The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  Edie seemed to take Lee’s pause as answer enough. “Fine,” she snapped, grabbing the flier from Lee’s hand. “I’ll ask Claire.”

  Edie really knew how to stick it where it hurt. Claire Faver had been Edie’s best friend before Lee came along, and Claire’s animosity toward Lee was barely concealed.

  • • •

  Lee spent her birthday at home, sharing a dishwater-colored cake that tasted of socks with her mom and Steve. “We noticed some links you left up on the computer.” Steve took a bite of cake and closed his eyes with pleasure. “Looks like you’ve been researching colleges?”

  Lee took a mouthful of cake and shrugged. She tried to get a view out the window, but Steve’s face was in the way.

  “College is expensive, you know. That means debt.”

  Lee forced the cake down. “I can get financial aid. Scholarships.”

  Steve nodded. “Financial aid is complicated. And scholarships take really good grades. Maybe if you had thought of that a year ago . . .”

  Steve had no idea what Lee’s grades were. She’d kept them up, despite everything. She felt like grabbing last year’s report cards and shoving them into his smug face.

  “. . . but anyway, we think college is a fine idea.”

  Lee looked at her mother. “You do?”

  “Sure we do,” Steve said, waiting until she looked at him before continuing. “But we also think that a year or two of real life under your belt would do you some good. Most kids waste college because they’re not mature enough to handle it yet. And after a year or so you might find that it’s not really for you anyway. I never went to college. Did you know that?”

  Lee looked down at her hands. She had bent the fork nearly in half.

  “It’s true. And look at me. I love what I do. My business is booming. And I could use a smart, energetic assistant soon.”

  Lee knew he was waiting for her to look up, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Julia and I talked about this. She’s on board, too.” Steve looked at Lee’s mom, who was trying to smile. “Anyway, just give it some thought. Oh, and happy birthday.” He handed her a bright red box with a sheaf of loose papers inside. She didn’t take it, and he set it down in front of her.

  “It’s for a Buddhist liturgy,” he said. “These are sutras. You sit with them in the morning and chant them, aloud or silently. Like this.” He opened the box and read aloud from the first page: “Shelter is the foundation for all you will set out to do. Shelter is the milk and honey of daily life. Shelter is the doorway to liberation.” He cast a smile at her. “Happy birthday from your mother and me.”

  “I’m going for a walk,” Lee said.

  “Just be sure you’re home by dinner.” Steve carefully placed the paper back in the box and closed it. “Curfew doesn’t go on hold for your birthday.”

  Lee left the house for Edie’s. It was a long walk but still early. Edie wouldn’t have left yet for the party. Fuck her curfew. When she got to the house, a medieval-looking two-story stone Tudor with elaborately manicured hedges, she made her way around to the back, to Edie’s room on the first floor. Peering through the window, she could see Edie from behind, applying makeup in a mirror. Lee was about to tap on the glass when she spotted a pair of oxblood Doc Martens in the mirror, attached to a pair of stockinged legs on Edie’s bed. Lee couldn’t see the rest of the person, but she didn’t need to to know it was Claire. When her eyes shifted back, she could see Edie staring at her in the mirror. Then Edie returned her attention to her own face, and Lee knew she’d been dismissed.

  On her way home, hurting in a way she hadn’t let herself feel in years, Lee began to notice a man following her. Edie often complained about unwanted advances from strange men—in cafés, on the subway, walking down the street—but Lee rarely had that problem. The man was heavyset and a little hulking and was not at all subtle about stalking her, especially considering his attire: an old-fashioned tailcoat with brass buttons over a tight black waistcoat, black trousers, and a black bow tie. He looked ridiculous, like an English butler lost in the city. Lee quickened her pace, ducked down into a subway station, walked through it, and came out at the other end. She thought she’d lost him, but then he was right in front of her, blocking her way. Lee felt frozen in place. “What do you want?” she said.

