Golden Girl (2 page)

It all would’ve been lots easier if I could have just used my fairy magic. One of the things I can do with that magic is make people see exactly what they wish to see. But there’s a problem: when I use my magic, the other fairies can feel it. This was really bad, because it wasn’t just my parents those fairies were after. They wanted me too. So using magic was out. We were going to have to do this the hard way.

The sun was just starting to come up over the hills, but the trolley to Culver City was already full by the time it pulled into my stop. I had to hang on to a strap the whole way out, and I wondered if the high heels had been such a good idea. At first I stood there trying to paste a look on my face that
said I did this every day. That didn’t work so well, so I just concentrated on keeping my head down. I knew nobody was looking at me. Fairies weren’t the only ones who lived in their own world. Everybody else on that rattling, squeaking trolley was reading the paper or a book, or just staring out the windows at Los Angeles rolling past. Nobody knew me from Adam’s off ox here, and they cared even less about me. But that didn’t matter. My layers of disguise from the mission store felt paper-thin over the Callie LeRoux underneath, and a whole hive’s worth of questions was buzzing around inside my head. Like, what happened to girls who were screwy enough to try to sneak into movie studios? Probably they just got thrown out, maybe with a stern warning, and the boys who helped them get in were fired. On the other hand, the studio had all kinds of walls and fences around it, plus security guards sitting in these white houses at the gates. Maybe they’d arrest me. Us. Maybe we’d end up in jail. Did they send you out on the chain gang in California?

When I get nervous, I start to lose my hold on my fairy half. See, like all fairies, Seelie or Unseelie, my inborn magic means I can grant wishes. But magic always has another side. The other side of being able to grant wishes is that if I’m not careful, I feel any wishes being made around me. And everybody on that trolley wished for something. They wished for fame, and better jobs, and love, and for that guy the next desk over to get what was coming to him, and for a better seat on the trolley home. The fairy part of me wanted
to grant those wishes. It’d be fun, and the people would be happy, and I’d get to feel all that happiness, just as clear as I could feel all those hungry wishes. I could draw the feeling inside me and use it to fill up my magic with fresh power. Then I could do anything I wanted. Anything at all.

I shoved that idea back down and tried to find something else to think about while we bounced and rattled and clanged over the rail crossing. I settled on making up a second letter to my mother. Mrs. Constantine would want to see me writing another one, and I wanted to keep Mrs. Constantine happy so she wouldn’t ask any more questions than was strictly necessary.

The next letter would start like this:
Dear Mama: Hope you are well. I promise I’ll be seeing you soon. And guess what? Today I got to see a real movie studio!

I’d tell her about Los Angeles too, if I actually wrote the letter. She’d want to hear about that. It was so different from Slow Run that it might as well have been on another planet. The dust storms that had wiped out Kansas and five or six other states never reached California. The hills blocking off the empty horizon were bright green. Coconut palms, live oaks, and date trees grew everywhere, and there were more kinds of flowers than anywhere else in the world. The buildings were all clean and new, and shiny cars and clanging trolleys filled the straight, paved streets. It was big and loud, suspicious and mean, beautiful, exciting, and confusing, and despite everything and everybody after me, I was in deep danger of falling in love with it.

But it wasn’t love I was feeling by the time I climbed off the trolley at Overland Avenue. I was halfway to being sick and all the way to being exhausted from trying to keep my brain closed to all the wishing and feeling from the other trolley passengers. It only got a little better as they spread out onto the sidewalk, because they joined a whole river of other people who had their own wishes. People came from around the world to find work here, and their skin was every shade from pink to deep black and their eyes were as many shapes and colors as you could think of. They wore all kinds of clothes: suits or overalls, pretty dresses or hotel maid uniforms, long silk coats and pants on the men from China, smocks and sandals on the men from Mexico or the Philippines. The white ladies had big floppy hats on their heads to keep their skin from turning brown, the brown ladies wore big floppy hats to keep from turning black, and the black ladies wore prim hats and white gloves so nobody would think they were anything less than respectable.

