Blues for Zoey (15 page)

44

Hairy-Terry

In the hospital bed, M
om's face was pale and damp. Her hair clung to her forehead in sinister curls, like she was floating through weeds in a lake.

“Is she okay?” Nomi asked.

“She's just sleeping.”

“She looks hot. She's sweating.”

I brushed back Mom's hair, smoothing it away from her face.

“Do you think we'll get it, too?”

“Get what?”

“The disease.”

“It's super rare. You don't need to worry.”

“But she
's our mom. Katie told me she had an uncle who got cancer from his father, who got cancer from
his
father. She said it's hairy-terr
y.”

“
Hereditary
. Somnitis isn't like that. It's not contagious, either.
”

“How do you know?”

“I've read a lot about it. Nobody knows why it happens.”

N
omi covered her eyes. She never liked watching Mom asleep.

“You shouldn
't worry about that stuff,” I told her.

“Can I stay at Jenn's?”

“What? Tonight?”

N
omi nodded. “Until Mom gets home.”

“It could be a couple days.
I don't know if—wait, who's Jenn?”

“
J
ennifer!
I told you, she plays violin! And they have an upright.”

“A what?”

“An upright piano!”

It stung a little that my kid sister didn't want to hang out with her big bro, but only a little. I
f Nomi wanted to have a slumber party with Jennifer and an upright
piano, it'd mean I'd have the house to myself.

“Okay
, well, if Jenn's parents are
fine with you staying over, then … ”

“I already called them from home.
They said it was fine.”

“Great,” I said. “So we're all set.”

45

Simple

While Nomi packed for the sleepov
er, I skulked off to my room and called Z
oey. She didn't pick up, so
I left a message saying I hoped we could hang out soon and, in case she wasn't doing anything that night, it
looked like my mom would be away, so maybe after I finished work, around ten or so, maybe
we could … et cetera. It was one of those rambling messages you regret halfway through, at which
point it's too late to turn back, so you just keep going.

When Jennifer and her mom came to pick up Nomi, I noticed how strikingly this other mother differed from ours. She was a plump woman, with stylish, thick-rimmed glasses and brightly colored clothes.

“Oh, Jennifer's so excited!” she kept saying. “She's been talking about this all day!”

Jennifer, meanwhile, sat in the
back of the minivan, waving at my sister with all the enthusiasm of Becky Leighton.

As soon as they were gone, I went into the S
it 'n' Spin. I didn't see Mr. Rodolfo, meaning he was either out back or in the basement. Sliding by the counter, my jeans rubbed the wood
and I felt something dig into my thigh. It
was the die.

Even though I'd changed into a fresh pair of jeans, I couldn't help transferring it into the new pocket. Like with B-Man, it had become my talisman.

Mr
. Rodolfo must have heard me come in because he creaked up from the basement. “I'm taking off. You close up, okay?”

I nodded and watched him g
o. After that, I kept checking my phone, looking for a call from Zoey
, but there was nothing. I made some change for
a young couple who came in, wanting to put a d
renched canvas tent in one of the dry
ers. I let them, even though I was pretty sure Mr. Rodolfo would have said no.

Later
, I went out back and crouched in the
alley. The ground was dry. I couldn't
see anything that looked like blood. I opened Ol' Betty's mouth and peer
ed down her throat. She was wiped so clean she sparkled. I went back to the counter and stood at the top of the stairs, swaying on the threshold of the basement.

The Arbitrator hung on
the wall as always. It was black and shiny, as
if it had been recently polished. Then again, I
had never examined it closely before; maybe it always shined like that. Either way, there certainly wasn't any blood on it, at least none I could see.

I stood on
the stairs for a long time. I remembered
what Mr. Rodolfo had told me when I first started working there.
Down there's
my space, understand? Upstairs—your space. Downstairs—my space. Simple, y
eah?

Simple.

I tiptoed down the steps.

At the bottom was an open area, a medium-sized room with the walls exposed,
showing off struts and wiring. Under the stairs
was the door to Mr. Rodolfo's office,
while on the far side was the door to the poker room. I tried that one first.

