Vertical Lines (The Vert Series Book 1) (2 page)

“Excuse me,” I hear, and the voice gives me pause for a moment. I know it’s the Stepford Wife because she’s the only one in here, but the sound doesn’t seem like it should belong to her. The glance I had earlier showed me everything I’ve already seen a thousand times: uptight, rigid, and lifeless. The voice behind me is anything but that; bold, cultured, a little throaty.
Sexy.

I have a strange urge to glance over my shoulder. I don’t, because I’m positive that however different her voice, this girl is the same as all others: empty, superficial, a walking clone of all women in her life who have taught her to be the perfect thing until some man comes and takes her to be
his
perfect thing.

This is why I have no art: my subjects have no soul.

“Yes?” the cashier says. I scowl at his sudden change in demeanor. He’s watched me with me with the eagle eye since the moment I walked in, waiting for me to rob him. Now there’s a pretty girl behind me and he’s Mr. Personality. Typical.

“Do you have cake? That sounds stupid; I’m not looking for birthday cake, just something with frosting and sugar and chocolate. Sweet Lord, yes, something with chocolate that’s not good for me. Do you have that?”

I roll my eyes because now Stepford doesn’t just sound like a princess, she sounds like a ditz, and I couldn’t be less interested to stand around listening to her ask about calorie count and some other shit her sorority sisters probably put her up to for some stupid ass initiation ritual. Fall semester at the universities started up again last month and there’s always idiotic things like this happening from the end of August well into October.

Slapping my five and change on the counter, I grab the pack and walk out the door, ignoring the slight intake of the cardboard cutout behind me when I brush by her.

My laugh is gruff. For a second, I toy with the idea of stopping in front of her and giving her the once over, making her uncomfortable just because I can. I don’t, not because I care that it might actually scare her, but because now that they’re in my hand, the call of nicotine is stronger than the call to mess with some girl who means nothing to me.

On my way out, I hear the clerk tell her she needs a Hostess, and I almost shit myself when she asks “To be seated?”

Yeah, brains do not run strong in her.

I don’t get into my truck to smoke; I’m already pulling it into my lungs, I don’t need to let it seep into my pores, too. Instead, I lean back against the side of the store and rip the plastic casing off before I turn the pack upside down, tapping on its bottom and shaking one out.

I flick my lighter and take a drag, hating how good the smoke feels in my lungs. Three months. Just over ninety days, yet here I am, desperate enough to endure the hell of quitting again—because I will quit again, I know it—just to break the fucking ice that’s frozen my brain and my ability to work.

The auto doors
bing
open. I watch from the shadows as Stepford walks through them, her hand holding tightly to a white snack package. I wait for her to continue on, to get behind the wheel of the trendy Mercedes coupe in the parking lot I assume belongs to her and not the bum across the parking lot, but then she surprises me by stopping right outside of the door and opening her treat.

Inhaling smoke, one knee bent with my foot flat against the side of the store, I gaze at her and wonder what in the hell she’s doing way down here instead back on the hill; there’s no doubt in my mind she goes to USD. No state school for this princess.

She’s as out of place in the harshly lit parking lot of a convenience store as I would be at a black-tie dinner. Her dress is a staid tan color, something that looks awful with her pale complexion, washing her out instead of contrasting or warming her. Her hair isn’t red, but it isn’t blonde or brown, either, stuck somewhere in between the three. It’s pin straight and left to fall down her back just beyond her shoulders in a blunt cut that does nothing for her face.

She’s tiny, as average in height as she is in looks, with almost non-existent hips and a thin build. From the quick look I got of her when she was walking into the store, I’m sure there is nothing remotely good happening under the bust of her dress either.

I’ve nearly finished my cigarette by the time she finishes opening the hostess bag and takes out her chocolate. She stares at it for a second, looking at it from the top and sides before bringing it to her lips and taking a small bite. She only makes it three more seconds before she gags, chokes, and looks around until she spots the garbage can that’s a few feet from me, illuminated next to the front doors.

When she spits the cake back in its wrapper before throwing it away, I’m about to laugh. And then she speaks, and I’m damned.

