Hell's Hotel

by Lesley Choyce

  “Never was. But maybe he’s smartened up.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, maybe not.”

  “Why do you think he wants you to sign things over now?”

  “I don’t know. But if he needs the money, I should help out.”

  “Then help out. Loan him what he needs. Don’t sign everything over to him. You hang onto it. You’re good with money. He isn’t. If he can’t pay you back, you only lose a little, not a lot.”

  Emma smiled. “You’re a good friend, Tara. I’m really impressed by how mature you are. Some people are smart, but they don’t usually have good sense to go along with it. You seem to have both.”

  Tara didn’t know what to say.

  Emma said thoughtfully, “It’s important to be in control of your own life, whether you’re old or young.”

  “I know,” Tara said. “But it’s not always easy.”

  “What do you mean? Certainly you seem to know what you’re doing.”

  “Well, it’s not me. I was just thinking about my friend Jenn.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  So Tara proceeded to give Emma the full picture, including the story of the night before.

  “Well, it was a good thing you came to the rescue.”

  “I don’t know what she’d do if I wasn’t around. But she’s not going to go home, I know that, and she can’t stay permanently at my house. It would drive me crazy. I’m going to try to convince her that getting into some kind of group home might be the way to go.”

  Just then, Tara caught a glimpse of somebody in the mirror. There weren’t just two faces this time, but three. And one of them wasn’t looking too happy.

  “Sorry to intrude,” Jenn said.

  “Oh, hi,” Tara said. “How’d the interview go?”

  “It was short and not so sweet. She said she wasn’t hiring.” Jenn sounded not just unhappy, but angry.

  “Um, Emma, this is Jenn. She —”

  “I think she knows who I am,” Jenn snapped. “You just told her my life’s story — your version at least.”

  Suddenly Tara realized how it all would have sounded to Jenn who must have been at the door listening. “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have been blabbing.”

  “At least now I know how you really feel about me. You with the cool parents, the hot boyfriend, and the good grades. And me who has nothing!”

  “That’s not what she meant,” Emma tried to smooth over the scene.

  “That’s how it looks to me! And you knew she wasn’t going to hire me, too, didn’t you?”

  “I thought it was worth a try!”

  Tara suddenly realized that they were both almost shouting. Emma looked very upset, and now the figure of Mrs. Klein had appeared at the doorway. She looked straight at Tara.

  “We can hear the ruckus from all the way down the hall. What are you two doing in here?”

  Jenn didn’t say a word. She folded her arms and looked smugly at Tara, as if pleased that she had her revenge by getting Tara in trouble.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Klein.”

  “Seems to me you’ve upset Emma, and we don’t like to see our clients put through the wringer like this by a couple of squabbling teenagers. I also think you spend far too much time gossiping with the clients here and not enough time doing your job.”

  “Now just a minute,” Emma said, coming to the defence. “Tara was not gossiping. I was the one who had asked for her help and she felt obliged to discuss a problem with me. I don’t see that you have a right to criticize her for that. If anything, it was my fault.”

  Mrs. Klein looked a little miffed. Nobody could get away with talking to her like that except Emma, the one patient in the nursing home who commanded respect from everyone.

  “I see,” she said abruptly, but then, turning to Jenn, she concluded by saying, “but I don’t believe you have a right to be snooping around here. I told you there were no jobs.”

  Once again, Tara had come out unscathed. But not Jenn. She looked hurt and angry. “No problem,” she said sharply. “I can tell where I’m not wanted.” She turned and walked down the empty hallway, out into the sunlit morning.

  Jenn’s Blues

  Tara couldn’t find Jenn anywhere. Jenn’s parents had said on the phone that she hadn’t come home on Saturday or Sunday. Tara scoured downtown. Courtenay, who sometimes hung around with Jenn on the street, said she’d seen Jenn “around,” but Tara didn’t have any luck tracking her down. She wanted to apologize for the way things had gone. Instead of helping her friend, she had ended up causing her more grief.

  She ran into Craig Hollet in front of the free soup-and-coffee bus that sometimes parked on Grafton Street. “Maybe she doesn’t want you to find her,” Craig said. Craig had been on the street for a long time. He had problems like all of them, but he seemed like some kind of leader. If new kids showed up, Craig was willing to go the distance and make sure they knew where to get free meals, where to bum quarters, and where to crash for the night and not get messed up. But Craig had never been too friendly towards Tara. She wasn’t one of them.

  “Craig, I’m her friend. She needs me. If you see her, will you tell her to call me? Please?”

  “I’ll be sure to pass on the message,” Craig said, his voice flat and insincere. “By the way, about your boyfriend and his little paper, I hope he knows what he’s doing. You know, reporters try to write about us all the time or they come down here with their freakin’ cameras and start snooping around. They never get it right. They never get the whole story, the real story. They see what they want you to see.”

  “I think that’s why Josh is starting his paper. He thinks there’s another side to a lot of things. Did he talk to you?”

  “I gave him some good quotes. I hope he doesn’t mess with my words.”

