The Prince of Venice Beach

by Nelson, Blake

  Ailis waved away her mother and we went into her room. She showed me the website on her computer. MISSING PERSONS INCORPORATED was the name of it. She’d come up with some logo ideas, blowing up the letters M for “Missing” and P for “Persons” and fusing them together. It looked pretty professional. But I wasn’t sure we could put this on the Internet without getting into trouble. We didn’t have a license. We weren’t registered anywhere. I was technically a missing person myself, in the eyes of the Nebraska juvenile courts. So who knew what would happen.

  I was shooting baskets the next morning when my phone rang. I checked the number: restricted.

  I took it. It was Reese. The minute I heard her voice, my chest filled with a hollow ache.

  She was leaving, she told me. For good. She wanted to meet up before she left. I said sure, though I knew any contact was going to be painful. It wasn’t necessarily fun to hang out with people you were in love with, I was learning. Especially if it was to say good-bye.

  We agreed to meet at the Milk Bar Cafe on Washington. I took extreme evasive action getting there—climbing over fences, slipping through alleys—in case Grisham’s guys were around, or even Mr. Abernathy himself.

  At the Milk Bar, I got a latte and stayed in a corner by the window. I didn’t know if Reese was going to be driving the fancy car. Or taking a taxi. But no, she appeared on the street, on foot, with a big REI backpack and her hair tucked under a baseball cap.

  She looked excited, and a little scared. She’d bought a Greyhound bus ticket to somewhere back East—she wouldn’t tell me. One thing though: Her backpack was huge and it was stuffed to the brim. It was as heavy as a load of bricks.

  “Uh, Reese?” I said, lifting it. “This isn’t good.”

  So then we spent a few minutes in an alley behind the Milk Bar going through her stuff. I explained that you had to be brutal when it came to packing. You had to dump anything that was not absolutely necessary. Like the big bag of hair products she had. Or the two pairs of jeans. Or the six paperback books. “One book at a time,” I told her. “You finish one, you trade it for another.”

  “Who do I trade with?”

  “The other people.”

  “What other people?”

  I smiled at her. “All the nice people you’re going to meet in the truck stops and bus stations across the country.”

  When we’d cut her possessions by half, we repacked her bag. It was a lot lighter. “The trick is,” I told her, “less stuff, more money.”

  A hint of worry flashed across her face.

  “What?” I said. “You have money, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, hesitating. “Of course.”

  “How much do you have?”

  She seemed reluctant to say.

  “C’mon, let’s see,” I said.

  She got out her wallet. We both looked inside.

  She had $58 and some change.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “That’s not enough. Not even close.”

  “I can’t get any more,” she said, embarrassed. “My dad froze my accounts.”

  “You don’t have any cash anywhere?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t I just do what you do?” she asked. “Find free food? Dumpster dive?”

  “Not in the normal world. People will see you. You’ll get picked up by the cops.”

  I looked around. There happened to be a branch of my bank across the street. I looked at it. I looked at Reese.

  “Come on,” I said, taking her hand.

  After that, we went to the pier and sat on a bench facing the ocean. Somewhere out there was Japan and China and other places I didn’t know the names of.

  It was hard to picture Reese alone in the world. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t figure things out. She would. And it wasn’t like she could stay here any longer. It was a miracle she hadn’t been found already.

  Eventually, we walked back to the public bus stop, which would take her to the Greyhound station downtown. We sat on the bench together. I wanted to tell her stuff, and I did, little tricks of traveling that occurred to me as we sat there. Mostly I told her every way I could think of to stay safe. She listened to me, but we both knew nothing I said was going to make much difference. She’d find her way, like people do.

  When I saw the bus coming, my whole body tightened up. We both stood up. And then I couldn’t restrain myself anymore. I threw my arms around her. I held her to me as tightly as I could. Tears came into my eyes. She hugged me back, and then gently pulled away. I could see she was crying too, a little, but also smiling.

  The bus hissed to a stop. I helped her lift her backpack onto her shoulder.

  The doors opened. Reese turned to me. “Do you know what Strawberry told me, the day I met her on the boardwalk?”

  “What?”

  “She said you were the prince of Venice Beach.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re a good person. And that your friends love you.”

  I took in that information. I didn’t know what to do with it.

  “You comin’ or not?” said the driver.

  Reese leaned forward and kissed me on the lips: a single, precious, unhurried kiss.

  “Let’s go!” repeated the driver.

  Reese steadied herself and then climbed onto the bus. The doors immediately closed behind her.

  I stepped backward and watched the bus go. The ache in my chest was so deep and painful I had to sit back down on the bench. I lowered my head, so people wouldn’t see the tears falling between my shoes.

  TWENTY FIVE

  For the next couple days, I fell back into my old routine. Hoops in the morning. Surf in the afternoon. I couldn’t think of what else to do with myself.

  Jax and I kept checking back at the Pizza Slice for any signs of Strawberry.. It had been several more days since anyone had seen her. Jax was getting a little desperate now. One night, when Dimitri said something to us about moving away from the Pizza Slice window if we weren’t going to buy anything, Jax started yelling at him through the little window. Jax kind of lost it. This was not good as Dimitri was someone we all relied on pretty heavily for the occasional free slice or odd job. Dimitri threatened to call the cops and I had to drag Jax away from the Pizza Slice.

