“I’m starving,” she said. “What’s fast to make?”
“Calzone,” he replied, gesturing at the hand-painted price-board on the wall behind him. “Ten minutes.” She searched in vain for something like salad or even pasta. Nothing. Calzone, pizza, garlic bread, and drinks were all that were offered. With a sigh, she dug the bank envelope out of her pocket and extracted a twenty. “Cheese and mushroom calzone, a cola, and a large pizza to go,” she said. “Mushrooms, olives, peppers, tomatoes.” That was going to be the closest she was going to get to anything healthy, it appeared. “Can I have the cola now?” The sugar would probably stop her stomach from growling.
“Coming right up, miss. Find a seat wherever you like while you wait.”
Staci picked a table by the window; it was the most well-lit spot in the entire restaurant, even with the checker paint covering the lower part of the window. She kept trying with her cell phone to find a signal; nothing here either. At least the smells coming from the unseen kitchen were nice. After all these years of spending summers with Mom, Staci had a good nose for awful grease-bomb food. A survival tactic, as it were.
She was trying to access her Facebook newsfeed for the umpteenth time when she heard it. Something in the distance, moving closer. A deep, guttural thrum sound. As it came closer, it started to vibrate the windows slightly. Staci couldn’t help herself; she stood up from her seat, almost knocking the chair over. She had to stand on her tiptoes in order to see over the paint on the windows. The rumble suddenly became louder…and a blinding light rounded the corner of the street, three blocks down. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust; strange, given that the sky still seemed overcast. After a few moments, she saw what the limited sunlight was reflecting off of. It was chrome, and big, and loud. An exotic motorcycle, but perfectly maintained. She couldn’t place what kind it was; her father had always read motorcycle and hot rod magazines, wishing for toys that he couldn’t afford, so she had become fairly adept at recognizing makes and models. The only thing that she was sure of was that it was a cruiser, and it was beautiful.
The man riding it, however, was absolutely breathtaking. He looked to be anywhere from his late teens to his mid-twenties. He wasn’t wearing a helmet; all the better, because it allowed his nearly shoulder-length blond hair to catch the wind. He had high, good cheekbones, and a strong if slightly pointed chin, lightly colored with a tasteful amount of stubble. He was tall, with a lean physique; even that much was apparent past the black biker jacket, low-cut white T-shirt, and blue jeans. Instead of a helmet, he was wearing a pair of dark goggles. Every part of him looked like he was cut from marble, a living artwork, fit to be on a Hollywood screen. When the man turned his head for a moment in her direction, she could’ve sworn that he was looking at her…with the goggles on it was impossible to tell, of course, but her heart stopped all the same.
A moment later, and he was past the window, and the pizza man was coming out from behind the counter with her calzone on a paper plate, with a second can of cola for her. He glanced out the window; the motorcycle’s engine was still shaking the glass a little. “Hooligans,” he grumbled. “Girls should stay away from guys like that. They’re nothing but trouble and heartbreak.”
She sat down as he returned to the kitchen. He didn’t seem to need a reply, so she began eating the calzone. It wasn’t the best she’d ever had, even with her hunger that would usually make cardboard appealing, but it was by no means the worst. She was about halfway done with it when the man came back with a plain, unprinted pizza box, and set it on the chair across from her.
Of all the places where her mom had landed, this had to be, by far, the worst. Unless there was something more, better, down by the waterfront…which didn’t seem likely. The entire town seemed frozen in 1950. Not being able to get a cell phone signal was making her feel as if her right hand had been cut off—no, more as if she had been abandoned somewhere in some foreign country.
What am I going to do if my cell won’t work? She hadn’t seen anything like a cell tower.…
The town itself was bad enough. Not being able to even vent to her friends was much, much worse. Over the years, between her father and her friends, she thought that she could handle anything. Now…both were gone. What was she going to do?
Can I even get Internet? What am I going to do without Internet?
It was like Dad—or, rather, Brenda—had purposefully chosen this place to cut her off from everyone.
