Tracers

by J. J. Howard

  It was Nikki.

  He pulled himself to his feet, and jogged to catch up to her, breathing hard. For a few seconds they were face-to-face, just like that day in the cherry picker. She seemed to be trying to figure something out—but what? Whether or not he was okay? Whether or not she was sorry she’d gone back for him?

  Whether or not she thought he was the most annoying person on the planet?

  “You’re not careful,” she observed. A crease had appeared in her forehead. She was letting her guard down, just a little, after seeming so standoffish in front of her brother and the others.

  Cam felt confused—he wasn’t careful? “You were the one who smashed into me after jumping off a five-story building,” he told her.

  She bit her lip—which seemed to be a habit of hers. “Yeah. But it took me a long time to learn how to do that. Besides, that was an unusual day. I don’t usually stop traffic. Or wreck out bike messengers. I’m careful. I swear. You have to swear you will be too, yeah?”

  She didn’t wait for his promise, just turned without another word and chased off after the others.

  Cam shook his head. He seriously doubted that being careful would get him very far with this crowd. He stood up, feeling defiant, and pushed himself to catch up to the group. He got back into the rhythm of things, copying Nikki’s moves now. Trying to keep up with her—pushing himself to best her.

  He followed as they vaulted up from one level to the next until they were on the uppermost deck. Too late, Cam saw that the metal of the deck beneath his feet was moving. The grate was designed to slide open to allow access to the cargo hold below. But, high on adrenaline, and not knowing the ship as well as the others, who all stopped short of the gap, Cam leapt across.

  Well, he tried to leap across. What actually happened was that he didn’t get enough height in his jump, a fact he became aware of halfway across the gap, when his arms and legs started flailing around like he was swimming in midair. He missed the far edge of the gap, but managed at the last second to grab on to a length of chain that hung from the metal ledge.

  He dangled in midair, holding on for dear life.

  “Seriously?!” he heard one of them—maybe Jax—yell.

  “He’s probably dead.” That was Dylan.

  Cam made the mistake of looking down. Five stories down into the empty bowels of the ship. He took a deep breath and tried to pull himself up, but his arms were fully extended and there was nothing but air for his feet to hold on to. He forced himself to stop kicking. It wasn’t doing any good.

  A pair of boots landed with a thud just above his head. Cam looked up, but the sun was behind the figure and he couldn’t see the face clearly. Whoever it was had just made the same jump he’d missed like it was nothing.

  The guy hunched down on his knees, and Cam got his first look at his face: he was older, maybe thirty or more, dark hair, slim, but there was something familiar about him.

  “Hey. You must be Cam.”

  Cam stared incredulously at the man, then nodded and grunted, “Yeah.”

  The guy smiled, taking his time, while Cam struggled to hold on. “Dylan told me about you. Said you’re new to parkour. Said you’re pretty good.” He paused, and smiled down at Cam. “Clearly a few kinks to work out, though.”

  “Yeah,” Cam said again, through closed teeth.

  Pull me up or just go away and leave me alone to die, he was thinking. But by this point he had a feeling Nikki was watching, so he kept trying to remain cool while slipping and preparing to fall.

  The guy went for Option A, and in one quick motion grabbed Cam by the arms and pulled him up onto the deck. Cam lay there heaving for breath like a dying fish.

  So much for the cool factor.

  Cam closed his eyes again.

  “I’m Miller.”

  Cam forced himself to raise his eyelids, then took the hand the new guy was offering him. He let Miller pull him to his feet.

  “Thanks.”

  “Pick a fight with gravity before you’re ready, you can expect a beatdown.”

  Thanks for the excellent advice.

  “Thought I could make it,” Cam said aloud.

  “Stop thinking,” Miller corrected. “Stay in the moment.”

  “I still don’t really know what I’m doing,” he admitted in a low voice, shaking his head, feeling discouraged. He looked up and saw Nikki. She hadn’t made the leap across. Apparently it didn’t take all that long to simply walk around the gap.

