“Oh no. Oh man, you must’ve gotten in so much trouble.”
“You don’t even know. He found us, so drunk off a few sips each, that we were cackling in the basement, on the floor, at two in the morning. He drove each of us home, chewed out our parents and us, then pressed theft charges…”
“He did not.”
“He did. Theft.” She shrugged, sighing. “He only pushed it enough to scare us all stupid. We didn’t get any lasting records out of it, but we did get community service hours, on top of having to do yardwork for Mr. McClellan every Saturday morning for six months.”
“And your parents?”
“Mom was fucking apoplectic. Like, so mad she couldn’t even shout. She was just white and silent with absolute rage. Didn’t speak to either of us for three days. Called us each by our full names every time she spoke to us for a week after that, which was to assign us all the chores in the entire house for a month, and then send us to our rooms as soon as we were done. Charlie got it the worst, though, because as the older sister, she was responsible for me and should’ve known better.”
“Wow.” I eyed her. “How many sisters do you have?”
“Four. I’m second oldest, Charlie is the oldest. After me is Lexie, then Torie, and Poppy is the baby.”
“Charlie, Cassie, Lexie, Torie, and Poppy.”
She nodded. “Charlotte, Cassandra, Alexandra, Victoria, and…Poppy. The only one whose name isn’t short for anything.” Cassie swirled her beer, swigged. “You? Any brothers or sisters?”
I shook my head. “Nah. Just me. I got a shitload of cousins, though. Mostly second cousins or first cousins once removed.”
“I’ve never understood how that works.”
I laughed. “I’m an expert. My mom’s sister’s child is my cousin, Juneau. My Mom’s sister—my aunt, has grandchildren—those grandchildren, my mother’s sister’s children’s children, are my first cousins once removed. My mom is the baby of her family of four brothers and three sisters, and her next oldest sister—Juneau’s mom—is way older than her and has six kids, of whom June-bug is the youngest by several years.”
She blinked at me. “Wow, so…you have a big family.”
“A big, complicated family. Most of whom live far away from here, far from anything you might understand as civilization. Most of ’em live, for all intents and purposes, the way our family has lived for hundreds of years. We got electricity and plumbing, cell phones and satellite TV and laptops, but that’s all just…gravy. Day to day life is all pretty much the same as it’s been for…well, generations.”
She gazed at me for a moment. “Wow. That’s…it’s really cool, actually.”
“Not when you’re a teenage kid who just wants to feel normal, it ain’t.” I took a sip. “I feel different about it now, but only because I sorta walked away from it all and did my own thing.”
“Which is what?”
I tapped my forearm. “This.”
“Tattoos?”
I nodded. “Yep. I own a tattoo shop. I’ve been doing tattoos for years. Taught myself, and then apprenticed to the best tattoo artist in Ketchikan, worked for him from the time I was fifteen doing tattoos the traditional way out of his trailer until I was old enough to get a license and do modern tattoos using a special gun, you know? Did that for a few more years, saved every penny I made, and bought my shop.”
“Did your family not approve?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I mean…it’s complicated. It was obvious from the time I could hold on to things with my hands that I’m the type of person who’s meant to do one thing, know what I mean? Like some people are just…created by whatever you want to believe in, for one specific person. Like God or the universe or nature just looked at unformed me and went, ‘This kid, he’s a tattoo artist. That’s his thing, his only thing. But he’s gonna be the best at it.’”
She was silent, staring into the bubbling tan liquid in her glass. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I know all about that.”
I stared at her, letting the silence open up. Clearly, a sore subject. Something to do with her anger, her limp, and her stated desire to get blackout drunk today. But I knew enough not to pry, not to push. If I just held my counsel and my tongue, chances were, she’d start talking eventually.
Bast brought our food over—a giant oval tray cluttered with paper baskets of food: mozzarella sticks, steak fries covered in melted cheese and house-made chili, deep-fried pickles, fried green tomatoes, chicken wings with a bunch of dipping sauces, onion rings, melted brie cheese with triangles of toasted pita and slices of green apple, and my usual, a triple-decker cheeseburger with fries, and a cup of chili.
