Carefully, I removed her wallet from the side pocket of the bag. It was nothing fancy, brown leather with little flowers and a snap closure on top. As gently as I could, I snapped it open. There, in the front ID window, was her driver’s license. I knew for sure it wasn’t a fake, because fuck knew I’d had some experience with fake New Mexico IDs. This one was real, and her beautiful face smiled back at me. Stella Peretti, thirty-four. It gave her address, which I placed as being right near where the old guy she’d been helping lived. Using the light of the microwave, I snooped a little further. Credit cards, a library card. Totally upstanding and normal. A punch card for a frozen yogurt place on Central, the hole punches in the shape of ice cream cones. She had eight out of ten punched, and on the back she’d written, Note to self: Thumbs-down on the watermelon sorbet. Yuck.
I shoved the card back into its slot. What the fuck was I doing? No matter if she was a thief, she was also a woman with a private life, and I was prying into it without her permission. Riffling through her wallet after I’d spent a perfect night with her? That was the old me. And I was fucking sick of that dude.
So I put her wallet back in her bag, left it where I’d run into it on the kitchen floor, and headed back to bed. I got in beside her, pulling her body into mine. I nestled my face against hers and closed my eyes. Bad news or not, I wanted her. That was a fact. Tomorrow, I’d new-me the fuck out of this situation and straight-up ask her about her deal.
Except I didn’t get the goddamned chance, because the next thing I knew I was standing at the window in the blinding morning light, watching her get into a car that had an Uber sign taped inside the back window. No way, I thought. No way. I threw open my bedroom window, stuck two fingers in my mouth, and whistled to her. “Where the hell are you going, gorgeous?”
She spun around, her hair in a high ponytail, the dark-brown curls catching the light. “Hi! I’ve got stuff to do! It’s eleven in the morning!”
Eleven. Jesus. I realized I actually felt pretty hungover. But it wasn’t three beers and a glass of wine making me feel rough around the edges. I’d been all over her all night long; probably hadn’t slept more than fifteen minutes at a time. That was a Stella hangover I was feeling. Nah, fuck that. Stella withdrawal.
“C’mon. There’s an IHOP down the street. They’ll make you caramel apple pancakes.” I adjusted my balls in my boxers, and her eyes followed my hand past the windowsill. Her eyes definitely widened. Hell yeah. “I’ll make sure they give you extra whipped cream.”
She hoisted the world’s heaviest purse over her shoulder like it didn’t weigh anything at all. “Tempting!”
“I’ll show you tempting,” I said with a lift of my chin.
She shifted her lips off to the side, like she really was thinking about it. For about two seconds, I felt like I had her. I had visions of running my hand up her thigh underneath a full IHOP spread. But then she said, “Nope. I gotta jet. Thank you for a great night!”
Holy shit. What was going on here? Was she actually, really and truly, leaving? After the night we had?
I rubbed my face with my hand hard enough to know that I wasn’t, in fact, having a truly shitty dream at all. First, I chased her all around town. Now she was leaving me the morning after? Either I had seriously lost my edge, or I really had finally met my match. “At least tell me you left your number,” I called down to her.
She shielded her eyes with her hand. “I give that to the same number of people who buy me diamonds.”
I remembered what she’d said yesterday. “Nobody,” I called back at her.
She gave me an exaggerated wink and a big nod.
Goddamn it, if last night had told me anything, it was that we’d never be nobody to one another again. So it was time to up the ante. “I’ll drive you to up to Santa Fe. I’ll take you to India House on Cerrillos,” I said, to sweeten the deal. Or spice it up. Or whatever. “You think last night’s tikka was good? Just you wait.”
Her adorable smile glistened in the sunshine, but then she shook her head, making her long ponytail swing across her back. She hopped in the car, and I had to brace myself on the window frame.
A second later, she rolled down her window, looked up at me, and beamed. “Just teasing, lover! Go look in your bathroom! I always wanted to do that!” she called out as the Uber drove off.