  He said nothing. When she looked into his eyes, she could see that his irises were weirdly misshapen. He shuffled in place, smiling at her, and there was something childlike about him. Lee was suddenly more curious than afraid. Then she noticed a black box in his hand, about the size of a cigar case. He clumsily flipped it open, and a lens on a bellows popped out. He raised it to his chest and snapped a picture of her. Then he bowed slightly, turned, and walked away. Lee wanted to tell someone about the encounter, to confirm the weirdness of it, but there was no one to tell.

  The following Monday at school Claire and Edie spent the day huddled together, whispering and laughing and sharing glances. A door had been shut in her face. The one time she found Edie without Claire, she asked her about the party, but Edie just shook her head and laughed, then went back to texting.

  • • •

  The prospect of college, and with it the prospect of reinventing herself, had become something more than a distant, formless hope. She began looking into programs, researching college towns. Edie had slowly opened the door to Lee again, and Lee spent every day after school at Edie’s house, where they leaned against each other on Edie’s bed and fantasized about disappearing. They began making plans, which were vague at first but solidified as they discussed which schools offered the brightest fields of hope and possibility and plain old American fun. Lee persuaded Edie to look out of state—New York or California or some small town where they could rent a house together and bicycle to class.

  Edie wanted to study psychology, and Lee considered that as well, until she happened upon a photo in a National Geographic magazine. The article was about the discovery of a buried Assyrian city, which was being carefully unearthed, and in the photo a young woman in boots, khaki shorts, and a green cotton shirt squatted low as she brushed dirt from the head of a statue. The woman had a scarf wrapped around her black hair, and her clothes and tanned skin were dusted in red earth. She worked solo. Lee knew immediately that she wanted to be that woman. She tore the photo from the magazine, put it into her pocket, and brought it out again in the seclusion of her room that night. She tacked it to the wall above her bed and fell asleep wondering what it would take to become an archaeologist.

  As she turned down requests from the kids at school and stopped dealing drugs, Lee found herself growing invisible again by degrees. Her new friends, the kids in Edie’s crowd, had always found Lee to be a little off, too distant and inside herself to ever be one of them. They tolerated her when she was dealing and stealing for them, but she no longer sensed the eyes of the other kids on her as she’d walk the halls, no longer felt the twitchy anxiety of some boy nearby trying to get his nerve up to ask her for something.

  Edie persuaded Lee to introduce her old dealer to Edie’s boyfriend, Deke, and Deke became the new go-to guy. The itch to steal never went away—in fact, it got worse—but Lee refused to scratch it, and after a while it became like a phantom limb.

  Claire seemed pleased with Lee’s fall from favor with their crowd, and even warmed to her some, until one day Claire just didn’t show up at school anymore. Poof, gone, just like those other kids. When Lee asked Edie about it, Edie looked around the quad as if she’d only now noticed. “Maybe she finally ran off with that skinny indie bassist dude,” she said. “She was always threatening to.”

  Then two detectives came by the school one day to interview her friends, and Edie took Lee aside and made her promise not to tell them about the S.A. party she and Claire had gone to.

  “Why?” asked Lee. “What does that have to do with anything?”

/>   “It doesn’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. But if my father finds out I went, he’ll kill me. And if the police find out about it, you can bet my father will, too.”

  Lee promised, but it didn’t matter. The detectives never asked her anything anyway.

  • • •

  Lee was seated by herself on the bleachers with a sandwich and a short list of colleges. She had narrowed it to four, and Edie was supposed to narrow hers to four, and together they were to agree to a first choice, then a second and a third. Lee had a 3.7 GPA and had scored a 2100 on a practice SAT test. Edie had money and connections. If they didn’t shoot too high, they were sure to get into one of them together, and they had made a pact to choose only a school that accepted them both. Lee saw Edie approaching from across the field, hugging herself against the wind. Edie skulked up the bleachers, her big eyes moist and smeared in mascara. She snatched the cigarette from Lee’s mouth and sat beside her.

  “What’s wrong?” Lee asked.

  Edie took a drag and handed the cigarette back to Lee, sniffling as she gazed out across the empty football field. Despite the chilly October air Edie wore only a short skirt and a tight-fitting cardigan.

