Jaden's Chance

by Ashlynn Ally

  But then he repeats himself, and there’s an add-on this time. Some kind of ultimatum, or a threat; it takes me a moment to process which, since this is all so out of the norm for me. “You’re not going anywhere unless I hear you make a promise to yourself that you’re going to cut this bullshit. No more stealing wallets. No more acting like some kind of Billy the Kid wannabe. You have your whole life in front of you. Don’t blow it. You got that?”

  I’m so shocked, I’m stuttering, and I never stutter. I’m usually quick with my words, cutting even, witty and acerbic. But now I don’t know what to say. All I see is a Get Out of Jail Free card waving in and out of the thin air in front of me, and I take it. I reach out and grab it. It’s too good to be true.

  “Uh, uh, yeah, sure. I promise. I really do. No more stealing wallets. You’re right. It’s stupid.”

  And I manage a sloppy cheap little smile as I feel his grip on my arm lifting, trying not to let it turn to a smirk as I think of the fresh wallet in my pocket, ready for me to ravage it. To rip it apart. And then Justin is letting me go and turning around and we’re separating, walking in different directions. When I’m sure I’m far enough away that he won’t notice me running, I’m off, stride after stride until I reach sidewalk again, safe and anonymous under streetlamps in front of a Safeway.

  I pull out the wallet, I count out the bills, I shake my head and I suck my teeth. All that bullshit for thirty lousy bucks. Dammit, Jaden, you gotta work on how to pick ‘em. All that trouble and I won’t even be able to scrape up enough for the mangiest most flea-ridden crime-smeared place in town. Looks like I’ll be in my spot in the bushes in the park again. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred. Better luck next time.

  Chapter Two

  Sleep shifts from me as I start to feel my body, clammy and cold in the early morning dew. Immediately, I do what I always do when I wake up on the streets—feel to make sure I still have all my possessions on me. Running shoes still laced to my feet, the little satchel with my valuables still tied to the inside of my shirt, and my backpack with all my clothes in it still stuffed under my head as a pillow.

  After the possessions check, I sit up in the bushes where I slept last night. I’m groggy still, desperate for a coffee, but the Trader Joe’s across the street isn’t open yet. They give out little free cups of coffee to their customers, but they don’t say boo about it when the homeless help themselves, too. In fact, they almost encourage it, giving us free spotty bananas and day-old bread if they have it, wishing us luck on our journey, their smiles nearly genuine.

  In the light of the morning, I check the wallet again, ignoring the early morning runners and dog walkers giving me long sideways glances full of pity, curiosity, and… what else was it? Scorn maybe. Or fear. Thinking one wrong move and this might be them. At least they most likely had a parents’ basement to crash in, some sort of safety net. Something. Not me though. I’m only eighteen, and have already used up all my chances.

  Alexander Rodriquez. So I was right, Latino. Brother from another mother. I check over the rest of the stats on the dude’s driver’s license, an old one, nearly expired. Twenty-one years old, black hair, brown eyes, an organ donor—not that anyone would want his alcohol-shot liver. I wonder if the address is up to date, 1117 Sea Breeze Way, Pacific Palisades—an expensive beach town a few miles up the coast, and no apartment number. A house. Had to be his parents’ place. I study the address again. For some reason there’s something perplexingly familiar about it, like it is a place I’ve experienced before somehow, seen it in a movie, read it in a book. If I read books, that is.

  1117 Sea Breeze Way. Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California.

  I feel anger and annoyance rising up in my chest as I think of the way this dude’s older brother, this Justin person, rebuked me last night. Made it out like I was some horrible poor little rich girl who was going around preying on people’s money for thrills, when in reality his own brother was the real screw-up. Going over the exchange they had last night in my head, it’s not hard to guess this is a normal thing for them. Alex is probably a borderline alcoholic. Bored little rich kid, his fancy digs in a rich neighborhood not enough to keep him occupied. I’m only sorry he didn’t have more money in his wallet. He probably had already spent it all on booze.

