A Constellation of Roses

by Miranda Asebedo

Shadows move along the wall as the seconds pass. But maybe it’s hours. It’s dark outside.

  “I wish I had some pajamas. Something to change into.”

  Shane laughs. “I prefer to sleep naked, myself.”

  “Let’s go get some pajamas.” I have a sudden desire to put my gift to work, to prove to myself that I still have what it takes to survive on my own.

  “Sure,” he says, pulling himself up from the bed. “Give me a minute and I’ll get us a ride.”

  When he returns, he leads me out to an older Mustang that smells like patchouli oil when I climb inside.

  “What happened to the Camaro?” I ask him when he gets in the driver’s seat.

  Shane grins as we whip out of the parking lot of the Starlite, the world spinning beyond us. “My friend needed it back. So I borrowed this one instead.”

  And then we’re at a Target, weaving through the aisles. I can’t believe Shane managed to drive us here. He seems sober, like Charly wasn’t pouring his drinks nearly as strong as she was pouring mine. The floor tiles seem a little wavy, and Shane laughs when I tell him. I wander into the pajama section, picking up a nice pair of loose, comfy pants and a T-shirt. But then I spy a scarf down the aisle. It’s printed with blue-and-purple feathers on a silvery gray background, and it reminds me of Ember. She would like it. I pick that up, too.

  My mouth still tastes like ham and pineapple pizza, so we make a detour to get a toothbrush and toothpaste. On the way, I see a T-shirt that would look great on Shane. I pick that up, too. It’s like my hands have magnets in them. I keep picking things up, and damn, it feels so good.

  Finally, I am the old Trix again. There’s no guilt, no worry. Only the rush of getting exactly what I want. And I walk outside Target with all of it in my arms. No one stops us, because I have a gift, you see.

  In the parking lot, I slip my arm through Shane’s to steady my walk. Everything is like it used to be. There’s no one judging. No one testing me. There’s just the boy who loved me unconditionally. No matter if I was a shade of gray or deepest shadow. “Shane,” I say, my breath coming out in small puffs of white. “Don’t do that job alone.”

  Shane lets out a small sigh. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Charly wanted me to. But it was stupid. I can do it by myself.” He pauses, rubs my arm with the back of his knuckles. “I need enough to get a new start somewhere else.”

  “I’ll come with you this time,” I say, wanting this feeling to stay forever. Wanting to turn back time, to when we were us, and Mom was only a thin motel wall away, forgiveness still conceivable.

  Back to when another Good Year was still possible.

  I lick my lips, as if I could taste the promise on them. “My gift will make sure we don’t get caught. And it will be a new start for both of us.”

  Shane looks down at me. His breath ghosts between us in the cold night air. “Are you sure?” he murmurs, his voice deep and dark. “We can’t go back on our word once I call this guy.”

  “I’m sure,” I say.

  Shane helps me get into the car and shuts the door. When we start driving, I close my eyes because it feels like the car is moving too fast, golden streaks of light against my eyelids. “Are those the stars? I thought you couldn’t see them in the city,” I ask Shane, my eyes still closed.

  He reaches over and takes my hand. “They’re stars, Trix. Every constellation you could dream of.”

  Twenty-Two

  MY HEAD IS THROBBING.

  The light pouring in through the motel blinds tells me it’s long past noon. Shane steps through the motel-room door with coffee and a heavy plastic bag from the QuikMart.

  “Ugh,” I groan, sitting up. There are flashes of memories: pizza, vodka, promises, starlight. “Why did you let me drink that much?”

  “I tried to stop you after your third, but you told me to stop being a boring old man.”

  I sort of remember that. “Did we go to Target last night?”

  “Yeah, you wiped out half the store.” He gestures toward the pile of stuff in the corner of the motel room.

  “That’s what I thought.” I find myself grinning, that high of taking what I wanted with no regrets coming back to me.

  “You were amazing. No one noticed you. You breezed through there, picking up whatever you wanted and then walked out the door. The alarms at the exit didn’t even go off. Not even for that pair of sunglasses you picked up.”

  “Sunglasses?”