  The next morning, first thing, I swung by the Pizza Slice again. There was still no sign of Strawberry. I did a full boardwalk cruise that morning. I started asking around. But nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen her or knew where she was.

  That afternoon I played basketball with Diego and some of his cousins. But everyone seemed in a bad mood. People were pushing. Elbows were flying.

  Then Jax showed up. He wanted me to come to the police station with him, to see if they knew anything. So we went.

  Jax didn’t like being in the police station. I wasn’t so happy about it, either. At the desk, I asked to see Darius Howard but he wasn’t there. So we talked to a lady cop instead. She listened to our story. Then she checked her computer. They hadn’t picked up anybody of Strawberry’s description. Nor had anybody died that might have been her. Since we didn’t know her real name or address, there wasn’t much else they could do.

  Afterward, we walked down to the pier. I tried to remind Jax as delicately as I could that Strawberry had appeared out of nowhere, and might disappear the same way. But he didn’t want to hear that.

  Later, we stopped by the Pizza Slice again. I kept Jax away from Dimitri and talked to him myself. Dimitri wasn’t pissed now. He was worried about Strawbs just like we were. I watched him for a moment, with his dirty apron, stuck in his tiny kitchen making pizzas all day. It wasn’t like his life was so great.

  Then, as we passed Café Italia, Jax suddenly stopped and pulled me into a doorway. “Look who it is,” he whispered.

  I looked. Sitting at one of the outside tables were the Evil Twins.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s those guys.”

  “What about them?” I said.
/>   “They might know where Strawberry is.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. The Evil Twins probably knew more about what happened in Venice than anyone. Especially the sketchy stuff.

  “Dude, I’m not talking to them,” I said. “They beat the crap out of me and stole my skateboard!”

  “Dude,” said Jax. “Strawbs has been gone for a week. I don’t care if they killed their own mothers. We gotta find out if they know anything.”

  So we approached the café patio, moving slowly, carefully. As we got closer, I got a good daylight look at the twins. They looked even more evil than usual.

  We arrived at their table. I let Jax start the conversation.

  “Hey,” said Jax, his voice faltering slightly.

  They glared at us with cold, threatening stares. If they remembered robbing me, they didn’t show it.

  “Can we… uh… talk to you guys for a second?” said Jax.

  They barely acknowledged us. “What about?” hissed the blond twin.

  “We need help,” said Jax.

  “We don’t help people,” said the dark-haired twin.

  “We need your advice,” I said. “We need your knowledge of the boardwalk.”

  The blond twin stirred his coffee. Jax gestured for me to get my phone out, since I had a picture of Strawbs on it.

  “It’s about our friend Strawberry,” said Jax. “She’s missing.”

  Jax cautiously took a seat at the table and tried to show the blond twin my phone picture of Strawbs.

  He barely glanced at it. “What is she, some runaway chick?” he said. “So she left. So what? That’s what runaways do. They run away.”

  “She didn’t take her stuff, though,” said Jax.

  “So maybe she left in a hurry.”

  “It’s weird that she wouldn’t say anything,” I said. “We were buddies.”

  “Buddies?” scoffed the dark-haired twin, bored, looking at the phone. But then he looked closer. He recognized her. “Oh yeah, ” he said. “The chick with the pizza sign.”

  “Exactly,” said Jax. “Her name is Strawberry.”

  “That’s a stupid name,” said the blond twin. “What is it with these girls named after flavors? Pretty soon there’s gonna be chicks named Grape. Or Butterscotch.”

  The two of them smiled at that. I saw the dark-haired one was still wearing Chad Mitchell’s thick gold watch. Which bugged me.

  “Could you maybe ask around?” said Jax. “You guys know a lot of people.”

  The blond twin glared at us. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said, speaking up. “Just that you guys have more connections than us. You could put out the word.”

  “We don’t do people favors.”

  “Well, maybe we could do something for you,” said Jax.

  “What could you possibly do for us?” said the dark-haired twin, staring hard at the both of us.

  Jax and I tried to think of something.

  “Just like I thought,” he said. “You got nothin’.”

  “How about money,” said the blond twin. “You got any of that?”

  That was a painful question for me. I had money. But I’d just given it all to Reese.

  “I didn’t think so,” he grumbled.

  Then, as if to humiliate us further, the blond twin looked again at the photo. He took the phone from my hands and studied it closely. “I know this girl. Strawberry is her name? Ha-ha. Figures.”

  “You know her?” said Jax. “When did you see her last?”

  The blond twin shrugged. “I saw her… a day ago? Or maybe it was a week ago. I dunno. I lose track of time sometimes. Maybe if I had some more coffee…”

  He looked at Jax sideways. Jax grabbed his wallet out of his pocket. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  “I think I need two coffees. Actually, I think I need about three hundred bucks.”

  “Dude, I don’t got three hundred bucks,” said Jax.