  The rest of the contents of the wallet are useless to me; some used-up gift cards to sporting and clothing shops and a tattered old library card, but that’s it for plastic. No credit cards or anything, which is odd for a rich boy. I search it thoroughly, turn it inside out, but the only other thing I find is an old letter, folded and refolded so many times the edges are so soft I’m afraid the thing might fall apart in my hand. It’s written in Spanish, so I can only make out a few words, that it’s made out to some girl, Paloma, with Alex’s name signed at the bottom. A love letter he didn’t have the guts to send. Or maybe he rewrote it into an email. A middle school crush probably, judging from how old the paper seems.

  The heat rises with the sun, and I wonder what I’m going to do today as I cross the street to the grocery store for my coffee fix. The guy in the sample booth recognizes me, acknowledging me with a flick of his long Brazilian eyelashes as he lets me help myself to three tiny cups of coffee in a row and two free samples of persimmon shortcake. When the few customers that had been surrounding the booth clear away, he offers me a small smile as I fill up my little paper cup a fourth time.

  “Mami, what are your plans for the day?” he asks me.

  I shrug lazily, an indolent smile stretching across my own face, just grateful for someone treating me like a real person. “I dunno. Might catch a bus down to the beach. It’s gonna be hot today.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “El Niño’s killing it, right?” He turns away from me to help another customer, but makes sure to catch my eyes and give me one last smile and an obligatory, “You be careful now.”

  I’m already on the bus when I realize I forgot to buy a bag of candy or something for later. The days are long on the street, and hunger gnawing. Sometimes cheap eats are the only thing I have to keep me occupied, that and cigarettes if I can bum them, maybe a little weed. I’m not like the other street kids, already addicted to heavy drugs by fourteen, fifteen years old.

  I think again about the dude from last night, Justin, how he was wrong about me. If I were really a rich girl, I wouldn’t waste it. I’d be starting college in the fall, I’d spend my nights studying rather than partying it up and getting wasted. Even though I never did graduate high school, but that wasn’t my fault. You try graduating high school in a fucked-up foster home that’s more of a warzone than a home. Warzone homes, ha, that’s what they should have called them.

  I rest my head against the cool glass of the window pane I’m sitting against, let out a long yawn. I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I was up tossing and turning in my bush till God knows how long, shook up from the way that Justin guy had run me down and tackled me. I was almost never caught.

  Well, I’d have to catch a nap on the beach, maybe spend the night there. The cops in Venice are assholes though, always kicking vagrants like me off the boardwalk. They don’t want us there begging, bothering the tourists that are actually there to spend money, not make it. Luckily I’m a relatively new face still, they don’t recognize me yet, and I’m usually able to blend in. I might pull my magazine scam, or maybe the all-inclusive day at the spa one.

  I don’t know what makes me do it—boredom from sitting on the bus as it stops every single block to let passengers on and off maybe—but I slip the wallet out of my pocket again. Usually I’ve ditched them by now, or at least ditched the cards. It’s never a good idea to hold onto a wallet with somebody else’s identification inside it, but something has made me hold onto this one. Maybe it’s because of that address, the uncanny way it stuck in my head. All those ones, and lucky number seven. The street name that sounds like it is out of a storybook. I wonder how far the house is from the ocean.

  The bus
finally lets the last of us off a block from the beach, and I accept a transfer just in case I might need it, even though they expire after only fifteen minutes. There’s another bus sitting at the end of the street already. Probably waiting to put itself back on schedule. Not an uncommon scene, but for some reason, even though my plans are to spend the day here on Venice Beach, I catch a look at the lit-up letters across the top of the windshield advertising the destination.

  Of course, it figures. Pacific Palisades. Is it fate? I don’t know. I hitch my backpack up high on my shoulders and run to catch it. The driver lets me on with a grunt and a frown. The bus is half empty, full of immigrants who work on lawns and pools and send the money to their family back home.

