Poison Ink

by Christopher Golden

  The tattooist continued talking them through what he was doing, sharing odd facts about the history of tattooing and body modification, very serious about his business. Sammi watched his hands, how deftly his fingers moved, and she studied those blue eyes.

  Only when he set to work on Letty’s back, glancing again and again at the design he had drawn and then pressing the tattoo needle against her flesh, did Sammi have to look away. As she did, she noticed another door off to one side, between a metal cabinet and a shelf filled with plastic containers. The door had a padlock on it, and she wondered where it led. Not to the alley in back of the building. She tried to imagine the layout of the strip of shops on this block. If Dante had more space beyond that door, it must be storage or something. But if the shop was locked up, why would he need a padlock there?

  Letty hissed through her teeth.

  “You’re all right,” Dante assured her. “The closer we are to bone, the more it hurts. We’re above the tailbone here.”

  “Be gentle with me,” Letty said, as though she were the heroine of some old romance novel.

  Dante did not glance up from his work. He pushed the needle down again, moving it in a circle, creating the world, the ocean, the storm of his inspiration.

  “Always.”

  Katsuko offered herself up next. Since she was a swimmer, there were very few places she could hide the tattoo, and though she had made a lot of noise about wanting to shock her parents, when it came down to it, she became more wary. Her tattoo went on her right hip, low enough to be hidden by her pants or skirt, but high enough not to be revealed by her bathing suit. It did not take Dante long at all, because Katsuko’s tattoo covered only about an inch of flesh.

  T.Q. had hers done on the back of her neck, just below the hairline. It would only show if she wore her hair up. Caryn had a hard time deciding. She wanted to have Dante tattoo her belly, with her navel as the center of the design, the uninked core.

  The tattooist did not like that idea. “It ruins the design. And it won’t match your friends’, which I thought was the point.”

  Caryn looked irked; then Letty spoke up.

  “You don’t want it there anyway.” Letty reached around, gingerly, to touch the bandage Dante had put over her tattoo. “We’ll all be old ladies with saggy bellies someday. Even if you’re still thin, it’ll look awful there.”

  Caryn decided on her shoulder blade.

  As the time had gone by and the hour had become later, Sammi had watched in fascination as her friends were inked—branded. When Dante turned those ice blue eyes on Sammi, she took a step back, bumping into a shelf full of art books, overflow from the design studio in the front.

  The girls stared at her.

  Dante narrowed his eyes.

  Katsuko was the first to understand the expression on her face. “Sammi, you can’t. We all agreed. There’s no bailing on us now.”

  Then they all got it, and she saw it in their eyes. Disappointment. Anger. Betrayal. All along she had planned to go through with it, despite knowing how her parents would react if they found out. But now that the moment had arrived, she couldn’t bring herself to let Dante touch her with that needle.

  “I’m sorry, you guys. I thought I brought the money, but I think it’s in my bag back at Letty’s.”

  T.Q. smiled, looking relieved. “Don’t scare us like that. The four of us have enough left over to spot you.”

  Sammi trembled, caught in the lie. In the back of her mind she could hear her parents, could practically see them standing in the corner like ghosts, staring at her with angry, disdainful expressions. It had come down to a choice: disappoint and betray the expectations of her friends or those of her parents.

  “You guys, I’m sorry,” she said, feeling her face flush and her eyes begin to moisten.

  “Sammi,” Letty said, shaking her head, not understanding. “You were on board with this.”

  “What?” Katsuko said. “This doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “My parents—” Sammi started.

  Katsuko shook her head, hurt and angry. “Come on, Sam. You know what my parents will do if they find out. If it meant enough to you, that wouldn’t matter.”

  Sammi looked to Caryn for support but found none. “You’re ruining the whole thing, Sammi,” she said, her disappointment etched on her face. “Ruining it all. Now, instead of looking at these tattoos and thinking about how much we all wanted them, and why, we’re gonna think about how you didn’t want yours.”