  “Of course you don’t have three hundred bucks, you frickin’ street scum. How would you get three hundred bucks?”

  Jax didn’t answer.

  The blond twin looked back at the phone. His voice softened: “Now little Strawberry here, she might be worth three hundred bucks….”

  Jax’s face started to burn. I saw the muscles flex in his jaw.

  “A young girl like this…” the blond twin said. “Clean her up a bit…. Now you’ve got something, a person might be willing to pay for….”

  I could feel that Jax was about to explode. I casually took the phone back from the blond twin, pretending to look at the picture again, I slyly texted Diego: Café Italia. Need backup.

  Then the phone was grabbed out of my hands. “What are you doing with my phone?” said the blond twin.

  “Uh… that’s my phone,” I corrected him.

  “I don’t think so,” said the blond twin. “This is my phone. And you just tried to take it from me.”

  “You guys might want to think about moving on,” said the dark-haired twin. “The management here doesn’t like beggars in their café.”

  “We’re not begging,” I said..

  “No, I don’t have a dollar!” said the blond twin loudly, in the direction of one of the waiters. As he did this, he slipped my phone into his pocket.

  The waiter came toward Jax and me, as if to shoo us away. Another café employee, maybe a manager, appeared at the door and also moved in our direction.

  “I want my phone back,” I said quietly to the blond twin, though there was no way I could make him do it.

  Jax snapped. He grabbed the glass sugar jar from the middle of the table and slammed the butt of it into the middle of the dark-haired twin’s face. You could hear his nose break. The blond twin, quick as a cat, lunged forward, grabbed Jax by the front of his shirt, and dragged him over the table and onto the floor. I grabbed at the blond twin, but he was too big and too strong. Plus the waiter had joined in. He grabbed Jax too and helped the blond twin force him to the ground.

  Meanwhile the dark-haired twin, with his face bleeding, struggled to his feet and then attacked Jax, viciously kicking and punching him. All three of them began raining blows down on him.

  I did the only thing I could do. I picked up Jax’s chair and swung it down as hard as I could on the top of the dark-haired twin’s head. This knocked him down, but then the blond twin picked up his chair and swung it at me, very nearly chopping my head off with it.

  I don’t know what happened after that exactly. I got tackled by a different person and was wrestled to the ground. Suddenly several large bodies were on top of me with someone’s forearm on my neck, pressing down and making it impossible to breath.

  Then, at the last possible moment, a wavelike surge seemed to enter the patio, rearranging everything in its path. The people on top of me were suddenly torn loose. Tables turned over. Tourists scattered. Coffee cups, dishes, umbrellas crashed to the ground.

  This was Diego and six of his cousins. The waiter, who had been the one choking me, was thrown into a table, all his tips and change spraying out of his apron onto the ground. Diego got the blond twin in a headlock and rode him face-first into the concrete, landing his full 235 pounds on the twin’s cranium. The manager, on his hands and knees, crawled pathetically toward the kitchen. He got dragged back into the fight by his ankles.

  And then the cop cars pulled up, several of them, lights flashing, sirens squawking. I studied the scene from under a table lying sideways. There was no escape. We were all trapped in the front of the café, mostly by the huge crowd of tourists who had gathered to watch the patio-clearing brawl. Then, to my right, I saw the dark-haired twin, facedown among the broken glass, groaning and trying to stand.

  I crept over to him and stomped my foot down on his elbow, pinning it to the ground. As he gasped with pain, I reached down and tore Chad Mitchell’s thick gold watch off his wrist.

  Which I found out later was made in China and didn’t even work.

&nb
sp; TWENTY SIX

  I thought about Nebraska as I sat in the large empty holding cell in the Santa Monica Juvenile Detention Center. What would it be like to be back there?

  They’d send me on a bus probably, handcuffed to the seat in front of me. My return would be my original trip in reverse. The same highways. The same Burger Kings along the interstate. And then I’d be back in Omaha, back in the Nebraska system. I’d get transferred around to the different facilities. Maybe I’d remember some of the people. Maybe they’d put me with my old foster-care counselor. She’d be like, “Where have you been?” And I’d say, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  It was about ten thirty at night when I heard my cell being unlocked. A guard came in and handcuffed me. In my paper slippers and orange jumpsuit, I was led down the clean white hallway into an empty visitors area. Apparently there weren’t a lot of juvenile offenders in Santa Monica.

  There, I was surprised to see Ailis’s smiling face through the Plexiglas. She wasn’t really smiling I saw. She was trying to smile.

  I took a seat, my hands cuffed together in front of me. “Hey,” I said.

  “Oh, Cali,” said Ailis, sadly, as she looked at me.

  “Do I look that bad?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she assured me. “It’s just the jumpsuit….” Ailis had to take a breath to calm herself.

  “Where’s Jax and Diego?” I asked.

  She lowered her voice. “I think Diego got away. They got Jax, though. And those other guys.”

  “What about me? Are they gonna let me out?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ailis. “They said they have to process you, and then tomorrow you’ll go before the judge.”

  “They’re gonna send me back to Nebraska,” I said.