Pack Up the Moon

by Rachael Herron

  Now she stared at the glow-in-the-dark moon and stars until they blurred. A single, unwanted tear trickled down toward her ear.

  Not telling Nolan about Pree . . .

  She regretted nothing more.

  But what the hell was she supposed to do about the regret? She didn’t feel guilty, exactly, not now. She had, up until three years before, when the fury pushed it out of her. So what was this feeling, then? It crept into her throat, a tightness that didn’t ease as she tried to clear it with a short, sharp cough.

  As she started to stand, her cell phone gave a short beep. She pulled it out of her pocket.

  Thanks for last night. The cake was good.

  Her heart beat erratically, and for a brief moment Kate felt light-headed. She swayed, wondering if she should sit back down before she fell.

  At the kitchen nook downstairs where she kept her laptop, Kate sat, taking a deep breath. She opened her e-mail and entered Nolan’s address. It autopopulated as fast as it always did. They’d only written about Robin, up until now. That was the rule. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—talk about Robin with anyone else.

  Kate closed her eyes and for one second could almost feel Nolan’s leg behind her in bed, that steady pressure that said, Love, here, love. She missed that particular touch so much her throat ached. She had to finally try to set this right, if such a thing were even possible this late. She rubbed her eyes and then opened them again slowly.

  Dear Nolan,

  There is something I have to tell you.

  Oh, god, she couldn’t do this in an e-mail. Telling him in person would be even worse, but nothing could excuse it being done via an electronic message.

  I should probably see you to say it. If that’s something you could feel comfortable with, please e-mail me back to set up a meeting.

  I hope all is okay with you,

  Kate

  It was a polite sign-off, something she wrote to acquaintances. It wasn’t until after she’d hit send that she realized she actually agreed with the sentiment. She did hope he was okay. Perhaps only okay, but that in itself was an improvement upon actively wishing him harm.

  She clicked on the sent-mail icon, hoping for a small moment that she’d imagined mailing it. But there it was. In her words. She’d aimed a gun and fired a bullet across the ether to the man with whom she’d made two children, the man who had killed one of them, the man she’d loved for so long before trying with all her strength to find the method of hating him.

  Kate wondered what he looked like now.

  Chapter Eight

  Monday, May 12, 2014

  12 p.m.

  As Pree walked from BART toward the post office on Sutter, she let her thoughts swirl inside her head like ink mixed with water. This particular post office was a good one—always too preoccupied with trying to keep the homeless guys from peeing in the corners to ever notice a girl with blue-streaked hair and a relatively huge backpack.

  She couldn’t tell Jimmy her secret. She shouldn’t. Why in the hell did she want to? Jimmy reminded her of an alley cat, long and rangy and sleek. He was a genius, sure, which was why he was the game designer, but that was even more reason not to trust him with any kind of secret. Cats were sly, untrustworthy. Everyone knew that. Not like good Flynn. Flynn, if covered in fur, would be a golden retriever.

  Pree told herself that she was just helping a fellow artist. That’s all it was. The fact that she had a stupid schoolgirl crush on that artist—her married boss—was irrelevant.

  She dodged a guy who was wielding not one but two iPhones while striding down the sidewalk as if he owned the whole damn thing. He was texting with one hand and talking with the other and came pretty close to clocking her in the eye. “Hey!” she yelled. He threw her a dirty look like it was her fault.

  Graffiti were at the core of the games they were designing at Pree’s job. The main characters left clues and hints in what they left behind. Jimmy Donegal, the game designer, had known he didn’t understand street art, and since tagging was an actual part of the game, he’d hired her as a junior concept artist. She was an art major, yes, with a minor in computer programming, emphasis in gaming. But the fact that she also had street cred as an LA female street artist, limited though it was, was what had won her the job in the end.