  Shane points to the pile again. “You were busy last night.”

  “Shit. I am good.” We both laugh.

  “Here, I brought coffee if you want it. Or Gatorade and some ibuprofen if you don’t. I even found the donuts with cinnamon and sugar that you like.”

  Actually, I’m dying for one of Mia’s muffins and some Earl Grey, and the sudden thought of the McCabes makes me uneasy. “No tea?”

  “I don’t know if they have tea at the QuikMart. I can go back and check if you want.” He’s always wanted to take care of me, and it shows.

  “Coffee’s fine. I’m going to take a shower.”

  I grab a sack of clothes on my way into the bathroom. We’re still in room 7. I know, because I recognize the small gouge mark I made by the tiny window in the bathroom. I know if I looked behind that bland beach artwork on the wall next to the bed, I’d see the picture I sketched at thirteen, one of me and Mom, to remind me that it would only ever be the two of us, scarred and broken. No mantel lined with family photos for us.

  I get in the shower, letting the warm water sluice over my face. I turn it hotter still, waiting to see if it’s going to wake me from this strange dream. I’m back in the Starlite. Shane is here. I’ve got a bag full of stolen clothing sitting on the sink. We are going to pull a job that will give us a fresh start. We’ll get out of the city. We’ll go somewhere new.

  Somewhere where my mom isn’t dead. Somewhere where the smell of lemon doesn’t make me feel homesick. I wonder what Mia is doing now. If she’s worried about where I am, or if she’s relieved that it’s all over. Auntie will mutter about my fortune. And Ember. She will hate me for breaking my promise to not run away. But eventually she will put away the homecoming dress she was making for me, and I will become a distant memory, the scent of my skin each time I tried the dress on for her fading from the fabric until it is gone completely.

  When I get out of the shower and towel myself off, I grab the clothes I picked out last night. A big hoodie. A baggy pair of jeans. Yes, I am the old Trix again.

  When I emerge from the bathroom dressed in my stolen clothing, there’s a strange man in our room.

  “Who are you?” I ask, glancing at Shane, who is closing the front blinds.

  “This is the guy I was telling you about. Don. I let him know we’re in.”

  “This is about the jewelry store,” I say, looking at Don again. He’s older, with slicked-back hair and a scruffy day-old beard. He smells like sour beer.

  “It’ll just be you against a bunch of security cameras and maybe a couple of guards if they’re on that side of the mall,” Shane says. “You proved last night that alarms don’t pick you up. Don has everything else we need.”

  “Where are we going to fence all this high-dollar crap?” I ask. I’ve stolen things before, but never anything that required this much work. It was always easy stuff, pickpocketing and shoplifting. Survival stuff.

  “Don has connections.”

  Don leers at me, playing with a chain around his neck. He makes me uneasy, not just about our safety in this room, but the whole deal. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure you get your cut,” he says.

  “Just give us what we need and get out,” I reply, my voice hard.

  Don looks to Shane, who nods. He tosses a set of keys to Shane. “Meet me in the parking garage at Eighth and Tannen when you’re done tonight.”

  He leaves, but the sense of apprehension is still with me. Don reminds me of too many dealers, too many johns who hung around Mom when she was alive.


  No, no. I can’t think of that now. I can’t think about Mom or anything that came before today.

  This will be a new start.

  Every intersection we drive through in the dark of night tells a story. I’ve stood at every crosswalk, losing myself in the crowd, my hands stealthy as I snatched a wallet or a watch. I’ve waited at every bus stop, my shoulders hunched against shadows and cold, wondering which motel I should stay in for the night. My hands tremble as I remember those days, the sheer vulnerability of them, and I slide them under my legs, the material of my new jeans scratchy against my skin.

  Shane parks this latest car he borrowed, a bland but new Chevy sedan, on a side street behind the mall, next to an assortment of high-class condos. He shuts it off, but as he reaches for his seat belt, the alarm goes off. The lights flash and the car alarm shrieks, echoing through the city streets.

