cheap because we still have to catch the BART back home.”

          I counted my money and put $2.85, the amount it costs to get back to Berkeley separate from the rest of my money so that I didn’t spend it. I told Valina to do the same and we were both left with 2 dollars and some odd cents. There were no fast food restaurants nearby, so the dollar menu was out of the question.

    We came across a little Mexican place along the way. I didn’t see any other food places around, so it looked like this was our only choice. Luckily Mexican was one of my favorite foods. We couldn’t afford to get our own burritos, so we went half on one and split it. It was pretty warm outside with summer slowly creeping in and I didn’t have enough money left over to buy a drink to help cool me down or wash down my food.

          Half way through my burrito I remembered something that I wish I had thought about five minutes sooner. I had met up with Valina in Berkeley and we got on BART together from there. When I left Hayward I was going home, to Richmond, which meant that it would cost more than $2.85 and I had just spent my money on that burrito. (that wasn’t even that good) I thought about what I was going to do to get home. Oh yeah, I’m meeting Anthony in Berkeley I’ll just ask him for a couple dollars to get home. I was somewhat relaxed now that I had that figured out. Unfortunately not all of my dilemmas were going to be solved so easily.

          After the sound of the roar of a vicious grizzly in my stomach faded away, we began our journey to the mall. Beep! Beep! Another car with a 30-something year old Hispanic man in the driver seat honked at us. That had to be at least the fourth one within five blocks. Which came out to almost one honk per block. I didn’t know if this was because they thought we were prostitutes or because we were young, pretty, and our breasts didn’t hang down to our belly buttons like the women their age.

    We stopped thinking about how many cars were honking and 

noticed that it seemed like we were walking a marathon because we had been walking for about an hour and still had not come to the street that we were supposed to turn on.

          “How much further is Hesperian Boulevard”?, asked Valina .

          “I don’t know. There’s a busy street ahead, that should be it”, I responded.

          That eased some of our anticipation so we resumed our conversation and kept walking for what we thought wouldn’t be that much longer. Ten minutes later we reached the busy street that we saw before, but when we looked up, the street sign that we thought would bring us some relief, it actually brought back that uneasy feeling because it did not read “Hesperian Boulevard”. From there on, every time we saw a busy street up ahead we said “ That must be it right there”, and every time we would look up at the street sign and be disappointed. That went on for about one more hour and four more disappointments.

Once we finally reached Hesperian Boulevard a sense of relief swarmed through my body. By that point we had been walking for about two hours. I was exhausted, my feet were aching, and it felt like a ton of bricks were on my bladder. While walking down the street doing the world famous “pee pee dance” I searched for the nearest restroom. A lot of places were closed by then so that was not an easy task. There was a Jack In The Box along the way so I went there. After that we walked a couple more blocks until we reached the destination of the whole journey, Southland Mall.

          I walked into Macy’s and asked the lady behind the counter that looked like she had had a long night also where I could get an application. She told me in a dry tone that I had to fill out the application on the computer they had in the customer service department. I think that was officially the longest application I had ever seen in my life. The estimated time they said that it would take to complete it was twenty minutes, but it was really more like an hour. If it took an hour to fill out an application they were asking too many questions. I didn’t really want to finish the application, especially after all that walking, my patience was running thin. I was still trying to catch my breath from power walking the last few minutes to the mall so that I could hurry up and get back home. I knew that I would have been upset if I went home that night after all that and didn’t even complete the application so I sat there and finished it.

           Now that I was done with the application we had to come up with a solution to our dilemma, “how we were going to get home.” We had enough BART fare to get to Berkeley, but we didn’t have enough money to get on the bus and there was no way that we were going to walk that treacherous length back to the BART station. We were not left with too many options so we started thinking of things that we wouldn’t normally do.

          “We could steal a car and drive it back to Berkeley then park it somewhere. I can catch the bus from there”, I suggested.

          “Yeah and my brother showed me how to hotwire a car.”, said Valina

          “Kayla cousin said Toyota Camry’s are easy to steal”

          “My cousin told me that when you get blurped by the police you just pull over, let them start walking up to the car and when they get to about the end of your car you smash on them.”

          “You got something to use to break into the car?”, I asked.

          We both searched our purses for something useful to our plan, but came up with nothing. So we sat in silence for a minute to come up with a plan B. Then another car with a man fitting the same description as the others honked at us. That sparked an idea into my head.

          “The next car that honks at us, we’re going to get in the car with them since they think we’re prostitutes already. There’s two of us and one of them, we can handle him. We gone kick him out of his car and it will already have the keys in it” I told Valina.

          She said OK, so now all we had to do was wait for our victim to signal us with his car horn. As we were sitting there I thought about all of the things that could go wrong. What if they have a gun? The two of us put together can’t stop a bullet. I told Valina what I was thinking and we both came to our senses and eliminated that plan also. I knew that I would never do something like that anyway, so I think the only reason that I said it was just to say that I had a plan. She agreed to it, but I don’t think that she would have gone through with it either.

          Meanwhile, Anthony is calling me every ten minutes asking me when I’m going to get there, which was making me get even more frustrated. After I calmed down and started thinking clearly we decided that we would catch the bus to the BART station then transfer to another bus that would take us to downtown Oakland and then catch the 72 from there. Although it is cheap to catch the bus, it would also take forever for us to get home, but at least we would make it there.

           We caught the bus to the BART station then got on the 82 which would take us downtown. We were on the bus for about five minutes when the bus driver said “last stop”. It turns out that after a certain time, the bus doesn’t go all the way to Oakland. Just when we thought we could finally relax little bit, we were stuck again. At least the last stop was at another BART station. We each had one dollar and some change left. The minimum BART ticket price was $1.10 so we bought a ticket with that amount on it and said that we would just get off on the elevator when we got to our stop because that would take outside of the BART station and we wouldn’t have to pay.

 Valina got off at Ashby and we said our goodbyes. My boyfriend Anthony got on the BART with me in Berkeley and when we got to Del Norte station he gave me his ticket so I could walk through and he went through the bike entrance so if anyone got caught it would be him. I then called Valina to make sure she had gotten out safely because I couldn’t call her while I was in the tunnel on the BART. She told me she did and she was almost home. It was way too late for Anthony and I to go to my cousin’s for dinner, so we just went home. The first I did when I got there was change into my pajamas and get into my bed. My bed had never felt so comfortable until that night. That let me know that I was over exhausted because usually I could feel the springs digging into my back. I closed my eyes and quickly fell into a deep slumber.