To my surprise, it wasn
't locked. The walls of the room were pasted o
ver with fake wooden pressboard. In the middle of the room was a large
round table with metal legs, surrounded by chairs. The tabletop
was marred by the sticky, overlapping cir
cles left by coffee mugs and beer glasses. The only
other piece of furniture was a low white bookshelf, featuring a plastic tray of poker chips, some weathered notepads, and two DIY books about washing machines and
bathroom tiling. That was it. Mr. Rodolfo'
s poker fortress was basically just a room with some chairs and a table. If there was anything to find down here, I thought, it would be in his office.

Which (of course) was locked.

46

I
♥
NY

After my shift, I went out
into the street. A wet, gloomy warmth rose off
the pavement. It was that mysterious time on
a summer night when you can walk from inside to outside without any perceptible change in temperature. There'
s something eerie about that. Eerie, but intriguing. Maybe that was why I didn't go upstairs right away.
Instead, I wandered across the street
and stood in the place where Zoey played.

The tiny clipping from the
Chronicler
was still taped up in Dave Mizra
's window. Now that I knew he had made up that story, it looked smaller, shabbier, the tape fading to a sickly yello
w. It was becoming clear that although Dave
Mizra dressed like a hipster, listened to cool music, and had pretensions of being an artist, his store was basically a pawnshop.

I put my forehead against the glass. Inside was a trio of glassed-in counters arranged in a U-shape. It looked like a conventional jewelers. The only difference was the large, framed, black-and-white photograph on the back wall. Why had I never noticed that before?

I
t was a framed poster of a thickly bearded man with wild hair and narrow eyes. He was
wearing an
I
♥
NY
T-shirt, standing in an alley
with one arm raised above his head, fingers hooked
into the grill of a fire escape. From
the dim glow of the street lamps out fr
ont, he almost looked real, like he might step off the wall, smoke spiraling from his ciga
rette.

It was Shain Cope. That same image was in the French liner notes of
Freudian Slap
.

“Planning a robbery?”

Startled, I pulled away from the window.

It was Zoey. E
ven with the rattler slung across her back, she had someh
ow snuck up on me. I must have been really out of it. She was back to her goth-slash-punk look:
black skirt, black shirt, and black leggings, with the silver and leather jewelry that seemed to be an extension of her instrument.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“About a second.”

My forehead left a foggy oval of g
rease on the glass. I tried wiping it away, but it only smeared. “What did you just ask me?”

She laughed. “I asked if y
ou were planning a robbery. You looked pretty suspicious, staring in the wind
ow of a closed jewelry shop.”

“I was just looking.”

“That's cool. I got your message. Am I too late to hang out?”

“N
o, I think my mom's gonna be gone … all night, probably.”

“So what do you wanna
do?” she asked, glancing across the street at the
Sit 'n' Spin. “Were you just gonna
hang out around your work?”

“I was hanging around
because—well, that's where I live.
” I pointed to the windows above the laund
romat. Most of the time, our apartment embarrassed me,
but after seeing where Zoey lived, it didn't seem so bad.

“A while
back, my dad and I lived in an apa
rtment like that, above a row of shops. That was in Prague.”

“Where?”

“The Czech Republic. Over there, it's called a
konírny
. It means ‘mews,' a row of apartments that once had stables under them.” She pronounced it
ko-neer-nay
, with a curl to her tongue that sounded authentic.

“Is that where you're from? The Czech Republic?”

“We just lived there for a while, but yeah, in a
konír
ny
.”

“Because of your dad's work?”

She nodded sadly. “I've lived all over. Europe, Mexico City, Montreal, New York, California—
LA was crazy!
I hated it. You couldn't walk anywhere.” She shook her head, recalling something amusing but something she didn't care to share. “Sorry I freaked out the other night. I don't think it's cool my dad keeps a gun in the house, but I kind of understand. He just wants to protect us.”

“
I'm
the one who freaked out. I thought you wanted to give it to me.”

“What, like a present?”

“You said you ‘had something for me,' and then when I opened the drawer … ”

“Well, yeah, but not
a gun
!”

“This is gonna sound weird, but for a second I thought you wanted me to kill somebody.”

She threw her head back and laughed. It came out in a juddering machine gun of
HA-HA-HA
s. “You're crazy!”