  “Trust him,” Tara heard herself saying as she started to walk off. Maybe Josh’s intentions were good. He loved to help out at anything he considered a noble cause, but she didn’t really trust him to get the story straight. He would have his own spin on the whole thing and his own opinions.

  ***

  On Monday, Tara finally zeroed in on Jenn walking away from her down the hall at school, so she ran to catch up. “You still mad at me?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenn said, looking straight ahead. “I get dumped on so often, I kind of get used to it.”

  “Well, it was stupid of me to be talking like that.”

  Jenn stopped in her tracks. “Tara, no one would ever accuse you of being stupid. Cruel, maybe, but not stupid.”

  “Whatever I was, I’m still sorry. I don’t want you staying mad at me.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You know I’ve been worried about you. Where have you been all weekend?”

  “Working things out. Look, you know I can’t go back home and I can’t stay at your house forever. I guess I just got a little spooked that first night back on the street. But now everything is cool. I got friends there.”

  “Yeah, friends,” Tara said, studying how tired and frazzled Jenn looked. “But you need a place to live.”

  “Oh right. Like your bright idea of signing me up again for a group home. Remember last time?”

  The last time Jenn had allowed Social Services to put her into a group home, she quickly made friends with a couple of kids who were experts at breaking and entering. She’d learned all about ripping off jewellery and electronics. And then she’d been busted.

  “You just got in with the wrong crowd,” Tara said.

  “I think I’m better off on my own.”

  Jenn was walking faster now. The bell for class had sounded. Tara felt that a big chasm was opening up between them, and she didn’t like it. “Jenn, okay, I’ll stop preaching. I just want to know t
hat we’re still friends.”

  Jenn stopped. “Fine, I’ll forget about the other day at the nursing home. I’m okay. It was a good lesson. Yeah, we’re still friends. Next time, though, let me tell my story, all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  But Jenn wasn’t smiling as she walked into her class. Tara was left alone, feeling confused. She wasn’t sure she had patched things up. Tara realized how much she needed Jenn as a friend. If Jenn had written her off, who would replace her? Tara had to admit to herself that she would have felt really lost, and it would have hurt a lot.

  Tara needed to talk to someone, and she didn’t feel like going to math class. She decided to find Josh, find out how his paper was coming along. Hadn’t she promised to write a piece for it? She wasn’t really sure that she wanted to be part of the controversy that was bound to erupt, but she had promised. For only the second time in her entire life, Tara decided to cut class. If Josh was in school at all, he could only be in one place, sitting at a terminal in the computer room with some phoney reason for being there instead of in class.

  There was a substitute in charge of the computer room when Tara walked in. She looked up at Tara, as if waiting for an explanation.

  It wasn’t easy for Tara to scan the room without standing up on her tiptoes to see over the computer monitors. But there he was, in the back, hunched over a keyboard, his face close to the screen.

  “I’m here to work on my, uh, my project, with Josh.” She pointed to him in the back of the room.

  “You have permission to be here?” the substitute asked. She was new at this, Tara could tell, and didn’t know anything about the rules around the school.

  “Of course,” Tara said convincingly. “It’s a special project for the newspaper.” She didn’t say which newspaper.

  “Okay,” the young woman said.

  Josh was wearing earphones that were plugged into a digital recorder. He was busy transcribing the recording, crunching away on the keyboard, fast and sloppy, as was his style.

  Tara was trying to focus on the words on the screen when Josh noticed her.

  “Hey, Tara,” he said, taking off the earphones. “How did you, like, just appear out of thin air?” He turned down the brightness control on the monitor and the screen faded to black.

  “You should be in English,” Tara said.

  “And you should be in ...” Josh checked his watch, “math. Right?”

  “Yeah. But we’re both here now.”

  “That we are.”

  Tara suddenly had the feeling that Josh was nervous about something, that he didn’t want her there. “What are you working on? Something for The Rage?”

  “You got it. It’s all coming together great.”

  The substitute was giving them a dirty look. Tara pulled up a chair beside Josh and decided to whisper. “Maybe I should get a look at what you’re including so far, so that I know what to write about.”

  Josh still had his finger on the brightness control of the monitor, almost as if he were guarding it. There was something on the screen that he didn’t want her to see. “Well, you know the whole first issue is only going to be like a four-page news-paper. Space is getting kind of tight. Maybe you should just hold off until the second issue.”

  Tara felt a little chill run through her. It’s true that she had offered to write something because she thought Josh could use some help on the first issue, but now what was he saying? That she wasn’t wanted?

  He read her look immediately. “No,” he said earnestly. “It’s not like that. Look, we’ve established a certain tone to this first issue. It’s mostly about kids who get kicked around by the system. It has to be angry and it has to focus on the problem and go right for laying the blame.”

  “And you’re writing the entire issue — just you, right?” Tara couldn’t believe it. What an ego.