  Letty sighed. “There are five waves in Dante’s design, Sammi.”

  Dante’s beautiful features had turned ugly. From the look he gave Sammi, it was as though she had insulted him, had ruined his inspiration instead of theirs.

  She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Sammi shook her head, reached up to wipe away tears, and then turned from them, unable to look for another moment at the hurt on the faces of her friends. She ran into the front room and pushed open the door, stepping out onto the street and letting the black-painted door close behind her.

  Once there, in the blue glow of neon from the Open sign, she felt exposed and endangered. This neighborhood wasn’t the kind of place where a girl ought to be walking alone—and she knew she was alone. She thought about taking off, going into a shop to hide from her friends. Her skin prickled with goose bumps and her face burned with embarrassment and tears.

  They’d be coming out any second.

  She pulled out her cell phone and flipped it open, even started to call her mother. It was still before midnight. Her mother wouldn’t mind. She had always said if Sammi ever got into any trouble to call, that she would come and get her daughter. But Sammi knew that whatever her mother said about “no questions asked,” eventually she would have to explain what she had been doing down in this neighborhood, and why she and her friends had been arguing.

  The door opened and the girls came out.

  Sammi didn’t even look up at them. T.Q. put a hand on her shoulder, a quiet reminder that as mad as they might be at her right now, they still loved her. In almost total silence, they walked back to Letty’s house. What little discussion took place had to do with who was going to sleep where. Once they arrived, they spread out on their sleeping bags on the floor of Letty’s room and watched television for a while, the room full of awkwardness and hurt feelings. They were disappointed and angry and confused, and Sammi could not blame them. She felt like a coward, and despised herself for it.

  In the dark, lying on top of her sleeping bag because it was too warm to slip inside, she could not take it anymore.

  “You guys, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice hitching with emotion. Sammi had never let anyone down this badly in her life, and she vowed never to do it again. “I’ll go see Dante tomorrow night. I’ll get it taken care of. I just…I freaked out. But I don’t want to ruin this. I want to show you what it means to me to have you all as my friends.”

  Letty sat up in bed. In the light that filtered through the curtains from the streetlight outside, her hopeful expression broke Sammi’s heart.

  “Do you mean it? You promise?”

  They were all sitting up, watching her now.

  “I swear,” Sammi said. “I feel like such a loser.”

  “You are,” Caryn said. “But we love you anyway.”

  She reached over to grab her jeans where they lay on a chair and plucked a folded piece of paper from her pocket. At first Sammi thought it was the designs that Caryn had done for them, but as she unfolded it in the gloom of the bedroom, she saw that it was Dante’s design, the tattoo they had inspired him to create. He had said he would give it to them so he could never duplicate it for anyone else, and Sammi realized he must have done that when she had been waiting outside on the sidewalk.

  “Perfect,” Sammi said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  “Go to sleep, girl,” Caryn said. “It’s been a long night.”

  5

  O n Sunday morning, Caryn’s mother came to pick u
p her daughter just after ten o’clock. When Mrs. Adams offered Sammi a ride home, she did not hesitate at all. Her own mother wasn’t supposed to pick her up until lunchtime, but she did not want to spend another two hours fumbling awkwardly around the girls who were her best friends in the world. They had all tried to be nice and behave as if they weren’t upset with her about the way she’d let them down the night before, but Sammi knew there was only one way to fix what she’d done.

  The damn tattoo.

  Now she rode in the back of Mrs. Adams’s SUV with Dante’s design folded in her back pocket. Rain pattered on the windshield, and the wipers had a rhythmic, hypnotic quality that kept drawing her eyes. Caryn talked to her a little—small bursts of conversation accompanied by halfhearted smiles—but it all felt forced. Even if the girls forgave her, Sammi knew that wouldn’t erase their hurt.

  She stared out the window, just watching the rain, and pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her Covington High sweatshirt. With the rain had come a chill.

