Freefall

by Tess Oliver

  “Britches?” Dray managed to spray some food as he spoke. “Who the fuck uses the word britches?”

  “Sorry, Dray, I’ll try to keep the vocabulary at a first grade level in your presence.” Clutch jumped and the entire table shook. “What the hell are you doing, Taylor?”

  She lifted up a permanent marker and turned her head to admire her handiwork. “There’s a tattoo on your arm that says your name here so I put my name there.”

  He rubbed vigorously at his skin. Clutch looked at me. “Can you fucking believe this?”

  I chugged back the rest of my beer. “Hey, I told you that tattoo was just going to bring you grief.”

  He scowled down at Taylor, but she met his scowl with her own steely green gaze. I had to hand it to the kid, she was brave.

  “Maybe you didn’t notice the line underneath my blank billboard tattoo.” Clutch poked at his arm. “It says hot chicks need only apply. That does not include snot faced kids like you.”

  This time I saw hurt flash across her face. Her small nose crinkled beneath the spray of freckles.

  “You really need me to cover up that tattoo. It makes you look like a total ass,” I said.

  “I like it,” Clutch said quietly, but he too sensed that his last words had burned Taylor. He actually looked bothered by it. He deftly changed the subject. “Hey, look at those two, Nix. They’re definitely checking us out.”

  Taylor stood. The sassy spunk had disappeared from her pretty face, and I wanted to kick my friend under the table. “Now you’re dreaming, you fat headed jerk,” Taylor said. There was a slight waver in her voice, and I was certain Clutch heard it. “They’re only looking at Nix, not you, you stupid Viking.” She stomped away on her long legs, and I caught my thick-skulled friend watching her leave.

  “Irritating kid,” Clutch muttered.

  I stared at him. “Is she irritating because she’s only seventeen, or is she irritating because she’s only seventeen?”

  Dray laughed at my question, but Clutch was not amused.

  He stood and his shadow darkened the entire table. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’ve got to go make some dinero.” He lumbered away on his Frankenstein sized shoes.

  I looked over at Dray. He’d lit a cigarette and was watching something through the curtain of smoke. “Isn’t that Cassie over there?”

  I looked in the direction he was staring. Cassie was wearing a yellow sundress and sitting on a bench having a beer with the band drummer. “That’s definitely Cass. She mentioned something about meeting the guy from Hell Cats down here.”

  He took another long drag on his cigarette, but his eyes didn’t leave Cassie. “What the fuck is that all about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He extinguished the cigarette in the remnants of his beer cup. “Nothing. The guy looks like a douchebag, that’s all.” He stood and stretched. “Let’s cruise around. I’m bored of sitting here.” We headed in the direction of the cars, but Dray took one last glance over his shoulder at Cassie.

  CHAPTER 4

  Scotlyn

  The warm California sun was once again the highlight of my day. Lincoln kept the temperature inside in the sterile house at a constant frigid temperature, not unlike an underground cavern. And even with all the floor to ceiling windows, the place felt like a cave to me.

  Lincoln refused to sweat like a real man, so he kept the house cold during the long summer months and I stayed draped in sweatshirts to keep warm. Sitting at the pool, I could at least escape the headache inducing cold and feel the comfort of the sun on my skin.

  I stretched out my legs and placed my head back against the plush cushion of the lounge.

  Lincoln sat under the fan-cooled shade of the cabana, sipping expensive liquor and avoiding wrinkles in his pristine white Dockers. Three of his business partners sat with him. Lincoln had inherited most of his money from his father, but when he’d finally realized that it was easy to blow through a huge inheritance, he began investing his money. But you don’t make big money with investments unless you’re doing something sketchy, and Lincoln’s business deals were definitely shady. At one point, even I’d become an entity for profit making. Lincoln was certain I could make him a fortune as a model, but my long scar and my lack of enthusiasm in front of the camera were limiting. Once he realized that it was making me more unhappy and that other guys would be staring at my picture, he gave up on the idea.

