The Prince of Venice Beach

by Nelson, Blake

  I led Strawberry to the back of the shop and handed her the suit. “Change,” I said. Mei and I held a big beach towel up in front of her.

  Strawberry did it, though she wasn’t too happy.

  Once she got the bikini on, I handed Strawbs the towel to wrap herself in. She looked miserable with her ratty hair and strange, large eyes. She didn’t like being exposed to the open air.

  I led her out of the stall and down the boardwalk to the outdoor showers. There, I took off my own shirt, my shoes and socks, and set them aside. Then I got in the shower in my basketball shorts and started lathering up, so Strawberry could see how it was done.

  She stood there staring at me. She was shivering. She looked terrified.

  I scrubbed my chest, my arms and legs. A surfer was at the other shower, washing off his board and rinsing out his hair. When he left, I pointed for Strawberry to take his place.

  “You’re up,” I said.

  She stared at the shower.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Is it clean?”

  “Of course it’s clean. This is California. Everything’s clean. Except you.”

  She stared at the shower.

  I went over to her. I gently took the towel away from her. She looked ghostly pale. And she was really dirty. Her feet were black with street grime. Her hair was wild and tangled and so full of grit and dirt, I didn’t know if we could get it clean.

  I led her gently to the shower and pushed the metal button. When I felt the water was warm, I gently pulled her under it. She gasped when the water hit her. Her eyes opened wide. At that moment, I had the scary thought that Strawberry might be a serious mental case, that she might be too far gone and would live on the street the rest of her life and become a total bag lady. But I didn’t let on.

  I handed her the soap. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it. So I took charge. I held her under the water and lathered her hair up until she looked like a snow lollypop. I scrubbed her skull, digging my fingers in there, using my fingernails. This was pretty brave of me. Who knew what was living in there. It was a miracle she didn’t have lice or fleas or worse.

  Next were her shoulders and back. Those weren’t so bad. Then her arms and hands. Her feet were the worst. They were dirty and cut up, with blisters and broken toenails. I did my best, scrubbing different parts of her feet with a corner of the towel. Then I did her ankles and her calves but stopped at her knees. I didn’t want to totally freak her out.

  After that, I rinsed her off and got the towel back around her. We sat on a bench, in the sun, and let it bake us dry. Despite her resistance, you could tell she was fascinated by her new state of cleanliness. She kept feeling her hair and looking down at her clean feet. She stared at the back of her hands.

  “You need new clothes,” I told her.

  “I wear children’s clothes,” she said.

  “I believe you,” I said, since she was about five feet tall, probably ninety pounds.

  Also, I could now see how young she was. She had claimed to be eighteen. But that’s what all runaways say, since then you’re legal. Now that I could actually see her face and her ears and her shoulders, I knew she was more like fifteen, maybe younger.

  “Feels good, being clean?” I said to her.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You find yourself a place to live yet?”

  “I sleep by the pizza place.”

  “I know you do,” I said, losing my patience again. “That’s why you’re so dirty!”

  She lapsed into silence.

  “Strawberry, listen to me. You gotta find a real place. You can’t sleep outside. Do you understand that? This isn’t some small town. This is Los Angeles, the big city. Bad stuff happens here. It’s dangerous.”

  She said nothing and I realized I was being like an angry parent: ordering her around, making her shower, yelling at her. That was probably the wrong approach.

  I walked her back to the Pizza Slice. She got some “clean” clothes out of her backpack, which she kept hidden in an oil drum behind the Dumpster.

  I held up the towel again while she changed out of her bathing suit. Then we sat on her curb and ate pizza slices. We barely said a word. I watched the people walking by, keeping an eye out for Reese. Strawberry just sat there.

  “Since you sit here all day,” I finally said to her. “Maybe you could help me out.”

  I dug three pictures out of my back pocket.

  “I’ve been looking for this girl,” I said. “Her name is Reese Abernathy. If you see her on the boardwalk, can you let me know?”

  She looked at the pictures a long time. “Who is she?”

  “I dunno. Some girl. Ran away from home. Her dad is trying to find her. They asked me to help.”

  “My parents are trying to find me,” said Strawberry.

  “I’m sure they are,” I said, though it seemed like if Strawberry was this weird, her parents might be even worse. I tried to stay positive: “Even screwed-up parents worry about their kids,” I said.

  Strawberry seemed to ponder this for a second. But I could never tell what she was thinking, or if she was thinking anything at all.

  FOURTEEN

  A couple nights later, I was in my tree house, in my sleeping bag, balancing my laptop on my stomach. I was watching a video about the Civil War. My GED teacher had asked our class about the Civil War, and none of us knew much about it, which freaked her out. So now we were studying that.

  I went to the library and the same guy who always helps me found me a Public Television series about it. The show used letters and eyewitness accounts, so you could picture what it was really like. The Civil War was a long time ago, before cars or planes or anything really, though they did have cameras. And guns. Which reminded me I still had to figure out where to take a gun safety class.