  “Shit!” Shane swears, kicking beneath the steering column. He leans beneath it, reaching up with one long arm to tug at the wires under the dash. I look frantically around for the police, but it’s only annoyed passersby, their arms loaded with bags from the upscale department stores in the mall. To them, we’re only a couple of stupid rich kids who don’t know how to shut off their car alarm.

  Finally, the alarm stops. I can still feel my blood pounding in my ears, looking around to make sure that no one has suspected anything’s amiss. Shane sits back up, visibly sweating.

  “So you borrowed this car from your friend, huh?” I ask breathlessly.

  “Yeah. Nice guy.”

  “I bet.” We both laugh nervously, but I can’t help but wonder if this is a sign that we shouldn’t go through with our plan.

  “It’ll be over before you know it.” He smiles at me, but it does nothing to lift the heavy weight that settles over my shoulders.

  I follow him to the mall, remembering all the small details I’d collected about the place, the ebb and flow of shoppers, the best times to work through the crowd. The security guards are in their usual spots by Nordstrom and Saks. It’s nearly nine o’clock at night, so the crowd is beginning to thin out. People are going home, leaving to get ready to go out on the town in their newly purchased clothing. Everyone is distracted, peering through shop windows to see if they’ve overlooked any good sales, or looking down at their phones.

  I pick out at least five easy marks as we wind through the crowds. I mentally calculate how much cash they’d likely have on them. Enough to put me up in a cheap motel for at least a week.

  We pass the jewelry store, Markus. It’s a little boutique, not a chain. I remember the old man who runs it, that he likes to go to the hot-dog cart on his twenty-minute lunch break. He’s been here even longer than I’ve been using this place as a means of easy money. But he’s in the shop now, wearing a green sweater-vest and talking to a young couple who look like they’re probably shopping for engagement rings. I consider the long hours, the struggle that goes into owning your own business. How it would feel if someone walked into the McCabe Bakery & Tea Shoppe and took everything that they could grab. Or if someone had gutted the bank deposit bag from the Jasmine Dragon after a busy night. Another quiver of unease winds through me.

  Next to Markus is an empty shop. Another store, Celebrations, has put up a few mannequins in the empty front window to advertise their wares while the space is available for lease. They wear short, poufy dresses—the kind of thing you might wear to a homecoming dance. I think of Jasper, and I wonder who he will go with now that I’m gone. And then I wonder if Ember will finish my dress, sure that I’ll come home soon.

  Not home.

  I don’t have a home.

  Shane peers into the empty storefront. “This is it,” he says. Behind the mannequins, the rest of the store is black, in darkness until someone moves in.

  “This is what?” I ask.

  “Where we’ll hide out until the mall closes.” He takes my hand and leads me down a service hallway a few feet away. We follow the hallway for at least thirty feet before we take a left turn, and I know we’re behind the shops now. Shane listens quietly for anyone else who might be lurking in the dimly lit hall, but there’s nothing, only the sound of the two of us breathing as we stand behind a door marked 136. Shane pulls out a set of keys from his pocket, finds one that fits, and opens the lock.

  Inside, the storeroom is dark and dusty. Shane pulls a small flashlight from his pocket. There are boxes everywhere, some of them open, as if someone left in the middle of packing up their business.

  “Come on,” Shane says. “Let’s have a seat. We’ve got a while to wait.”

  We move a few boxes around until we’ve cleared a space on the back wall to lean against. There’s a small sliver of light coming in from the door opposite us. It must lead to the shop out front, where the dresses are displayed.

  “So what’s the plan now?” I ask Shane as we settle in next to each other.

  “In a few hours, we go back out to the service hall and in through the stockroom door of Markus.”

  “We’re just going to waltz in there?” I ask. “Won’t the jewelry be all locked up?”

  Shane pulls the keys back out of his pocket and jingles them. “All the good stuff is kept in cages in the back office. They’re welded into the floor and wall, perfectly secure against anyone who doesn’t have the keys. But we have what we need.” He shows me a small key with a 1 written on it in permanent marker. “Don swiped the spare set and made copies when he was doing maintenance there for a busted pipe.”