The cars and trucks that rumbled down the street belched heavy smoke into the morning air, crashing their gears and blaring horns at drivers who didn’t hit the gas quick enough when the light on the corner changed. It was going on nine o’clock. I tried to hustle down the sidewalk to get past the worst of the crowds, but the heels weren’t making that real easy, especially when I had to duck around the people who stopped to grab their breakfast off the coffee cart before they filed into the office buildings.

The offices stood on the right side of Overland. On the
left side, all you could see was a tall fence, its white paint peeling off in big patches. On the other side of that fence waited the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Just thinking about it doubled those butterflies inside me. All the stuff they wrote about in the magazines and the gossip columns or talked about on the radio programs—stars, fame, and glamour—it waited just on the other side of this long white fence. Maybe I’d get to see them making a movie. Maybe I’d see somebody famous. Maybe Cary Grant, or Ginger Rogers, or even Ivy Bright.

But first I had to get through the gate. I lifted my chin, as though I walked past this fence every day and it meant nothing. Not that there was anybody left to see me. The sidewalk had cleared out, except for some men toting tin lunch pails and a raggedy bum hunched in the shadow of the fence.

“Spare a dime for a war vet?” I heard him croak as I got closer. “Spare a dime for a war vet?”

His big brown hands dangled on his knees, and he had his hat pulled low so the battered brim hid his face. A few withered apples sat on the sidewalk beside him, not doing anything to attract a second glance from the workmen hurrying past.

“Spare a dime for a war vet?”

I meant to pass on by. You could see bums like him slouched on every corner in Los Angeles. Some of them were just men out of work and scrounging, but some were out of their heads from cheap wine or whatever else they’d
found. But then I noticed how his broken shoes were coated with gray dust. I knew about trudging across miles of dust, and about trying to get through with just what you had with you, even when that was nothing at all.

I had one nickel left in my handbag. It was supposed to be trolley fare back home, but I could get another from Jack. Now that he had a steady job, we usually had at least a few cents left after we’d paid for room and board. That made us lucky. It wasn’t safe for me to be granting wishes just now, but I could spread what little luck I did have.

I laid my nickel down on the sidewalk and picked up one of the soft, sun-warmed apples.

“Thank you, miss.” The bum tipped his hat brim up.

I stepped back before I could help myself. This man had been through something bad. It’d left behind a long white scar from his forehead to his chin, straight down over his left eye. That eye was milk white, shining wet in his wrinkled brown face, but his other eye was bright gold and amber, and that eye got a good look at me.

“You.”
The bum surged to his feet. “I found you!”

He was a tall man and bone thin. His ragged clothes hung loose around his whole body. He smelled like the dickens and grinned big and loose, showing me the gaps where his teeth had been broken off.

I stepped back again, ready to run, but I wasn’t fast enough. His crooked hand shot out and clamped down on my wrist. “None of them could, but I knew, see, I
knew.…
”

I wasn’t about to wait around to hear what he knew.
I shoved that mushy apple right in his face, and when he jerked back, so did I. I whirled on my heel and stumbled up the street.

“Hey! Hey!” the bum shouted behind me. “Don’t go in there! They’ll spot you! They’ll get you! Come back, Callie!”

The sound of my name almost made me break stride, but I clenched my fists and poured on the speed. He might’ve found me, but there was no way I was letting him catch me. Whoever he was. Since the fairies had found me that first time, I’d been threatened and tricked and followed, and I’d already come close to dying a bunch times more than is good for anybody.

The studio’s side gate opened ahead of me, and I stumbled through, plowing straight into Jack.

“Jack.” I stuck out one shaking finger behind me, and we both looked where I was pointing. But the bum was gone.

“There you are, sis!” Jack said clearly. “I was getting worried.”

Jack’s the kind of boy who gets called “a long, tall drink of water.” He was only sixteen, but he was eyeballing a finish line of at least six feet tall. His brown hair used to be all bushy, but when he got his studio job, he chopped it short and slicked it back. It seemed to me he was starting to look less like a boy and more like the man he would be, especially now that he wore long trousers instead of knee pants, and a button-down shirt instead of patched calico. That made me feel strange when I looked at him. I tried not to think about it too much, but sometimes it was real hard not to, especially when he got close to me or had hold of my arm, like now.

