Step Closer

by Scott Cawthon

  Soon she was stealing instead of working—snatching purses, picking pockets, shoplifting food and other necessities. One day she was at a street festival, lifting wallets and loose bills from people’s pockets, when two men approached her. At first she was scared they might be cops, but they didn’t look like cops. One was a scrawny, fidgety white guy with lots of tattoos; the other was a broad-shouldered black guy with the appearance of a former high school football player.

  “We’ve been watching you, and you’re good,” the thin, nervous-seeming one said. “Have you ever thought about working with a team instead of flying solo?”

  “We look out for each other,” the big guy said. “And we split our take. More people working, more money.”

  She fell in with Jack and AJ because they had been on the streets longer than she had and were willing to share their knowledge of how to survive. Sure, they were more reckless than she was, and blew through the money they stole, but there was safety in numbers. Even though the guys got on her nerves sometimes, she would rather have their companionship than try to make it on her own.

  Kasey finished the red lollipop and snuggled into her sleeping bag. She fell asleep with the sweet taste still on her tongue.

  She awoke to sunlight streaming through the warehouse’s skylights. Jack and AJ were both still snoozing away in their sleeping bags. Kasey had no idea what time they had come in last night. She slithered out of her sleeping bag and decided she’d use two dollars from yesterday’s take to buy a cheap breakfast at the Burger Barn. A sausage biscuit and a small coffee with free refills could last her all day if it had to. Kasey grabbed her backpack and walked into the bright morning sun.

  The Burger Barn was just half a block from Circus Baby’s Pizza World, the site of yesterday’s heist. Kasey chuckled, thinking of it as something as dramatic as a heist, since it involved stealing a bag of candy from a child. She went inside the Burger Barn, placed her order, then sat down at an orange vinyl booth beneath a mural of cartoonish barnyard animals. She added cream and sugar to her coffee, unwrapped her biscuit, and took her time with breakfast.

  As she nibbled her biscuit and sipped her coffee, she watched the other customers. Most of them were grabbing orders to go as they rushed off to their jobs at offices or stores or construction sites. They all looked stressed-out and in a hurry.

  That was one good thing about Kasey’s life. She could take her time. The only time she had to hurry was when she was running off with somebody’s purse or wallet.

  Buying breakfast at the Burger Barn gave her the right to use the ladies’ room without being kicked out. This was a right she treasured. After she finished her meal, she made her way to the restroom to do her grooming for the day. She locked herself in a stall and took a sort of sponge bath with baby wipes, then changed her socks, underwear, and shirt. After she was done in the stall, she went to the sink and washed her face and brushed her teeth.

  A woman dressed in the button-down shirt and khakis of an office job gave Kasey a dirty look, but Kasey ignored her. She had as much right to be there as anyone else. Kasey filled her water bottle and put it in her backpack. She was ready for her day.

  Out in the sunshine, her belly full of food and coffee, Kasey felt good. She thought she might take a walk in the park before she went back to the warehouse to see what the boys were up to. As she walked, she shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and felt the cardboard glasses from the little girl’s goody bag. She smiled to herself and took them out.

  She hadn’t noticed that a tiny slip of rolled-up paper was taped to the glasses’ left earpiece. She peeled the tape off carefully, unrolled the slip of paper, and read:

  Put on the glasses, and Ballora will dance for you.

  Kasey put on the glasses and felt the same dizziness as the night before. She looked down the sidewalk toward Circus Baby’s Pizza World. There, in the distance, she saw the image of a ballerina, her hands above her head, standing on tiptoe and spinning. It wasn’t a very sharp image, blue and a little fuzzy. A hologram. That was what these kinds of pictures were called, she suddenly remembered. But even if distant and blurry, there was something fascinating about the strange ballerina doll twirling.

  A pirouette. That was the word for that kind of twirling. When she was little, Kasey had wanted to be a ballerina, just like lots of other girls. But there had been no money, and her mother had said that even if there had been money, she wouldn’t waste it on something as useless as dance classes.

