No Memes of Escape

by Olivia Blacke

  “Like I said, a lark. And the boyfriend stuff was water under the bridge. Besides . . .” Amanda paused. She seemed to be considering her next words carefully. “Have you ever been friends with a bully?”

  “Not exactly friends. There was this girl, Carin Butcher, who bullied me when we were kids, but my parents still forced me to invite her to birthday parties anyway. I try to be nice when I see her now, and we used to end up at the same events a lot because Piney Island is so small, but I don’t think we’re ever gonna be friends. She’s still mean to me to this day.”

  “Bullies are the worst.”

  “Hashtag fact,” Izzy agreed.

  “Then you guys understand. Part of me was hoping that Vickie had grown up and become a nicer person. The other part of me was hoping she had split ends or a botched nose job. I was wrong on all counts. But by the time I figured that out, I’d already paid my share of the escape room, so I tried to make the best of it. And we all know how well that turned out.”

  Izzy grunted in affirmation. “For reals.”

  Amanda’s phone chimed, and she glanced down at it. “Looks like the pics have transferred.” She pushed a few buttons. “I’m logged out of your account. Anything else?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Sure, anytime,” Amanda said, walking us to the door.

  “You really think those pictures will help?” Izzy asked as we trudged down the stairs. They were a lot easier going down than they had been coming up, but there were still a whole lot of steps.

  “Who can say? They certainly can’t hurt your case.”

  Izzy looked over her shoulder, back toward Amanda’s apartment. “You think she did it?”

  I shrugged. “Hard to tell. She tried to play it off as no big deal, but I think she was still salty that her freshman boyfriend left her for Vickie. She wouldn’t have given me those pictures if she thought there was any evidence on them, but she sure wasn’t eager to let me see them in the first place.”

  “Oh, please, she was worried that you might see a less-than-flattering angle. It’s Sunday morning, and even though she was at home alone, she had on makeup and she’s redone her nails since we saw her on Friday.”

  Izzy was more observant than I’d previously realized. “So?”

  “If her Instagram obsession and her neatly designed apartment are any indication, she really cares about appearances. A lot. You know how when you take a selfie, you’re always supposed to take it from above you, and off to your ‘good’ side?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” I knew how to work the angles to look my best in selfies. It was one of the perks of practically growing up with a smartphone in my hand. It was hard to work all the tricks while getting touristy landmarks in the background, but I’d gotten better at it since coming to New York, where practically every street corner was photo op–worthy.

  “Whaddaya wanna bet there’s a picture in there where she’s got a booger or something?” We both giggled at the thought. For someone who seemed to care about appearances as much as Amanda did, that would be devastating. I made a mental promise to myself that if we did find a picture like that, unless there was vital evidence in that shot, I would delete it.

  Once we got out onto the street, I looked around, uncertain which neighborhood we were in. The street was lined with everything from tattoo parlors to holistic massages to one place with blacked-out windows and a hand-lettered sign that read, “Appointments only.” We’d passed a small park on our way over. In typical New York fashion, half of its occupants pushed strollers and the other half pushed grocery carts piled high with all their earthly belongings. “Where exactly are we?”

  “Alphabet City.” She pointed to a street sign. “We’re on Avenue C. Where the avenues run out of numbers on the edge of the East Village, Alphabet City begins, and continues to the river. This neighborhood had the best twenty-four-hour café back in the day. We’d sneak out and come all the way from Staten Island to sit in the garden until the wee hours of the morning. And the food! I mean, Parker can cook, don’t get me wrong, but their menu was divine.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “Like everything else, they eventually folded. I think there’s a dry cleaner in that spot now.”

  “Want to walk by and see?” I suggested.

  “No way. Too depressing.” Izzy led the way back to the subway, and I hurried to keep up with her. I glanced down at my phone to check the time. “Got someplace to be?”