Except maybe he didn’t need to be squeezing quite so hard while he pulled me up to the little white guard shack.

“Hey, Solly,” Jack said to the man sitting inside, who was mostly hidden by his open newspaper. “My sister’s here.”

The guard turned down the corner of his paper with one finger. I smiled and swallowed and tried to look like I really could be related to Jack.

It was pretty plain that the guard wouldn’t pay a plug nickel for any of it. The only thing that kept me from turning tail right there was the possibility I’d meet that bum coming the other way. Jack, on the other hand, stood there cool as cool could be. This was his best game. Once he had a story set in his head, Jack Holland could convince a snake it needed a new pair of socks.

Solly shrugged and rattled his paper. “She’s gotta sign in just like everybody else.”

“Oh, of course. Here, Callie.”

I signed “Callie Holland” on the list Jack passed me. As soon as I finished the
d
, Jack grabbed me again and with a big wave pulled me past the swing-arm gate and into the back lot of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.

“You okay?” Jack asked as soon as we were out of earshot of the guard shack. “You look like you’re gonna be sick or something.”

Truth was, I felt like I was going to be sick or something. I told Jack about the bum and how he’d known my name. At the same time, I knew I had to pull myself together. This might be our only chance to get onto the back lot. I could not afford to go to pieces, no matter what my knocking knees thought.

“Was he one of
them
?” asked Jack.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “He was awfully … broken to be a fairy.” Fairies don’t like ugly things. They want everything around them to be perfect, even their monsters. That’s one of the reasons they like movies so much. Everything’s always perfect in the movies.

“Okay, okay.” Jack wiped his hands on his pants. “I’ll tell Solly there’s a bum hanging around bothering people. If he’s still there, Solly’ll run him off.”

“No, don’t. If it was one of them, he might magic the guard into letting him inside.”

Jack saw the sense in this—which just goes to show how strange things get when there’s magic hanging around. “Okay, we’ll play it your way. So.” He took a deep breath and gestured to the studio. “What do you think?”

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from a real movie studio. Maybe I’d thought it’d just be one big building with a whole bunch of stages inside, or that the world would turn all gray and silver and there’d be people in tuxedos and evening gowns with fame sparkling like fireflies around them. But we’d just stepped into a new city nestled inside the old. The air was full of shouts and engine roars and the smell of paint and hot concrete. Trucks rattled down straight streets, kicking up exhaust and dust. Men with their shirtsleeves rolled loaded crates and furniture from brick warehouses into trucks. The only hint that we were not really in Los Angeles anymore was the trucker who walked down a ramp
carrying a big old battle-axe in one hand and a clown’s head in the other.

“I think I don’t want anybody here mad at me.” I nodded toward that shiny-sided axe.

Jack chuckled. “You know what I mean, dopey. Did you feel anything when you came inside?”

When I get close to a fairy gate, I get this twisty feeling, like I’m inside a padlock while somebody’s turning the key.

But I had to shake my head at Jack. “Nothing.”

“Well, it’s an awfully big place,” he said. “And that bum tried to tell you not to go in here, didn’t he? That
they’d
see you?”

“Yeah, but that could mean anything. He could’ve been thrown out on his ear by the guards once for hopping the fence or something.”

“But he knew your name,” Jack reminded me, and I really wished he hadn’t. I mean, I knew going looking for the Seelies was looking for whole new worlds of trouble. I just hadn’t thought we’d find them so fast.

“What do we do now?” I asked before I could start looking over my shoulder for the things that weren’t there. Yet.

Jack made a face. “I gotta run some new script pages out to Copperfield Court, so I haven’t got a lot of time. My lunch break’s coming up, though. I can meet you, and we can take a real look around.”

“But what about till then? Somebody’s going to want to
know what I’m doing here.” Mr. Mayer hadn’t put up that fence and stationed guards at those gates because he was glad to let just anybody wander around his property. Movie people were different, but not that different.