I eyed the mountain of food in front of Cassie. “I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the Badd boys don’t skimp on the portions.”
She eyed me, and then the food—each basket held enough food for two or three people to share. “Yeah, you could’ve mentioned that.” She laughed, rubbing her forehead with a knuckle. “There’s enough food here for fifteen people.”
I shrugged. “You seemed to know what you were about.”
She sighed. Eyed me, the food, and a bemused Bast. Then, she tugged over the chili cheese fries, the fried green tomatoes, and the brie. “Give the rest away, so it doesn’t go to waste,” she said. “I’ll pay for it all, either way.”
Bast just chuckled. “You’re family, Cassie. No charge.”
She shook her head. “You’re kidding.”
Bast refilled her beer without being asked. “Your mom is dating my uncle. Makes you family even if you weren’t here with Ink, and family eats and drinks for free, always.”
“But…that’s like, seventy bucks worth of food.”
Bast shrugged. “Family is family.” He winked at her. “I’ll keep the beer coming until you cry uncle.”
She nodded. “Thank you.” A pause. “I need it.”
“Been a bartender my whole life,” he said. “I know when a person just needs to drink themself into oblivion.” He gestured at me. “And there ain’t nobody better to have around you in times like that than Ink.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself, but thanks.”
Bast just laughed. “You do you, boo.”
She stared hard at Bast. “Yeah, don’t call me boo. Ever.”
Bast quirked an eyebrow. “Just jokes.”
Cassie turned her attention to the food. “Shitty day, shitty week, shitty month. Shitty couple of months. Shitty life as of…” she pretended to check a nonexistent watch, “…two months, two weeks, and six days ago.” Another pause as she pulled out her phone to actually look at the time. “And…eight hours.”
Bast and I exchanged looks, and then Bast gave me a look that said that’s all you, buddy, and good luck, and then walked away to take a beer order from the other end of the bar.
A long silence unrolled between Cassie and me as I dug into my lunch and Cassie hers. After about twenty minutes of silence between us, she glanced at me.
“Not gonna ask?”
I just shrugged. “You wanna tell me what happened two months, two weeks, six days, and eight hours ago, you’ll tell me. You don’t wanna tell me, that’s fine too.”
“So you don’t want to know.”
I set my burger down and turned sideways in my chair to face her. “I’m sittin’ here, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, so?”
“I ain’t a social sorta guy, Cassie. I like my solitude. I do my tattoos, I hang out with my cousin when she has time to visit me, and that’s about it. Shit like this,” I waved between her and myself, “ain’t how I live. Me sittin’ here, talking to you, spending my lunch hour with you, that’s me interested in what you got to say, and if you don’t got nothin’ to say, I’ll listen to that too.” I leaned forward, gave her a long hard stare. “You need a friend, Cassandra Goode. That much is real fuckin’ obvious.”
She frowned, swallowing hard. “Why is it so fucking obvious, Ink?”
“Well, you damn near walking off the pier into the channel was the first clue.”
She didn’t answer for a minute or two. “And you’re offering to be that friend, are you?”
Against my better judgment, I wanted to do just that. This girl was high octane, high maintenance. All fire and fury one minute, and then acting like everything was fine the next. Made me dizzy.
But there was something about her that intrigued me. The intensity in her changeable, hazel eyes…stormy gray one minute, and then fiery green the next, and then a muted roiling brown another, depending on her mood, which seemed to change with every breath—they drew me in, made me curious. Curious about her as a person, about how she got here, to Ketchikan, curious about the emotional reasons behind the blinding pain that nearly caused her to walk off the pier and into a channel which would still, even at this time of year, be so cold as to induce hypothermia if you stayed in too long.
I realized I’d been staring at her for a while without answering her question. I just nodded and said, “Yes, I am.”
“And if I don’t tell you what happened, you’re not going to ask?” She sounded outright disbelieving.
I nodded. “Ain’t my business unless you make it my business.”