  “Between the long subway ride and transferring all those pictures, that took longer than I’d expected. It will take a while to get home, and I promised Betty I would cover for her tonight. If I wanted to get all of Aunt Melanie’s clothes washed, dried, and folded before work, I should have started an hour ago.”

  “Leave it to me,” Izzy volunteered. “I’m off tonight.”

  “I can’t ask you to wash my aunt’s laundry.”

  “You’re not asking. I’m volunteering. Besides, I like doing laundry. It’s soothing. Gives me a chance to think.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Well, if you insist . . .” I handed her my keys, knowing she couldn’t access the building, much less my aunt’s apartment or the laundry room in the basement without them, and she’d given her keys back when she moved out abruptly. “Thanks.”

  “No worries,” Izzy said.

  On the train ride back to Williamsburg, I brought up the idea of throwing Parker a surprise birthday party. Izzy was all over it and was eager to get started. “You know, I don’t want to hijack Parker’s special day, but I’m sure he won’t mind if this doubles as my going-away party,” I suggested.

  “Don’t even say that. Trust me. I know the murder apartment wasn’t your speed, but we’ll find something.”

  “Even if we could find an apartment, and could manage to swing the exorbitant broker’s fee . . .”

  “Extortion is more like it,” Izzy grumbled.

  “Agreed. Even if we scraped together enough money to rent a place, the clock’s ticking. My aunt wants me out in three days.”

  “So, we get creative. Leave it to me.”

  Izzy had regaled me with stories of some of her previous creative housing solutions, and frankly, they horrified me. “I’m not squatting in a schoolhouse or pitching a tent in a graveyard or any of your other wacky ideas.”

  “Never even crossed my mind,” she said. “Don’t you worry. Like I told you, I’ll find us something. I’ve got this.”

  16

  Cosmic Raleigh @RealRaleighRousedale ∙ July 14

  .@CosmicPossumBrooklyn is playing Clubsburg Thursday, 9PM—come out for the best Bluegrass, Banjos, & Beer this side of the bridge! #livemusic #bluegrass #banjonation #CosmicPossum

  The Sunday-night shift at Untapped Books & Café was usually quiet, but tonight it was deserted. I glanced at the time. It was nine o’clock. We hadn’t had a single customer in almost an hour, and didn’t close until eleven.

  Normally, if it wasn’t busy, I would hang out near the kitchen and chat with Parker. He was teaching me a little sign language, and in exchange, I was trying to teach him how to juggle. But Silvia was covering the night shift as usual, and while I enjoyed her company—she had a wicked sense of humor—she got annoyed if the waitstaff spent too much time hanging out in the cramped kitchen. Andre was running the register, and he’d sent the other server home at seven when it became clear that we could handle the evening on a skeleton crew.

  When a customer did finally walk in, I was able to give him my full attention. Which was fortunate, because it was the same guy who’d come in earlier, the one who had called me by my name. Now it was my turn. “Raleigh, right?” I’d been waiting tables on and off since I was seventeen, and nothing brought in the tips quite like a big smile and remembering the names of the regu
lars. It was harder in Williamsburg than it had been in Piney Island, Louisiana, where I’d practically grown up with most of the patrons of the Crawdad Shack, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  I glanced over at the sea of available tables. “Sit anywhere.”

  His face blossomed into a grin, and he ran one hand through his slicked-back hair in an unconscious gesture. “Don’t mind if I do. Which one’s in your section?”

  I liked the way he spoke. His voice had an almost rhythmic cadence to it, and while there wasn’t even the slightest hint of an accent I could detect, he spoke slower than most New Yorkers, so I didn’t have to concentrate to keep up with what he was saying. I waved my arm at the dozen empty tables. I grinned at him. I enjoyed feeling like we shared a joke, even if it was a silly one. “The one with the spaceship.”

  Out of all of the unique tables, my favorite looked like someone had upcycled a kid’s curtains into a tablecloth. On it, green space invaders with bulbous heads shot ray guns at astronauts in bulky white spacesuits while behind them, UFOs and other spacecraft battled among the stars. It was fun, and the more I looked at it, the more details I found, such as a startled black-and-white dairy cow caught in the tractor beam of a flying saucer.