I’ve got to get back home, somehow. I’ll be eighteen in two years, and they won’t be able to stop me leaving. I can go anywhere I want!
For a moment she fantasized about getting back to New York, finding a job, maybe in a cute little boutique, getting her own place.…
But then reality hit her with the last bite of her calzone which stuck for a moment in her throat. All that yammering about how important that rent-controlled apartment was…Brenda had hammered that home again and again, with stories about how the mailroom kids where she worked were jammed in six together in a one-room walkup. Staci had never held a job, ever. How could she get one on her own, much less one that would let her even make enough money to share a place with four or five other roommates? Her friends were all going to college soon enough. None of them were going to have to worry about staying in the city, getting jobs and paying through the nose just to live.
I’m going to be stuck here forever…By the time she was eighteen, Dad wouldn’t have any more legal obligations to her—Brenda had made that crystal clear—so by that time, Brenda would probably have programmed him out of the idea of paying for any college. And Staci didn’t have any idea what she’d do at college anyway. She had always done well enough in school; no real extracurricular activities, and she hadn’t been a math-lete, but she had kept her grade average up so far. But there just wasn’t anything she was particularly good at, or anything she really wanted to do. By now, she was supposed to be figuring out what the rest of her life would be like; what she would major in, what college she would go to; her entire life path. Except…nothing really appealed. And right now, it didn’t look like anything mattered, either. If Brenda talked Dad out of supplying college money—and she would, Staci had no doubt of that at this point—just how would she even have enough for a couple classes at a community college, much less a real college? So why even bother to plan?
She had already paid the man, and he was out of sight in the kitchen anyway, so she picked up the pizza box and left. There was no sign of the boy or his motorcycle anywhere. For some reason everything seemed darker and more gloomy because of that. The street was back to being gray and bleak and unwelcoming. She trudged back to the house with her shoulders hunched against the wind, trying not to cry.
She threw the zombie pizza out and put the new one in the fridge, and explored the house. It was probably the biggest house Mom had ever lived in; downstairs there was the living room, a dining room, the kitchen, a pantry, and a bedroom with a bath that were obviously Mom’s. Clothes strewn everywhere, bed unmade, sheets hung up at the window instead of curtains, makeup scattered all over the bathroom. Upstairs there were four bedrooms with a bath, and a pull-down staircase into an attic. She picked the one room that had a bed and a couple of Goodwill chests of drawers in it. It had one window that looked east; you could see the ocean and docks, and from here, you could tell that the whole town was built on a hill that slanted down to the coast. The bed was pretty awful: white-painted cast iron, with a set of exposed springs and a lumpy mattress. Mom had left some mismatched sheets and blankets on top of it. With a sigh, she began bringing boxes upstairs and unpacking.
A lot of stuff she couldn’t unpack; there was no place for anything to go but her clothes. She discovered that Brenda had packed up everything, including the curtains from her old bedroom. Which was pretty mean in principle, but welcome right now. At least she had something to put up on the windows to keep the sun and peeping toms out. She prowled the house looking for a sign of a cable. Not
hing. No Internet router either. Just the TV, which had two dials, one with twelve channels, which must be VHF, and one with a lot of channels. And a radio. Her mother probably didn’t have much home time to appreciate television; between her drunks and her hangovers, she was most likely out of it most of the time.
She turned on the radio, which got one channel, the rest being static. When she tuned into it, the station was playing “Hotel California,” which seemed all too prophetic. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
She turned it off and tried the TV and got just one channel again. The show on was a woman showing how to make planters out of coffee cans. Some sort of public-access, she guessed. Staci turned it off, and turned the radio back on, just to have some sound in the house. Mom still was a no-show, which meant she was probably still working and knowing her, she’d segue from “working” to “drinking” and not come back until the bar closed, having completely forgotten Staci was supposed to be here today.