“You’re weird.” She said this without looking at me, tossing back her third or fourth beer in half an hour.
“Been called worse,” I said, and then finished off my burger and my beer.
“Like?”
I wiped my hands on a napkin. Hesitated. “Jumbo. Dumb ass. Fat ass. Filthy Eskimo. Stinky Inky. Useless. Illiterate.”
“Illiterate?”
I snorted. “Figured you’d fix on that one.”
“Are you?”
I rolled a shoulder. “No, I can read alright. Just…not super well. I grew up in the bush, off-grid. Homeschooled, by which I mean if we finished our chores around the homestead, we were allowed to do schoolwork, which was ratty old textbooks that were probably outdated in the seventies. I mostly taught myself to read, write, and add and subtract.” I sighed. “My family is just weird, reclusive, distrustful, and backward.”
She gazed at me. “And you taught yourself how to do tattoos, too?”
“More or less. I was always drawing on myself. As a little baby, just learning to crawl, I’d get my hands on anything that would mark my skin and just go to town. Pens, pencils, food, pieces of ash from the fireplace. Ketchup was my favorite. They couldn’t stop me. They’d lock up everything and anything, but I’d find something. Shit, if I couldn’t find anything else, I’d just go outside and make mud and use that to mark up my skin.”
“But your name, Ink, was what they named you when you were born? It’s not a nickname?”
I nodded. “My folks’ve been asked about my name as often as you’d imagine, and all my dad’ll say is, ‘sounded like an interesting name at the time.’ No deeper meaning or reason behind it than he thought it sounded cool, I guess. Never heard him or Mom say anything different my whole life. So did my name inform what I do? Maybe. I didn’t know what ink was as a kid. I just knew I liked how my skin looked when I made marks on it.”
“It’s just a compulsion for you, then?”
I shrugged, nodded. “Started off that way. Just me, and Juneau, who lived near me and was my best and only friend. She was the same way. We’d steal pens and hide them in our secret fort in the woods behind our trailers, and we’d sneak out there and draw on each other for hours.”
“So she’s a tattoo artist, too?”
“She is now, but it was a bit of a journey for her to get there.” I ran a thumbnail along a groove in the bar top. “That’s her story, though, so you’ll have to get her to tell it.”
“Fair enough.”
“Eventually my folks realized there was no stopping me from drawing, from art, from tattooing. So they stopped trying to make me be something else. They didn’t like it, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than who and what I am. Eventually, I connected with John Thomas and he was the first person to let me do a real tattoo on him. I was hooked then, boy, let me tell you. A hell of a rush. Like, when you finally do something for the first time that you’ve been dreaming of for forever, and when you do, it’s like…you’re home, you know? Something just clicks in your soul, and you know this is it, this is what you’re supposed to do, forever. This one thing—”
I glanced at Cassie, and she was silent, unblinking, staring down at the top of the bar. Her posture was turtled—shoulders hunched, head drawn down on her neck, chin tucked in, breathing hard and fast. Biting her lip so hard I was worried she’d bite straight through it.
“Cassie?” I said, my voice low and hesitant.
She shook her head, all she seemed capable of.
“Hit a nerve, huh?” I turned away, giving her privacy to gather herself.
A nod, a subtle, almost-missed-it jerk of her head.
I raised a hand, and Bast came over. “Shot of whiskey for our friend here.”
“Vodka,” Cassie whispered. “Please.”
Bast filled a shot glass with Grey Goose, and Cassie threw it back. Shoved the glass toward Bast, who filled it again, and then left the bottle. Cassie tossed back another shot, hissing.
“Aren’t you going to tell me that getting shit-faced isn’t going to solve anything?” she muttered.
I shook my head. “Nah. You’re an adult. And the fact that you’re asking me that tells me you already know it.”
“Sometimes you just…you just need to get blitzed, you know?”
I nodded. “I do.” I laughed. “That can be tricky when you’re physically incapable of getting blitzed.”
She twisted her head sideways to look at me without lifting up. “Why are you being so nice to me?” She frowned. “I’m not going to fuck you.”