  Kasey stood on the sidewalk and watched the image as though hypnotized. It was beautiful, and there was so little beauty in Kasey’s day-to-day life. Kasey felt overcome with sadness and longing and another feeling, too … regret? Was she regretting the way she lived? A life should have beauty in it, shouldn’t it? Life should be about more than just survival.

  After a while, Kasey started to feel dizzy, as if she were the one doing the pirouetting herself. Afraid she might be sick, she took off the glasses and leaned against the side of a building to get her bearings.

  She looked down at the pair of glasses in her hand. Really, the ballerina was a pretty impressive visual effect for what looked like such a cheap toy. No wonder the little girl was upset when Kasey snatched her goody bag. To a little kid, these glasses would seem downright magical.

  Kasey put the glasses in her pocket. She decided to skip the park and go back to the warehouse. She had to show the guys this crazy toy.

  Jack and AJ were just waking up when she got back.

  “What time did you guys get in last night?” Kasey asked, sitting down on a crate.

  “Dunno. Two? Three?” Jack yawned. He propped up on one elbow in his sleeping bag. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to punch anybody’s time card.”

  AJ unzipped his sleeping bag and sat up cross-legged on the floor. “Hey, we were just saying we might take that gas card you pinched up to the Gas ’n Go and see if we can use it to get some groceries.”

  “Sure,” Kasey said. It would be good to have some food in the house. “But first I want to show you something.”

  Outside the warehouse, beside a dumpster, Kasey took out the glasses. “These were in the goody bag from the pizza place. Try them on.” She held the glasses out to Jack.

  Jack put them on, struck a “cool” pose, then laughed.

  “Look in front of you,” Kasey said. “Do you see her?”

  “See who?” Jack said.

  “The dancing ballerina.”

  “I don’t see anybody,” Jack said. “They just make everything look blue, that’s all.”

  “Let me see ’em,” AJ said, taking the glasses from Jack and putting them on. He looked around. “I don’t see anything, either.”

  “No ballerina?” Kasey said. It didn’t make sense. Why could they not see her?

  “Nope. Everything just looks blue, like Jack said.” AJ handed the glasses back to Kasey.

  Kasey was confused. Maybe the glasses only worked in front of Circus Baby’s Pizza World? But that didn’t make sense, either. Why would someone make a toy that only worked in one place?

  She put on the glasses and looked straight in front of her, across the street. The ballerina—Ballora, according to the instructions—was there, dancing in a garbage-strewn alley between two warehouses. But soon the dizziness overcame her, and again there was that uneasy feeling she’d had before. “Well, I see her,” Kasey said, taking off the glasses before she lost her balance or threw up. “Maybe there’s something wrong with your eyes.”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with your brain,” Jack said, laughing and elbowing AJ, who laughed, too.

  Kasey ignored his ribbing and put the glasses back in her jacket pocket. But she did wonder. Were they right? Was there something wrong with her?

  At the Gas ’n Go, they grabbed way more food than most people would buy in a convenience store: a jumbo loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, six bags of chips, cans of ravioli and beef stew, and a twelve-pack of soda. Kasey knew s
he would be the one to pay at the register because Jack and AJ always said she had an honest face. Also, people were less likely to suspect a woman of criminal activity.

  The cashier looked sleepy-eyed and bored as she rang up and bagged all the items. Kasey scanned the stolen card in the machine and held her breath. It took only a few seconds, but it felt like ages until the word “Approved” appeared on the screen.

  Kasey, Jack, and AJ grabbed the bags and waited until they were outside the store to laugh at their good fortune. “Well, we won’t have to worry about food for a few days,” Jack said. “Hang on to that card, Kasey.”

  Kasey put the card in a small compartment in her backpack. “I will, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to get by with using it again,” she said. Usually credit card companies were pretty quick to cancel cards they suspected were stolen.