  “No, not quite. Look, here’s the thing. I’ve talked to a lot of these kids on the street. I know why they’re there. It’s like a conspiracy between the parents, the school, the city, and the law. It’s like they’ve been shoved out of everywhere and all they have is the street.”

  “That’s a bit simplistic, isn’t it? You know it’s more complicated than that. Tell me how this school encourages kids to end up on the street.”

  “I’ll give you one example. It’s in my story. Mr. Henley. Now there’s a vice-principal who likes to throw his weight around. Craig Hollet says that he was kicked out of here because Henley had it in for him. Craig was caught vandalizing Henley’s Toyota. Now that might not have been the right thing for a young scholar to do, but Henley took it personally, and he made sure that Craig got booted from the school for good. Henley is part of the system that pushes kids out onto the street.”

  Tara could see where this was going. “Josh, Henley was responsible for getting you kicked off the school paper. Are you just trying to get personal revenge?”

  “What should I do, go scratch up his car instead?”

  “You know what I mean. But you’re not being objective. Isn’t that what writing the truth is supposed to be all about?”

  Josh gave her a dirty look. “Tara, when this paper comes out, I’m going to get in a lot of trouble.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  “I have to. How many kids are down there hanging around Grafton Street without any real place to go? Twenty? Thirty? I owe it to them. I’ll get this issue of The Rage out and make sure every kid in the school reads it. I’ll get myself in trouble and then go to the media. They’ll have to take notice of the real story about kids on the street.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust the TV or the papers to report anything fairly.”

  Josh threw his hands up in the air. “Look, I know I hurt your feelings on this, but I don’t want you to get into trouble over something I cooked up. That wouldn’t be fair.” He looked up into her eyes with a warm, genuine smile.

  Tara looked away and stared at the black screen of the monitor. Then she reached out and turned up the brightness control until the words came up on the screen. This time Josh didn’t stop her.

  At first she didn’t recognize the story. “This isn’t your writing,” she said.

  Josh squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “I told you I didn’t write the whole paper. I had help. I was just transcribing this.”

  Tara punched a couple of keys and scrolled the story to the beginning. The title read, “Becky’s Blues.”

  “Who’s Becky?” Tara asked as she began to read.

  “We changed the name. It’s a real person but I’ll use the pseudonym. It’s her story. It needs to be told.” Tara was reading the third paragraph when it clicked. The arguing parents, the group home. It was unmistakable. It was Jenn’s story. And just like Josh had wanted, the tone was definitely angry. The language was rough — offensive even.

  “Everybody’s gonna know who Becky is,” Tara said.

  “No they won’t. I’m not going to tell. Jenn gave me permission to use her story. It took more than a little persuading, but once she started, it all just spilled out. She told me the whole thing. I got it word for word. It’s tragic, but it says it all, even better than I could. I’m going to run this as the lead story and then follow up with commentary. The first issue of The Rage is going to be a screaming success. It’s going to do some serious damage to the system that created this tragedy.”

  For a split second Tara didn’t know whether to hug Josh for being so bloody committed to his cause or to scream at him and tell him he was crazy. She read on down the screen and heard Jenn’s words echoing in her head, the story that she too had heard before over the many years that they had been friends.

  “But what if you’re wrong? What if everyone knows this is Jenn’s story, and what if her language and her accusations here get her into big trouble? Remember, you t
old me that Mr. Henley likes revenge, and he doesn’t exactly come off looking like a saint here. What if this gets her in so much trouble that she gets kicked out of school?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” he said, all too confidently.

  “You’re wrong. It could happen. It’s a real possibility.”

  Josh studied the words on the screen for a minute, then he looked at Tara. “I guess it’s just a chance we have to take.”

  Tara felt like reaching around and yanking the cord out of the computer, or deleting the file, sparing Jenn from seeing her story in print. But she knew that wouldn’t be enough. Josh would persevere. He’d write it again. Josh didn’t give up on anything he’d set his mind on. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him, that and his great, sensitive eyes. But now she saw this other side of his stubbornness and his so-called compassion and she didn’t like the looks of it at all.

  She scraped her chair back across the floor, got up, and walked out of the room.

  The Rage

  Tara had to admit that Josh was right about one thing: when the first issue of The Rage came out a lot of people noticed. He printed hundreds of copies with money out of his own pocket — that is to say, money saved from his allowance. The paper was everywhere around the school and in a bunch of shops downtown.

  When Tara arrived at school on Friday morning, she saw Josh surrounded by a crowd of students. She could tell by the look on his face that he was soaking up the attention. When she noticed her friends Carla and Beth doting on Josh, she had a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  Tara hung back, but Josh came over to her with a big goofy smile on his face. She knew the paper was his personal triumph and he was on top of the world.

  “Whaddya think?” he said, putting his arm around her.

  “About what?” she toyed with him.

  He pulled a copy of The Rage out of his back pocket and held it out in front of her. “The paper, man. What did you think about the first issue? It’s hot, I’m telling you. Everybody’s onto it.”

  “I thought you were asking me the question. Or were you answering for me, too?”