Like a shot, I was in my bathroom. I flipped on the lights, and there it was. Her number, written in light-pink lipstick across the mirror. The digits had to be ten inches high at least, surrounded in hearts of all different sizes. I planted my hands on the sink and let my head hang down, laughing to myself. Fuck. In five seconds, I felt like I’d lost the lottery and won it all over again.
From the bedroom, I grabbed my phone and typed in her number. For a second, I thought about some clever shit I could say. But really, there was only one thing I wanted her to know. There was only one thing that needed to be said. To hell with playing it cool. To hell with being a badass. I’d told myself I was going to be honest, and that’s exactly what I was going to do.
I already know what we’re having for dinner tonight.
Ooh!
Indian again? Or maybe . . .
Chinese? I also really love Chinese.
I’ll buy you all the eggrolls you can eat.
But I’m having you.
We’ll have to see about that. ;-)
Fuck. I knew I shouldn’t want her so badly—not this fast, and not in light of what I’d seen yesterday. But I knew that was exactly why I wanted her so much. The thing I shouldn’t want was all I wanted. I’d never met a risk I didn’t want to take. And I definitely wanted to take Stella. Again and again and again.
I set my phone on the bathroom counter and turned on the shower. Stripping out of my boxers, I was just about to get in when my phone buzzed. I fully expected it to be Stella. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was a text that said:
Norton. I want my fucking money.
I didn’t recognize the number, but I knew exactly who it was from. I sure-as-shit did. Goddamn it.
11
STELLA
Having sex-shaky thighs and writing on a mirror in lipstick had never been my life . . . until now! I tried to keep my giggle to myself as I unlocked the deadbolt to my apartment, where I was met with the usual Saturday morning routine in apartment 3A. I tried to tame the perma-smile that was on my face, just so it wasn’t blatantly obviously where I’d been. I’d never been much for kissing and telling. And also, I was dying to see how long it would take Roxie to figure me out.
She was on the couch with her legs dangling off the side like Lady Godiva on a fainting sofa. She was wrapped in a skimpy terry cloth robe, her face caked in some very strange mud. Her hair was up in a pineapple, tied with a bright-pink scrunchie. Definite hints of Blondie. Definitely. She was watching house-flipping shows on mute and drinking hard lemonade from the bottle with a pink straw that looped around in the shape of a heart. When she saw me, the straw dropped from her lips and the lemonade zoomed back down the straw. “Well hello, sexface!”
It had taken her all of two seconds. Among her many talents, including making every single man with a pulse forget what he’d been about to say, she could sniff out what she called “man musk” like a bloodhound on a trail. She made a circle with her hand in my general direction and smiled, which made her mask crackle. “Ravaged is a cute look on you,” she said, then hooked her heart-straw with her tongue and took a few long slurps.
Across from her on the floor was Ruth, sitting cross-legged with a steaming cup of tea next to her. Her hair was in its seemingly unalterable straight dark bob; didn’t matter how hot it got or how windy, the bob was unchanged. Next to her on the carpet sat her ever-present green tea; Ruth being Ruth, though, she didn’t drink tea out of a regular mug. It was some type of rare Japanese tea bowl, with special “balance.” I didn’t really know the specifics; what I knew for sure was that it didn’t go in the dishwasher and it most definitely wasn’t to be used
for cereal. In her lap was a silver briefcase with a three-digit combination lock built in. It was called a Zero Halliburton. It was what she’d wanted for her birthday, and Roxie and I had pitched in to get it for her. She wore a doctor’s stethoscope dangling from one ear. As she rotated the numeric wheels, she listened to the lock with her eyes closed. And then she smiled, just a little.
The hinges sprang open, and Roxie tapped the stopwatch on her phone, reading out Ruth’s time. “Two minutes thirty-two seconds.”
“Hit me again,” Ruth said, and slid it over to Roxie, who zeroed out the numbers. She pulled a ballpoint pen from her bun, pushed the tip into the reset hole, and clenched her eyes shut as she tried to think up a new combination.
“I got worried about you,” Ruth added as she blew on her tea. “Sidenote, filing a missing person report isn’t really that complicated.”