  Lee pulled a sweatshirt from her bag and held it out, but Edie ignored it, taking the cigarette back. “I really fucked it up this time.”

  Edie Oswald. Golden girl. Touched by angels. Nothing ever went wrong for Edie. How bad could it be?

  “I got scared. I panicked. I’m sorry, Lee.”

  Something in the distance spooked Edie, and she stood up and inhaled from the cigarette, then made her way down the bleachers. She turned. “My father will help you, I swear. I’m really sorry.”

  Lee leaned forward and squinted. An amorphous blob across the field resolved itself into three separate figures as they approached. Lee recognized Mrs. Bartlett, the school principal, followed by two uniforms of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  TWO

  SOLITARY in the Queensbrook Juvenile Detention Center was a concrete box measuring six paces by eight, with freshly painted pale walls, a stainless-steel toilet, and in the middle of the room a concrete slab with a vinyl pad on top to sleep on. They put Lee in and left her there, they told her, for her own protection. She stayed in the cell for twenty-two hours a day for thirty-three days with nothing but a Bible and the nonstop screaming of a girl two cells over for company. Lee had been alone all her life but never like this. The cell had no window, and the guards never talked to her and never turned out the light in the room, so each hour stretched out in meaningless succession until she lost sense of time completely. An hour was a day was a week was an hour.

  To pass the time, she played out the events leading to her incarceration as though they were scenes from a movie, rewinding and replaying them again and again. She had to guess at a lot of it, determine what had happened based on what the prosecutor had laid out in court, what Edie had confessed to her in one short, tearful phone call, and what she knew to be the truth.

  As far as she could piece it together, it had gone down like this: Deke, not long after taking over Lee’s connections, had gotten greedy, expanding outside their closed circle, and his greed had turned to sloppiness. But the cops had been sloppy, too, and Deke spotted the two plainclothes officers following him on his way to school. He lost them, then called Edie, who met him in the school parking lot. He gave her his stash to hold, but Edie panicked. If they were watching him, they would be coming for her once they found nothing on him. So she stuffed the bag in Lee’s locker. This anxious gambit might have worked out, except that Edie broke when they found a small bindle of cocaine at the bottom of her bag. Edie must have thought about her father’s reaction and about expulsion from school and about her blown chances of getting into a good college, and Lee’s name probably just sort of spilled out in a flood of remorse. When they went into Lee’s locker, they found a butcher-paper-wrapped block of cocaine the size of a microwave burrito.

  Lee’s mother came to the police station in tears, with Steve consoling her. They sat across a table from Lee in the interview room, a bored-looking detective from the narcotics squad leaning against the wall behind them. When Lee asked about hiring a lawyer, her mother looked at Steve for a long time before answering.

  “All our money’s tied up in Steve’s business,” she said, still staring at Steve. “It’s just getting off the ground.” Steve ran his business—Amused Buddha! Tools for the Humorous Buddhist—from home, and the whole house was cluttered with boxes containing cheap goods imported from Nepal and Thailand and China: Buddha coffee mugs and bobbleheads and car fresheners, yin and yang bath towels, dharma whoopee cushions and nirvana beer cozies.

  “It could be our business someday,” Steve said to Lee. “I still believe in you. But your mother and I believe it’s time you take some responsibility,” Steve said.

  “Then go into my room. In Dad’s old guitar case. There’s money there.”

  Steve turned to interrogate her mother with a stare, and her mother shook her head in ignorance. Whatever look was on his face passed when he turned back to Lee. “Remember what I told you about everything in life being a kind of opportunity? We think this might be one for you,” he told her. “A chance to turn things around.”

  “They weren’t mine,” Lee said, her eyes still on her mother, refusing to look at Steve. “The drugs.”

  Her mother turned to the detective, who shifted his gaze and scratched his armpit as if to say he’d heard it all before. Steve pursed his lips. “Then whose were they?”

  Lee wouldn’t say. Her mother wasn’t going to come through for her, but Edie would.

  “You’ve been out of control for a long time,” her mother said, turning back to Lee. “It’s my fault. I should have done something about it earlier.”