Staci heated up some of the pizza and ate that for supper, washing it down with one of the diet drinks. Then, since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, she watched a couple movies on her laptop, making the best of a bad bed with the throw pillows and cushions from her old room. Eventually she got tired enough that she closed the laptop up and fell asleep.
At some point she woke up, startled awake by the slamming of the front door, hearing her mom singing at the top of lungs. She thought about going downstairs and letting her mom know she was there—
Why bother? She won’t notice me, or she won’t remember in the morning.
So she rolled over, hugged a pillow tightly to herself, and cried herself to sleep.
Chapter Two
The curtains weren’t thick enough to block out the morning light. Staci’s old room in New York had faced a building; this window faced due east. She woke up a lot earlier than she usually did on a Saturday, but she had gone to bed so much earlier than she usually did on Friday night that it didn’t seem to matter. For a moment, she was disoriented. The bed was hard and creaked, not like her bed, and the walls were some faded flower wallpaper—and the smells were all wrong. Then she remembered, and wanted to cry. She was stuck in Nowheresville. She could hear someone stumbling around downstairs. Mom, of course.
She pulled on some clothing and got ready in the little bathroom. It actually was a bit better than the one back in the old apartment, which hadn’t been updated since maybe the 1920s. This one had at least gotten new plumbing and a proper shower around the ’50s. None of the upkeep of her old bathroom, though. After all, Mom couldn’t afford a housecleaner twice weekly; she wasn’t exactly the “homemaker” sort, either. I guess I’m going to have to do all the cleaning too. Ugh, and so unfair.
From the sound of things, her mom was rattling around in the kitchen. And sure enough, when Staci poked her nose in there, Mom was staring at the coffee maker as if she had never seen one before, still with a bed-head, wrapped up in a fuzzy magenta robe.
She turned at the sound of Staci’s footsteps, and it was clear she was hung over. Her eyes were bloodshot, and not quite focusing, her forehead showed headache lines, her brows furrowed. And to clinch the diagnosis, there was a bottle of aspirin in one hand. She looked at Staci blankly for just a second, as if she didn’t remember who her own daughter was.
Then her face cleared. “Oh hi, honey,” she said. At least her speech wasn’t slurred, so she was hung over, not still-drunk. “When did you get here?”
“Lunchtime yesterday,” Staci said, as her mother put down the aspirin and rummaged in the fridge.
“Well, there’s pizza and beer if you want breakfast.” It took her a moment before Staci realized that her mother was serious. Rather than actually getting anything, her mother closed the fridge door and went back to filling and starting the coffee maker. “I was going to go back to bed; I’m on at four, and I worked a double yesterday, I’m beat.”
Mom, you’ve flipped out. You just offered your sixteen-year-old daughter cold pizza and beer for breakfast. Staci had thought her mother couldn’t get any worse the last time she’d visited, but…well, this was the first time she’d ever offered Staci booze when she was sober. She was, somehow, much, much worse than Staci had ever seen her before. Silence, evidently, was not good for her.…
Whatever happened to my real mom? she thought in despair. Before the divorce, her mother had always seemed more of a free spirit than a wackaloon. She would always have a game to play, or a story to tell; about heroes and villains, creatures that could do impossible things and wondrous realms that those things inhabited. Stories with princesses named Staci who were able to save themselves, thank you very much, and who didn’t need handsome princes to bail them out when the monsters came. But of course, there were handsome princes too, they just didn’t get to do all the adventuring. There was no sign of that happy, spirited mom in this…thing…that was sitting at the kitchen table.
Staci wanted to cry again, but instead she settled for anger. “I’m going out. I’ll find something in town.”
“Okay, honey, have fun.” Her mother flapped a hand at her and wandered back out. There was a Mason jar full of money in the middle of the table—the tip money from her mother’s job. Staci grabbed a handful. No way am I spending any more of my money, she thought angrily. Besides, if it’s not here, she won’t drink it.
