by Sara Reinke
Her eyes had grown glossy with tears, but she sniffled loudly, struggling proudly not to cry.
“I’m sorry, Mei,” he said, his brows lifted, but when he reached out to touch her face, she swatted his hand away. “I didn’t know. I thought—”
“I know what you thought, that I was just some runaway whore, sponging off whoever I could for whatever I could.” She bit her lip now because it was trembling. Her voice warbled and she started to turn away from him.
“I didn’t think that.” He caught her by the elbow and she shrugged herself forcefully loose.
“Maybe I’m not a saint, but I’ve done what I had to do to survive.” Her voice faltered and she looked away. “People just keep on trying to hurt me, you know?” she whispered. “First my folks, then that guy in Reno, then J-Dog and Pops. It’s always something, always someone. No one’s been nice to me in…God, I don’t even know how long.” She glanced up at him. “No one but you.”
He blinked at her, moved. “Mei…” he began softly.
Blushing brightly now, she laughed again, trying to pretend she wasn’t a half breath away from bursting into tears. “But hey, enough bullshit. It’s not like you want to hear my stupid life’s story.”
“I don’t mind,” he said gently.
“Let’s hop on the red line and go down to the waterfront,” she said, still feigning brightness, determined to ignore him. “Remember my friends from the other night? They like to hang out around Holiday Island and panhandle.”
He raised his brow, dubious, but granted her the escape. After all, she’d done the same for him when the conversation had turned to Sam. “Sure,” he remarked. “Why not? Sounds like fun.”
Mei laughed, less forced this time, and by far more genuine. “Come on. You’ll love them. It’ll be a blast.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
By the time they reached the waterfront, early-morning fog and clouds had burned off, leaving behind a cloudless sky overhead and bright warm sunshine. Mei had shrugged off her coat and long-sleeved T-shirt, leaving only a black Lycra tank top beneath that fell only to her midriff and revealed a tattoo on her left arm.
“It’s a rose bush,” Mei explained, cocking her elbow out slightly so he could see the intricate design twining down her bicep from the curve of her shoulder. “There’s a rose for all the people who are important to me. See? Here’s one for my zu mu. This one”—she pointed—“is for my best friend, Angie, back in Kentucky. This one is for Justin, my first boyfriend… This is for Tyler, the first guy I ever slept with.”
As they walked along, she directed his gaze toward an entire litany of people in her life, friends and lovers who had come and gone. Finally, she reached the last two near the crest of her shoulder. “This one is for Ja’Niece, who brought me out here from Reno. And this”—she tapped her fingertip against a black rose—“this one’s J-Dog’s. Come on.” She caught him suddenly by the hand, squeezing fiercely. “There’s the ink place now. I want to get one for you.”
“Me?” He blinked in surprise, stumbling along as she dragged him across the street, cutting recklessly in front of cars passing by and earning a sharp blast or two on car horns.
The tattoo shop was small, the walls lined with poster-sized canvases depicting all the different tattoo styles and designs available. Framed photographs of various original works of tattooed art adorned the walls, and the air buzzed with the sounds of the needles as artists worked. This was apparently where Mei had all her work done since arriving in the city, because she and one of the tattooists exchanged greetings by name.
“You should get one too,” Mei told Jason.
“I don’t…” Jason began.
“I’ll pay for it,” she added, and he raised his brow.
“Where did you get the money?” Jason asked in surprise.
Mei shrugged. “I went to go see some friends this morning before you woke up, called in some favors. It didn’t seem right, you paying for everything. I thought I’d do my fair share.”
He watched as Mei sat in one of the parlor chairs, and the tattooist dabbed the curve of her shoulder with an alcohol pad. She’d already picked out a pattern from their predesigned catalog and the artist used a stencil to adhere a rudimentary outline of the small flower to her skin.
“Does it hurt?” Jason asked, watching with admitted fascination as the buzzing needle began to ink in the design.
Mei looked up at him, her forearms crossed beneath her chin, as relaxed as if she enjoyed a massage. “Nah. This isn’t shit.”
When the tattoo artist had finished, a new rose, its petals painted a bright cerulean blue, had bloomed on her existing design. Now it lay tucked beneath a gauze pad, taped gently in place.