  She was just lucky. It wasn’t like she was really someone in the scene. Pree had worked on a few group bombs that had picked up some press, had done some outlines while bigger, more experienced artists did the real work. But the Los Angeles Times had liked the RARE stickers that she slapped under the drawings of her girls. She couldn’t help thinking that the fact she was white in a minority-dominated art scene got her extra attention, too, which was a fucking shame.

  What would Bira and Sleet say now if they could see her? Working a day job, living with her guy, practically settled down. The girls she’d known on the street, the ones she’d run from cops with, laughing their lunatic heads off, those girls would just shake their heads and smile if they could see her now. Knocked up. Most of them had kids now, too. That was just what people did.

  It wasn’t what Pree had ever foreseen for herself, though. Nothing like it.

  Pree had to tell the moms, of course. But the way she knew they’d react made her want to put it off. Maybe until she was eighty-three. And yeah, she had to tell Flynn. Obviously. Soon.

  Pree shook her head and tugged on her left ear as if she could pull the thoughts out and throw them away, toss them out into the street with the spent cigarettes and dropped pennies. She pushed open the door of the post office and made her way past the perpetual line to the mother lode, the pile of free USPS stickers that lined the back wall along with the certified and international forms. There was a code, see. You didn’t buy stickers. You just didn’t. It was a thing. Most taggers stole the “Hello My Name Is” ones from stationery stores, but Pree wasn’t good at that. She’d tried once when she was in high school, and she’d gotten all itchy. She’d ended up putting a pack of name tags inside a manila folder and then buying that, so she kind of snuck the stickers out of the store, but it felt like cheating. It was better, for her, just to get the legitimately free ones.

  She lifted a stack of them and stuck them in her bag next to her black book. An older blond woman with honest-to-god pink curlers in her hair glared at her. Pree stared back. Who went out in curlers? Was this 1961?

  “You can’t take those.” The woman’s voice was abrasively high-pitched. Everyone turned to look at them.

  Pree ignored her and walked past, but the woman reached out and grabbed Pree’s arm, her bony fingers digging into her elbow painfully. “Hey!” Pree said. “Let me go!”

  “Officer!” The lady used her free arm to wave at the postal worker behind the desk. “She stole a pile of papers!”

  “Just stickers,” Pree told the clerk. “The mailing labels.”

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Is there a limit?”

  He sighed and pushed his glasses up his sweating nose. “Let her go, lady.”

  “I pay taxes. She’s wasting my tax dollars,” the woman said, but she let go of Pree. Pree could smell dryer sheets on her, and something else, maybe onions.

  “I pay taxes, too,” Pree said as she threw the woman a peace-out. Okay, she hadn’t been paying them for long, she supposed. As she went down the steps, she felt babyish, as if she’d gotten caught stealing a Blow Pop.

  She trucked up to Union Square through the heavy mist. It wasn’t cold. If the sun burned through, it would probably be about perfect.

  Union Square was a tourist trap, of course, surrounded by shops that she never visited—Pree wasn’t drawn there by its shopping potential. What she loved about the square were its little tables, some occupied by the mumbling homeless and others taken by families from Germany or backpackers from Australia. You could get a coffee and stake your spot, and no one besides the occasional panhandler would give you any grief. It was a good spot for drawing. Pree had told Jimmy she�
��d be by the flagpole, but he wasn’t here yet, and she felt both relieved and disappointed.

  She got out her favorite marker, a fat blue Pilot jumbo that she’d customized by flattening the tip out. You had to have speed when you worked—you had to have flow.

  Pree drew for ten minutes, diving down into her name, moving smoothly over the edges of the stickers and back onto them. RARE was all she did today, all she’d done for a while now. In the world of graffiti, she could admit now she was a toy: someone who played at it. Her whole life wasn’t graf anymore, not like when she’d graduated high school, when it had been all she could think of, when she’d snuck out of the house to throw herself into Valencia’s pimped-out Honda, headed for the canals, the rattle of cans in the truck as dizzying as the paint’s fumes. That was a long time ago now, more than four years. But you didn’t get over your first love, right? Even limited to stickers as she was now, Pree was still crazy about the big stuff, the colorful work, the murals that shone a million colors, reflecting the sun.