Today was just like yesterday: overcast, damp and chilly. She went back upstairs and pulled a hoodie on over the rest of her clothes before going out. Uphill seemed to be all houses, with a couple bigger buildings. At least one was obviously a church, complete with steeple with a cross on top—fairly rundown-looking all in all. Downhill had led to the pizza joint yesterday, so maybe there would be more stores in that direction.
The pizza joint was closed. The cardboard flip-sign on the door said it didn’t open until one; she didn’t feel like she could wait for it to open. She trudged down the cracked sidewalk, still not finding anything with food. Antique shops, Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent De Paul’s…actually as far as she could tell, the antique stores had pretty much the same stuff as the three thrift stores, except the antique stores didn’t have clothes. This was supposed to be a town with about 25,000 people in it. So far all she had seen were her mom, the pizza guy, a fleeting glimpse of a couple of people inside the storefronts and the motorcycle guy, passing through.
What a lousy, gross town. Even the people that live here don’t want to be seen here.
She turned a corner at random. This, clearly, was not the scenic, quaint, fun little tourist town that her father had described for her. She’d been to one of those with Dad and Brenda in the fun days before Brenda had gotten what she wanted—a wedding ring. There had been neat boutiques, shops with interesting stuff in them, lots and lots of cafes, lots of real antique stores. Not like this. Dusty windows with merch in them that looked like it hadn’t been changed in decades, and nothing she even wanted to look at, much less buy.
Staci started daydreaming about running away, going back to New York City or maybe even hitchhiking all the way west, see how California would work out…She was in the middle of wondering how she’d do in the California sun when she realized that she had no clue where she was anymore. All of the buildings had started to run together for her; everything was grimy and old…and she couldn’t see any landmarks from the side street she was on, and the buildings were so close together, the street so narrow, that she couldn’t see uphill or down, just the buildings around her.
Just when Staci was starting to panic, a man lurched out of the alleyway to her left, nearly knocking into her. She didn’t quite scream, but she did squeak loudly, throwing her hands up to keep her balance. Strong hands grabbed her by the shoulders, and her mind went blank; she thought she was about to be mugged, or worse…when the man spoke.
“Hey, it’s okay. Didn’t mean to scare you, kid. Are you all right?” He let her go as soon as she had regained her balance and
stepped back a pace or two, holding his hands out to the side in a non-threatening position. That was when she realized she’d seen him before.
It was the guy from yesterday who’d been riding that gorgeous motorcycle. Up close he was even hotter than he had been riding by—which wasn’t always the case. Some guys kind of faded when they weren’t on their bikes.
He definitely looked rough; not in a dirty way, but tough, what her dad would call “school of hard knocks,” competent, sure of himself. He carried himself easily, and wasn’t that menacing close up. What really got her were his eyes. For a moment she thought that they were fake. But only a moment, until she saw the light in them. They were almost literally perfect; no discoloration, no red lines; just two irises that were a shocking electric blue. And they were staring right at her. “Haven’t seen you around here before.” He added, “I’m Dylan.”
Of course you are, she thought, a little dazzled. Then she collected herself. “I’m Anastasia Kerry, but my friends call me Staci. I just moved here yesterday. With my mom. She’s a waitress at the Rusty Bucket.”
“Okay, so you’re Paula Kerry’s gal.” She felt a surge of dismay that he knew her mom’s name, which meant he must know at least something about her, and—she flushed with embarrassment. Her mom never had a good reputation. He crossed his arms and leaned against the side of the alley he had surprised her from. “What’re you doing in this part of town? Bucket closed a while ago.” He had this little half-smile on his lips that kept on distracting her, making her trip over her own thoughts.
“I was looking for someplace to get breakfast,” she confessed. Is this where Mom works? Somewhere around here?
He chuckled to himself. “You’re definitely in the wrong place, then. Unless you’ve got a hankering for bait. Hardware store sells worms and some old shoe leather that they call ‘beef jerky.’”
“What are you doing in this part of town? Besides scaring girls.”
Silence - eARC Page 2