Burn

by Shey Stahl

  “Not good.” Izzy laughs, and then a look of anger flashes in her eyes. “I cannot believe you had sex with that guy in my massage room. How do you feel about that?”

  “Actually pretty good.”

  Then both laugh at me, but as I’m driving, I think about whatever it is I’m about to do next.

  As we drive, I consider my plan. I wish I could slap myself sometimes before I do shit. I really do. Then maybe I would knock some sense into myself before I do things like this. But I don’t slap myself.

  Izzy and Scarlet are arguing about something and the more Scarlet talks, the more I smell alcohol. “Have you been drinking?”

  She hands me a water bottle from inside her purse. “Nobody’s stopping you from doing it.”

  I slap it away. “Do you really put booze in water bottles?” I pull into traffic on Washington Street and try not to run over the hobos who think they own the goddamn road. “I thought Tom was joking about that when he said you carried a water bottle of vodka.”

  “Don’t judge me. You’re sleeping on my couch and I have daddy issues.”

  “You’ve never met your dad,” Izzy adds.

  “Which is why I have daddy issues,” she points out. “Back to your problems, Mila. Where is Caleb, and why are we stalking him?”

  Remember when I said there’s a reason why Scarlet is my best friend?

  There is. She knows what I’m doing before I even tell her. It’s like she’s telepathic. Or psychic. I’m not really sure the difference between the two, or if there is one.

  “No one said anything about stalking.” Izzy suddenly seems nervous, but her eyes hold, I don’t know, excitement? Is Izzy Bizzy secretly a rebel?

  Well, you have to admit, the rebel idea isn’t all that surprising. She does have a tattoo the size of a toddler on her body.

  She slaps my shoulder. “Are you serious? Is that what we’re doing?”

  “I think he’s at home, but I’m too afraid to go there by myself.” Some dude in a Nissan cuts me off and I almost rear-end him. “Goddamn stupid fucking drivers!”

  “Yet another reason I use water bottles. Spill proof.” Scarlet smiles when she picks the bottle up from the floorboard of my car. “So we’re going to his apartment then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so lost right now.” Izzy isn’t great at keeping up with conversations. She’s actually easily distracted. “Why are we doing this? I thought you said you weren’t into him very much?”

  I look at Scarlet. “I’m about to make you feel a whole lot better about your life.”

  “Doubt that.” She knows exactly what I’m referring to.

  My eyes meet Izzy’s in the rearview mirror. “I lied. I really like him a lot.”

  “So why are we going to his apartment? Wouldn’t you want to go alone?”

  “Mila thinks he doesn’t like her anymore because he hasn’t seen her in four days,” Scarlet informs her.

  I should have gone alone. It would have been easier.

  “I didn’t say that.” Or maybe I did? Crap. “I just want to . . . I don’t know.” This sounds even worse when I try to explain it. “It’s been a few days and all of a sudden he stops coming by. I don’t get it . . .” My words drift with the thought of me being crazy and much like the emotional fifteen-year-old who faked her own death for a break-up. Did I tell you I even did up a death certificate?

  I’m thorough with shit.

  I sound pathetic. I really do.

  “You just want to see for yourself,” Izzy says, our eyes meeting in the mirror again.

  “Yes.”

  “Cool.” Scarlet claps her hands together. “Now that we have that settled, stop by McDonald’s.”

  “Jesus.” When you go anywhere with Scarlet, she demands certain things. Like McDonald’s. But I’m getting impatient, and I need to go by his apartment first. If I feed her first, I’ll chicken out and be left wondering all night.

  Scarlet flips her hand at me. “You want my help, you’ll feed me.”

  Izzy pops her head forward. “I could eat.”

  The peer pressure gets to me and I drive twenty minutes to downtown Seattle, catch every stoplight, and manage to get the bitches with me their food. Which, by the way, could have fed the entire firehouse.

  “Where do you put all that food?” I ask Izzy. I can tell by the way Scarlet is watching her, she’s thinking the same thing.

  “I’m very active,” she says, shoving a handful of fries in her mouth.