“Your turn.” Mei made a show of dusting off the seat, patting the cushioned upholstery in invitation. “Come on.”
“Mei,” Jason began reluctantly.
“Jason,” she replied, mimicking his tone. “Don’t be a pussy.”
He laughed; then, as he looked beyond her shoulder toward a display of tattoo designs mounted on the wall, his smile faltered.
“What?” Mei asked, turning to follow his gaze. “What is it?”
He brushed past her, reaching out and touching a familiar design drawn on the poster, a trefoil Celtic knot pattern. “This one,” he murmured, almost transfixed. He glanced over his shoulder at the tattoo artist. “What is it?”
“A triquetra,” the tattooist replied.
“What does it mean?” Mei had come to stand beside Jason now and studied the image with a thoughtful frown.
“Depends on who you ask,” the tattooist replied with a laugh. “It’s an old Nordic rune and a Celtic pagan design. Pagans still use it—witches too—right along with Christians and Led Zeppelin.”
“I want it,” Jason said. “Can you give me that one, a triquetra?”
“Sure thing, man,” the artist said, and with a smile, he patted the vinyl padded chair. “Have a seat. We’ll get ’er done.”
After about twenty minutes of needle pricks and pain, Jason stood in front of a mirror, craning his head to see his back reflected in the glass. The tattoo looked nice, he had to admit, etched just past the delta of his shoulder and neck. It felt odd to him, though, a peculiar tingling sensation, as if the tattooist’s needle still prodded at him lightly, insistently.
Strange, he thought, brushing his fingertips against it, frowning slightly.
“You like it?” Mei asked, hands on hips, watching with him.
“Yeah,” he said as the tattooist taped a square pad of gauze over the design, almost directly opposite the bandage on his chest. He glanced at her hopefully. “What do you think?”
“Hot,” she replied. “You picked a good one.”
Although he stood across the room while she paid, Jason watched Mei shove her hand down in the pocket of her jeans and pull out a handful of rumpled bills. When she let them tumble through her fingers to the bed, he saw a wadded-up twenty-dollar bill, a pair of tens, several fives and at least a half dozen ones.
Where did you get all this money, Mei?
“How’s J-Dog doing?” the tattooist asked her, loud enough for Jason to hear. Jason stood near a mirror, and through it he caught the big guy shooting him a quick, pointed glance. “Haven’t seen him ’round here lately.”
Mei didn’t say anything, just made an I- dunno sort of noise and shrugged, cramming her change back into her pants.
They ran into her friends along the boardwalk outside the Holiday Wax Museum. Here, a life-size replica of Marilyn Monroe rubbed shoulders with pop tart Britney Spears in the front windows. Posters promised that inside, visitors would find wax versions of Johnny Depp, Frank Sinatra, Nicole Kidman, Paul Newman and more.
The kids, nearly a dozen in all, had camped out around the marquee-lit windows of the museum, lounging on the ground and leaning together, smoking cigarettes and passing bags of potato chips back and forth. Several of them held hand-lettered signs on cardboard or co
nstruction paper. Hungry and homeless, please help, read one, while another pleaded, Out of work, out of gas, out of luck. Several large paper cups had been left out for donations and a smattering of loose change had been tossed into each.
“Mei!” Though they swarmed around Mei, for the most part, the teens ignored Jason altogether upon their arrival, and when they did look in his direction, it was with undisguised suspicion.
“Hey, Liang, you remember Jason, don’t you?” Mei asked, flapping her hand at him. “From the other night down on the beach? Jason, this is my friend Liang.”
“Yeah, man, hey,” the guy, Liang, said, nodding at Jason before summarily dismissing him again. Mei seemed to neither notice nor bother. Liang and another guy from the group drew her aside, out of Jason’s earshot, while the rest returned to their roosts outside the wax museum’s entrance.
Feeling unwelcome and decidedly uncomfortable, Jason wandered over to one of the museum windows, looking in at Paris Hilton and Groucho Marx. Through reflections in the glass, he watched behind him as Mei and the two young men passed things back and forth, their hands slipping together, their bodies positioned close, as if trying to disguise their actions.