  She drew another sticker, the R thick and triangular, then the jagged A, followed by the backward R and the sideways E. She did her standard swirl underneath with some fills over the address area at the top, and then added her signature heart in the right corner. Drawing the heart had started out ironically, something the girls had laughed at her for doing. But then—that whole cliché about San Francisco and where that guy left his heart? Since moving here, Pree sometimes felt as if she were leaving her heart behind when she slapped and moved on, signing her new city with something that mattered.

  “I don’t think the postman’s gonna be able to read that one.”

  Pree jumped. The voice came from behind her, familiar and warm.

  Jimmy. Pree was aware her crush was probably some kind of reaction to living with a laid-back artist for the last three years, because Jimmy was everything that Flynn wasn’t. While Flynn was fair in looks and countenance, Jimmy’s hair was short, his complexion dark. Jimmy favored ironic T-shirts and skinny jeans that Flynn wouldn’t be caught dead in. Jimmy looked like he knew where he belonged (which was everywhere) while Flynn swam upriver, flopping in and out of the current as he went.

  “You made it.” Pree recapped her pen. “Sneak up on girls often?”

  He gave her a look, the one he’d been giving her for a while now, the one she couldn’t quite read. The one she knew she probably shouldn’t figure out.

  “Nope,” he said simply. “It’s good to be out of the office, huh? I like the hooky thing. What are you drawing?”

  “My slap.”

  That look again. At that moment, the sun broke through the fog and hit her cheek with a sudden warmth as it flooded the square. People smiled. She heard laughter and then watched as a very small child lost a blue balloon and burst into tears, bolting away from his mother. She ran behind him, her arms outstretched to catch him. Pree looked away.

  Jimmy pulled out a chair and sat, dropping his bag to the ground with a thump. Two banana stickers and red glitter decorated the side of it. Pree pointed at it. “Did the kids have fun with that?”

  “What?” He looked confused. “Oh. Shit. I guess so.”

  “You didn’t notice?” God, she almost giggled. Why did he make her feel so young?

  “I try to ignore a lot of what goes on in my house.” He gave a rueful smile, and Pree’s heart tugged. “Okay, street girl. Show me how this is done.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She pulled three more stickers out of her backpack. “This is a slap.”

  Jimmy turned one over in his fingers. “It’s a mailing label.”

  “It’s called a slap. You put them up wherever you can reach. People actually collect them—can you believe it?” Pree tapped hers with the pen. “I wouldn’t ever do that, peel a slap. But people do. Sometimes I wonder if mine is in an album somewhere . . .”

  “What else do you know about these?”

  “This part is very important. You steal them when you want to draw. You don’t buy them.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “So that’s where the file folder stickers have been going. You’re fired.”

  Her heart galloped. Console studios often laid off their entire team after the project shipped. Their first game in the series ended production last month, and they were out of crunch, into future content support—the juniors were always the first to go. “No! I only took like five— Oh. You’re kidding.”

  Nodding, he said, “I am. I don’t give a shit. Show me what to do with this. And tell me why you do it.”

  Pree handed him a Pilot. “Don’t inhale. Or if you do, enjoy the ride as your brain cells scream their way into oblivion. Okay, the first thing is to figure out your name.”

  “Jimmy. Have we met?” He winked, a straight-faced lazy drop of an eyelid that made Pree accidentally bite the inside of her lip.

  “It can’t be your own. Related, sure, but not just your name. Usually people pick an anagram. RARE is what I took from Peresandra, my real name.” Rare was what her mothers had always said she was. She’d believed it when she was a kid.

  “You need a fake name because technically this is illegal. Should I fire you again?”

  Pree shrugged and hoped she looked as casual as she meant to. “Misdemeanor vandalism, that’s all.”