  Mrs. Adams pulled into Sammi’s driveway and threw the car into park, then turned around in the seat to give her a smile. “Home safe and sound.”

  Grabbing her bag, Sammi popped open the door. “Bye, Caryn. See you tomorrow.”

  Caryn lifted her hand in a wave. “See you later.”

  Sammi forced a smile. “Thanks, Mrs. Adams. I’m sure my mom’ll be happy not to have to make the trip.”

  “Anytime, sweetie. You know that.”

  As the car pulled away, Sammi ran to her front door with her overnight bag over her head, fishing her keys out of her pocket. When she entered the house, her mother sat on the living room floor with the Sunday paper spread out around her. Linda Holland looked up and smiled.

  “Hey. What are you doing home? I thought I was supposed to come and get you.”

  Sammi stepped out of her sneakers and left them on the mat inside the door. Her house enveloped her with welcoming arms. The smell of coffee brewing seemed to ease some of the tension from her shoulders. For the first time since agreeing to get that stupid tattoo in the first place, she felt safe. “Caryn had to go home early and Mrs. Adams offered, so I figured I’d save you having to get out of your pajamas,” Sammi said. And this time when she grinned, it felt real, as though she’d woken up from a bad dream and found her mother at the edge of her bed, telling her everything would be all right.

  Her mom glanced down at the cotton pajamas she wore and the white socks on her slender feet. She didn’t sleep in the whole outfit, but on weekend mornings she pulled PJ’s on the instant she woke up and didn’t shower and change until she went to the gym. Most Sundays for the past few months, that had been uncharacteristically early. Sammi had missed the Sunday-morning ritual with her father today, but she took it as a hopeful sign that her mother hadn’t rushed off this morning.

  “You’re just jealous of my jammies.”

  Sammi went into the living room and plopped onto the couch, pulling her legs up under her. “True. Very cozy. Anything interesting in the paper?”

  “More every day,” her mother said. “All the things you think are boring when you’re sixteen—stuff you can’t imagine ever being anything but boring—becomes strangely fascinating when you get older.”

  “Sorry. Can’t see it.”

  “It sneaks up on you.”

  “On you, maybe.”

  Her mother gave her a familiar look that suggested the wisdom of the ancients and then looked back down at the paper.

  “You want to go to the movies later?”

  “If we can go at dinnertime. I’ve got some stuff to do today. Library stuff. I think I’m gonna meet Caryn there,” Sammi told her mother. It surprised her how easily the lie rolled off her tongue.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asked.

  “At the gym. The Patriots game is on later. He’s getting his workout in before he sets up camp in front of the TV.”

  Sammi rolled her eyes. She didn’t mind football, but the season felt like it started earlier every year. And when the Patriots played, the living room became her father’s man cave.

  “Fantastic. You enjoy that.”

  Her mother stuck out her tongue. Sammi laughed and hopped up from the couch. Maybe her parents had made amends. The way their relationship had been fraying lately, she hardly dared hope. Overnight bag in hand, she trotted up the stairs, all too aware of the folded paper in her back pocket.

  She’d promised the girls she would go back to Dante’s today. In the back of her mind she could still hear the whir of the tattoo needle, smell the ink, see Katsuko flinch as the little design—that tiny world with its five ocean waves—was scarred into her flesh.

  In her bedroom, she tossed her bag on the floor at the end of her bed and pulled off her sweatshirt. Sammi hadn’t bothered taking a shower at Letty’s house, just wanting to get home. But before she could shower, she had more pressing business. Moving back to her door, she peered out and looked down the stairs. When she saw no sign that her mother had abandoned the newspaper, she darted across the hall into her parents’ room. The taller of the two bureaus belonged to her mother, who always kept her address book beside the small jewelry box on top.