She’s buying drugs, Jason thought as Mei’s hand dipped into her pocket again, as she tucked something concealed against her palm inside. Then he reconsidered the cash she’d been sporting all morning long. Or selling them. Where the hell did she get them?
Once the transaction was complete, the trio stepped apart, widening the distances between them, and Mei pivoted, peeling back her bandage to show off her tattoo addition to them.
“Jason got one too. Hey, Jason, come here,” she called.
Whether the tattoos lent him some street cred or not remained to be seen, but the group seemed to at least relax around Jason after he pulled up his shirt and showed them. When they started passing around a bottle of lime green Mad Dog 20/20 wrapped in the piss-poor disguise of a brown paper sack, he took a swig. Not because he wanted a drink or felt like swapping spit with everyone, but because Mei had looked at him expectantly, hopefully. She wanted her friends to like him. She wanted him to like her friends. She obviously wanted them all to be some kind of great big homeless family, and he went along with it.
“So you hear about what happened to J-Dog’s apartment?” Liang asked Mei. Like the tattooist, as he said this, his eyes darted briefly toward Jason.
“Yeah.” She was smoking a cigarette and tilted her head back, exhaling a quick stream of smoke. “Sucks to be him.”
Jason sat beside her against the wall of the wax museum. As she spoke, the girl next to him passed him the liquor bottle.
“The police are looking for him,” Liang remarked.
Jason tipped the bottle back and took a long swallow. The wine was sweet, tangy and strong, scraping against the back of his throat and searing a molten path down to his belly, where it pooled uncomfortably. This was the fifth such swig he’d taken thus far. It occurred to him the bottle seemed to be passing pretty rapidly among the ranks and that he seemed to be the only one really drinking any. Mei had downed a sip or two but, for the most part, had been too busy talking to bother.
“Like I said”—she snuffed her cigarette out beneath the toe of her boot—“sucks to be J-Dog.”
Jason passed her the bottle and she brought it to her mouth. Before drinking this time, however, she paused, cutting her eyes around the semicircle of her friends, her brows narrowed. Jason didn’t miss, but didn’t understand, the way several of them met her gaze evenly, then looked away, muffling snickers against the backs of their hands.
She stood, swatting her hand against the seat of her jeans. “Come on,” she said to Jason, holding out her hand. “Let’s go check out the museum.”
He felt momentarily light-headed as he got to his feet. Closing his eyes, swaying unsteadily for a moment, he pressed the heel of his hand to his brow and waited for his head to clear. “Here.” He tried to hand the wine back to the girl who had been sitting next to him but she shook her head.
“No, thanks,” she said. “You keep it. You and Mei.”
“The lovebirds,” Liang offered in a singsongy voice, the words and tone eerily reminiscent of his bartender, Eddie’s, on the night he had been murdered, a good-natured taunt offered as Jason and Sam had sat together in one of the corner booths.
A regular pair of turtledoves.
Others snickered at this. Mei caught Jason by the hand, leading him toward the museum entrance. “Very funny. You guys are all fucktards, you know it?”
The longer Jason was upright, the stranger he felt. Not just light-headed now, he felt dazed, as if he moved in slow motion and everything around him had slowed right along with him. His footsteps felt heavy and plodding, as if he marched underwater or on the surface of the moon. Once inside the museum’s narrow lobby, while Mei bought them each a ticket, he leaned heavily against the wall.
“I don’t…feel so good,” he murmured.
“It’s the wine,” she said, taking the bottle from his hand and throwing it into a garbage can. “Come on. You’ll feel better once we’re moving.”
Everything in the museum seemed garish to him—bright, dazzling lights, dizzying colors, ridiculous costumes and sets. The wax statues didn’t look real at all to him but rather cadaver-like and creepy, reaching for him with spindly alabaster fingers or staring out at him with flat, lifeless eyes.
“Come on,” Mei said, leading him by the hand. “Just keep walking, get your head clear.”
The corridors were shadow-draped and dimly lit, the walls paneled in dark wood and gaudy, blood-colored wallpapers meant to look posh in a Victorian way. The wall was a scarlet and blue oriental pattern that, if he stood still too long and studied it too closely, seemed to be moving, just like the tattoos on Sitri’s body, the intricate, interwoven pattern alive and writhing, tangling and twisting in constant motion.
