Night Owls

by Jenn Bennett

  “I can’t take them back,” Mom argued. “It’s one thing to abscond with supplies and a whole other thing to sneak them back in.”

  “They’re stolen? You’re a terrible influence.”

  “The supply manager was rotating stock and was going to throw them away because they expire at the end of the year, which was ridiculous. At least five months of use left in them. Probably more.”

  “So, you’re telling me these are leftover garbage condoms?”

  “They haven’t been used, Bex. You know I hate waste.”

  “Maybe you should hand them out on Halloween instead of candy.”

  “Don’t be smart. They’re perfectly fine. I bring them home for Heath all the time.”

  Too much information. I quickly steered the conversation back between the yellow lines. “If you’re asleep when I wake up, I’ll see you in the afternoon.”

  She rolled onto her side, with her back facing me, and curled up with her e-reader again. “Tomorrow I have to run an errand in the Mission at lunch. If you want to come with, we can get burritos at El Farolito. I have a coupon.”

  Of course she did. “Sounds good.”

  “Night.” She kissed her fingers and wiggled them at me over her shoulder.

  I stood there for a moment, grabbed the stack of condom boxes, and quickly made my way back to my room to stash it in the bottom of my wardrobe. Eight boxes. That was a lot of condoms. I could probably sell them at school in the fall and make some extra cash.

  Or . . .

  But I didn’t have time to think about or. I had only fifteen minutes to dress in black—definitely not a problem, since I barely owned anything with color—and make my big escape. Arranging dummy humanoid shapes under the covers never worked for anyone in the history of the world, so I just left a note on my pillow that said: I’m fine, don’t worry. I’ll be back before dawn. If you’ve busted me, please remember I’m the good kid. And if it’s Heath reading this, cover for me. You owe me, big-time.

  It took me several minutes and snail-paced movements to close my X-ray doors behind me and sneak outside. I tiptoed down the front steps and watched the living room window for movement. Nothing. I’d made it!

  “Psst!”

  I spun around and spotted a dark figure behind the stairway to the top-floor unit.

  Jack was wearing his old jewel-thief getup, with the black knit cap pulled down to his eyes and a backpack slung over one shoulder. I didn’t have a cap, but I had a hoodie beneath my tight jacket, and my hair was wound up in a plaited chignon above my neck.

  “Is that you?” I asked in a stage whisper, joy pinging inside my chest.

  “Come here if you want to find out.” Jack pulled me into the shadow and then against his chest, grinning as he kissed me quickly—first on the mouth and then, when I hugged him, on my neck, right below my jaw. And, whoa. Major shivers.

  I held him tightly, as if I could absorb all his goodness. He felt safe and warm and exciting, and I had trouble letting go of him.

  “Mmm.” His low voice burred against my skin in the most thrilling way. “This is already way more fun than usual. I should’ve hired a getaway girl a long time ago.”

  “Does that mean I’m getting paid?”

  “Depends on what you’ll take for payment.”

  I had some ideas, thanks to his shiver-inducing neck kisses. But when one of the women who lived in the neighboring teal-blue row house stepped outside with her terrier on a leash, I decided it was best to table all my lusty thoughts and get the heck out of there before we were spotted. “Let me get back to you on that.”

  Hand in hand, we rushed uphill to the bus stop. Jack never took Ghost on graffiti runs because she was crazy identifiable, so tonight we’d be slumming it on Muni with all the other late-night riders. It was almost like the night we met, only this time I was filled with excitement instead of dread.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said while Jack used his phone to find out exactly where the train was. There would be one or two more trains coming before the Owl took over the route.

  “Second thoughts?”

  “One or two,” I said. “But no chance I’m bailing now.”

  “What about Nurse Katherine?”

  I grunted. “She’s drinking wine in bed, which means with any luck she’ll be snoring in about an hour. Either that or she’ll be pushing expired condoms off on Heath.”

  “Um, what?”