  Miller surprised him with a friendly smile and a pat on the back. “But that’s the great thing about parkour, my friend. There are no rules.”

  The others had followed Nikki, and they stepped forward, forming a semicircle around Cam. “You okay?” Dylan asked.

  “I’m good,” Cam answered.

  “Oh my God, dude. That was ninety-eight percent pure psycho.” Jax was looking at him with either admiration or pity—Cam couldn’t tell which.

  “What was the other two percent?” Nikki asked dryly.

  “Luck,” Dylan answered. “Definitely luck.”

  Cam snorted. His name and the word luck did not belong in the same sentence, unless the word bad was added in there too.

  “Well, what would you call it?” Dylan asked him. “Seeing as how you’re alive and all.”

  Cam shrugged. “I was just trying to keep up.”

  Nikki shot him an angry look, but she was visibly upset. Her eyes were suspiciously bright.

  He’d managed to throw her words back at her—and make her feel bad by almost dying.

  Definitely worth it.

  FIVE

  THE BENEFITS of almost dying continued. Cam had earned a ticket to the gang’s lair, a space deep in the bowels of the cargo ship, all rigged out for postjam hanging: old TV, Xbox, Ping-Pong table. Miller had apparently brought lunch too, because the table was piled high with Wendy’s bags.

  “Sit,” Dylan told him. “You’ve earned it.”

  “Cam?” Jax looked at Cam from across the table. “What’s that short for? Camaro?”

  Tate pinged Jax in the head with a ketchup packet. “Seriously, dude?” He turned to Cam. “Ignore him.”

  “It’s Cameron,” he answered, smiling. “But I wish it were Camaro.”

  “Where you from?” Dylan asked, taking a big bite of burger.

  “Queens.”

  “City native, huh?” Dylan said.

  Cam nodded. He noticed Miller regarding him steadily from across the table.

  “Wherever you’re from, you’re a natural, dude,” Jax said. “I mean at parkour.”

  Cam smiled at him again. He seemed like a good dude. The kind of guy it was hard to be in a bad mood around. He’d been hanging around wannabe-hipster bike messengers and mid-level Chinese mobsters so long he’d started to forget that it didn’t always suck to hang out with other people.

  Tate broke in: “You play any sports in school?”

  “Barely went to high school,” Cam told him. “Tried baseball . . . once. Used to do some martial arts.”

  “I wasn’t much of a jock in high school either,” Jax told him.

  Tate snorted. “Yeah. Look at you.” Jax just kept eating; he seemed pretty good at ignoring Tate.

  Miller broke his silence with his own question: “Where’d you do your time?”

  He didn’t know how Miller had figured it out. He hadn’t told any of the others. Thrown, he took a deep breath before answering. He didn’t dare look across the table just then. Some girls were impressed when guys had done time. He had the feeling Nikki might not be one of them.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s okay,” Miller told him. “You’re not the only one here with a record.”

  Cam looked around the table, wondering who the older man was referring to. He avoided Nikki’s gaze. “Abbot
t House. Hillside.”

  “That’s juvie,” Miller observed.

  “Yeah. Did six months in Otisville a couple years ago.”

  “What for?” Miller asked. Cam wondered if he was imagining that Miller seemed oddly invested in his answers.

  Cam kept his voice level as he recited his rap sheet. “B and E. Boosting cars.”

  Following in his old man’s illustrious footsteps.

  “You ever go in hard? Pull any holdups?”

  Cam stared at Miller for a moment. Speaking of his old man’s footsteps. “No,” Cam answered, and heard the hardness in his voice. “I didn’t want to go that way.”

  “What do you do for money?” This was turning into Twenty Questions with Miller.

  Clearly, Cam was expected to play along. It was true what his mom used to say: no such thing as a free lunch.

  “I’m a bike messenger,” Cam answered.

  “What do you guys deliver?”