  Raleigh settled at the table I suggested. “Do you have a menu or something?”

  “We have rotating options,” I told him. “In other words, a limited selection that changes at the whim of the chef.” Parker handled the creative side of the kitchen and Silvia served similar dishes in the evening, until the ingredients ran out or the kitchen closed. “Vegan? Vegetarian? Dietary restrictions or food allergies?”

  “None of the above,” he replied.

  “Then I would recommend the turkey club on locally baked wheat bread, grilled flatbread pizza with chorizo and olives, or an all-American grilled cheese sandwich with a cup of gazpacho.” In the winter, the grilled cheese would come with tomato soup, but in the hot summer months it was served with a cup of cold gazpacho.

  Once Todd realized that the air conditioner was working properly for the first time since I’d been here, he promptly turned it up until it was a balmy seventy-three degrees inside. To save money. Despite that, Parker’s breakfast chili had been an immense success and had sold out before the lunch rush started.

  “Can I get pickles on that grilled cheese?”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I liked pickles as much as the next person. With a burger. I’d never tried them with grilled cheese. “Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want. And to drink?”

  The residents of Williamsburg liked their beer. No, scratch that. The residents of Williamsburg liked their craft beer—beers brewed in small batches, with a wide range of flavors. At Untapped Books & Café, we specialized in local craft beers and had an impressive selection. However, by Sunday night, we’re usually down to just a few remaining choices until the delivery arrived on Monday morning.

  In order to prevent me from having to run back and forth between the cooler and my tables to let them know that their selection was unavailable, would they like to make another choice? I tried to memorize what we had at the beginning of each shift and check back often when we’re running low. I’ve learned to appreciate the subtle differences between different brews, but it never hurt to memorize the beer’s info sheet as well.

  “Tonight, we have Landlord’s Lunch, a hearty seven percent stout, Butcher’s Hyperbole where, ironically, the flavor is understated, and Pursuit of Hoppiness, a rich nine and a half percent IPA. Of course, we always stock Pour Williamsburg, the local favorite. Now, if you’re in the mood for a nonalcoholic beer, we might have a bottle or two of Crafty Like A Faux left.”

  “PBR?” he asked.

  I nodded, “Of course.” Everyone had different tastes and opinions. That’s what made the world go round, and why we had so many choices. Some people liked taking chances on craft beers. Since batches were small, and they’re always experimenting with different flavors, there’s no real way to guarantee anyone ever got the same beer twice. Mass-market beer, like Pabst Blue Ribbon, was consistent, which held a certain appeal, too. “Coming right up.”

  I swung by the kitchen and gave his order to Silvia before pulling a can of PBR out of the beer refrigerator and grabbing a glass off the shelf. When I delivered it, Raleigh pulled out a chair for me. “Sit a spell.”

  I sat. If Todd ever saw me sitting on the job, I’d be out of work before I could say bedazzler. But since Andre was supervising, I didn’t see how it could hurt. Even so, I sat on the edge of the chair so I could jump up if we got any more diners, as unlikely as that seemed on such a slow night. “Where are you from?” I asked. I could tell he wasn’t a native New Yorker, but beyond that I was stumped.

  “Upstate,” he replied. “But you probably already knew that.”

  I guess if I’d been a local, I might have recognized his speech patterns. The state of New York, especially upstate, was as different from New York City itself and the surrounding suburbs as Piney Island, Louisiana, was from New Orleans. For one thing, Manhattan, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn were all on islands. Queens and Brooklyn shared an island—Long Island to be precise, which continued far out beyond the city proper to form its own community. The only borough of the city that was on mainland New York state was the Bronx, which I hadn’t visited yet despite having heard amazing things about their world-famous zoo.