  “Damn, I envy you, Hammond.” Grady was one of Lincoln’s creepier partners, and he was always hanging around. “All that hotness and never having to listen to someone nag or gripe that you never take them anywhere or that you don’t buy them nice things.”

  Lincoln didn’t respond.

  It always amused me when people talked about me while I sat nearby. It was hard to fault them for it. It was an automatic assumption that my lack of speech meant I couldn’t hear either. Of course, Grady knew I could hear, but he always seemed to forget because of my silence. The doctors had never had a reasonable explanation for my loss of speech. There had been no physical damage to my throat or voice box in the accident, but I hadn’t spoken a word since they pried me from the car and from my family. They’d told my aunt to take me to a psychiatrist to deal with my trauma, but my close-minded aunt had laughed at the notion. She was certain God would heal me. But I was certain that she was pleased with the idea of having a teenager in the house who could not talk back.

  I heard Lincoln’s partners get up to leave, but I didn’t open my eyes. A few seconds later the edge of the lounge creaked as Lincoln sat down on it. I still didn’t open my eyes.

  “Hey, Babe, I called that tattoo parlor.” His fingers caressed my leg, and my entire body stiffened at his touch. He sensed my discomfort but didn’t remove his hand. “We’re going to go meet with the guy at six.”

  I swiped my fingers across my forehead. It was the simple gesture I’d created for telling him I had a headache. It was a gesture I used frequently.

  He stood abruptly and anger radiated from him, but I kept my eyes closed.

  “Then you should get out of the fucking sun. Six o’clock,” he snarled and then the sliding glass door shut behind him.

  I knew I was pushing the man to his limits, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was terribly unhappy and he knew it. And at the same time I didn’t know if I had the strength to face being homeless again. I had no voice, no skills, and had taken just enough night classes to pass the high school equivalency test. I would probably never learn to drive. Just sitting in a car as a passenger required a shot of vodka. My options were as dismal as my spirits.

  CHAPTER 5

  Nix

  It had been a wild day at the shop. Every chair had been filled all day. Michelle and Dexter, the two other artists who came in to work on busy days, looked as exhausted as I felt. Cassie had left a few minutes early for a date with the drummer, and I finished the clean up on my own.

  I still had to stop by the gardening store to buy flowers before heading over to Nana’s house. I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter after six. I hadn’t really expected the guy on the phone to show, and I was glad to be right.

  I walked to the door to flip over the sign. A silver Porsche with darkly tinted windows pulled up in front of the shop. A slick looking guy who was dressed for a day at the country club stepped out. He walked around and opened the door for the passenger. A tall, thin girl wearing tight faded jeans climbed out of the passenger seat. She had the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up over her head, and her hands were tucked tightly into the pockets as if she wanted to make sure she didn’t touch anything and that no one touched her. Her face was covered with a large pair of black sunglasses. Definitely an odd couple.

  “Crap,” I muttered and swung open the door. They stepped inside. The girl did not take off her hood or her glasses. An amazingly lush pair of lips jutted out beneath the tiny nose holding up the glasses.

  “You must be Alexander,” the guy said, an
d stuck out his hand.

  “People call me Nix. I guess you’re Hammond.”

  “Nix? Great. My name’s Lincoln, and this is Scotlyn.”

  The girl nodded but didn’t say a word. She walked over to the wall with design ideas and perused them while her boyfriend motioned me over to the counter. He pulled a folded paper out of his wallet and laid it out on the counter. Several pieces of paper had been taped together. I recognized Ginny’s artwork immediately. She was big into the vintage art nouveau style. She’d drawn a vine of pink flowers.

  “It’s long. Where is it going?” I glanced over at the girl. She stared up at the pictures, her hands still tucked tightly in her pockets and her face still masked by the sunglasses. Her faded jeans hugged every inch of her heart stopping curves. She seemed to have no interest in her tattoo.