I sighed. “I had no expectations that you would.”
She frowned harder. “What’s that mean?”
Dangerous ground. “Nothing. I’m not being nice to you for any reason other than sometimes you just need one person to be nice for no reason. I’ve been on the other end of that, so I know.”
Her eyes were cloudy, by now. Woozy. Looking me up and down. “You’re complicated.”
“I know.”
“I’m getting tipsy.”
I laughed. “I know.”
She stared at the food in front of her—she’d done a hell of a number on it, but there was still a lot left. “I can’t eat any more.” The bottle of vodka. “He left the whole bottle?”
“Bast don’t fuck around,” I said.
Cassie carefully poured herself more, threw it back. “Mmm. Goose. I love Goose.” Another shot. “I don’t suppose you happen to know where my mom lives, do you?”
I laughed. “No, I do not.”
Cassie shrugged. “I don’t want to go back there anyway. She’ll just irate me—um. I mean. Be-rate me, I mean, for drinking so much.” She shoved a mozzarella stick into her mouth defiantly. “And for eating…” her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Junk food.”
Another shot.
“Maybe you oughta slow down just a teeny bit, huh?” I eyed her drink. “Those are gonna catch up and hit you like a truck.”
“Already been hit by a truck. That’s the whole fucking problem with my life.” She poured yet another shot, tossed it back, and now I physically removed the bottle and pushed it away before she gave herself alcohol poisoning. “A fucking truck. They called it a—a lorry. But it was a truck. Like a semi. Had fish in it. Lots of fish. Tuna fish and salmon, and lots and lots of fish. Ran right into us. Fish everywhere.”
“Cassie…”
“I told you. I told you I was gonna get blackout. I just had to warm up to it, okay? Some beer, some food. So I’d have something to throw up, later. And because I haven’t eaten junk food since I was…since I was thirteen. I had a piece of strawberry cheesecake from Juniors in Times Square on my thirteenth birthday. It had four big strawberries on it, and it was the siz
e of my head. They sang Happy Birthday to me, but it was the wrong tune. Just me and Mom and Dad. We went to Broadway shows and a ballet and they took me shopping, and I got a piece of strawberry cheesecake all to myself. Ate the whole thing.” A long pause. “I haven’t had any junk food of any kind ever since. A few alcoholic drinks here and there, like when I went to Tennessee with Charlie last year. It was my twenty-first birthday so I could legally drink in the US. Of course, the drinking age in most of Europe is eighteen, so I’d been drinking with my troupe now and then for years. But. But. Alcohol is not junk food. You know what I eat?”
She peered at me, pointing a finger at me.
“Do you know what I eat? Every day?” She tapped the bar top with an angry finger. “Rabbit food. All day. Salads. Egg white omelets. A handful of almonds. More salad. Veggies. So, so, so many vegetables. White meat, as lean as possible, in very small amounts. And you know what I do all day? I dance! All day. Practice starts at seven in the fucking morning. Dance all fucking day on an empty stomach. Probably burn a thousand calories by lunch, and then eat like a fucking baby bird, and then dance until dark. Past dinner. More bird food and rabbit food. For years I’ve done this. Fucking years. You know I haven’t had a fucking French fry since fourth grade? First French fry I’ve had since fourth grade.” She picked a fry off the pile of fries, which she hadn’t gotten to until then.
“So you’re a dancer?”
“Was? Am? I was, I am. I was-am.” She blinked hard. “But the truck. The truck took it away.”
Shit, the vodka was hitting her.
“The truck took dance away?”
She peered into the empty shot glass. “Empty. Damn. Empty glasses are stupid.” She slid the glass away with a morose gesture. “Truck took dance. Took Rick. Took me. Took me away from me.”
“Who’s Rick?”
“Fiancé. Ex-fiancé. He was brain damaged by the wreck. Made him not love me anymore. He knew me, remembered us, everything. Just didn’t love me anymore.” She paused. “Fuck him, though, right? Without dance, why would he love me? He can dance. I can’t dance. No dance, no us.”
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