She
was laughing so hard, it got me started,
too, but then it hit me that we were
cackling away about killing somebody.

A picture of B-Man flashed in my head. I couldn't keep the laughter going.

Zoey stopped too. “My dad pulls stupid shit sometimes.” She looked across the
street again, at the two front windows
of our apartment. “It's all dark.”

I nodded. “My sister's sleeping over at a frien
d's.”

“Then I guess it's your turn to give
me
a tour.”

47

You Always Remember Your Second
Time

So I finally got it right.

What surprised
me most were the things that stuck in my
head: The way Zoey's instrument made the softest noise in the world when she propped it against the wall in the entrance
way. How, for no good reason, my tour of the apartment ended in the
laundry room, which was where we started to kiss. Ho
w we made out going up the hall and finally into my bedroom, and how ex
citing it was to leave the door open—just a crack—because no one else was there. How, when
Zoey was naked, her body was so white she looked f
rosted in ice, and how the illusion was foiled
by a bruise on the outside of her leg,
just smaller than a fist. How natural it felt
to finally know what I was doing. How it wasn't until afterward, when she rolled onto her stomach, that I noticed her tattoo: a rectangular criss-cr
oss of black lines, spreading across the small of her back.

It was a single bar of music.

“What is it?” I asked her, running my fingers over the notes.

“You don't recognize it?”

I tried to hear the song in my head, but
I had never been very good at reading music.

“I played it for you. O
n piano.”

“ ‘Claire de lune'?”

She nodded.

“Is it your favorite song?”

“Maybe. It
's so,
so
beautiful.”

“Then how come you nev
er play it? On your instrument, I mean.”

“I do, but only sometimes.”

S
he rolled over and put her head on my chest. Her dreads were smoother than they
looked, but they still tickled. I picked up a strand as
thick as my thumb, twirling it against the skin of her arm.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“
Duh
. On what the question is.”

“You ever think about love at first sight?”

She laughed. “You mean like seeing me walk past a laundromat and thinking, ‘check it out, it's the new messiah'? Because t
rust me, you've
definitely
got the wrong person.”

“Okay, but that wasn't really the first time I saw you.”

“I thought it was.”

“It was and it wasn'
t. When you walked past, I noticed you, but I
didn't
see
you. What I saw most was
the instrument. And your clothes, your hair, but
not you. Not your face. That wasn't until
we were out back at Toph's, under the gazebo.”

“So
you're saying you believe in it?”
She sounded surprised.

“I don't know. I'm just asking.”

“I'm sure it happens sometimes
,” she said in that older voice of hers, the one that seemed to come and go at random.

“Is this what you want to do? Like, forever?”

“It's nice, isn't it?”

“
N
ot
this
-this,” I said. Then I reconsidered.
“I mean, sure, screwing forever would be—well, yeah, nice—but I'm fairly su
re there would be unforeseen ramifications.”

“Chafing, for instance.”

I laughed. “I meant the question in a more general sense. I mean moving from
school to school, playing music on the street. Do
n't you ever want to play somewhere else? Like somewhere, I dunno …
better
?” I regretted how much it sounded
like an insult.

Zoey didn't seem to mind. “As long as I get to play, I don't care about anything else. I don'
t care what the music is, I don't even care about the
instrument
. I'll make one myself if I have to, like I did with the rattler.
That's the deal, get it?”

“What deal?”

“The one I have with my dad.” Her voice turned harder than I'
d ever heard it. “He drags me around, but no matter where we go, I always get to play my music. It's the only thing that keeps me going.”

W
e were silent again. It didn't feel
right to keep toying with Zoey's hair. I let the one thick dr
ead drop on the pillow.

“Okay, maybe you're right. If I had my choice, I'
d go to Europe. To London or Paris or Rome. They
have some crazy music schools over there. Classic,
ancient
places. I'd go there and study.
”

“You should,” I said, but I realiz
ed I didn't mean it. I didn't want
her to go anywhere. I stared at my
jeans, lying in a puddle of denim on the floor.
“Maybe for now, your dad could get
you into classes at Falconer. They must have a decent program.”

“Into
where
? Oh,
yeah, Falconer.” She picked up the same dread I had plopped on the pillow, examining the tip. “That place is a hole.”