  “Cali?” called Ailis’s voice. It was pretty late, so I was surprised to have company.

  I paused the video and pushed my door open. I looked down at her. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said back. There was a long silence. “What are you doing?”

  “Watching a video about history,” I said.

  She stood there for a long time. “Can I come up?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure that was the best idea. It was hard enough to concentrate on historical stuff without a girl sitting there. “I kinda need to watch this,” I said. “It’s homework.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything. She also didn’t leave. Something was going on with her.

  “All right,” I said. “Come up.”

  She climbed up the ladder and crawled in. She was being weird and quiet.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “My dad came home,” she said.

  She had told me about her dad. He was a scary alcoholic. He didn’t live with them but he would show up sometimes and it was always bad. First her dad would get drunk and scream at her mom. Then her mom would get drunk and the two of them would scream at Ailis.

  I made some space for her on the sleeping pad. She sat there. She couldn’t look at me. You could tell from her face she’d been crying.

  “Want an orange?” I said, pulling in my bag of oranges.

  She shook her head. She wiped her eyes. “What are you watching?” she sniffled.

  “A show about the Civil War.”

  “Is it good?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Did you know the South started their own country, and had their own money and their own president?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Ailis sat there. She didn’t say anything. She looked pretty shaken.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “My dad said it was a joke that I go to community college,” she said. “He told my mom it’s a waste of money and not to pay for me anymore.”

  “That’s not very nice,” I said.

  She blew her nose. We both sat there in silence.

  “Can
I watch this with you?” she asked, pointing to my laptop. The screen was paused on an old general with a huge walrus mustache.

  “Sure.”

  “Where do I sit though?”

  There wasn’t really that much room in the tree house. The only way for her to watch it was to lie beside me on the sleeping pad.

  But we figured it out. The problem was we had to touch a little bit, like our shoulders, which was no big deal but it was weird to suddenly be right next to a person and hear them breathing and every time they move you have to move a little too. It reminded me of foster homes, which weren’t my fondest memories.

  “Is this okay?” she asked, sensing my awkwardness.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said casually.

  I hit play on the video and we both watched. The guy was talking about this one battle where like a thousand soldiers got killed in ten minutes. That was pretty scary. But that was nothing compared to what happened next: Ailis started snoring. Not super loud or anything, but this odd grumbling, rattling sound. She had fallen asleep. Now what was I supposed to do?

  So I just lay there, and watched the rest of the episode and then, when it was over, I moved Ailis down a little, and put some of my sleeping bag over her. Then I rolled over so my back was to her so I wouldn’t have to listen to her snore.

  That was okay. It was warmer with another person there. And she was soft in a way. I mean, it was just my back touching her shoulder, but still, you could feel the girl-ness. You could smell it.

  But then, just as I was falling asleep, she woke up suddenly and jerked upright. I’d turned off the light so it was dark and she didn’t know where she was. She started to freak out. I reached out to her, to calm her down. But that made it worse. She threw off the sleeping bag and started banging around. She hit her head on the ceiling. She found her way to the door and pushed it open. Without a word, she scrambled down the ladder. I held my laptop open above her so she could see the steps. When she got to the bottom, she ran into Hope’s house.

  I had no idea where she went. Home maybe. I knew she sometimes slept in her mom’s car when her dad was around. So maybe she did that.

  The next morning, I went to the basketball courts and shot hoops with Diego. I texted Ailis and asked if she was okay, but she didn’t text back. Which was maybe for the best. I didn’t know how to help her with her family stuff.

  Then Jax showed up. We’d become buddies in GED class and I’d invited him to come play basketball with us. He wasn’t very good though. He threw himself around. He had this one move, where he’d cradle the ball in his gut and charge forward, head first, which was probably how he got all those scars on his skull. Not from playing basketball, but living his life that way. Head first. Crashing forward.

  Jax sat down and Diego and I ended up playing a real game against some guys from El Segundo. It was a good game, an even match. We all played pretty hard. And then something very strange happened.

  A girl appeared under the basket.

  I didn’t notice her at first. The courts are right next to the boardwalk, so random people often stopped to watch us play. But then I drove hard to the hoop and got fouled and I ran right into her. I had to wrap her up, so she wouldn’t fall. And then, with my arms still around her, I looked into her face.

  It was Reese Abernathy.

  I let her go. I stared at her. She stared at me. And then she smiled.

  “C’mon man,” yelled the El Segundo guys. “Take the ball out!”

  I backed away from her. I went back to the game. I kept playing. And while I did, she stayed right there under the basket, her arms crossed over her chest, watching.

  When the game was over, I picked up my T-shirt and wiped the sweat off my face I approached Reese cautiously.

  She put her hand on her hip. She said: “So you’re Cali.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I heard you’re looking for me,” she said.

