by Pelzer,Lissa
‘You’re about the right age, I guess.’
‘I have a pretty hard time myself, keeping them on the straight and narrow, but it’s taught me a thing or two about how to get my message across.’
And Lilly could just imagine it, Sunday school, purity balls, and promise rings. Davis going around telling them to be good, to be pure, getting a kick out of thinking about it. Like telling yourself ‘don’t think about sex, don’t think about sex,’ until all you can do is just that.
‘When my oldest started dating I put an ultrasound scan on the fridge. She came home and said, ‘whose having a baby, Mom?’ And I just looked at her…’ Davis opened her eyes real wide. ‘Just like that. It made her think.’
‘Uh huh. I bet it would.’ Lilly bet it made her think her mom was insane.
‘But it’s a different world, the one they’re growing up in, than the one I grew up in. Teen pregnancy isn’t the scariest thing that can happen to a girl anymore…’
Lilly narrowed her eyes, tried to find the balance between listening and not giving a shit. Davis was talking, but it was just filler. She was shifting her shoulders like she was trying to get up the guts to jump in the sea. Her whole body was trying to get Lilly to look up to the mantelpiece. She wanted her to know how much she’d seen, her and Bobby and the money, enough to be suspicious, but not enough evidence to let her walk in and arrest him. She probably thought he was paying her to do a job. It showed how much she knew.
‘If I could play them a video of how it appears through my eyes, perhaps they’d get the idea. Because if I get on their backs, they shut me out, so I have to let them know indirectly, without words…’ Davis paused. She blinked.
Lilly could hear the buzzing in Davis’s pocket as clear as if her phone were sitting on the table between them.
‘You going to get that?’
Davis sat up, dug down like she was looking for loose change and pulled out an old phone with a shiny gray back. She had to find her glasses in her purse to read the text and squinted to see the screen. Lilly looked away.
‘Well darn it!’ She pressed the buttons, trying to lock it. ‘It doesn’t rain, but it pours! But what was I saying?’
It buzzed again.
‘Sounds urgent,’ Lilly said and she stood up. ‘You better see what they want. I have to go anyway. I need to make it to the presentation before the doors close.
‘When is that?’
Lilly looked at her phone. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said and for a moment she genuinely believed that she was going and not just making an excuse to get away from Davis.
‘You got a ticket? Bobby got a ticket?’
‘Everyone has a ticket.’ Lilly smirked. Let her see, there were something she couldn’t weasel her way in on.
‘Well, then I suppose I will.’ And like a prayer answered, Davis got up and went.
Lilly was leaving the lounge when she noticed the framed picture up on the mantelpiece. It looked familiar, an old building, kind of western, a little like the front of this hotel, but it wasn’t this hotel. She went closer. It was another hotel in the same chain. She recognized the logo now. She picked it up. Then she got it. They left those postcards inside the guest directories in the rooms at Sea Island. For a split second, she was in that room again, flicking through the leather book, telling The Judge they had the champagne he wanted.
The picture hit the arm of the chair before it hit the ground, but the glass smashed all the same. A thousand tiny, sharp pieces of evidence scattered across the floor.
It took a second for it to sink in, the implication, Davis knew about The Judge and she knew about Sea Island. She wasn’t here to chase Bobby up about girls. She wanted to take him down for murder.
He must have told Cassandra. She must have told Davis. Lilly shook her head. She’d been fishing around with the idea that Cassandra was here to do one more job, to frame him up. But maybe that wasn’t it. She had no idea what it was Davis needed him to do before she sprung. Unless Cassandra was wearing a wire… Lilly kicked the broken mess under the couch. She had to get to that party, she had to get the cash out of him and she had to go and get her damn shoes.
She followed the street up, past a row of clapperboard houses with box fans collecting dust in the windows and past the vacant lot to the warehouse. A caged light bulb illuminated a surveillance sign and she ignored it as Thad had told her to do. The sign was so old anyway and the bulb so dim, it was hard to believe, but still she was staring at this sign, not quite sure if she should go past.
It was a judge’s hammer.
Just the image turned her stomach.
Something formed in the back of her head, the kind of visions she’d taught herself to tune out. If you didn’t remember what happened with these guys, it was just the same as if it never had. It was a skill. She’d had to learn it. But sometimes she heard a tune that had been playing, smelt their aftershave or saw something stupid that just brought it all back.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice shouted.
Lilly started. She blinked in the dark but saw nothing.
‘What are you doing here?’ The voice demanded, angry and afraid.
‘I came to find you,’ Lilly replied, seeing Moon Face illuminated by the city lights, her plain make-up, and black dress, maybe the same one from last night and a pair of old, lace less Converse on her feet.
‘What happened to the movie?’
Lilly shrugged. ‘I sold my ticket.’ And she saw Moon Face roll her eyes. ‘I really did, to that guy Thad at The Plan 8.’
She rubbed the back of her neck. ‘The same Thad that you supposedly had a room with yesterday?’
She would have told her to believe what she liked, but that wouldn’t have helped. ‘Yeah, so I lied about that, but I’m not lying about this.’
‘Whatever. What time is it now - eight thirty?’