“So much for rebelling. Points for you, Mother, I can’t even keep down my contraband calories.” She wipes her mouth. “I’ll be damned if this stops me, though.”

The image is a flash, so brief that it shocks my system to life and then stills my entire being. I forget about the end of the cigarette in my hand, about the smoke I just exhaled out of my lungs. I don’t really even see her anymore as she dusts off her hands.

Yellow slashes, block stencil, faded in gray, spelling out… EMPTY. Obscured face and pearls around a perfect neck. Warhol-like candy wrappers splashed everywhere else. Highlight painted hair over a charcoal sketched face and shoulders.

The vision recedes as quickly as it came, but just the idea of working again, of doing something other than helping Hunter flip houses—
actually creating something
—has my hands tingling and my blood buzzing.

In my rapture of the image, I must have taken steps toward her, closing the distance until the only thing that’s between us is the garbage can. When I focus on her face again, it’s wary and a little afraid. I don’t blame her.

She may be average height and small of stature, but I am not. I’m a solid four and a half inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and big hands. I carry some muscle with me, a gift of genetics maintained through daily manual labor and outdoor activities. According to my mother, my father was also a big man. He’s gone and has been since I was five, so I’ll have to take her word for it.

My chin-length hair is pulled back in a bun, and my shirt and jeans, although clean, are well and truly stained with paint from an easel and the outside of a house. They’re frayed and old and comfortable. I haven’t shaved in a day or two, and my scruff combined with everything else might make anyone wary of me, especially some princess from the other side of town.

The cigarette starts to burn down to its end, singing me slightly. I drop it and step on it, reaching down to pick up the end and throw it in the sand on top of the garbage can between the two of us. Littering fines are a bitch, and I have no doubt the cashier from inside is watching this exchange.

“Excuse me?” she says. Her voice is prim, despite the fear I see in her eyes.

“No need,” I tell her, and snap a photo with the phone that’s in my hand.

Chapter 3

Jordan

My roommate is not in our room when I get back to the dorm. I can’t decide if I’m happy or disappointed to be alone, but I take advantage, muttering to myself the entire time I shed the simple ugly dress and sweater I only wear when I go somewhere with my parents.

Kicking off the low kitten heels, wincing when my feet cramp, I grab a pair of silk boxers and a plain white tank top, yanking them on. Adrenaline is coursing through me, causing my hands to shake like they do when I’ve had a cup of coffee.

The man at the gas station—the stranger who took my picture—I was terrified when he walked toward me. That fear put the fear of my parents into perspective. I was beginning to regret my bold move; however powerful dumping food in my brother’s lap and walking out felt, there have to be consequences. Those consequences were reeling through my mind when I bit into that horrible, plastic concoction disguised as cake and gagged it back up.

When I saw him in my peripheral, the look on his face intense, all I could focus on were the tattoos on his left arm, and his size. Naïve as it might make me, tattoos make me think of prison, and that along with his height and foreboding look brought images of just what he could do to me, things I knew I would be helpless to stop. But then—he took my picture. Snap.

Dumbfounded, I stuttered out an incredulous “Excuse me?” as if to check that I wasn’t hallucinating. He wasn’t mugging me, he was… photographing me?

Before I could come to terms with that, he spoke, and I knew he was aware of his effect on me, the fear I was feeling. And he didn’t care.

Like the sight of Mason eating all of the bread, this spurred me into action. The deed was done. Worrying over my parents’ reaction to my outburst wasn’t going to change anything.

As if to challenge me, my phone buzzes. I dig it out of my purse and see my mother’s name on the display. I hit
IGNORE
. There will be consequences for this, too, but at the moment, I don’t care. It feels great. No walking on eggshells—no answering my mother’s call to pander, to hear how disappointed she is, to apologize and tell her I’m sorry when
I’m not
.

I’m not sorry I did it; like my gas station stranger, I’m not apologizing for something I did on purpose. Walking to my desk, I flip open the lid to my Macbook and start typing.

When Nala keys in our door thirty minutes later, my fingers are still flying over the keyboard. I stop to glance at her over my shoulder.