  “I don’t know. Business stuff . . . documents.”

  “At least that’s what they tell you,” Miller said.

  Cam looked at him. It was a strange comment. Nikki caught his eye across the table—like she was trying to tell him something. She’d made a sort of sculpture out of her straw and plastic fork and knife, but she wasn’t actually eating.

  Cam returned Miller’s gaze. “They hand me a package, I drop it off. Simple as that.”

  “But it could be anything, right?”

  “I guess,” Cam answered warily.

  “You never look inside the bag?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No. Why would I . . . ?” Cam looked over at Nikki again.

  “Curiosity,” Miller suggested.

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “But you’re the one carrying the package.”

  Cam paused, taking a drink of his soda. He raised his eyes and met Miller’s gaze. “Look. As long as they pay me my money after I drop it off, I don’t really care what’s inside the bag.”

  Nikki let out a breath like she’d been holding it awhile, and stabbed at her plastic sculpture with another straw. It crumbled and she continued to stare at Cam.

  Miller nodded at him from across the table, smiling a little.

  Cam realized it was time for the million-dollar question. “So . . . what do you guys do?”

  Miller’s smile widened. “We do whatever we can not to get caught.” He stood, crumpling the paper his burger had come in and throwing it into the pile at the center of the table. He nodded at Cam. “Come with me.”

  Cam followed Miller up a set of metal stairs to a window that looked out over the back of the ship. A question flitted through his mind: Did Miller own the ship? The setup down in the hold seemed designed to look like a squat, but as Dylan had observed, Cam was a city native. He knew that city real estate didn’t stay abandoned for long.

  “You’re a smart kid, Cam.” Miller’s voice broke into his thoughts. “I can tell.”

  “Yeah, my teachers definitely thought so,” Cam quipped.

  Miller barked a laugh. “What do they know? No money in what they do.”

  Cam smiled back. It was nice to not be judged for all his failures, for a change. They stood looking out over the water in silence for a few minutes.

  Miller asked him some more questions about his life—but didn’t offer anything about himself in return. Eventually, Cam noticed that the others had resumed their training on the deck; apparently they had digested their lunch. He looked down and watched Dylan and Nikki perform two flips, side by side, in almost perfect synchronicity.

  “Looks like fun,” Cam observed.

  Miller nodded. “That’s the right attitude. No limits, my friend. Only plateaus.”

  “Plateaus?”

  “You’ve got to constantly push past what you think you can do, or you stay stuck.”

  “I like that. What else you got?”

  “How about this? Parkour, free running, tracing, whatever you call it—it’s really a state of mind. The real obstacles are not out there.” Miller nodded toward the ship’s deck. “They’re in your head.”

  Cam followed Miller’s gaze down, watching Tate clear a wide jump, barely sticking the landing. Nikki stopped to check on him. “I don’t know. Those obstacles look pretty real to me.”

  The thing was, Cam wasn’t really talking about the ship.

  “Well, you’re gonna have to start seeing them differently.”

  He watched Nikki execute a nice wall trick. “Look where the car isn’t,” he said aloud, remembering his first parkour lesson.

  “Exactly.”

  Miller gave him an approving nod and moved away from the window, but Cam stayed where he was for a long time, watching Nikki.

  • • •

  “How’s that new bike treating you?” Nikki asked as they filed through the shipyard gate.

  Cam felt the blood drain from his face at her question. “Awesome!” he said, too brightly. “Thanks again. For the bike, I mean.”

  Nikki stared at him, a smile peeking through her frown. “You’re welcome. Where is it? The bike, I mean,” she said, echoing his words with a smirk.

  “Oh! I left it at home today.”

  Her arm brushed his as they walked side by side. “Liar.”

  He sighed. “Somebody clipped it. I didn’t want to say anything . . .”

  Nikki nodded. “It’s okay. I get it. You’re one of those people.”

  “Who are those people?”

  “The ones who can’t hang on to anything nice.”