Lilly took out her phone. ‘Near enough.’
And Moon Face looked at her, her jaw dropped. ‘Unbelievable! You know I felt sorry for you yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘Is that your phone? The one you lost?’
‘It’s a new one, a pre-paid I just got it.’ And the girl was reeling. ‘With the money I made from selling the ticket!’
‘Where did you get it, huh?’
‘At the Sunoco.’
‘Which one?’
‘On the corner!’ Lilly was practically shouting now.
And Moon Face was blinking and she couldn’t quite get her head around it. If it was all lies or none of it lies.
Lilly waited for her to point out that every gas station was on a corner, but she didn’t. It was nothing to smile about, but she really wanted to. Some people were just so gullible.
‘So, you live around here?’ Lilly said. ‘Thad told me to come up here – when I sold him the ticket just now. I didn’t know where he was sending me…’
‘So you want to go now? Is that it?’
‘Sure, why not?
‘Only I’ve got to get ready if we’re going.’
‘Weren’t you going anyway?’
‘I wasn’t going to go on my own,’ she said.
‘No. I guess not.’
‘Hey, I could meet you at Denny’s at about nine thirty.’
‘Or we could just go to yours and I could just wait while you get ready.’
Moon Face had the same face on her that she’d had last night. Lilly wasn’t going to do a repeat of yesterday and risk losing her again.
‘Come on then.’ She waved her forward. ‘Come and see how we live.’
They were crossing the tracks, cutting between the boxcars pulled up on the sidings when Moon Face stopped, put her hand up to one of the doors and pulled it open. It took Lilly a moment to work it out, why there was a light on inside and why there was a curtain hanging down. There was a metal garage shelf in there, with plastic baskets on it, a couch and a table. The floor was full of broken up cardboard and newspapers, with an oriental style rug on top.
Lilly stepped up first. She walked across the boxcar and lowered herself onto the couch where a white sheet made a bed. Moon Face was looking at her waiting for her to say something.
‘So get ready,’ she said and took out her phone and pretended she was busy.
Moon Face went to work on herself, peering into a round mirror, caking her lashes in layer after layer of mascara. Lilly looked up but quickly looked away again. She couldn’t watch her pulling guppy faces at herself so she glanced towards the shelves instead.
There were some pictures tacked up on the shelf with magnets and Lilly peeked back to check Moon Face wasn’t watching her before she focused on them. It was Moon Face without the makeup and an older woman, probably her mom and two pictures of the same black and white dog. There was a transcript too, from a school in Muncie, Indiana slipped into a plastic sleeve to keep it clean, like a certificate for winning a competition up on her bedroom wall. Lilly saw a name. Janine Kenny.
‘Impressed huh?’
‘What?’
‘My grade point average. 3.0. You didn’t think I’d be smart.’
‘Is that you?’
Moon Face leaned over the certificate and got her meaning. ‘Yeah.’ But something connected. ‘You don’t even know my name –’
‘Thad said you were called Summer.’
‘Summer’s like a nickname.’
‘You mean a pen name.’
She lowered her mascara wand. ‘And Thad doesn’t know everything. Hey, you know what, you really play people off against each other, don’t you?’
‘I’m not judging.’
‘Best you don’t. So my real name is Janine. But I can’t change it. You want to know why?’
‘Why?’ she said slowly.
‘I’ve got a scholarship in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles in Culver City starting in September. I wrote a story for their competition.’ She lifted the wand to her eye and turned away. ‘And it won.’
‘Good for you.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Sure I do. I’m looking at your transcript right here.’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t get you a scholarship.’ She dug into her makeup bag. ‘They said, with the stuff I write about, in a few years time, I’ll be one of those ‘voices of a generation’. Apparently, I’m brave.’ She was pouting to do her lipstick, getting all the color in the wrong places.
‘So what was your story about?’
‘Just my life…before I came here.’
‘Cool.’
‘I grew up in a care home.’ Her voice dropped. ‘But that’s not why they picked my story. I mean, the scholarship is for kids who grew up in care. So we were all the same. I still won.’ She brought out her pencil and began to line her eyes.
Lilly leaned back on the couch. She wasn’t going to say it, that it was a charity scheme, just like the one Davis had been telling Cassandra about. So what if it was. You had to take what you could get.
‘That’s cool. I bet there were a hundred kids applying for that scholarship…’
‘Look.’ Moon Face pulled a letter off the shelf and handed it to her.
Lilly read it over, a letter confirming the scholarship. Her hand stiffened as she read the amount of the stipend they were going to give her for four years.
‘So all this…’ Moon Face waved her hand around the inside of the boxcar. ‘Coming here, living like this, it’s all about the experiences, you can’t be a writer if you don’t have experiences. Well, except if you’re Jane Austen, but she was a freak.’
The name was familiar. Lilly couldn’t say who that was, but still, she was pretty sure it took more than just living in a boxcar on a train track and sniffing junk to be a writer. But she could be wrong.
‘That’s what they mean, when they say a voice of a generation, you have to do things that people in your generation are doing or wish they were doing. This is why I’m here, why I’m doing all this, why I’m going to this party tonight. I keep a diary about all of it. I write in it every day at least two pages and when I’m older I’m going to publish it.’ She put the cap back on her eyeliner.
