The House Guests

by Emilie Richards

  The kind of girls Savannah had been friends with at Pfeiffer Grant and in Battery Park City, where she had lived in a spacious high-rise, weren’t available to her in Tarpon Springs, so she’d been forced to settle. All the popular girls seemed to have been born on the same day in the same hospital to mothers who’d known each other since childhood. They weren’t interested in strangers, especially one with a New York accent. She knew they talked about her behind her back, giggling at anything she did. Cassie, sensing her unhappiness, had told her to give the adjustment time, to be friendly but not too, to concentrate on schoolwork and look for clubs to join where she would be welcome. Cassie had gone to school in Tarpon Springs herself. She was sure Savannah would make friends.

  Cassie had also been sure that moving here would help her stepdaughter heal. How many bad guesses could one person make?

  “So, are we going to go inside or what?” Helia blew a smoke ring, something she was obviously proud of because she almost smiled.

  “We can cut across the lot,” Minh said. “They have a pile of cool hats in the corner by the door. We could each buy one and wear it to school tomorrow.”

  Savannah was pretty sure wearing a weird hat would sink her with everybody except the small group of girls who hung around Minh and Helia. Or maybe it would be even worse, like that awful scene in Legally Blonde when Reese Witherspoon showed up at a law school costume party dressed as a pink bunny to find nobody else had gotten the costume memo.

  They crossed the small parking lot that separated them from the row of shops. Helia cut between cars, banging against the side mirror of a lackluster sedan and purposely shoving it farther out of position, like it had wounded her on purpose. “My brother and I used to let air out of tires in parking lots,” she said.

  “Why would you do that?” Minh asked.

  “Something to do. It’s easy. You just take the cap off the valve, like this.” She demonstrated. “Then you poke something sharp, like a screwdriver inside.” She didn’t demonstrate the last. In fact she put the cap back on and straightened. “No point now, I guess.”

  Savannah was more sure than ever that Helia was trouble. She steered her way to the aisle that ran along the edge and continued in the same direction. Three steps later her toe caught something, and she stumbled. When she looked down, she saw what had tripped her.

  “Hey, look.” She bent over and picked up a purse, a small one, waving it in the air for the other girls to see. Minh joined her and eventually so did Helia. The purse was shiny and green, some kind of heavy woven fabric with a gold tassel at the end of a long zipper and the name Jeannie embroidered in the same color gold with three-dimensional red roses on either side.

  “So?” Helia said. “Open it.”

  Savannah unzipped the pouch and stared. “Wow, that’s a lot of money.”

  Helia peered inside, then poked a finger among the bills. “Looks like a lot of ones to me.”

  Savannah took out the wad and started counting. There were a lot of ones, but plenty of fives, and farther in there were tens and twenties and a couple of fifties. “I think there’s like eight hundred dollars here.”

  Minh gave a low whistle. “That is a lot of money. I wonder who lost it?”

  “What do we do with it?” Savannah looked at the others. “I mean, how do we figure out who it belongs to?”

  “Like we could,” Helia said. “There are three dozen cars in this lot right now. Who knows how many came and went in the last few hours.”

  “Maybe we ought to put an ad in the newspaper.” Minh took the empty pouch and fingered the fabric. “We know it belongs to somebody named Jeannie. I’d keep it if that was my name.”

  “Nobody’s named Jeannie anymore. Do you know any Jeannies? And nobody reads the newspaper.” Helia frowned, at least Savannah thought she was frowning. It was hard to tell.

  “I guess we ought to take it to a police station,” Minh said. “There’s probably one somewhere near here, right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

  “What, so some dumb cop can pocket the money and toss the purse?” Helia was screeching now. “I don’t think so!”

  Holding this much money in plain view made Savannah uneasy. She had Manhattan street smarts and knew better than to wave money around. She took the purse back from Minh and stuffed the cash inside. “You have a better idea?”

  “You two dumbasses can’t see what’s right in front of you?” Helia demanded. “This is our money now. Some woman with a stupid name dropped it and doesn’t even know she did. She doesn’t know it’s here or she doesn’t know it’s gone or maybe she just doesn’t care.”

  “Well, if we use your logic, it’s actually my money,” Savannah said. “I found it.”

  “But we know about it...” Helia was practically drooling now. “Do you know what we could do with this much money? We could have the best party ever.”

  Minh brightened. “We could invite everybody we know.”

  “My brother might buy us beer.” Helia glared at Savannah. “Unless that doesn’t suit Your Highness.”

  Until that moment Savannah had thought Helia was kidding. “You’re serious? You think we ought to spend the money on a party?”

  “I think it would up our game, that’s for sure. People would talk about it for the rest of the year.”

  “We’d have to find a place.” Minh shook her head before anybody could ask. “Not at my house. No way my parents would let me have a party with a bunch of girls they don’t know.”

  Helia was on a roll. “Nobody’s parents will be there! Besides who said anything about girls? You think this is going to be a PG party? Silly paper hats and a DVD of Frozen? We need a place where parents are either out of the house or too drunk to notice.”

