Without Scars

by Jones, Ayla

  Not even the villain herself.

  Chapter Three

  Charlie

  I really didn’t know why I went to the auto shop. It wasn’t like I had to. When I called Ghost he said Nikki was keeping him company until she went to work.

  Okay, Nikki was still there, so that was why I went.

  When I pulled up she was laughing at something Ghost was saying as she poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup. I could see him leaning over the service counter, eyes on her ass. He was the pretty boy of our group—brown hair, crew cut, no tattoos, and hazel eyes. He’d done an underwear runway show during Miami Fashion Week a few years ago, and since then you couldn’t tell him every woman didn’t want him.

  “Here he is! Perfect timing!” Ghost announced, raising his arms in the air when I walked in. I did the same. We’d been doing it for years and I wasn’t sure how or when it started. “You picked a place yet?” he asked me.

  “No, but everyone wants tapas, right? That should be easy. Why?” I walked over to the couch in the waiting area. There were no other customers in there at the moment, so I took full advantage of the opportunity to recline.

  “I invited Nikki,” he said, and I twitched, instantly resentful.

  “Oh…” I said. “You invited her.” I was pissed that I hadn’t even thought about inviting her.

  “Uh, yeah. Fiona gave me a shitload of tickets to her comedy troupe’s performance,” he explained. Fiona was his boss’s daughter. “Nikki took six off my hands. She helped me out. Figured the least I could do was invite her.”

  “‘Oh’?” She raised her eyebrows; my disappointment was that noticeable. “‘Oh’ sounds like my invitation getting rescinded.”

  “No!” I said quickly. “You should come…once I figure out where we’re going.”

  “You want tapas? Coco’s is good for that,” she suggested.

  “Um…Coco’s is where you go when you want to bang eighteen-year-olds,” Ghost explained.

  Her snicker trailed off into a burst of laughter. Comfortable laughter. I guess they’d had some time to chat and feel each other out. “Are you speaking from experience?” she asked.

  We weren’t but Ghost and I still looked at each other guiltily to mess with her. “Is that why you go?” I asked.

  She took a slow sip of coffee then bit her lip as she pulled the cup away from her mouth. “Oh, yeah, nothing turns me on quite like hearing about how Mrs. Perry, the science teacher, is fuckable, even with the cankles.” I grinned. She was really fucking cute. “What is tonight, exactly?”

  “We get our group of friends together every Saturday night for food and drinks, and just to catch up. Good conversation. Good people.” Right in the moment, though, my body immediately rejected the idea of going out, as a wave of heaviness swept in. I think I literally sank farther down into the couch. I was still at a level of exhaustion that only a coma would fix. Fuck. Maybe if I took another nap and popped half a pill, I could power through tonight and not be a zombie in the morning.

  “You guys just bring people off the street?”

  “You’re hardly off the street,” I said.

  “Oh, right, we swapped robbery war stories...” She dumped packet after packet of sugar into her coffee. Then she shrugged. “Okay, I’m in.” Ghost mouthed Good God to me when she turned her back to toss the empty sugar packets.

  I clenched my jaw, didn’t smile. We never competed for women, and I wasn’t even sure she was interested in either of us, but I did want to know more about her…without violating the ironclad bro code. There was something about the fire I saw in her eyes when she was talking about dance, a mingling of loss and hope. I wanted to hear that story.

  Nikki picked up her purse and dug through it. “I should call a cab now…” She froze when she found her cell, and then looked at me. “Wait, it’s probably going to be expensive with traffic. Can you just give me a ride? I can give you gas money. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, I can take you. Don’t worry about gas money.”

  “Awesome. We should go now, though.”

  “Think you can get it done today?” I asked Ghost as I got up.

  He nodded. “Pretty sure. I have a buddy who can get a replacement here in a few hours. A few people dropped off already. But I told her I’d squeeze her in.”

  “Thank you so much, Ghost,” Nikki said.

