Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “For f—” I let out a hiss of exasperation. “She doesn’t even like to be called Klementina anymore, Gavrikov. She doesn’t remember you, or her life before. It’s all gone. All that’s left is Kat.” I stared at a cloud shaped like a kidney. “Stupid, selfish, Kat.”

  You didn’t know Klementina, Gavrikov said. She was not selfish. Wounded, yes. Damaged, perhaps—

  “Your sister is damaged, all right. I’d help inflict more, if I weren’t trying to self-improve.”

  —but not selfish. Never selfish.

  “Times change,” I said. “People change. She’s changed, trust me.”

  She has the power to heal, to give life, Gavrikov said.

  “Well, she’s dealing out more death than me, lately,” I said, tapping my foot on the thin grass. “And that takes some doing.”

  She is merely trying to do what—

  “What she wants,” I said, cutting him off pretty harshly. “She’s doing what she wants, not what’s right. Therefore, she is selfish.”

  We all want what we want.

  “Yes,” I said, losing patience, “but we don’t all start getting people killed to get it, do we? There’s the selfish thing again, see. Reasonable people are willing to maybe back it off when people start dying for what they want. You don’t even have to be a hero to do that; you just have to not be a totally self-centered asshole.”

  There is still good in her.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t see it,” I said, tilting my head back and looking up, “but maybe I’m the wrong person to be looking.”

  “Is that self-pity I hear?” Reed’s voice came from behind me and I spun to see him standing at the sliding glass door, closing it quietly behind him.

  “It’s …” I searched for an answer and did not find a good one. “Probably.”

  “Why ever would you feel sorry for yourself?” Reed asked. “It’s not as though your life isn’t completely perfect, every moment a blissful treasure free of stress and worry—”

  “Where’s Kat?” I asked, turning my attention back to my brother with a surge of alarm.

  “Relax,” he said, “Augustus is keeping two very watchful eyes on her.”

  “Probably also keeping a very drooling tongue on her as well.”

  “I don’t rule that out,” Reed said, “he does seem a bit starstruck.” He took a couple steps off the patio into the yard. “You talking to the voices in your head?”

  “Just the one that’s pleading for clemency for Kat,” I said, tapping my skull with my index finger a little too hard. Ouch. “What is it about brothers that blinds them to their sisters’ faults?” I smirked at him as I asked.

  He gave me a wary eye. “I don’t think that’s a universal thing.”

  “No?”

  “Yeah, I got a really long list of yours. It’s not something I can travel with, though, because the airlines dock you if you fly with a suitcase over 50 pounds—”

  I raised my hand to playfully swat at him and gave him plenty of time to cringe away. “Love does tend to blind us,” he said finally, continuing to get closer to me. “To faults, I mean. Probably why people who love themselves so much don’t realize how shitty they are.”

  “I don’t love myself enough to ignore how shitty I am,” I said, uncomfortable with the sudden self-reflection. “I mean … I know why people hate me. Kat busted me over the head with it, but she didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

  “What’d she say?” Reed asked, eyes full of concern.

  “Ohh …” I played it back in my head. “I don’t know. Something about not being attentive to others, but I wasn’t really listening …” I flashed a grin at him. “She said … I kill people. Lots of people. And I’ve got powers. And I’m cold and mean … yadda yadda, you know all this.”

  “Well,” Reed said, slipping his thumbs in his pockets like a hillbilly with a pair of overalls, “if it makes you feel better … you’re less of those things lately, in my estimation.”

  “I’m trying,” I said softly. I actually was, at least to the people I cared about.

  “I know you are,” he said. He put an arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. He smelled like queso and salsa, like freshly chopped onions, and I wrinkled my nose but didn’t say anything. “Change isn’t easy.”

  “Scott figured it out,” I said. “The memory thing.”

  “Ouch. He mad?”

  “Is the Pacific Ocean filled with water?”

  “I don’t know, you’ve seen it more recently than I have, and supposedly there's a drought.”