  Savannah tried to imagine a family like that. She hated her own life, but that might be worse. She swung her backpack over her shoulder, zipped the pouch and stuffed it deep inside before she slipped the pack back on. “How about your house?” she asked Helia. “Would your parents look the other way?”

  “No.” Helia didn’t say more.

  Savannah chewed her lip. “My stepmother’s going to be gone this weekend.”

  “What about your dad?” Minh asked.

  “He died. That’s why we’re living in this hellhole.” Savannah managed a shrug, as if it didn’t matter.

  “Tarpon Springs isn’t so bad,” Minh said. “Give it a chance. I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “I never even had one, so get over yourself.” Helia dropped what was left of her cigarette and ground it out with the black high tops she always wore. “Having just one parent might make it easier to have the party.”

  “It doesn’t seem to work for you.”

  “I don’t have parents period, okay? There are like six creepy kids in my house and foster parents too creepy to be sorted for Slytherin. Does that bother you?”

  Savannah hadn’t run into foster kids at the academy. There had been a few scholarship students, who had been carefully screened and for the most part fit in okay. Now she wondered if they’d felt the way she did at Winds.

  “I don’t know why it would bother me,” she said. “My stepmother Cassie’s like Voldemort in a dress.” She hoped her own Harry Potter reference would lighten the tension.

  “Are you supposed to stay with somebody while she’s gone?” Minh asked.

  “Some loser named Dorian is spending the night. She’s related to my stepmother. She’s coming home from Florida State for the weekend.”

  Helia waved her cigarette in Savannah’s face. “Can you get rid of her?”

  For a moment Savannah thought Helia meant “get rid of” as in dump Dorian’s body in the Anclote River. Apparently Helia had read her thoughts. “I mean make sure she’s not hanging around! For God’s sake!” She followed with a stream of profanity.

  Savannah wa
ited until she’d finished. “I haven’t met her, but she has a boyfriend in town. If I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody she was with him instead of me, she’d leave me alone in the house.”

  “What if she shows up, you know, to check on you?” Minh asked.

  “I’ll check in by text. I’ll figure something out.”

  Minh turned to Helia. “You said you have a brother? Like a foster brother?”

  “A real one. He’s not old enough to be my guardian, but he comes to see me all the time. He’ll do whatever I ask him to.”

  Somehow that made Savannah feel better about Helia’s life. She had always wanted a brother.

  “Are we going to do this or not?” Helia asked.

  Savannah was thinking. “My house isn’t that big, so we have to keep the party small. I don’t want word to get back to Cassie. Just invite the people who are most important.”

  Helia was already planning. “We can buy food, lots and lots of it, beer, maybe get a deejay. I know a guy who would set up his sound system.”

  Savannah didn’t know how much money all that would take, but she was pretty sure there was enough in the pouch now burning a hole in her backpack.

  Minh was shaking her head. “I just wonder. You know... This money belongs to somebody. I mean, it could matter to her, you know? A lot.”

  “You planning to knock on every door in Pinellas County and see if it belongs to a Jeannie?” Helia asked.

  “Maybe we ought to wait and like, you know, see if somebody reports it missing. Look on the internet, maybe. Call the police and ask about it without telling them who we are.”

  Savannah thought out loud. “If we wait, we won’t have a place for the party.”

  Helia’s squinty eyes were narrowing even more. “For all we know, it’s drug money or something, which is why it’s all cash, and nobody’s going to visit the police over that.” She made her voice into a whine. “Hello, Officer. I lost the money I made selling smack on my street corner. Can you help?”

  Savannah doubted that drug money would be stashed in a pretty little zipper purse with a woman’s name on it. “Maybe we still ought to look a little.” Even as she said it, she knew the idea was ridiculous.

  “You going to do it or not?” Helia asked. “There are a lot of guys who would like to come to a party like this.”

  “We can’t have a lot,” Savannah said again.

  “Then how about just the best?”

  Savannah wondered what she was getting herself into. Of course Cassie thought she was a loser anyway. This was exactly the kind of thing she had expected from her stepdaughter since the day Savannah had been expelled from Pfeiffer Grant for injuring another student. Part of the reason Cassie had dragged Savannah to Tarpon Springs was because she thought her stepdaughter needed a fresh start in a place where nobody knew her checkered past.

  For a moment picturing the horrified look on Cassie’s face if she found out about the party gave Savannah pleasure. Why not? Telling the truth and doing the right thing hadn’t got her anywhere.

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “I’m in. But you have to help plan and clean up. I’m not doing this by myself.”

  “We’ll help,” Helia said. “We’ll do it all.”

  “Minh?” Savannah asked.

  Minh still looked troubled. “I guess it’s okay. I can tell my parents I’m spending the night with a girl they approve of.”

  Without even discussing their next move, they turned and walked away from the parked cars and the shops beyond. In a moment they were deep into plans for the weekend.

  3

  FROM THE MOMENT SHE’D become a mother, Amber had been careful not to collect too many possessions. She had known that without notice, she might need to pile everything she and Will owned into their car and head quickly for the open road. Today a new reality had become obvious. Not everything they had acquired in Florida would fit in their car now. Not by a long shot.