Lilly felt the bile rising up her throat. ‘What - You don’t blog?’ she asked sarcastically.
But Moon Face blanked her. ‘Can you turn around a minute?’
Lilly did as she was told.
Facing the wall, she heard Moon Face cross the boxcar. She knew what she was doing, taking her letter and some other things and hiding them. It was too much trouble to go through just for her scholarship letter. She heard a sound like mice under the floorboards. And she smiled to herself, corrected her thoughts. It was probably her diary which she was most concerned about.
‘Come on. Are you going to get ready?’ Lilly asked when she felt the air again.
‘I’m ready - I guess I’m ready.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Do I look okay?’
‘You look fine.’ Lilly turned and saw her high school certificate was gone too. Did she think she’d try to steal it? ‘But hey,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to do your makeup? I’ve got some stuff in my bag.’
‘God. Do you think we have time?’ She was playing it up, they had plenty and Lilly could see the light coming on behind her eyes.
Chapter 13
Lilly didn’t do much to her. Just shaded her cheekbones and eyebrows, lined her lips properly and put her parting on the other side of her head. The girl looked at herself in the mirror, admiring her new look from all angles, but she didn’t say thank you. Lilly didn’t mind. She probably hadn’t thanked Cassandra the first time she showed her how to make herself up using just foundation and brown eyeliner.
But she did look better and that was all that mattered. Lilly just wanted to make sure they got in. It seemed kind of suspicious that someone who could get into this thing had invited Moon Face to go with them, especially the way she had looked last night. But guys were into all sorts.
They came out of the boxcar and Moon Face pulled the screeching door closed.
‘Do those guys stay here too?’ Lilly asked.
‘In the other one.’ Moon Face nudged her chin towards the darkness. ‘But they’ll be at the bar.’
‘So you and that guy Leif aren’t…’
‘Sometimes.’ She touched her hair as if she’d just come back from the salon. ‘But if we see him, I’m just walking you into town, okay?’
Lilly smiled. She didn’t need to be loved, not by people like them.
They went a different way back into town, down the tracks and through a narrow tunnel of trees, overgrown and stinking of dank leaves and dog shit until they came out into a clearing over the bridge. Down on the corner, Lilly changed her shoes and left her wedges sitting behind the wall and they crossed to the pull-in where Moon Face said they were meant to wait.
‘Just chill and stand over here,’ Lilly told her.
‘What? Why?’
‘Pacing up and down like that makes you look like a hooker.’
‘I look like a hooker?’ Her voice went up.
‘Yeah, but that’s not a good thing. You want some guy to pull over and try to pick you up?’
Moon Face grinned. ‘Has that ever happened to you?’
‘No.’
She carried on. Now she was doing it with intent, swinging her shoulders around and twisting her ankle out.
‘Look, I’m serious. You’re drawing too much attention to yourself. If the cops come along and ask what you’re doing, what are you going to say?’
‘I don’t really care.’ She leaned against the pole and kicked the toe of her shoe on the pavement. ‘I’ll tell them I’m waiting for a friend.’
‘And what if your friend comes along and there’s some cop talking to us? You think he’s going to stop and say he’s the friend?’
‘I’m pretty sure he’d risk it.’
He wouldn’t. Lilly thought. He wouldn’t.
‘Oh - Here they are!’ Moon Face straightened up as a stretched black limo came their way.
It was obviously a rental job. The driver’s door didn’t open, this wasn’t the kind of ride that came with service, but the window went down and a guy with bleached blonde hair stuck his head out. ‘Hey girl,’ he called out to Moon Face, but he was looking at Lilly. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Oh, this is C.A.’ She gave her a wink. ‘You don’t care if…’
Lilly wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at this guy, looking past him into the dark interior. There were other guys with him. Moon Face had forgotten to mention them.
‘Hey C.A.’ he broke in, opened the door and got out, shiny shoes and thin trousers. His face contracted into a smile, pushing his eyes into his forehead. ‘Just what the doctor ordered! …I’m the doctor by the way.’ And he was laughing at his own joke.
For half a second, from the way he was leering at her, Lilly thought they were going to leave Moon Face standing there on the sidewalk. For maybe a full three seconds until the guy waved her in, Moon Face stood there like she thought the same.
The guy who’d been sitting in the middle got up, leaving a space free next to a man with heavy eyes. And Lilly sat down, feeling her bare legs stick against the imitation leather, which had been left warm by the guy who had just moved. She offered her hand to Heavy Eyes and he looked at it like it was a dead fish.
‘Drink?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’ She took the glass of champagne or whatever it was and let it sit on her knee. Hopefully, they’d get to this party before she had to put it to her mouth.
Moon Face was in now, talking away to the guy with the bleached hair. Telling him some story, not selling herself as a writer. Bleach Job smiled at her and Lilly didn’t realize she was smiling back, not until Moon Face stared her out. She was just trying to work out what the deal was. The guys’ angle was obvious, but Moon Face’s, she wasn’t so sure.
Heavy Eyes muttered something and Lilly turned.
‘Excuse me?’