  “She gave me a billion hospital condoms that expire at Christmas.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance, and I was instantly aware that this conversation was heading into untested waters. “Is this something she often does?” he asked carefully.

  “You know how thrifty she is,” I said with a forced shrug. “The hospital was throwing them away, I guess.”

  “Huh.”

  Ugh. Why had I even brought this up? “She says she gives them to Heath all the time. Not that I want to think about that. I don’t know. She’s just weird sometimes.”

  “A billion of them?”

  “More like a hundred. What, do the ER patients need to get it on before they leave the building?” I laughed nervously.

  “But they aren’t expired yet?”

  “December, apparently. That’s what she said, anyway. I didn’t look.” More like I didn’t want him to think I was studying the boxes in my room like a fiend.

  “A hundred condoms by December. That’s nearly one a day.”

  “Is it?”

  “We could break your record with Howard Hooper in less than a week.”

  I nearly choked. We, as in us. Was that a suggestion, or was he teasing? “Quality over quantity,” I managed to say over the erratic thump of my pulse.

  “Why settle?”

  I made a small noise. “You’re awfully confident.”

  “You bring out the best in me.”

  To hide my smile, I pretended to watch a car passing. But it didn’t matter, because the train was pulling up to the stop. I boarded ahead of Jack with a spring in my step. I even greeted the driver.

  Yep. I was definitely a goner.

  The train was mostly empty and fairly clean, and we settled together in a two-person seat. I assumed we’d be discussing the plan for his graffiti attack, but all he’d tell me was that we were headed for the Civic Center BART station on Market—where underground rapid-transit trains depart for the outlying counties beyond the city and across the Bay. “We’ll have some time to waste when we get there, so we can stop for caffeine if you need it.”

  I wouldn’t.

  As the train picked up and dropped off other passengers, we spent the trip talking about this and that. Friends. School. The art contest and my plans for using the scholarship money if I won. I even told him more of the story about my parents’ divorce, and about the mysterious artist’s mannequin being delivered and my email response from the wood-carving shop in Berkeley. He offered to go with me if I decided to talk to the guy who’d made my mannequin and find out how to contact my dad. If I was going to make the trek out there—behind my mom’s back, I might add—I’d definitely rather do it with Jack at my side.

  Not surprisingly to either of us, toward the end of our conversation the train broke loose from the overhead cable near Duboce Park (this happens all the time), and we had to wait nearly half an hour for the driver to reconnect it. By the time it dropped us off near the Civic Center, the BART station was closed and locked up.

  “Perfect,” Jack said, slipping on thin leather gloves.

  “It is?”

  “Yep. Follow my lead. And let me know if you see any cops.”

  This area was dodgy at night, but it was mostly homeless people and nonthreatening street punks. I wasn’t all that worried, since Jack was with me, though my nerves were bouncing with anticipation. What I didn’t understand was why we were here, exactly. It was a major thoroughfare, and though it wasn’t exactly bustling at one o’clock in the morning, it wasn’t hidden, either—unlike
most of the other places he’d hit.

  At the end of the block, he watched for a moment before we retraced our steps.

  “Where are we—”

  He stopped at one of the subway entrances. It was a small one—like many others around the city, just a railed-off area of the sidewalk with a BART sign. Normally, there would be steps descending underground inside the railing, but on this night the entrance was covered by one of those temporary plywood construction enclosures with four walls and a roof. A makeshift door was boarded up, with a laminated sign attached: ENTRANCE OUT OF SERVICE UNTIL ___. The blank had been filled in with the next day’s date, and the sign instructed riders to use an alternate entrance around the block.

  “Tell me if anyone’s coming and hold this,” Jack said, and before I knew what was happening, he’d handed me a heavy flashlight and—dear God!—was prying open the door to the enclosure . . . like cars weren’t rushing by, and like a couple of vagrants weren’t huddled inside a closed store entrance half a block away.