  I’m not at all surprised.

  Another dozen stoplights and we find ourselves two blocks down from Caleb’s apartment. And guess what, his truck’s parked on the street. I’d recognize that lifted white Ford anywhere. I’ve been by here every day, a couple of times a day, all four days, and it hasn’t been parked there.

  “Okay, so now what. You want us to go in there with you?” Izzy asks, trying to hold back laughter as she slurps down her diet Coke in a cup that’s as big as her head.

  Just as I’m thinking about going up there with maybe some lame-ass excuse about seeing if he was home and saying hello, Izzy gets out of my car and starts climbing up a tower crane across the street next to his apartment where they’re working on a new building.

  Caleb lives on the fifth floor. I have to stop her. She’ll kill herself.

  “Jesus, she’s like a damn spider monkey,” Scarlet notes.

  I get out of the car and point to the ground. “Get down here!” My order falls on deaf ears.

  Between the traffic and the steady mist of rain, I doubt she even heard me.

  This is just crazy.

  I glance over at Scarlet, who’s gotten out of the car now too and resting her chin on the top of the door and drinking from her water bottle. “She’s going to fall from that thing and break her neck. Then you’ll have an excuse to go up to his apartment.”

  While Scarlet makes a valid point, I can’t have Izzy breaking her neck on my conscience. Mostly because Gigantor would probably hunt me down and kill me. Stab me to death with his hockey stick or slit my throat with his skates.

  Reaching into the pocket of her hoodie, Scarlet pulls out my keys and dangles them in my face. “I have the getaway car, butt crack. You suck at this stalking thing.”

  My eyes narrow at her. “I should have never invited you.”

  “Mila?” Izzy yells out, but it’s more like a distant plea with how far up she is. I thought for sure she would slip on the metal and come crashing down by now, but hasn’t.

  Izzy yells something else, but I can’t hear her. Frantically counting the windows, I try to see if she’s even close to the fifth floor and she’s not. Maybe like the second, but that tower crane isn’t going to work out.

  “I don’t see why we don’t just go knock on the door,” Scarlet asks, watching a homeless man across the street who seems to be looking at Izzy on the tower crane like she’s Wonder Woman. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  Yes.

  “No.” I refuse to admit failure. “It wouldn’t.”

  For a good two minutes, Izzy yells at Scarlet and me from her third-floor climb. We have no idea what she’s saying.

  “I wonder when she’s going to figure out that we can’t actually hear her?” Scarlet pulls her hood over her head. “Do you think she’s been giving Gigantor too many blow jobs and he’s pounded the shit out of her brain so much that part of it’s dead?”

  I have to think about that one for a second. There’s actually some logic to it.

  I keep glancing up at the apartment and Izzy dangling from a tower crane. The realization that I’m twenty-six and stalking someone like some kind of jealous high school girl isn’t lost on me.

  In fact, it’s all I can think about. What have I become? All this for what? What am I proving here? That I’m certifiably crazy?

  Rain hits the side of my face as I let out a heavy sigh. “Come on, Izzy! Let’s go!”

  She must have heard that because she starts to come back down.
And I might add here a police car has pulled over two blocks up and a cop’s getting out of his car.

  Busted.

  Scarlet smiles. “This could get interesting. He looks hot.”

  When he begins to walk toward us, that’s when I really start to panic. Scarlet’s completely calm, she even waves at him.

  Cupping my hands around my mouth, I yell, “Izzy, hurry!”

  Don’t think I wouldn’t have left her if it came down to it. She chose to climb that damn thing. That’s her problem.

  Just as I’m about to run away, Izzy’s about ten feet from getting off the yellow monstrosity, she slips and nails her chin.

  And you would think right about now, we’re gonna have to head to the ER, right?

  Nope. Just wait.

  “Son of a bitch!” Izzy cries out, but she sees the cop and knows we have to scramble.

  Every time I look up, the officer is closer and Scarlet is getting giddy, rolling from her heels to her tippy toes, ready to run.