  Lincoln was one of those fastidious, not a hair out of place, kind of guys who I could instantly dislike. The kind of guy who used his money to gain friends and, obviously, in this case, to keep around pretty women. “She’s getting the tattoo to cover something up.”

  “Really? This is a pretty skimpy drawing to cover up another tattoo. It usually takes a large, dark picture to camouflage a bad tattoo.”

  “It’s not a tattoo.” His perfectly pressed shirt nearly crackled as he looked back at the girl. She was still entranced by the wall of examples. Or she was snooty enough that she was trying to avoid any conversation. “It’s a scar,” Hammond said in a lower voice as if she didn’t know she had one.

  “Oh.” I was completely baffled. It was hard to imagine that a girl like that had any scars, but that might have been the reason for her staying so strangely camouflaged in a hood and sunglasses. “If it is a thick scar with ridges, it might be hard to cover.” I was getting annoyed with having to go through a middle man to talk about this tattoo. “Can I see the scar?” I called to the girl, knowing full well that I was probably going to piss the guy off, which would have been all right too. The girl turned and stared at me from behind her glasses for a second. She walked silently over to the counter. She looked at Lincoln for what seemed like approval and then lifted the side of her sweatshirt up. A long thin scar ran up her side ending somewhere above her sweatshirt and below the waist of her jeans. Looking at it made me swallow hard. It wasn’t a thick scar but something bad had happened to her.

  I looked at her. “Was it an accident?” It was none of my business, but for some reason, I needed to know what this girl had been through. She lowered her head again and fished for something in her pocket. She pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. The guy reached over and stopped her from writing.

  “It was an accident,” he said with just enough anger to let me know it was none of my business to know more. “Scotlyn is mute.”

  I was completely confused. “Does she hear?”

  She nodded and her big sunglasses slipped down her tiny nose. She pushed them back up and turned to look through the earring tree on the counter.

  Impatience radiated off her boyfriend. “Will you do it or not? It has to be done in the evening and in sessions. I don’t want her getting anxious, and I don’t want her sitting in here with other clients.” He spoke fast now like a slick salesman. He stared at me with a touch of suspicion. “I’ll be here, of course.”

  “I won’t work with someone hovering over me.”

  His mouth drew tight. “I won’t hover, but I will be here in the shop while you work.”

  “Fine. Tomorrow night?”

  “We’ll be here.”

  “Leave the artwork with me so I can cut it into sections and make a stencil.”

  He looked at the drawing as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave it. If I knew Ginny, she’d probably charged him a pretty penny for it.

  “That’s fine.” He turned to the girl. “Let’s get going, Babe.”

  The girl picked up a pair of earrings with glittering pink stones. Her back was turned to us, but I saw her take off her glasses to get a better look at the earrings. She tapped the counter with her finger, held up the earrings, and spun around to face me. In her silent way she was asking how much, but I couldn’t find my tongue to answer. The wind had been sucked from my chest.

  Her round blue eyes widened, and she lifted the earrings again.

  “Uh, ten dollars— I think,” I was stuttering like a dumbfounded idiot.

  The guy yanked out his wallet and tossed a ten dollar bill on the counter. “Let’s go, Babe.” He nodded. “Tomorrow after six.”

  I watched her walk out and climb into the Porsche. My breathing had still not slowed. I fished my wallet out and pulled the crumpled flyer from between my credit cards. Not that I really needed to look at it. I’d stared at it so often, I’d memorized every curve and shadow of her face. I knew the blue of her eyes as if the color had been painted on my brain.

  The engine of the Porsche rattled the shop window as he threw it into gear and pulled away. I watched the car drive off and looked back down at the picture. She was even more incredible in person.

  ***

  Even after planting four flats of petunias in Nana’s garden and answering the same question about where I’d gotten my shirt ten times, my mind had never drifted away from the girl. I washed my hands with the garden hose and pulled out my phone. It had buzzed five times while I was planting, but since Nana had been sitting on a chair watching me, I knew it wasn’t her. So I’d ignored the calls until now. There was a text from Cassie with an urgent plea to call her as soon as possible.