  He got the door open in a few seconds. “Flashlight,” he said, as if he were a doctor requesting a scalpel. I handed it over. We waited for headlights to pass, and he cracked open the door and shined the flashlight inside. Satisfied, he gave one last glance around the area, rushed me through the door, and quickly closed it up behind us.

  Trying not to inhale the unpleasant, dank smell, I surveyed the dark area with Jack while he beamed the flashlight around. We stood at the top of the subway entrance. A set of stairs on the right was marked for entering the station, and a nonworking escalator on the left was marked as the exit. Dull fluorescent light blanketed the bottom of the stairwell, glowing from behind locked scissor gates that blocked the station entrance.

  “It reeks,” I complained in a whisper.

  “Have you never used this station?” he whispered back. “It’s way better than usual. When it’s not closed up, homeless people go down there to the bottom”—he beamed the flashlight over the station gates—“for some primo private rest room time. The BART workers have to clean up shit and piss every morning. If they don’t, when they turn on the escalator, it gums up the works. That’s why half the escalators in the stations are always broken.”

  “Vomit.”

  “Right? My dad told me about it. Instead of spending money to have gates built up here to block off the escalators when the station’s closed, they just keep funneling nickels and dimes into repairing them. This one got so bad, they had to replace the entire escalator motor. That’s why it’s boarded up.”

  “And it reopens tomorrow.”

  “It’s already tomorrow.” He shined the flashlight under his chin, looking like an old-school monster-movie actor, with all his beautiful bones casting eerie shadows. “It opens in three hours, so let’s get to it.”

  Jack had every detail planned: a small head-mounted camping flashlight that lit up the area directly in front of his face; a portable airbrush system preloaded with metallic gold paint; three cans of the fancy spray paint I’d spied the first night we met; a small plastic container filled with exactly five extra nozzles (because he had to occasionally swap out nozzles so the paint wouldn’t clog, he kept track of the number he came with—couldn’t leave any behind or the cops could trace the paint brand); folded-up hand-cut stencils and masking tape; and, lastly, two masks to filter out the paint fumes, which we each donned. We were ready.

  He pulled his mask down to talk. “If anyone dangerous tries to get in here, jump the handrail and get behind me.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got pepper spray.”

  “Terrific, but I’d rather defend you, if you don’t mind. I have a modicum of male pride that needs feeding on occasion.”

  “Fine, but what about cops or people patrolling the station down there?”

  “They don’t patrol the station. They don’t even monitor the security cameras—not in the bud get. But if a cop comes from the street entrance, he’ll likely have a gun. So just put your hands up, and I’ll do all the talking. Hey, you okay?”

  “I’m not built for a life a crime.”

  “You want to bail? Say the word. I won’t be mad in the least. I’m serious, Bex.”

  “No way. Let’s do this.”

  “Aye, aye, getaway girl. Mask on.”

  While I stood across from him on the stairs, holding his backpack and handing him supplies, he started painting at the top of the escalator. It was hard to see much at first, because he was mainly spraying the escalator steps solid gold. But as he switched back and forth between the cans and the airbrush, the grated silver tops of the steps became gilded, and on the vertical planes between the steps, in a contrasting flat gold, the top of an R took shape.

  He moved down as he worked, step-by-step—because once he’d painted, he couldn’t go back up and fix anything without smearing wet paint. And I followed his slow path on the stairs, handing him supplies on the way down. The farther we descended, the less we heard pedestrians and cars passing, and the more it felt like we were headed into a hellish pit, where the devil himself would appear behind the station gates.

  Fear and excitement clashed inside my chest, churning up the same kind of distress I felt on amusement park rides—only, when I was riding the Grizzly roller coaster at Great America in Santa Clara, I didn’t have to worry about getting arrested or being stabbed by a dangerous vagrant.

  Nearly two hours passed. I spent most of that time memorizing the way Jack’s long arms and fingers moved as he painted. How his eyes crinkled in the corners as he squinted at his work, and how he rolled his shoulders to stretch out the tension in his sleek body.