“Hey,” she says, closing the door behind her.

“Hey.”

“How was dinner?”

Now I swivel all the way around in my chair, watching her walk to her closet and kick off her Birkenstocks. She’s wearing what I have learned in the past few days is her standard uniform of short shorts, loose tank top, and some sort of slip on sandal. Her blonde curls are tamed into a fishtail braid and left to hang over her left shoulder.

She’s the essential California surfer girl—tan skin, blonde hair, sky blue eyes, repurposed clothes and hemp bracelets on her wrist. When I walked into our dorm room and met her the other day, I was wearing pearls, light green ankle slacks, and a sheer blouse carrying polka dots in the same green. My mother was right behind me, wearing essentially the same thing.

When she left, I buried that outfit at the back of my closet.

“Jordan?”

I focus on Nala again. She’s now standing in front of her dresser, looking at me in the reflection from her mirror. “Sorry. Dinner was… interesting.”

One of her eyebrow s wings up and I hear my mother tell me that expression will give me wrinkles. “Because the food was unique?”

“Because I had a sort-of meltdown and dumped my brother’s plate in his lap before walking out.”

Her eyes widen. She turns toward me, no longer satisfied with looking through the mirror. I know the feeling.

“Is this kind of behavior normal for you?”

I smile. We’ve known each other three days—living together makes it impossible to miss certain details about a person. For instance, I know Nala is a genuine beach bum. Every morning, like clockwork, she’s been up before the sun, some sort of teeny-mismatched-bikini on when she heads out the door. Along with this, she’s a slob. Like, no clothes hung on hangers—shoes, pants, and shirts all kicked to the floor of her standup armoire. Her bed is never made, her dresser, which doubles as a vanity, is littered with bracelets, hair bands, lotion bottles, and other paraphernalia.

She’s oddly respectful, though—barely making a sound when she gets dressed in the morning, never allowing her closet debris to trail out onto the main floor where we both walk.

With everything I’ve noticed, she’s sure to have noticed that my parents have shown up at our dorm each morning, pressed, prim, proper. They didn’t drop me off and leave—they stayed for orientation, for a round of family golf, a campus tour to find my classes (unnecessary, since Mason’s been here for a year already and I can read a freaking map), and a goodbye dinner tonight.

Classes start in two days; I’ve already got sticky notes identifying chapter outlines, vocabulary, etc. in my textbooks, which are stacked neatly on the edge of my desk.

Was throwing dinner in my brother’s lap normal? We both know the answer to that. I say it anyway.

“No, it is not.”

This gets a smile. Not the polite smiles she has offered me thus far, those I consider stranger-smiles, the ones reserved for polite and brief encounters. No, this smile feels kindred, reaching her eyes. She follows it by walking over and sitting on my bed, curling her legs under her. Despite the dirty bottom of her feet on my white Kate Spade Deco Dot comforter, I smile.

“Spill, Merida. What made you do it?”

“Merida?”

“Disney princess. Red hair, stifling mother.”

My eyes widen; Nala laughs.

“Well, she’s sure to be an
angry
stifling mother after this. He was eating
everything
,” I say. I laugh when she wrinkles her brow. “I know, it sounds ridiculous, but you should have seen him shoveling it in. There I am, a miserly piece of salmon, a few green sprigs, and water in front of me, and he’s got half the menu in front of him. It was too much.”

I go through the whole story with her, embellishing details when she makes me stop and go back. By the time I get to the stranger at the gas station, she has tears running down her cheeks.

“He took your picture?”

I cover my mouth to control the laughter, nodding my head. “Yes. It was horrifying. He was so big,” I say. “Dark hair, dark eyes, scruffy face and clothes. Smoke was literally coming from his nostrils when he walked toward me. I thought he was going to abduct me and use me as a coat.”

“So then you came home and what, decided to write in your diary?” She motions to the screen behind me.

I glance at it and then back to her. “No, I came home and decided if I was bold enough to make the move, I needed to be strong enough to follow through on it. It’s a list,” I say, a bit sheepishly. “I’m a linear person—having everything laid out makes it easier to take in.”