  Cam looked into those eyes of hers, trying, as always, not to think about everything she made him want.

  “Guess I haven’t had enough practice,” he told her.

  The moment stretched out as his words hung in the air between them. But she broke the silence first. “Probably just as well. I knew it was a bad idea. Next time I’ll just take my wallet and burn it.” Nikki smiled like she was trying to make it a joke, but the plan seemed to backfire. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, which were filled with something else. Pain, maybe?

  “You did say that a bike was a ball and chain,” Cam told her, trying to lighten the mood again. “And thanks to some crazy chick jumping on top of me, I got to find out about parkour. No bike needed for that.”

  “You’re really getting good,” she said. “Been practicing a little, huh?”

  He barked a laugh. “Try constantly.”

  “I could have guessed you’d love it,” Nikki observed. “You seem like someone who just leaps without worrying about where you’ll land. Miller says I’ll never be great at it because I always worry.”

  “You seem pretty great to me.” Her eyes widened. “At parkour,” he added quickly.

  “I’ve hit one of Miller’s plateaus, probably.”

  “Come on, Niks!” Dylan’s voice called out. Nikki looked relieved as she jogged to catch up with the others.

  Cam followed, stopping her with a hand on her arm. “So . . . you guys all work together, right? With Miller?”

  Cam could see that she knew what he was asking, but she didn’t answer his question. She pulled away from him. “See you around, Cam.”

  Her evasiveness confirmed his suspicions. Miller was their boss, that much was clear. And it was also pretty clear that they weren’t supposed to talk about whatever they were into with him.

  Cam watched her join the others. Miller was standing beside his motorcycle, and the recognition clicked into place like a switch being flipped.

  Miller was the guy who’d been watching him work out at the park. He gave Cam a nod, like he knew Cam had recognized him. “Nice to meet you, Cam,” Miller called. “Listen, don’t let these guys get you into trouble.” He put on his helmet, started his bike, and rode aw
ay.

  Before Cam could catch up to the other four, they’d grabbed on to the back of a flat trailer carrying a monster truck. Nikki was holding on to one of the huge wheels. She looked back at Cam as the trailer drove out of sight.

  She was always gone so fast. He never had time to figure her out.

  At the thought of the word time, his stomach dropped.

  He’d missed his appointment to settle up with Jerry.

  Cam raced to the subway, cursing steadily under his breath as he waited for the train. When he reached Chinatown, he ran flat out all the way to the fish store. He flew in the door, but the little old woman who always stood in the back didn’t flinch; she just continued breaking a brick of fish food into tiny pieces, then carefully sprinkling the food into the aquarium beside her. She glanced up lazily at Cam’s entrance, but didn’t stop what she was doing.

  A man holding a small net came out of the back of the shop. “Where’s Jerry?” Cam asked him, breathless.

  “You just missed him.”

  “Well, do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “When he returns.”

  Cam let out a grunt of frustration at the unhelpful answer, then ran back out the door. The trip home seemed to take even longer than usual, and again Cam arrived too late. He watched his car being “repossessed” by a tow truck driven by Mr. Personality, Hu.

  He felt sick, seeing his GTO being carted away.

  “Hey, stop!” he yelled, running alongside the moving tow truck.

  “Cam, you didn’t tell me you had such a sweet ride,” Jerry said through the passenger window.

  Cam reached into his pocket and pulled out his cash—holding up the wad of bills and thrusting them through the truck window. Jerry reached out and grabbed the cash, but Hu didn’t stop the truck.

  “We’re knocking five grand off your tab, in exchange for the car. You’ve got a month to get us the rest. Don’t look so sad, Cam. You clear your debt, I’ll give her back to you.”

  He did the math in his head. With interest, he’d still owe over twelve thousand. “How am I supposed to find that much in one month?”

  “Not my problem.” Jerry shook his head, then frowned, reaching a hand up to pat his hair back into place.