The walls seemed to be collapsing too, drawing closer and closer together, caving in on him. More and more, the ghoulish wax figures seemed to be encroaching too. Their hands brushed against him and he stumbled into them, making them wobble on their pedestals.
Finally his hand slipped free of Mei’s and he leaned against the wall, doubling over. “I…I’m going to be sick,” he gasped, because the room was whirling; instead of getting better, walking around had only made things worse. “Mei, please, I want to get out of here.”
“It’s all right,” Mei said, only it wasn’t Mei’s voice, and when he looked up in startled surprise, he saw it wasn’t Mei in the corridor with him, not Mei who approached him now.
“Sam?” he whispered, bewildered, stunned. “Sam, how…what are you…?”
“It’s all right,” Sam said again, smiling gently at him, and she was so beautiful, he nearly began to weep at the sight of her.
“Sam.” He caught her face between his hands and pushed her back against the wall. Her breath caught sharply in surprise and she blinked at him, wide-eyed and trembling.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Jason, wait. I’m not…”
He cut her off with a kiss, closing his mouth atop hers. She stiffened at first in reflexive surprise, then melted against him with a low moan, her lips relaxing as she leaned toward him, deepening the kiss. Her fingers spread in his hair. The tip of his tongue slid lightly, deliberately against hers and she moaned again.
“Oh, Jason.”
Only it didn’t sound like Sam’s voice, not at all. Bewildered, he looked up, then drew back in dismayed surprise.
“Mei?” Stricken, he immediately released her, stumbling back in stunned, confused recoil. “What are you…? Where is…?” He looked around wildly, but there was no sign of Sam.
“Jason, wait,” Mei said, reaching for him.
“I’m sorry.” He backed clumsily into the far wall, shoving the heels of his hands against his temples, trying to steady the wayward motion of the world around him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mei. I didn’t mean…�
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She’s a kid and I was about to rip her clothes off and fuck her right here in the hallway, thinking she was Sam!
“What’s the matter with me?” he whispered.
“Listen to me,” Mei said, and when her hands fell lightly against him, he shrugged her away, forceful and ashamed. “Jason, please. They played a trick on you.” Now her voice was choked with tears. “On both of us.”
The wine. He tangled his fingers in his hair and swore. Goddamn it, the wine.
No one else had been drinking it but him and now he knew why.
“I have to get out of here.” He turned and began to shamble away. He had no idea where he was or how to get back to the museum lobby. Behind him was nothing but a twisting, shadowy hallway, a landscape that continued to bob and weave like a capped bottle set adrift on a choppy sea.
He stumbled forward, trying to use the wall to keep his bearings, keep him upright. I have to get out of here, he told himself. I have to get out of this place.
“Jason, please wait,” Mei begged.
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He left her there and staggered down the corridor, trying to remember the path they’d taken to get to that point, struggling to retrace his steps. When he found himself in the middle of a chamber of horrors, surrounded on all sides by wax replicas of all kinds of cinematic creatures like Frankenstein, Jason Voorhees, Count Dracula and more, he floundered in a reeling semicircle, blinking in confusion.
Where am I? He forked his fingers through his hair and tried to clear his mind. None of this looks familiar. I must’ve made a wrong turn somewhere.
He had only two choices: go back the way he’d come or forge on ahead. Choosing the latter, he limped through a doorway at the far end of the room, entering a diorama of a medieval torture chamber. Here, a replica iron maiden loomed in one corner, along with pillories and stocks, plus a dunking stool and wooden tub, cast-iron thumbscrews and other grim-looking instruments. Along a far wall, racks of spears, manacles, swords, axes and maces dangled on display. A wax figure, tall and hulking, with a black hooded mask and bare chest stood with its arms crossed as it watched another replica, this one with his hands bound behind its back, being raised by ropes and pulleys into the air. As Jason crossed the threshold, it triggered motion-sensitive devices. Multicolored lights began to flash, creating a disorienting, dazzling strobe effect, while prerecorded shrieks and screams blared from hidden overhead speakers.