Oh Lord, not this again. This was the problem with staying out all night only once in, literally, a blue moon. The odds of something truly dreadful happening to me were actually higher than spending the night with a man. Especially a man like Nick. “Please don’t tell me . . .”
She blew the steam away and shook her head, saying to the tea, “Close, though. Called the nonemergency number and everything.”
Ruth and Roxie were the salt and pepper on my chicken breast of life. In some ways, we really were as American as second mortgages and Dunkin’ Donuts. But in other ways . . .
Roxie stuck the ballpoint pen in her bun, scrambled the digits on the combination, and slid the briefcase across the carpet to Ruth. Then she lay back down on the sofa and recommenced her love affair with her lemonade. “I told her not to worry. I said you were probably getting some much-deserved nookie and the last thing you wanted was the cops showing up.” She shuddered with the thought, flaring her nostrils and sighing as she pressed her thighs together and curled her cotton ball–parted toes. “That fantasy isn’t for everybody . . . I guess,” Roxie said with a gasp as Ruth set to breaking into the briefcase again.
. . . we were anything but ordinary.
It was, as Saturday mornings went, pretty much status quo . . . aside from the fact that every single muscle in my body ached. I opened the pantry and took out a bag of gummy cherries from the bottom shelf, which was very clearly marked with a sign that said STELLA’S. Above my shelf was Ruth’s, which featured strange things like gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan black bean crackers, and something that called itself hemp protein but was in fact a sandy, gritty powder created by the vegan cousin of Satan himself. Once, I’d been making myself a smoothie and thought maybe I should get some extra protein in there. What resulted was an entire day of sucking hemp grit out of my teeth and sending frowny emoji texts to Ruth.
Above Ruth’s shelf was Roxie’s, jammed all the way to the tippy top with every conceivable salty snack food. Every flavor of Goldfish. White cheddar popcorn. Macadamia nuts. Pretzel sticks. Rosemary and olive oil Triscuits. Enough peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers to see an army through a war.
I kicked off my Converse, feeling the tight warmth that was still pulsing through the inside of both thighs, and headed for the couch. I shifted Roxie’s feet onto the coffee table and flopped down next to her. On the screen, a big, burly guy in a tiny tank top was trying to maneuver a couch through a slightly-too-small doorframe. “Smells like man!” Roxie said, resting her head on my shoulder. “And looks like man!”
I jammed four gummy cherries in my mouth and touched my throat. It was tender under the pressure of my fingers. A hickey. A hickey? I hadn’t had a hickey since I was sixteen with a mouth full of braces.
But Roxie was on it, as ever. “A gentle brush with a toothbrush followed by a little ice. I swear. Works every time.” She raised the remote in a modified Scout’s honor move, and then she turned up the volume on the TV. With my mouth full of gummy goodness, I walked over to the safe in the corner, disguised as a side table. I opened it up and took out my notebook, going backward and forward and backward again over our plan.
Everybody thought we were dog sitters. Everybody thought we really were good girls. Everybody thought we were best friends. All true.
But we were also known as the Shimmy Shimmy Bangs. We were the Lady Robin Hoods of the American Southwest. And we were going to do one last jewel heist. The biggest of them all. The North Star.
It would be our final job, the biggest payoff, and it would set the three of us up forever. No more risks, no more worry. Whatever we dreamed would be ours.
We knew what we were doing, and we had each other’s backs. But the plan was a tricky one. And so I pushed aside my thoughts of Nick to focus on the plan, while on TV a lady swung a sledgehammer into some drywall and bellowed, “I am woman! Hear me roarrrrrrrrr!”
We hadn’t started with jewels; we’d started with a pair of secondhand bifocals when we were twelve years old.
Ruth, Roxie, and I grew up in a suburb of Denver called Aurora, the sort of place that always felt like it was not quite anything at all. Not quite suburb, not quite city. Not quite dangerous, not quite safe. Not quite good, not quite bad. In the afternoons after school, our parents would pack us off to the ice rink. We didn’t have particularly happy homes. Roxie’s looked normal, but when we’d be there for sleepovers, we’d hear her parents fighting when they thought we were asleep. Ruth had been adopted into a family that seemed to treat her like a visitor; she called her parents Sally and Michael instead of Mom and Dad. My mom was sick a lot, and my dad did his best to take care of me. Ruth, Roxie, and I couldn’t always be sure about things at home, but we could always be sure about each other.