  I know I stick out, but I don’t care. I work on smoothing back my thin, limp hair, straggly from days of not washing and dark as motor oil, and I wish the iPod I scored off a sleeping sunbather a while back had a little bit of charge left. The music on it isn’t half bad, lots of rap and house stuff, though I prefer a little bit of rock ‘n roll myself. The bus bumps and grumbles as we head into the canyons along the PCH, palm trees sticking out of mountains crazy and lopsided, their heavy leaves waving in the breeze coming in off the ocean. I gaze out the window and into the sea, looking for dolphins, but all I see are the usual paddle boarders and surfers, their skin gleaming like gold in the sun.

  The bus lets a bunch of us off in front of a Chevron station across from the beach, and I ask some of the migrant workers for directions to Sea Breeze Way. One of them speaks English better than the others and is able to point me in the general direction. Eighteen years of living in Southern California, I should be able to say more than hola and como estas in Spanish, but I’m hopeless. Flunked it twice in middle school before switching to French, and then flunked that too.

  As I veer off the PCH and up into the canyons, an eerie feeling suddenly creeps over me, like I’ve been here before. I get that sometimes and really, for all I know, it could very well have been true. After my parents took off when I was six, I’d been in more foster homes than I can count, bouncing around L.A. like the man on the moon in his spacesuit, no gravity, no stability, no nothing. I was a special case because I used to wander, get up in the middle of the night and sneak out the window, but that was so long ago now, I don’t even remember. I’m only going by what my caseworkers have said over the years in the system. For all I knew, they were full of shit. They usually were anyway.

  It isn’t long before I find Sea Breeze Way and start following it into a neighborhood. The air smells fresh here, like the salt from the sea and the sweet jasmine snaking around fence tops and in and out of wire gates. The houses here aren’t anything special, maybe two or three bedrooms, traditional style, stucco bungalows, but they have yards with flowers and fish ponds in them, little fountains and wraparound decks. I pass an orange tree and pick one. Leave a trail of peels as I devour the sweet flesh, feel my bloodstream absorbing the calories like a sponge. I know I need the vitamin C; I usually subsist on cigarettes and cheap candy. I can feel another cavity in the back of my mouth already, no more government insurance to get it filled either.

  I’m at the 1000s already, heading up a hill, feeling a layer of sweat form around my backpack straps and drip down my sides. I’m overdue for a shower, for a decent meal, for everything. I should have had it last night, but I fucked up. Picked the wrong rich guy to rob. Then the way that other guy—that Justin—had talked to me shook me up for the rest of the night. Made me slink away to my spot in the bushes in the park and stay there until morning.

  Yet there was also something exciting about it, something different—the way he didn’t call the cops on me, turn me in. How he had restrained me and scolded me and took matters into his own hands, calm and collected the whole time. And now here I was—what did I think I was doing anyway? Going to the house like this. Whose house is it anyway? I still don’t quite believe Alex and Justin are actually brothers, but I guess anything is possible here in La La Land.

  Maybe I’ll just return the wallet here. Really freak everybody out. Not that Alex probably has much memory of last night’s events, but I’m sure his buddy Justin would clue him in. I’ll leave it on the doorstep. A little prank, but a good deed as well. I’ll take the money of course, it’s only thirty bucks after all. But he’d get his driver’s license back, his stupid library card and weird old letter.

  As I come closer to the address on the license, the eerie feeling comes back. It’s inexplicable and ominous, washing over me like a heat wave. Yet at the same time, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like I’m cold.

  1117 Sea Breeze Way. There are birds of paradise bushes out front, and even though there’s a privacy fence around the backyard, it’s like I can see through it. In my mind, I envision sparse grass and the bare feet of little kids as they run through a sprinkler system, a little dog loping alongside of them. A poodle maybe, something fluffy and white, small and manageable. Have I been here before? I can’t remember. My mind is a haze, my memories untrustworthy.

  I peek into the garage. It’s empty. It’s the middle of the day, a Saturday, and no one’s home. Maybe out enjoying a day at the beach, or a shopping trip downtown. I find myself at the front door, my intention to remain casual. I belong here, I belong here. I try the handle. It’s locked of course, so I cup my hands over my eyes and scan the rest of the house. I feel my heart skip a beat like a key fitting into a lock when I spot my in. There’s a little deck over the garage, with a sliding glass door that’s been left open. I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’m so compelled to get inside, it’s like the rest of the world melts away and this is all that matters.