  Sammi slipped out her cell phone. Flipping through the pages of the address book, she found the number she wanted and keyed it into the phone but did not press the green button that would send the call through. The address book went back to its place on the bureau and Sammi hurried back to her own bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  Staring a moment at the number she had punched in, she hit the button. Her face felt warm, and she glanced anxiously at her door, hating secrecy. A song started to play on the line, and at first she thought it would be voice mail. Then she realized it was just a ringback tone, some thrash metal thing that pounded into her skull so that she had to hold the phone away from her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Zak? Oh, wow. I didn’t think you were going to answer. Hey, it’s Sammi.”

  “Samalamadingdong! What’s up? Hey, wait, is something wrong?”

  “No, no, everybody’s good. I just…need some help.”

  Zak hesitated. When he spoke again, the lightness had gone from his tone. “You know I’ll always help if I can, Sam. We’re family. Talk to me.”

  Sammi wanted to shout. She felt so trapped between obligations to her parents and her friends that it was as if she were all alone in the world. Cute Adam might be sweet, but they’d just met and she didn’t want to scare him off with any weirdness. Zak would never know how much it meant to her, just to have someone to rely on.

  Though she didn’t see him often—he was in college and five years older than she was—Zak was the only one of her relatives aside from her parents who had ever taken much interest in her. The whole family thought him bizarre, but he had always been a sweet guy, so they indulged him.

  While working toward his degree at New England Community College, Zak made a living handcrafting leather, everything from decorative masks to jackets, vests, and chaps for people who loved their motorcycles a little too much. He set up a booth at Renaissance fairs and that sort of thing. Sammi had always thought him wonderful, loved how he went through the world as an artisan, doing what he loved. If he had been a musician, he’d have been some kind of troubadour. And Zak had always encouraged her music.

  Sammi wasn’t alone. She reached into her back pocket and unfolded the paper, staring at Dante’s design.

  “You still going out with Rachael Dubrowski?”

  “Yeah, of course. What’s this about, Sammi?”

  Rachael was two years older than Zak, but they’d had a thing going on for years. Sammi had gone to school with her younger sister, Anna, since the first grade.

  “Rachael still has that tattoo shop downtown, right?”

  how’d ur sleepover go?

  The text from Cute Adam came through a little after nine o’clock that night. Sammi had just come back from the movies with her mother—Dad still celebrating a Pat
riots win—and when she got to her bedroom, it was a relief not to have to keep worrying about her shirt riding up to reveal the upper edge of the bandage on her lower abdomen.

  kinda weird, she texted back. long story.

  what @ ur date fri. nite? how’d that go?

  Sammi smiled and burrowed down under her covers. The windows were open and the curtains billowed in the breeze. The rain had stopped and the night air smelled amazing.

  pretty good, i think. he’s cute. smart. different.

  u think u’ll c him again next wknd?

  if he asks.

  huh. got a feeling he will.

  A warmth spread across her chest. She had only just met Adam, but she liked him. A lot. He was all the things she’d said, and clever, too. A little goofy, but she liked that, too.

  i hope so, she texted. A risk, but she felt daring. g2g2bed. talk tmrw?

  definitely. sweet dreams.

  nite.

  Sweet dreams. After last night, Sammi wouldn’t have thought it possible, but maybe she would have sweet dreams tonight after all.

  The old school bus shuddered, engine groaning loudly. Sammi sat in back, next to a window, with a freshman girl next to her who didn’t say a word. She rested her forehead on the glass and looked out at the houses passing by, the thrumming of the bus making her skull vibrate. Her stomach felt tight as a fist; she hadn’t been able to eat anything at all this morning. A glass of orange juice had been all she could manage, and that only because her mother insisted.

  The rain had cleared overnight, but the gray skies remained. The whole world had a muted, washed-out look, and Sammi had looked in the mirror this morning and thought similar things about herself. A gray girl on a gray day.

  A knocking sound came from somewhere under the bus and for a second she held her breath, wondering if the old beast would just seize up and drop its engine right there on the road. All of these old school buses rattled and moaned and belched out thick exhaust. Either they weren’t street legal and no one cared, or the laws were more lenient on bright yellow tanks.