  Then we both waved goodbye to him and walked out. “You can still call a cab, if you’re not comfortable,” I said, as I held the car door open for her. It was probably registering right now that we didn’t know a goddamn thing about each other. “That’s an iPhone, right? Take a picture of me. It’ll sync to your photo stream, and you’ll always have it.” Killers probably didn’t offer ways to be identified so easily. “Or just send it to someone in your phone. Like a fri…” She took a picture. “Wow. I was definitely talking when you did that. I don’t even want to know what that looks like.”

  She slid into the passenger seat. “If you turn out to be crazy,” she said, tapping away on her cell, “you’ll be the first person with a wanted poster that looks like you’re sneezing. It’s pretty funny. Anyway, I just sent it to my best friend with your license plate number, name, physical description, the name of this place, and our anticipated arrival time.”

  “I get it. I know what kind of world we live in,” I said as I cranked the ignition, and we cruised into traffic. She leaned over the center console and snapped a selfie with both of us in it.

  “What? There’s always more than one picture on the wanted poster.” She burst out laughing, glancing between her phone and me. “If it helps, you actually…didn’t look bad that time.”

  “Umm…thanks? So where are we headed exactly?”

  “Castles and Cupcakes,” she said, telling me the street address so I could enter it into my phone’s maps app. “The Medieval Times knockoff for kids’ parties. It’s not far at all.”

  “Castles and Cupcakes? My sisters used to love that place. Whoa. Am I in the presence of royalty? If I had known, I would’ve worn a collared shirt.” I rubbed my chin and shrugged. “Maybe shaved or something...”

  She laughed. “Oh God. I’m not part of the show. I work behind the scenes. I manage the schedule. Someone has to make sure Lil’ Susie gets her Princess Rescue party at four on Saturday, and not Lil’ Johnny’s Wednesday two o’clock sword fight. It’s important work, but mostly I do it for the free buttercream frosting.”

  I chuckled. “Hey, speaking of, have you actually eaten? I mean, real food. After all that dancing you have to be hungry. I know a really good place on the way. Do you like Cuban food?” I asked. “Stupid question.”

  She nodded, smiling. “I am Cuban, on my mom’s side. Definitely love the food. Thank you but I’ll get something at work.” She was watching me closely, studying every driving maneuver I made and monitoring my mirrors. “So, what do you do? Ghost and I were talking about you right before you walked in. He said you’re always up at odd hours. He wasn’t surprised you got robbed. He said that guy could’ve stripped all your clothes off because you were probably passed out.”

  “Ghost finds any excuse to think about me naked. Actually, I work in a tiny cubicle for a tech company that connects overseas students with American tutors. But I’m in the process of quitting to work on my YouTube channel full-time. My web series. It got picked up by a company that produces Internet shows.”

  “Whoa. Congrats. So, you act?”

  “And write and produce and edit and get licenses to film in places and hold castings, and pretty much everything…me and my best friend, Samira. With the company, Hillington Media - Digital, stepping in, it gives us a huge break to just focus on the writing and producing and acting part. I do all the writing, but Samira gives a lot of input on the female character she plays.”

  “That’s really cool. What’s it about?”

  “Well, Samira and I have known each other since we were fourteen, and we both went to Leeward University. We were part of the f
irst group of co-ed roommates when the school changed its roommate gender policy after our freshman year. It made the news. We were always getting media requests for interviews, and I got an idea about doing a Q&A on YouTube. It got five thousand hits in a day or two. So we started doing it weekly, focusing on different topics, like how to handle it when we wanted to have dates over. Or have people sleep over…”

  “I’ve never lived with a guy. Was it weird? Did it change your relationship to something more than platonic?”

  “She got herself a boyfriend early on—Patrick, the guy she’s married to now—and I dated a few girls over the four years. I don’t think we ever got a chance to even think of each other that way, which is cool. But then I wrote a short story about two childhood best friends, Chuck and Sami, whose relationship starts to change when they room together in college. My creative writing professor loved it and helped me turn it into a full-length manuscript. Two years ago, Samira and I were hanging out and talking about college and she brought it up. She said a lot of people were making their own web shows about all kinds of shit, and we could do it. Our parents gave us a loan, I eventually wrote the pilot, and we turned my channel into a fictional series, How to Fuck up a Friendship.”