  “Nix?”

  “Yeah, Cass, where are you? What’s up?”

  “I’m in the emergency room with Dray.”

  “What? I thought you were on a date with the drummer.”

  “I was,” she said with a frustrated sigh, “and it was going great.”

  “The guy’s a douche,” I heard Dray’s voice in the background, which at least let me know he was alive.

  “No, you’re the douche,” Cassie snapped. She returned her attention to the call. “Anyhow, Boss, tag— you’re it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I’m done playing nurse maid. Dray’s waiting for a scan on his head.” She chuckled. “Won’t those doctors be shocked when they see it’s empty?”

  “Hey,” Dray said and then groaned in pain.

  “You’re suicidal friend got knocked out so cold tonight the refs wouldn’t let him leave until someone picked him up. They pressed one on his phone but you didn’t answer. Then they tried two but Clutch has apparently vanished from planet Earth. And guess who lucky number three is?” She said it sarcastically, but there was an edge of glee in her tone. “I decided to drive him to the emergency room.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Dray spoke toward the phone.

  Cassie snorted derisively. “Uh, in the car when I asked you what day it was you answered pepperoni pizza.”

  There was a long pause. “Oh,” I could still hear Dray in the background. “That’s probably not good.”

  “I’ll be right there, Cassie. And sorry about the date.”

  “Story of my life. See you in a few.”

  I tucked Nana into bed. Her blue-gray eyes crinkled as she peered up at me. “Is that a new shirt?

  I smiled down at her. “No, Nana, it’s not.”

  “You look dashing in blue. You should always wear blue. Your grandfather had a dark blue blazer that he liked to wear on his sailboat.” She laughed. “Fancied himself a sea captain in that coat. Your grandfather loved the sea.” Things from long ago stuck her mind like handprints in cement, but things that happened ten minutes before disappeared like smoke in the wind.

  I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I’ve got to go, Nana. Dray got hurt, and he needs me.”

  Sadness softened the wrinkles in her face. “Poor little, Dray. That father is such a monster.” In her mind, Dray was still that nervous, on-edge, skinny teenager who came to hide out at our house when things got really bad at home. “You better go then
.”

  “See you tomorrow, Nana.”

  I turned to leave and reached the door as she called to me once more. “You know, Alex, I think we should plant some flowers in the garden.”

  My throat tightened as I nodded and turned off the lights. On my way out I left a note on the table that said, ‘water the flowers’.

  ***

  It was a Friday night so the emergency room was packed with people. Cassie and Dray were tucked in a dark corner of the waiting area. Cassie was reading a book, and Dray had his head resting back. He had a cut near his eye, and his bottom lip was twice the size as normal. Cassie looked up first. She hopped out of the chair. “Finally. I’m going home to shower off the germs I’ve collected from these sticky chairs. Have fun.”

  Dray lifted his head and opened heavy lids as she walked away but he didn’t say a word.

  I knuckled him on the arm.

  “Ouch, shit. That’s right. Hit a dying man when he’s down.”

  “You could have at least said thank you. You interrupted her date night.”

  He closed his eyes again and rested his head back with a moan. “She should be thanking me. The guy’s a douche.”

  “Yeah, you’ve said that about a hundred times already.”

  “Have I? Guess that’s because it’s true. Fuck, my head hurts. Why do they have to keep those damn lights on?”

  I looked around at the line of depressed, pale faces. Most had probably been waiting for hours. “Uh, most likely because it would be a liability to have all the sick and injured people stumbling around in the dark. Didn’t the last doctor tell you to avoid another concussion for awhile?”

  “What does it matter? My brain’s already mush.”

  I scooted down but avoided touching the arms of the chair. “True.” The glass doors slid open, and a lady carried in a screaming kid. She was holding a cloth against his head in a futile attempt to staunch the river of blood.

  Dray opened his eyes to see what the drama was about. “Shit, that’s going to leave a scar.” Then he closed his eyes again.