S
uddenly, Zoey seemed bored. I wanted to say something to impress her.

“I think my boss killed somebody.”

“
What?
” She
lifted her head off my chest and sat up,
folding herself in my blankets. “Say that again.”

I told her everything. About A-Man and B-Man, about finding the die,
the Brothers, the pinky-gray water they poured into
Ol' Betty, how Mr. Rodolfo had unexpectedly taken over my shift.

“I knew
it,” she said when I was finished. “I
told
you he was a mobster.”

“What do you think I
should do? You think I should tell someone?”

“You just tol
d me.”

“I mean the police.”

She narrowed her eyes. “They'll want some proof.”

I got out of bed, dipped one hand in the pocket of my jeans, and took out the die.

“
That's
your proof?”

“I think that's blood on it.”

“Where? It's just a die with goofy-looking spots.”

“But what about—” I forced myself to concentrate on the little chunk of plastic, but
what I saw didn't make me queasy. It did
n't make the room cloud over in gray. It didn't make me faint.

“Shit.
It must have rubbed off in my pocket.
” I held the die up for a closer look, but there was nothing there.

“Did you actually see this happen?”

“No.”

Zoey winced at me, the way you screw up your face in sympathy when you see someone get kicked in the balls. “I can tell you, the police are gonna want more than just that.” She meant the die, which looked puny and pathetic in my hand. “If you do wanna call them, I'd suggest putting on some clothes first.”

I realized I was standing in the middle of the room in nothing but a floppy condom. My whole body blushed.

Zoey giggled. “I was just gonna say—not the best look for you.”

I jammed B-Man's die back into the pocket of my disembodied jeans and dove into
bed. Once I had wormed into my underwear,
we tangled our bodies together again. Dearborn once told us that we'd be able to tell
we had got it right when, afterward, we just wanted to lie there with the other person, just staring at each other. Turns out he was right.

“So if you ar
en't sure,” Zoey said after a while, “what are you gonna do?”

“No matter
what happens—if I'm wrong or if I'm
right—I'd still lose my job. And I need it.
I'm so close to having enough.”

Zoey'
s brow knotted together in the middle. “Saving
for school's that important? As long as you
get your ten grand saved for college, who cares about anything else?”

“
Twelve
. I need to save twelve thousand. I'm almost there.”

She sighed heavily and her
body shrunk away. “Money,” she said, and that was all.

“I know, it can really screw stuff up. It's the same with Dave Mizra.”

“H
uh?” She rolled back to me, this deeply curious look on her face. The shift to Dave M
izra was a leap she couldn't quite grasp. “What do
you mean?”

“I mean money screwed up everything for him too. Poor guy. I really feel sorry for him
.”

“Why? What happened to him?”

“He's broke,” I told her. “He might have to sell his sho
p.”

Zoey sat up. “Really? Where'd you hear that?”

“He
told me himself. Besides, this is Evandale. E
ven the rich people are broke. It's
kind of a prerequisite for living here.
”

“But I thought—I mean, doesn't he brag to
people about how much cash he makes, like with his
custom jewelry or whatever? I thought Veronica Heller shopped the
re.”

“He made that up. It was
a lie he told the
Chronicler
because he thought it
would drum up business. Only it didn't. Kind
of a dumb thing to do, if you ask me. I'm sure he could get in trouble for lying like that.”

“Shit.” Zoey thumped backward on the bed, her d
reads drumming the pillow.

“What's the problem?”

“I guess I feel sorry for the guy too.
”

“You do?”

“Also, I think I should go.”

“You don't hav
e to. My sister's gone until at
least tomorrow afternoon, and my mom—I don't think
she'll be home till then either.”

“I can't.”

“Wait, what's the rush?”

“I just remembered. My dad'll be home tonight. He'll kill me if I'm not there.”

“It's not that late.”

“Sorry.” She rolled her head back and forth, searching the bed. “Where's my bra?”

“On the floor.”

“Don't be mad. I just really have to go, that's all.”

“We can do this again, though, right? Like, next time we get a chance?”

She sat up, tucking one pink dreadlock behind her ear, her eyes sparkling. “Next time we get a chance.”