  “Oh, so that’s why stories are your favorite part.” Snail pace traffic finally gave me a chance to really look over at her, and she was holding a smile. Maybe it was just something she did a lot. But I liked that she was talking to me while she was doing it.

  “Yeah, and our characters are us—I pulled a lot of details from our real lives—but I get to weave these really cool backgrounds in that don’t exist, too. It’s like being in a parallel universe. Sometimes fiction is the only chance you ever get to do what you couldn’t.”

  “How to Fuck up a Friendship,” she said with a giggle and tapped away on her cellphone. “‘When their university announced a co-ed dorm room pilot program, Chuck and Sami were the first to sign up. Now that they’re living together, it’s the ideal situation for the lifelong best friends. So, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, just everything.’ Whoa, the new season starts soon. Quick recap, please.”

  “Let’s see…Chuck has always secretly been in love with Sami, since they were kids. He had very idealistic notions of her growing up. He could never work up the nerve to ask her out. As an adult, he still idealizes her, but he has a lot of grownup cynicism mixed in now. He doesn’t think he’s good enough for her.

  “Everything’s fine for a while, until she brings home a guy one night, and Chuck hears them having sex through the door. He crashes in another friend’s room, and he can’t sleep. Next morning, he starts sabotaging her relationship with the guy. He does so much damage—he loses himself in destroying Sami’s relationship—and he puts it above everything else. Chuck feels horrible eventually, though. He decides to move out, but Sami comes home after the breakup one night and climbs into bed with him. And it ended with a cliffhanger about whether they slept together or not. Season finale is pushing one hundred thousand views as of last month, the most of any episode, more than all the others combined.”

  “Oh, I’m so in. I’m totally subscribing. And watching all of them.”

  “Well, the first three aren’t great. Sound’s off. Lighting’s wrong. I’m blatantly staring at the camera in some scenes. Shoddy camera work. Dialogue felt forced and contrived in some places. The writing is kind of shaky on my part. I wasn’t good at putting a story together back then, maybe not great now, either. A little too much angst. We emoted a lot. So, maybe skip those?”

  She frowned. “Geez, you’re pretty self-critical. I thought I had that market cornered. Couldn’t have been that bad if that company liked it, right? And all the people who watch? You have thousands of subscribers. They obviously saw something they liked. Tell me what’s amazing about it.”

  “Well…I get to work with my best friend, and do what we both love. She really fought for the show. It’s because of her that Hillington bought it and licensed season one to show on their website. They want to sign us for at least three more series and for us to give them the right of first refusal option on any other scripts, too,” I explained. “We’ll probably take care of some of that tomorrow morning. We have a video conference with Hillington after our cast meeting and table read.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a stunned expression on her face, like I’d spoken gibberish. “How are you so subdued right now? I would be freaking out. When I got into So Cal Ballet…it felt like a dream nearly every day I was there. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”

  I nodded. “Yeah but, truthfully, I was just bullshitting on the Internet like everyone else when it happened.” I’d wanted to be a writer since the first time I watched the first episode of The Sopranos with my dad—against my mother’s wishes—when I was a kid. But my own writing never went anywhere in the past, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t get an agent and my work got rejected faster than I could send more out. How to Fuck up a Friendship sprung from wallowing deep in fuck this shit city. I hadn’t expected it to succeed, because after so much failure I had no endgame, no expectations. So, it wasn’t that I was subdued; I didn’t know how to feel about the way things had changed. Years of crushing feelings of inadequacy didn’t just go away because someone finally patted me on the back.