  We could break your record with Howard Hooper in less than a week.

  And that. I thought about him saying that. A lot.

  By the time we got to the bottom, I had a headache from the paint fumes, and Jack’s fingers were cramping. But when we met by the gates, pulling off our masks, I beamed the flashlight up the escalator. It was something to see. RISE. Each letter was elongated and multiple steps high. The font looked glamorous and sleek, like the titles on a 1940s Hollywood movie, and he’d tweaked the perspective so that the R was smallest and the E was biggest, making the whole thing look even grander and more epic than it was. When the escalator was switched on, Jack explained, the word would float up the stairs, one letter at a time, like movie credits.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whispered, taking it all in. His Golden Apple signature demurely sat to the right of the last letter.

  He slung his arm over my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek, utterly pleased with himself, and rightfully so. “It went twice as fast with you helping. Oh, hold on. Photographic evidence. For Jillian.” He stripped off one glove and navigated to the camera on his phone before snapping several photos.

  “I wish we could see it when the escalator is on,” I lamented. “Maybe we should come back tomor—”

  Static crackled from inside the station.

  We both froze.

  It was a two-way radio, sputtering instructions. And footsteps. And voices that said, “Blah blah junction box blah blah escalator—”

  BART guards patrolling the station? Was it already time for them to open it back up?

  “Crap!” Jack snatched the backpack out of my hand, stuffing his head-mounted light and the rest of the supplies inside. He pushed me up the stairwell, and we took the stairs two at a time, racing to the top—

  —only to hear the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up to the curb right outside the temporary plywood walls that covered the street exit. And another two-way radio. And male voices talking about disassembly and barking directions to workers about where to barricade the sidewalk.

  These were not BART guards. It was the freaking escalator repair company, coming to reopen the subway entrance and conduct final tests on the escalator before the station opened.

  We couldn’t go back down, and we couldn’t leave the way we’d come in.

  We were trapped.

  Jac
k zipped his backpack and strapped it on. Then he pulled up my hoodie and whispered against my ear, “Get ready to run.”

  Was he serious?

  Oh, hell—he was!

  As voices approached the makeshift plywood door, Jack reared back, lunged, and slammed his shoulder into it. The door flew open, smashing into one of the workers. Shouts of surprise ballooned behind the door as Jack grabbed my hand and jerked me through the opening.

  “Hey!” someone roared as we bolted along the sidewalk. “We got transients!”

  I didn’t even look at their faces. I just booked it as fast as I could go. Chilled air knifed through my lungs. The rubber soles of our shoes slapped against the sidewalk, the sharp sound echoing off the buildings and the cars rushing past.

  “Hustle!” Jack shouted.

  Stupid short legs. I was slowing Jack down, which made me a lousy getaway girl. At the end of the block, Jack pulled me around a corner and straight into a covered alcove that harbored a café delivery door.

  He held up a finger in warning and then stuck his head around the corner. My heart hammered. Images of being chained at the ankles in a female prison flashed in front of my eyes, along with my life.

  Jack turned back around and grinned at me with breathless delight. “That was, I believe, what you’d call a close one.”

  We’d made it? They weren’t going to chase us down with guns and crime-sniffing dogs? I peered around the corner to see it with my own eyes, and Jack was right. We were in the clear!

  I stood on tiptoes, fisted the front of his coat, and pulled him down to kiss him—firmly, wildly, until our teeth clinked and I nearly bit my own lip. I didn’t care. I was high on adrenaline and in love. I felt invincible. Like the entire city belonged to us. Every fog-ringed streetlight, every neon sign, every jagged crack in the sidewalk. All ours.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, smiling against his mouth.

  “For turning you on to new criminal possibilities?”

  “For making me feel alive.”

  “Alive is good,” he said, offering me his hand. “But let’s get you back home before they call the cops.”