  Will was the culprit. Teenage boys were magnets, and everything they touched came along for the ride. Where once she could pack his belongings in a small rolling suitcase and have room for linens, too, now jeans and hoodies took up all the room. And shoes? These days her son’s shoes and boots rated their own carry-on. His school backpack and extra books took up a wide space on the back seat floor. Then there was sports paraphernalia. The beloved baseball glove, a basketball he had won as most valuable player when they lived in Ocala. The list went on. How could she demand he discard any of it? Will’s life had been unusual from day one. He deserved some of the ordinary things other kids took for granted. Like a roof over his head.

  For the first time that morning Will sat down, his long legs spread out straight in front of him, his broad shoulders sagging just a little. “There’s a lot of stuff left,” he said. The apartment had two small bedrooms, and she had turned over the largest to him, claiming the smaller for herself, along with the tiny coat closet by the front door. She was afraid his bedroom closet held more of his treasures.

  Even in the midst of moving again, she took time to admire her son. No one would automatically assume he was hers. She was five-eight, with her mother’s red-gold hair and her father’s green eyes. Like Amber, Will was slender, but at five-eleven, he was still growing taller. He had wide shoulders and narrow hips, but he would add muscle and bulk once the frightening amount of food he inhaled added pounds instead of inches.

  Will was dark-haired, brown-eyed and at sixteen, still somehow unformed, but she knew what he would look like in another year because he was the spitting image of his father. And at seventeen, his father had turned heads. Most notably hers.

  “We can leave some of it here,” she said. “I checked online. Legally Mr. Blevin has to store our boxes for ten days, fifteen if he doesn’t give me written notice before we leave.”

  “It wasn’t such a good place to live anyway. The hot water heater kept shutting off. He should have fixed it. And the roaches kept coming back.”

  Will was trying to make her feel better. They had camped when they first arrived in Tarpon Springs. Tonight he would remember this apartment fondly when they were sleeping in two small tents pitched side by side. And this time there was very little hope they could leave until the end of the school year.

  In the past, if she suffered a reversal like this one, Amber would have moved on to another town. The timing was perfect to leave Tarpon Springs, the way they had left so many other places. They could start over again, some town with cheaper rent, good schools and restaurants with job openings. But even though Dine Eclectic might not recover from the hepatitis scare, and her own job was shaky, Will was happily settled in school. He was taking advanced placement classes and the guidance counselor had called to encourage Amber to find extracurricular activities Will could pursue to make him more appealing to the best universities.

  With his after-school job, her son barely had time to do homework, and the fees and gear for sports teams and computer camps were out of reach. But she had been convinced that this time, they had to put down roots until Will was ready to leave home. He had support here, professionals rooting for him and willing to help him move forward. No matter how much staying in one place scared her, Tarpon Springs was a stepping-stone to the life she so badly wanted for him.

  Now she tried to put a good face on things. “We’ll find another apartment, I promise. In the meantime figure out what you need most, and that’s what we’ll take in the car.” Amber looked at her watch. “I promised Mr. Blevin we’d be out by three, so we’ll need to get to our site and set up camp before I head into work. I have to stay late tonight to close. You’ll be okay?”

  “I have a lot of homework. I’ll try to finish before it’s too dark.”

  She had managed to reserve a site at the same rustic campground where they had stayed before. It was harder than it would have been in the summer because snowbirds were al
ready arriving in fancy RVs to enjoy the Florida winter. The few available tent sites were relegated to the farthest edge of the grounds, a hike from the small lake and the showers, but she and Will would be surrounded by other campers and safe. Best of all she could afford the fee.

  “You can always go to the clubhouse to do homework,” she reminded him. The clubhouse was just a screened pavilion, but there were tables, electricity and wireless.

  Somebody knocked, and Amber started toward the door. “That’s probably Mr. Blevin. Let’s be nice.”

  Will made a rude noise in response.

  Amber tried to put a good face on things. “He’s a scared old man convinced everybody is trying to cheat him. You keep packing while he’s here.”

  Will went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  She tried not to picture the old man tripping over the loose plank on the stoop or standing in the doorway when the rusting screen door finally parted company with its hinges. Until she’d got sick, she’d paid her rent on time, and she and Will had taken on chores around the property he should have done himself. After losing the zipper pouch, she’d promised Mr. Blevin she would bring him every cent she earned that night and all others until he was paid with interest. But by then he’d been apoplectic. She supposed she couldn’t blame him.

  The door was a three-second trip since the apartment was cramped. She peered through the peephole she’d installed herself, but the man standing on the doorstep wasn’t Blevin. He was much younger and definitely easier on the eyes. She debated first, but she opened it a crack and peeked out. “Yes?”

  The man, who was somewhere around her own age, handed her a card. “I’m Travis Elliott and I freelance for the Tarpon Times. Do you have time to talk?”

  Amber turned the card around and around before she opened the door wider. The Tarpon Times was a weekly paper specializing in human-interest stories and local gatherings. She used it to wrap garbage before she put it in the can.

  She handed back the card. “Talk about what?”