  Jimmy turned the sticker over and then held it up to the light. “Okay, then. What about Mijy?”

  “Sounds like a kind of drink. A Mijy drop.”

  “Yijim?”

  “If you painted lines from the Torah, sure. Use your whole name.” She scribbled “Jimmy Donegal” at the top of a blank page in her journal. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “JOIN GYM.”

  He made a sound at her, a grrr under his breath with a smile at the back of his eyes, and a shiver raced down Pree’s spine. “I like LEGMAN better.”

  “How about LOGJAM?” she suggested.

  Jimmy shook his head. “Closer.”

  “DEMON?” She sketched it out for him. “That would be pretty street. Or A GOD.”

  “I like ADOG better. Because I am one.” He tilted his head. “You know I am.”

  She felt that dizzy feeling again. “Fine. Draw it.”

  “Like yours?”

  “Of course not. Draw it like it’s yours.” She tossed him a small stack of stickers. “Just doodle a while. I’ll draw some, too.”

  A Russian family took over the table next to theirs, dumping bag after shopping bag onto the concrete. The father yelled something and the mother just laughed as the three children raced back and forth, from the table to the shallow steps. Pigeons scrabbled at their feet, hoping for a dropped crumb or two.

  After long, quiet minutes, Pree ventured, “So I was thinking. If Abel and Wichita both have a signature slap, that could be good, you know? We’re doing a lot with the bigger pieces, the murals, but what if they left something that others can find, hidden?”

  Jimmy didn’t lift his eyes from the sticker in front of him. “So you’re bringing up work.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted? To get a little real graffiti in there?”

  “Why do people hide the stickers?”

  Pree blinked. “They don’t, not always.”

  “But when they do?”

  “I guess . . .” She thought about how it felt when she stuck a slap behind something, the inside of a newspaper box or on a café wall below a table’s lip. “It’s like telling a secret.”

  “So you like to tell secrets.”

  “Or to hide them.”

  He looked up then. “Tell me one, you.” Again, that use of you that she wanted to mean . . . more.

  And there was only one secret she could think of right now. I’m pregnant. But if she told him, he’d immediately jump to whether or not she was going to have the baby, and if she did, how much maternity leave she’d need . . . She hadn’t been working there long enough yet to do this to the company.

  “Wow.” Jimmy pushed his chair back an
inch. “You got a good one, huh?”

  “I met my birth mother.” Pree offered the second-best secret she had.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. And?”

  “And?” She shrugged. “It was fine.”

  “You never met her before?”

  Pree shook her head.

  “So that’s a really big deal.”

  It was—oh, it was. “Nah. I’d been meaning to do it for a while.” She paused. “She’s an artist, too.”

  “So that’s where you get it.”

  Pree lowered her head to finish her sticker. The fumes from the pen made her slightly nauseated. That was new.

  “You must be freaking out.”

  Pree exhaled as she nodded. “I guess.”

  He capped his pen. “I didn’t know you were adopted.”

  “It’s not like you can see it on my skin or anything.” Pree felt nervous under his intense gaze.

  “Your parents . . .”

  “Are amazing.”

  “Of course they are. Look at the way you turned out.” He smiled so warmly that Pree’s knees heated. He went on in his uncommonly colored dark gray voice, “So what was your . . . biological mom like?”

  “She was nice. I guess. It feels kind of . . . weird that she was a total stranger. You know? If I’d passed her on the street, I wouldn’t have known her. I’d kind of always assumed there’d be some spiritual link or something. Like I would just know.” Pree felt herself blush. “That sounds stupid, I know. Oh, and I had a half brother.”

  “Had?”

  She fiddled with the edge of the sticker she’d just finished. “The papers say he died when his father killed him in the garage with carbon monoxide.”

  The legs of Jimmy’s chair reconnected to the concrete. “Accidentally or on purpose?”