  Back at the warehouse, they feasted on peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips and soda that was still cold from the convenience store’s cooler. Jack and AJ were still high from the adrenaline rush of successfully using the stolen card. They laughed and joked around, but something was bothering Kasey that she couldn’t put her finger on. She smiled at Jack and AJ’s jokes, but something that felt like worry was nagging at the back of her brain. The weird thing was that while she felt it, she didn’t really know what she was worried about.

  There was always the thief’s worry of getting caught. The worry of being arrested, tried, jailed. That worry never went away, but this feeling was something else. Somehow it had to do with the glasses, with the fact that she could see the dancing ballerina while Jack and AJ couldn’t, with the strange way looking at the twirling ballerina made her feel.

  After they were finished eating, Kasey grabbed one of the plastic bags from the convenience store. “Put your trash in here,” she said to Jack and AJ, “and I’ll take it out to the dumpster.”

  “Always cleaning up after everybody. Such the little housewife,” Jack said, dropping his empty soda bottle in the bag.

  “Hey, I can’t help it if you guys are slobs,” Kasey said. “I don’t want to get a bug problem in here.”

  Kasey had grown up in a series of progressively dumpier apartments. Her mom would get evicted for not paying the rent, and then they’d move to another place that was smaller and dirtier than the one before it. There were always cockroaches, and in the summer, an endless parade of ants. When Kasey got old enough, she washed the dishes and took out the garbage that her mom let pile up. Cleaning helped some, but bugs would still come over from other people’s apartments like party crashers looking for free food and drink. Kasey always thought that when she grew up, she would have a neat little apartment of her own that would be clean and bug-free. Unlike her mom, she would pay the rent on time every month.

  The warehouse wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind, but at least she could do her part to keep the bugs away. She took the trash bag outside and tossed it into the dumpster.

  Maybe she would take a walk. She felt a sudden need to be alone. She knew that, inside the warehouse, Jack and AJ would be making plans for the night. Since it was Friday, they’d probably want to go downtown to where the clubs were. If you waited late enough until people had been partying for hours, it was easy pickings. Kasey could walk past a cluster of guys and lift three of their wallets without any of them noticing.

  Purses were always trickier because you couldn’t grab them without the owner noticing. But Kasey was fast. She had been in track and field before she dropped out of high school. There was no way a tipsy girl in heels could catch her.

  Usually Kasey liked to plan out the evening’s job with the guys. She liked to strategize how to come up with the biggest take possible, how to maximize their chances of success. It was like solving a puzzle.

  But right now she didn’t feel like putting puzzle pieces together. She felt like walking, like clearing her head of the confusing thoughts swirling around inside of it.

  Swirling. Swirling rhymed with twirling. Why couldn’t she get that spinning ballerina doll out of her head?

  She walked to the park. Office workers on their lunch breaks sat on benches and ate sandwiches. A dog walker was somehow walking four dogs of different sizes without getting their leashes tangled. Kasey smiled at the tiny Yorkie that was leading the pack as if it were the biggest dog of all.

  On the playground, little kids climbed and slid and swung, shouting and laughing. Their moms watched them, making sure they were safe. Kasey envied those kids. What must it be like, she wondered, to play to your heart’s content and to know that whenever you got hungry or thirsty, your mom would just pull some crackers and a cold juice box out of her bag? To know that, when you were tired, you could go home, and your mom would tuck you into your nice, soft bed for a nap?

  Even as a little kid, Kasey had never known that kind of security.

  She walked into the more wooded area of the park because she liked the shade and the solitude. The fall leaves—red, gold, and orange—were drifting down from the branches of the trees. Leaves that had already fallen crunched under her feet.

  It was the strangest thing. She didn’t want to see Ballora. She didn’t like the way seeing Ballora made her feel. Yet she felt herself reaching for the cardboard glasses, felt herself putting them on. She felt the familiar dizziness, steadied herself against a tree, and stared into the woods in front of her, where sunlight sparkled through the gaps in the branches.

  There was Ballora, pirouetting among the colorful fall leaves. As she spun, the bright leaves were sucked into her vortex. They flew around her, at first gently, then faster, as though trapped in a whirlwind.