  Once Izzy is down, bleeding from her chin and down her neck, like a pro—something she probably learned from her boyfriend—she takes off running up the street and down an alley.

  Fearing arrest, all three of us run, laughing out of fear and panting heavily.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say we gained any ground or made ourselves less obvious about what we were doing here, but at least we managed to blend into the alley behind a dumpster.

  That’s about the time I face-planted, driving my face right into the pavement, and now two of us are bleeding. In reality, I had a reason to go up there now. I could ask him to stitch me up. If he can do that sort of thing. Maybe he can.

  “I can’t take you two anywhere.” Scarlet looks disgusted. “Now what’s your plan?”

  “We should go back to the car.” I don’t like dark alleys. Especially dark alleys in Seattle. “I’m sure we’ve lost the cop by now.”

  Izzy glances around the dumpster we’re hiding by and then covers her nose. “My God, did something die in there?”

  “Probably a body,” Izzy adds, moving behind me to block the smell and using my sweatshirt as her nose guard.

  “That cop looks athletic,” Scarlet notes. “I think I should introduce myself.”

  Just as we stand up to check the alley, Izzy elbows me. “I saw Caleb up there. That’s what I was yelling about.”

  “We should just leave. I don’t—” I stop midsentence when I realize what she said. “You saw him?”

  Scarlet rolls her eyes. “Now she’s paying attention.”

  I gape at Izzy, trying to figure out how the hell she could have seen him from where she was. She wipes her chin with her hand and smears the blood. “I think I need stitches.”

  “Focus.” I grab her bleeding face between my shaking palms. “You saw him? How?”

  She slaps my now bloody hands away, both of us wiping away red. “Yes.” She points up. “I couldn’t get high enough, but you motioned to where the windows in his apartment are, and there’s a dude standing near the window. Could be him. If he would have pulled out his dick, I probably would have recognized him.”

  Scarlet’s laughing, her questioning eyes scanning Izzy and me. “What? Did you see his fire pole?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Izzy nods and holds up her hands about a foot apart, like she’s imitating the length. “I totally see why she’s stalking him.”

  She’s exaggerating. If his dick was really a foot long, I would have run away.

  I’m not focused on that though. Instead, I’m caught between panicking and going up there to stop this nonsense. Izzy, however, chooses this moment to take off running down the alley to our left.

  This time her idea is slightly better. Adjacent to his apartments are condominiums under construction, only they had open walls on the side facing his apartment.

  Why I hadn’t seen them before is beyond me. Probably because I was never serious about this stalking thing. I think deep down my intentions were to drive by like normal nonprofessional stalkers do. But this . . . this I could work with.

  We haven’t made it up one flight of stairs before I slip. The roof isn’t entirely done, and the rain has created slippery steps. And being January, it’s icy.

  The thought isn’t far from my mind that if I do plunge to my death here, the Seattle Fire Department will be called.

  Then what?

  I would be stuck explaining myself. Unless of course I die. Then problem solved.

  Soaked from the rain, bleeding from my lip and with mascara running down my face, I’m white-knuckled as I climb five flights of stairs.

  At some point I think, What do I have to gain from this? But once I’m climbing, my logic is gone.

  I can pinpoint the moment the logic really left. It’s when we ran from the cop.

  Scarlet isn’t much more coordinated than I am. She slips, too, and tumbles backward down five steps, and then stands immediately, pumping her fists in the air. “I’m good. Christ almighty, I’m good.” And then laughs, holding her side. “Holy. Shit.”

  Izzy turns to look, then starts up the steps again. “And you think I’m the unstable one for climbing the tower crane.”

  Once we’re five floors up, we’re not able to see much, but I can see that he is in fact standing at the window looking over the city with a beer in hand.

  Nearly falling off the edge of the building, I have to push Izzy’s skinny ass up to the last set of stairs because they’re not entirely finished. “Cut back on the McDonald’s.”

  Scarlet stays where she’s at. I think her stair-surfing sobered her up a little more than she cared to admit.

  Izzy laughs. “What if he can see you?”