  “I just want season two to be better. Needs to be,” I continued. Tomorrow, we were presenting the entire new season as Samira and I saw the story progressing. Then media suits were going to be critiquing and judging the details. Preparing my writing had been an exercise in insanity the past several months, and why I had barely slept on a regular schedule the past few weeks. Why I was probably Fallon’s best customer. Final touches had turned into final-final touches and then one more final-final-final. Okay, there were two more after that. It never actually felt finished.

  Because it never felt right.

  To save myself from slipping into mindless obsession right there in the car, I changed the subject. “So, So Cal Ballet? That sounds serious. Is this like one of those dance movies where the frustrated ballerina, tired of her traditional moves, picks up some edgier ones, and finally gives some life-altering, standing ovation-worthy performance later?”

  “I wish my life were like those Step Up movies but, no, the company didn’t renew my contract a couple years ago. Dance has become a bit of a pipe dream since then. That audition was actually my complete fall from grace. Or rather an ass shaking while grinding on a bunch of other girls in pseudo girl-on-girl, guy fantasy crash-landing,” she said flatly. “And then in the ironies of all ironies, I was terrible at the thing I’m turning my nose up at. Complete and utter failure today.” A gray replica medieval castle with pink flags waving atop came into view in the distance, and I followed the posted signs to the employee lot.

  “Wow. I’m sorry…” I empathized with her career disappointment.

  “I thought you liked stories?” But that wasn’t really hers. What she had told me sounded more like the end of what she was used to, or at least the beginning of something unfamiliar. “Maybe you can put it in your show. I can act.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I manage to pull off Functional Adult, fooling many. Someone gives me paperwork every day and trusts me not to just shred it into confetti. So, yeah, I can definitely be the girl from across the hall, the dancer with a past. Maybe I’m into Sami and it’s a love triangle….dun-dun-dun,” she teased. “But I want some cred if you end up using any of my real storyline.”

  “Can’t use it if I don’t actually know it. Tell me what I missed in the middle tonight.” No way Ghost was going to get the final ask.

  She leaned into the window after she got out of the car. “Thanks for the ride…and for not being a serial killer.”

  “You’re welcome?” I said, laughing.

  “And consider me for a role. I might really need a new career.” She pushed back from the car. I smiled without answering and waved one last time as she disappeared into the castl
e. Nikki was doing what everyone always did when they found out about my show: throwing out random ideas about the plot, as if I didn’t have enough of that in my head already.

  Even just talking about the show with her made me nervous about the meeting tomorrow. Would those guys at Hillington Media even get my direction in the first place? Would they understand that Chuck wasn’t supposed to be a conventional hero, that I was intentionally exaggerating his flaws, and that the road to love wasn’t the comfortable, easy route the audience may have wanted?

  Shit. I probably needed to tone it down and make it safer. It was still early in the day. I had plenty of time to work on a few story arcs before we went out tonight.

  I reached into a cup holder and retrieved the baggie of pills I’d hidden beneath an old McDonald’s cup. I threw my head back and shook two pills into my mouth.

  Chapter Four

  Nikki

  “I got the job!” I told my co-workers when we reached the Castles and Cupcakes parking lot.

  “What? I thought you said you bombed it?” Denise asked. She wriggled out of her costume in a large shadow by her car. “That’s why we spent the last hour mocking that choreography you showed us.” Two girls bumped me with their butts, imitating a dance move.

  “Quit! Or you won’t get the comedy show tickets, bitches!” I yelled. “And I did bomb it…” But during a break at work I’d faked enough fearlessness to call the coordinator with the company that held the audition today, to hopefully sell my other dance skills. I was really glad I did. Apparently the judges all agreed that I sucked, but they all had also commented on my ballet freestyle and how exceptional it was. After asking if it was original choreography (it was) and if I could do more (I could), the coordinator told me he didn’t have anything on my level, but he did have a job opening that a lot of other dancers he knew had turned down. He hadn’t bothered to ask anyone else. His sister was a high school teacher and in charge of the drama club. They were putting on West Side Story and they needed a choreographer for the musical numbers. He really sold it, though, when he added, “It pays.”