  “Don’s a busy guy.” I lean forward to adjust a shoelace on my sneakers.

  “No shit. But he needed someone to go in. He’s got a bum leg. Couldn’t be fast if his life depended on it. Even if he could have figured out a way to cut the alarms on the exit, the security camera and the patrol would have done him in.”

  “And you thought you could do it alone?”

  “I was hoping you might come along this time.”

  I sigh, sinking back against the wall.

  Shane reaches over to hold my hand again.

  I pull away. “You’re not my boyfriend, you know. You’re my accomplice.”

  Shane gives a low laugh in the back of his throat. “I remember when you moved into the Starlite. All quiet and mousy. I barely noticed you. Then I go away for a year in juvie and you’re some badass in a hoodie, flipping me the bird when I see you and Charly talking in the parking lot.”

  I vaguely remember the moment he’s describing. I was thirteen when Mom and I moved into the Starlite, and Shane and I never interacted. He was just Charly’s older brother who was always in trouble. But he got sent to juvie for a year not long after that. I was a lot harder when Shane came home compared to when I’d first moved in. My time at the Starlite had made me that way.

  I wonder what young Trix, before she grew tough and wary, would think of me now. Back when her scars were still fresh, and she played poker for peppermints.

  How ashamed she would be.

  Or perhaps she wouldn’t even recognize me at all.

  “By the time you got out of juvie, you’d grown a foot and shaved your head. I thought you were some stupid john hanging around. I didn’t know you were Charly’s brother,” I tell him.

  “Well, after you flipped me off, I knew I had to get to know you.”

  “I thought my TV was on too loud.”

  “It wasn’t. I just wanted an excuse to see you.”

  “That was a dumb excuse.”

  “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

  “Only because you brought Coke-and-cherry slushes the next time you showed up at my door. If they’d been blue raspberry, I wouldn’t have even bothered letting you in.”

  Shane cracks a grin. “See how easy it is with us? We just fit, Trix. You and me.”

  He’s right. Everything is easy with Shane. Easy because it’s habit. Because we both already know all the dark crevices, the unspoken wounds, of the other. But as I sit there in the dark with Shane, I start thin
king maybe some of my old wounds have begun to heal over. Stealing used to feel like I was getting even with the world for the shitty life I’d been handed. But now, after the time I’d spent with the McCabe women in the bakery, I feel uneasy about robbing this old man who probably worked his whole life to have this little shop in this fancy mall. More than that, I feel uneasy putting our fate in the hands of a man like Don, who gives me the creeps.

  I feel like this is a mistake.

  “And after this?” I ask, my voice tight.

  “Whatever you want. Wherever you want. Just name it. We can hit the road and see where it takes us,” Shane tells me, tapping his knees with the tips of his fingers.

  I like that image, but when I picture us, we’re not the two people sitting here in this dark storeroom. We’re me at fifteen. Him at seventeen. It’s Trix and Shane before everything else happened. The years in prison. The two months in Rocksaw with the McCabe women.

  “And what happens when we run out of money?” I ask him.

  “We do it again.”

  “And again? And again?”

  Shane frowns. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

  I look at my hands, wonder at this strange gift that I’ve been given. I refused to use it once before. That destroyed us, Mom and me.

  My voice strains when I finally tell him. “My mom is dead.”

  “What?” Shane is incredulous.

  “She’s dead. She overdosed in a room over at the Happy Host. Alone.”

  He lets out a long sigh. “Fuck it, Trix, I’m sorry.” Shane’s arms close around me, safe and strong.

  “I don’t want to end up like her. Dead in some motel room. Alone.” I murmur the words into Shane’s shoulder.

  “You won’t, Trix. You won’t. It’s going to be okay. I’ll take care of you. I want to take care of you.”

  I pull away and look him in the eyes, needing him to understand how devastated I am that Mom and I could never find forgiveness. That we would never have another Good Year. I hadn’t realized how much her death had shaken me. Not until I stood on the brink of letting go of everything good I’ve built in the last two months. “She never got out of that shitty life. And you know what? This job won’t get us out. It won’t matter how far we run, or where we go.”