The ice rink was where we were happiest. There, we’d free-skate for hours in rented skates mended with duct tape, like glamorous bowling shoes, with tattered laces. The day it happened, we were in sixth grade; it was a cold afternoon, and the streets were blue with chemical ice melter. We were sitting rink-side, on one of the worn old wooden benches, catching our breath and drinking boxes of apple juice that Roxie’s mom had packed for us. On the far side of the rink, a clump of older boys skated together. Bullies, all three of them.
On our end of the rink, the new boy from our class tottered onto the ice. Gus was pudgy and kind, and he always had a little smudge of snot on his sleeve from his constantly running nose. He’d had trouble making new friends, and he wore glasses so thick that the lenses made his eyes look two sizes too big for his windburned face. Clearly, it was his first time on skates. With his arms out like a mummy, he was so focused on staying upright that he managed to get himself turned around and began to slide along with outstretched arms against the free-skate current.
And the bullies were skating right toward him. Two of them linked arms and sped up, getting ready to clothesline him.
“Uh-oh,” Ruth said softly next to me.
Roxie put her hand to her mouth and grimaced.
And I watched in utter horror with my straw pinned between my teeth as the bullies sent him flying, and he landed flat on his back with a horrible whump. The chatter of the rink went silent, leaving only the tinny and faraway sound of the radio playing over the PA system. The bullies’ laughs ricocheted around the rink, no longer boyish giggles but something sinister and vengeful. They circled him once, then again. Like wolves. The biggest of the boys gave him a kick on his side, the teeth of the skate tearing into his parka. One of the supervisors blew his whistle and began to skate over to help, but in the scuffle Gus curled up in a ball and lost his glasses. Before the supervisor could step in, one of the bullies crushed Gus’s beloved glasses with two stomps of his hockey skates, then sprinted away.
Some people say rage is a red haze. Mine is a magenta mist. It made my ears hot and my face tingly. It was overpowering; I could feel my heartbeat behind my eyes. My cheeks got sweaty, and my fingertips got cold. I felt sick and shocked. It had been so brutal, so fast, and so awful. And there I’d sat frozen, clutching my stupid juice box.
The rink supervisor helped Gus off the ice and sat him on t
he other end of our bench. A man with a dustpan and broom followed with the remnants of Gus’s glasses, which he put in a pile on the rink-side bench. The adults left Gus there, all alone. For a moment, he stared straight ahead. Stunned. Shocked. Then he hung his head and stared into his lap. And began to sob.
Roxie was closest and scooted down the bench first. She wrapped her arms around him. I remember the way his chubby body shook as he cried. Ruth and I joined them, our steps unsure on the rubbery mats that lined the concrete. As Gus cried with hoarse, barking gasps, I stared at the bits and pieces of his glasses. At useless remnants of the thing he needed to live in the world.
Even then, so young that I slept with headgear and needed a night-light, I understood that it was not only wrong but unjust. What had happened was unfair and terrible and cruel. Random and violent. I gave the bullies the stink eye as they looped around the rink, but they didn’t even see me. One of them wore his hair in a terrible rattail, and I thought about how much I’d like to snip it off with the scissors I carried in my pencil bag.
“We can call your mom,” I told Gus softly as his sobs became less jagged. “She can come get you.”
But Gus shook his head at his lap as a bubble of snot popped under his nose. “I have to take the bus,” he said, through racks and heaves. “Without my glasses, I don’t”—he sobbed—“know”—he sobbed even harder—“how.”
Ruth’s eyes met mine, and Roxie looked at us from over Gus’s tattered winter hat. I felt so helpless, and I could see that Ruth and Roxie did too. That was when the real problem came into focus for me. Calling his mom could wait. Taking vengeance on the bullies could wait. Right then, right there, only one thing mattered: Gus needed to be able to see. We had to do something to help him.
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