  Steve put a hand on her mother’s knee. “Julia. This is not yours to carry.”

  The image of her mother at that moment burned into Lee’s memory: sitting as though frozen, staring at the welts that the cuffs had left on Lee’s wrists. She looked hollowed out, filled with straw.

  “Mom . . .”

  “Look at me,” Steve said, drawing Lee’s eyes to him with his fingers. “You’re a juvenile; it won’t be too bad. And it will give you time to reflect and find your path. Remember what I taught you about using your Wise Mind? Do you think you were using your Wise Mind when you started dealing drugs?”

  “I have money. I can do what I want with it. I want to hire a lawyer.”

  Steve got up and took her mother’s hand. Then he led her out of the room. Her mother had never once looked Lee in the eyes.

  Lee felt a quiet rage enveloping her. She ground her teeth so hard she was afraid she might crack one. But Edie had told her that her father, a powerful lawyer with powerful friends, would help her, and Lee knew he would do anything for Edie. And Edie owed her. So Lee kept quiet, knowing that Edie would come through.

  In court, Lee sat beside the public defender, a man who smelled of corned beef and had orange Cheetos residue powdering his cuffs. Before the arraignment, he’d pressured her to agree to a plea deal, but Lee had refused. In the end, the truth would win out. A minute and a half into his opening statement, he realized he had the wrong case file and had to shuffle through a stack of folders until he found Lee’s. Edie’s father sat in the gallery, whispering sometimes into Edie’s mother’s ear. Lee stared at Edie as Edie testified against her, willing her to look at Lee just once as she answered questions from the prosecutor. If she could just get Edie to meet her eyes, she would stop. Edie never did.

  • • •

  Lee spent a lot of time thinking about Edie, her friend who had once told Lee that she wanted to save her. Lee hated that Edie had been right: she had been lost, and Edie had found her and rescued her before abandoning her again. For a while Lee had had direction in her life, plans for college and a friend to make
them with, but now she felt untethered again, floating in space with nothing to orbit. Lee had taken the fall for her. Why? Because she felt she owed Edie something? Lee was pretty sure she knew now what had happened to the baby bird that Edie’d brought home with her. She’d probably just moved on, found some other project, and left the bird to die in her room.

  Lee tried to hate Edie. She knew she had it in her—she found hatred for Steve and even for her mother—but Edie was just weak and scared, and Lee couldn’t hate her for that. The scenes that kept running through her head—times with Edie—were all positive memories. For most of high school, Edie had given her everything she’d ever wanted. Lee felt so sick inside it hurt.

  After a while—Lee couldn’t tell how long (a day? a week?)—this film loop in her head began to make her crazy. There was nowhere to be comfortable in her cell. The bed was in the center of the room, and so she couldn’t lean back while on it; the floors were cold; and the only other seat was a lidless toilet. Sometimes she lay awake on the bed staring up at the ceiling, feeling exposed, like something was there stalking her, just outside the periphery of her vision. The corner farthest from the door felt safest, and she curled up there for hours at a time, until she’d feel the cold begin to seep into her bones.

  • • •

  Lee didn’t start out in solitary. She came in to the juvenile detention center—a squat encampment of long beige buildings that looked more like a community center than a jail—on a bus with twelve other girls, none of whom looked as scared as Lee felt. The JDC consisted of three cellblocks, each block holding thirty to fifty girls according to their assessed risk. Lee was assigned to Block Two, designated for nonviolent, low-risk offenders.

  Block One was for girls convicted of violent crimes—assault or armed robbery—or repeat offenders, girls hardened by the system. Block Three, a long, windowless building set apart from the other blocks by the yard, was simply called, by both staff and inmates, Wonderland.

  Though the inmates were separated otherwise, their daily hour in the yard—a mangy strip of grass surrounded by benches, with a half basketball court in one corner—and their meals were communal. The blocks tended to sit together, and the time was supervised, with a guard stationed at each corner of the cafeteria and two more roaming between the tables. Conversation was kept quiet.