  There’s a trellis alongside the house the bougainvillea is growing up. For the first time in my life, I’m grateful I’m skinny and small as I fit my running shoes into the slots and start shimmying my way up. The trellis is strong and sturdy and it holds me nicely. Now all I have to do is grab onto the balustrade that wraps around the porch, hoist myself over, and I’m in. My heart pounds in my ears, and I’m amazed at how easy it all is. I don’t even have to take off my backpack, but I shed it when I get to the top. It’s heavy and I’m hot and I know it will be safe here anyway.

  The inside isn’t what I expect. I thought it would be sunny and light, with gleaming polished furniture and beds made up with country quilts. Instead, the bedrooms hardly seem occupied. The mattresses are bare or heaped with blankets. There’s stuff all over the floors, spilling out of big black garbage bags; old dilapidated board games and action figures, crumpled posters of super-heroes and pop bands. There’s three bedrooms, maybe four. I can’t tell because one of the doors is locked, a closet maybe, though the spatial alignment isn’t right. There’s bunk beds in one of the rooms, a canopy style in the one painted pink, and I remember Justin’s words from last night: pink canopy princess bed.

  The third bedroom looks the most lived in. Rumpled comforter on the bed, squished-in pillows, a desk with a laptop on it, a swivel chair pushed in neatly, the floor cleaned of debris, a couple of knickknacks on the bureau.

  I wander over. The distinct feeling I don’t belong here starting to creep over me, but I shoo it away as I open the top drawer. Socks, carefully rolled, a guy’s underwear. I rifle through, but no money, no valuables, just clothes. A teenager maybe, the last one to leave home, the other two away at college maybe. Only it’s summer now, so why aren’t they home, and why are two of the rooms so trashed? Not to mention the mysteriously locked door.

  There’s a landing at the top of the stairway that looks into the living room. Again, I get that sense. I remember standing here before, listening to someone talking… Talking… about what? Maybe I’m just imagining everything. Maybe I’m just cracking up.

  The downstairs is in better condition than the upstairs. Everything normal and in its place, except there are pictures of kids everywhere. Too many kids. Kids of different colors, nationalities. Foster kids. I feel goosebumps springing up all my
body, and my breathing goes real shallow. There’s an enlarged portrait above the fireplace showing off a gaggle of kids under seven or so. The oldest a boy, a blond, but it’s not the kids I’m paying attention to. It’s the little dog in the center of them, a poodle maybe, white and fluffy, its tongue hanging out, its gaze serene. Puppy kisses, a wiggling ball of fur—I used to love dogs. Suddenly I feel the urge to scream, but I don’t have time. I hear a car in the driveway, the garage door opening.

  “Oh, shit.”

  My first instinct is to run out the front door. It would be so easy. The garage door would close again and they would never see me. But my backpack, I remember my backpack at the top of the balcony, and everything is in it. Everything. It’s alright, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter. I have time. Plenty of time. I could run up and get it, climb down the trellis again. Maybe even snatch the laptop on the way out. This wouldn’t have been a total waste of a trip after all. I’ve been wanting a laptop anyway.

  I’m up the stairs nimbly and fast. Then I’m in the bedroom, wrapping the cord around the laptop to stuff it more easily in my backpack. Already I hear the sound of the garage door closing. Fuck, Jaden, you gotta move faster than this.

  I run, stumbling and clumsy, through the hall, back onto the veranda. I grab my backpack, unzip and try hard to find a place to fit the laptop, but it’s already stuffed full of so many clothes. Fuck! C’mon, Jaden, you’ve come this far. Don’t give up. Just cram it in. Should I relinquish some of my clothes? I’m not sure… they’re all I have, and the computer might have a password on it. It might even be a piece of junk, not worth any money or anything, full of viruses. With the way my luck is going lately…