  For a few seconds, Kasey admired the beauty, but then she thought, Wait. If Ballora is just a picture, a hologram, then how is she affecting the objects around her? It didn’t make sense.

  Also, wasn’t Ballora closer to Kasey than she was yesterday? It seemed like she was. The image was clearer, for one thing. Not so fuzzy—she could see the joints in the doll-like figure’s arms and legs, could see the blue eyes and red lips on the white face. The painted face looked clown-like, but unlike most clowns, Ballora wasn’t smiling. The empty blue eyes didn’t blink, but somehow Kasey felt they were staring back at her. Ballora was looking at Kasey and didn’t like what she saw.

  Suddenly Kasey couldn’t catch her breath. She doubled over, afraid she might pass out. Why was she freaking out over a stupid toy? She yanked off the glasses and shoved them back into her jacket pocket. She was being ridiculous, and she had to stop it. If you wanted to survive, you had to keep a cool head at all times.

  She should go back to the warehouse and talk to the guys. She needed to know about the plans for tonight.

  After midnight, Kasey, Jack, and AJ hit the clubs. They didn’t go into them, but skulked in the darkness outside. The guys had targeted a couple of different bars, and Kasey was waiting in the alley outside a dance club that was frequented by a lot of college kids, their pockets and purses fat with their mommy and daddy’s money.

  She spotted her target. The girl was wearing a short, light-pink dress with impossibly high pink heels. Her designer purse—the same shade of pink as the dress and shoes—hung from a skinny strap draped over her shoulder. Pink Dress Girl was talking loudly and giggling with her boyfriend.

  Kasey had a tool for jobs like these, a pair of strong scissors that could cut through a leather purse strap like it was only made of paper. She took out the scissors and stepped into the crowd. She slipped in behind Pink Dress Girl and positioned the scissors to cut the strap. As she snipped, someone bumped into her from behind. She slipped, and the point of the sharp scissors found flesh. When Kasey grabbed the purse, she saw a shallow but bloody gash on the girl’s arm.

  “Ow! What happened?” the girl yelled. “Hey, my purse—”

  Kasey ran.

  She ran until she was sure she had put enough distance between her and her victim, then slowed to a casual walk, tucking the pink evening bag inside her jacket.


  In her mind, Kasey kept seeing the girl’s arm slashed by the scissors, the red blood vivid against the girl’s pale skin.

  Kasey hadn’t meant to hurt her. Sure, getting your purse snatched might scare you a little—might inconvenience you—but it didn’t cause any physical harm.

  Kasey had robbed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people, but she had never harmed anyone physically until tonight. Spilling blood changed things.

  It was an accident, Kasey thought. But was it really? The girl wouldn’t have gotten cut if Kasey hadn’t been lunging at her with the scissors. Kasey hadn’t meant to cut her, but she couldn’t exactly claim to be innocent.

  Kasey beat the other guys back to the warehouse. She grabbed a flashlight and sat down on her sleeping bag to see what she’d scored. She opened the pink purse and dumped out its contents: a driver’s license, a lipstick, and a single twenty-dollar bill which, according to Thieves’ Den rules, would have to be split three ways.

  Kasey put the items back into the purse and sighed. It hadn’t been worth the effort or the bloodshed. She settled down in her sleeping bag, but it was a long time until she fell asleep.

  The next day, Kasey and Jack and AJ walked downtown, casing possible places for a job. They walked past the park where Kasey had seen Ballora. Kasey glanced into a grove of trees and saw the leaves rise and swirl just like they had around the dancing doll. She put on her glasses, and there Ballora was, closer than before. She was getting closer every day. If Kasey could just get the guys to see the doll, she would feel a lot better. Kasey took off the glasses and hurried to catch up to Jack and AJ.

  “Wait, you guys,” Kasey said. She held out the glasses. “Put these on and look over there, right in the middle of those trees.”

  “Again?” AJ said. “Not me. I love you like a sister, Kasey, but I’m done with this weirdness.”