  “Uh…” I said. “Yeah. I guess I am.” I was not prepared for this. And I was especially not prepared for how beautiful she was. She was gorgeous. Her skin was milky white and her lips were puffy and red and perfectly curved. The pictures had not shown this. And her eyes. They had this glow, this shine to them.

  “And what did you want, exactly?” she asked, grinning slightly. She seemed to think this was a boy-girl thing, like maybe I had seen her on the boardwalk and put out the word. She thought I had a crush on her.

  “Well, actually…” I said. But I was speechless. It was almost funny. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  Reese and I stepped away from the basketball court. “You want to get a smoothie?” I finally managed to say.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I took her to Seed, the trendy vegan place off Pacific Ave. It was expensive, but it was known as the “beautiful people” restaurant. Which seemed like the right place to take her.

  We went inside. I stared up at the huge chalkboard menu. Reese ordered a wheatgrass juice. I got the Sunrise Surprise.

  “How did you find me?” I managed to ask.

  “The girl with the pizza sign.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Strawberry.”

  Reese was looking at the gluten-free biscuits in the display case. “She came right up to me and said you were looking for me. She even knew my name.”

  “That’s pretty good memory, for Strawberry.”

  “She said you knew things. And I asked her what things, and she said, things about the boardwalk. So then I thought, well, maybe I should meet you.”

  “I showed her how to take a shower,” I said modestly. “So I guess that counts as knowing things.”

  Reese smiled at that. She seemed to like me. So far.

  We took our drinks to a table by the window and sat down. I still couldn’t get comfortable with how pretty she was. She looked like a model. Also, I wasn’t sure what we were going to talk about. This was a very difficult and unexpected situation.

  “So why exactly are you looking for me?” asked Reese, her smile lessening now. She was beginning to sense that something else was going on. I wasn’t just some crushed out boy.

  “Well…” I said. What was I supposed to say? Did I have to tell her the truth? It seemed like I did.

  “What happened was…” I started. I shifted in my seat. “Well, this guy… he asked me…”

  Her expression got sharper, more focused.

  “He wanted me to keep an eye out for you,” I stammered. “In case you showed up in Venice. He thought you might need help.”

  The smile vanished off her face. Her eyes narrowed. “What sort of guy?”

  “Uh…”

  “Like a cop?” she asked.

  “No, not a cop…”

  As I tried to think of a delicate way to describe Grisham, the memory of his shoulder holster crept into my thoughts.

  Reese stared at me with a firm, almost angry expression. I didn’t like that. I hated it. I wanted her to be smiling and happy—and beautiful—like she had been ten seconds before.

  She leaned closer. “Who is looking for me?” she said. “Tell me.”

  “He was a private investigator,” I told her.

  She stared at me.. “Where’s your phone?” she said.

  I tapped my front pocket, where my phone was.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you want to continue this conversation, let me hold your phone.” As she said this, she looked around the restaurant suspiciously. But there were only tourists there: girls in bikini tops, guys in cutoffs.

  I reached into my pocket and reluctantly gave her my phone.

  She slipped it into her own pocket. She glared at me again. It was chilling, that look. Reese Abernathy, I saw, was a complicated and formidable person. I guess she kind of had to be.

  We left the restaurant and walked down Pacific Avenue. “What did he tell you about me?” she said. She was tight lipped and walking very fast.

  “He said you ran a
way,” I answered, over the traffic going by. “That you were upset. That you might possibly… hurt yourself.”

  This made her furious. Reese walked even faster, shaking her head as she went. “So they told you about my mother.”

  I hurried to keep up. “They said your mother committed suicide.”

  This news seemed to bother her even more.

  “Is that not true?” I asked.

  “Depends on what your definition of true is. But yes, according to the police, the lawyers, the news media, and my dad’s friends, my mother killed herself.”

  I had no idea how to react to this. What was she suggesting?

  We walked for several moments without speaking. “How did you get involved in this?” she asked me.

  “In what?”

  “In looking for me?”

  “I just… I know one of the local cops,” I said. “I’m a runaway myself.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “From where?”

  “Omaha, Nebraska.”

  She turned and studied me, head to foot. “And you came all the way to California? How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  That seemed to impress her. She slowed the pace slightly.

  “So you don’t have a family?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “How do you live?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not that hard. It’s warm. I got a place to stay. There’s food around.”

  Oddly, she seemed to think about this, as if it could be a possibility for herself.

  “But nobody is looking for me,” I said. “Not like they’re looking for you.”

  Reese barely seemed to hear this. She seemed to have withdrawn into her own thoughts.

  We walked a little longer. Then she stopped and turned to me. “Listen, Cali, I don’t know you. I don’t know what your deal is. But I want you to know one thing: My mother did not commit suicide.”

  I nodded.

  “My mother…” She paused for a moment, overwhelmed by emotion. “Never mind. It would take too long to explain.”

  “I have time,” I said. “I have all the time in the world.”

  “The point is, I cannot be found. Or I’ll be in danger too. Do you understand? When did you talk to this guy?”