  “Fuck you, he can’t.” I kick at her but lose my footing and land on my ass. Again. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

  “You. You’re doing this,” Izzy points out. “Let’s make that clear. I’m a hostage.”

  “Amen, sister,” Scarlet yells from below us.

  “Hardly.” I try to get up again but slip. Izzy and Scarlet act as if it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. More than likely the sound is what’s entertaining.

  The sound of my ass hitting the plywood floors makes a slap so loud you’d think someone just spanked my bare cheeks. After tonight, if someone sees me naked, they’ll probably think I joined Fight Club and got the shit beat out of me. Or tried cross-fit again. Both are equally brutal.

  With all Scarlet’s laughing, she drops her water bottle she’d stored in her coat like a classic alcoholic. All she needs now is a brown paper bag concealing it. With no amount of amusement, her thumb runs over her nose, giving it a flick. “Goddamn it.”

  “You think it’s less obvious that you’re drinking in public by drinking from a water bottle?” I kick her again. This time she kicks back. “It’s pretty obvious that you’re drinking.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Motherfucker.

  All three of us immediately stop laughing.

  The officer is back, clanking his flashlight against the side of the building two-stories down. “You girls need to get down from there.”

  “Time’s up, bitch. We’re caught.” Scarlet sways as she stands, her face twisting into a scowl. “What are the rules on being drunk in public again?”

  “We’re about to find out.” I don’t care if I’m arrested at that point. My head hurts so badly, and I want Scarlet’s couch and Xanax.

  “Can you three please come down here?” the officer asks, but then I see from the distance that the dude’s smiling. I’m sure he heard our conversation.

  When we’re down to his level, he nods, “This building is dangerous. You guys need to get down,” he says with a motion of his flashlight to the stairs below. “And I might add, this is trespassing.”

  Scarlet’s the first to walk by the insanely good-looking cop with dark hair, her hands sensually running over his uniformed chest. “Whatever you say, officer.”

  He holds back a grin but d
oesn’t say anything.

  As I’m the last to walk by him, I glance at his name tag.

  Officer Ryan.

  You have to be shitting me.

  Down five flights of stairs, we stand on the street and I can’t help but stare at his name tag. Is he related to Caleb? They don’t look anything alike in the face, but I guess that doesn’t mean anything, right?

  He points his flashlight to the building. “What were you doing up there?”

  Izzy, you know, the spider monkey I should have left at home fucking rats me out. “Mila wanted to see if her boyfriend Caleb was home.”

  Apparently she’s scared of the law. And fuck her for saying his name. If he is related, now he knows who I’m stalking.

  I smack her head. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Why didn’t you just go knock on his door?” Officer Ryan asks, seeming entertained by this. Either that or he’s entertained by the fact that Scarlet’s acting like a fool and moving closer and closer to him. I swear to God though, if she steals his gun, I’m out of here.

  “She’s too much of a chickenshit,” Izzy adds, holding her hand to her chin that’s really starting to bleed. “I told her to just call him but she wouldn’t.”

  Officer Ryan grins, that same kind of smirk Caleb gets, and digs out his cell phone. Shit. He’s calling it in and we’re heading downtown.

  I wait in unbearable silence and contemplate throwing myself into oncoming traffic to avoid being arrested and my dad finding out about this.

  And then he says, “Hey, Caleb,” and I stop breathing altogether. “Do you know a Mila . . .?” He pauses, holding his hand over the receiver of his cell phone. “What’s your last name?”

  “Wellington,” Izzy says for me, because I fucking hate her right now.

  “I’m going to have you fired,” I whisper to her, completely serious.

  She rolls her eyes at my empty threat.

  The officer moves the phone back to his mouth. “Wellington? Do you know her? She’s apparently looking for you.”

  Caleb says something and Office Ryan grins. “Okay.” He tucks his phone away and crosses his arms over his burly chest, watching Scarlet out of the corner of his eye. Somehow, and I have no idea how, she found a sucker and she’s sucking on it. Anything to draw attention to her mouth, apparently.