  Upstate New York was its own separate world. Stretching up to Canada and the Great Lakes, upstate was marked with the Catskill Mountains, rolling farmland, and frigid winters. It was remote, rural, and rustic—in other words, everything that New York City was not. From what I’d heard, upstate might as well be a foreign country compared to New York’s most populous metroplex.

  “I hear it’s lovely up there.”

  “It is,” Raleigh agreed. “Gorgeous. Especially if you like looking at the back end of bears.”

  “That sounds so interesting. I’ve never seen real mountains before, much less bears in the wild.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Where I’m from is mostly at or below sea level, and the closest mountains are about seven hundred miles away. We’ve got bears, supposedly, but I’ve never seen one. Seen plenty of gators, though.”

  “Louisiana, right?” he asked.

  I looked at him with newfound respect. Most people, if they could recognize a Louisiana accent at all, could at best recognize a Creole or Cajun from New Orleans, not the northern part of the state. “You have an incredible ear.”

  “I better. I’m a musician. Surely you’ve heard my band? Cosmic Possum?” He looked at me as though I should know that, and I felt a teensy bit foolish.

  Izzy had been slowly introducing me to the local music scene, which, like Williamsburg, was vast and eclectic. So far, we’d seen an all-woman band called Deep Fried Cigarettes; Shamble and Roarke, a jazz band with a flamboyant lead singer; and a free-form choral group named Cauliflower Explosion. They had all been very . . . Williamsburg.

  “I’m still exploring the local music scene,” I said.

  A bell rang behind me, and I turned to see Silvia wave at me from behind the kitchen pass-thru. “Order up.”

  I jumped up and grabbed Raleigh’s sandwich and dropped it off at his table. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “You should come see us play sometime. We’ve got a gig Thursday.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out on the table, and passed it to me. “We go on at nine.”

  Despite Izzy’s reassurances, there was still a slim chance that I’d be in Louisiana by then, and I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep. “Not sure I’ll be in town Thursday, but thanks for the invite,” I told him. It was a shame. I was curious to see if his band was any good. I ambled away. I felt silly standing by the counter and staring at the only diner in the café, so I stepped into t
he kitchen.

  “Who’s the dude?” Silvia asked. “You were looking pretty cozy out there. Friend of yours?”

  “Name’s Raleigh.” I traced my finger along the list of band names on the flyer, until I got to the nine o’clock slot. “Said he’s in some band called Cosmic Possum. Heard of them?”

  “Have I heard of Cosmic Possum? Are you kidding?” She stuck her head out of the pass-thru. “No fricking way. That’s Raleigh Rousedale! You’re telling me I just made a grilled cheese sandwich for Raleigh Rousedale? If I’d known it was him, I would have buttered the inside of the bread before I slapped it on the hot plate!”

  “I take it the band’s a pretty big deal?” I asked. I’d never seen Silvia so excited before.

  “You could say that,” she replied. “They’re easily one of the top five best bluegrass bands in Williamsburg.”

  Which raised the question—exactly how many bluegrass bands were there in Williamsburg? At least five, I assumed.

  “Why don’t you go out and say hi?” I suggested.

  “Oh no. I couldn’t. I get so weird around musicians.” She picked up a nearby pot and studied her hazy reflection in it. Silvia’s dark hair was twisted up underneath a hairnet. Her forehead glistened with sweat and there was a smear of something on her cheek. “Besides, he’s not my type but he seems really into you.”

  “He does?” I asked with surprise. I hadn’t gotten any kind of vibe from him. “He’s just being friendly. Even if he was interested, there’s a chance I might be leaving town soon.”

  “I’ve heard the rumors. Have a little faith,” Silvia said.

  I nodded. “I’m trying. Izzy’s never let me down before. If I’m still here on Thursday, we can go to the show together.”

  “I’d love to, but I’ve got to work,” Silvia said.

  “That’s a bunch of malarkey. Cosmic Possum doesn’t go on until nine. Thursday nights are so slow that Andre could cover the kitchen, and he probably wouldn’t even need to put on a hairnet since he wouldn’t get any orders.”