  “It’s still there,” I assured him. “And … yeah. He’s not happy.”

  “You didn’t expect him to take it with grace and aplomb, did you?”

  “I didn’t expect to have to deal with it yet, if ever,” I said with a sigh. “I know, I know … I said I’d tell him, and I always meant to, but, you know … later.”

  “You should tell him how it happened,” Reed said, every muscle tense.

  “I don’t want to,” I said and buried my face in his side. “And I damned sure don’t want to do it before I find this Redbeard bastard and cathartically skin him alive.”

  “You need to tell him,” Reed said. “The how is the context. If you don’t tell him the how, he’s going to be mad forever.”

  “I’m not sure he’s going to get any happier after I tell him—” I sighed. “I’d rather start with something easier, like saying I’m sorry to J.J.”

  “What’d you do to my homie?” he asked with a frown.

  “He probably thinks I accused him of bestiality.”

  “Does he think that because you accused him of bestiality?”

  “… Maybe.”

  Reed let out a sigh. “You are getting better, but … yeah, you should apologize for that, too. And tell Scott.”

  “Uhhh,” I groaned, “making amends to people is hard. Screwing them up is just so much easier.” My phone buzzed, and I lifted it up to see another text from Dick-O. “And it comes so naturally to me, because so many people clearly just want me to go human wrecking ball on them.”

  Ricardo

  You are as glorious as the sunrise, and you burn my loins as though I had exposed myself to you all the day, without protection.

  “What the hell?” Reed stared at my phone. “Who sent you that?”

  “My new boyfriend,” I said, hiding a smirk. “We might just be married inside a month. For the money, naturally.”

  “And divorced in two?”

  “Please, I’m not Kim Kardashian. Besides, I don’t believe in divorce,” I said with a straight face. “Murder, though—”

  “I think I might approve, in this case.” He made a gesture at the phone. “So what’s your next move? How are you going to get this guy?” He waved off my phone. “Not that guy. Please, please, don’t ever get that guy. Redbeard, I meant.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, staring at the sun, enjoying having my brother just stand there with me, like I wasn’t alone for a few minutes. “I really don’t.”

  78.

  Scott

  Scott found himself by the beach before dawn. Steven Clayton had tagged along, not that Scott had done much to protest the movie star hanging around with him. Clayton seemed hung up on Sienna, which stuck in Scott’s craw, but what was he going to do? Deck the guy? He had an earnestness about him, and Scott was torn between warning him off and encouraging him, not sure whether he wanted to see Clayton get burned by Sienna or not.

  “First time on the coast?” Steven asked, staring out at the Pacific with him.

  “No.” Scott shook his head. “I’ve been to LA a couple times before.”

  “I don’t really like this town,” Steven said, staring out at the indigo sky, still deep and dark, the sun yet to rise.

  “Then why don’t you leave?” Scott asked with a scoff. “You’re kind of on top of the world, aren’t you?”

  “One person’s top of the world is another person’s bottom,
” Steven said with a shrug. “It’s all perspective.”

  “What kind of screwed-up perspective do you have to have to see Mr. Hollywood, People’s Sexiest Man, blah blah, as on the bottom of anything other than a neverending pile of sexy women?” Scott barely kept himself from laughing.

  “Maybe I don’t want sex and money in my life,” Steven said flatly.

  “Every man wants sex and money.”

  “Well, I don’t just want sex and money, okay?” Steven asked, now sounding a little annoyed.

  Scott held his peace for a moment. “Sex, money and … fame?”

  “Not really.”

  “Drugs?”

  Clayton gave him a hard look. “No.”

  “Because the fame gets you money, which can buy the drugs and—”

  “I want a life, okay?” Clayton said, finally losing his patience. “Wife, kids … you know?” He frowned. “And no drugs. Maybe a beer or two from time to time, but that’s it.”

  Scott felt a rush of inexplicable anger. “You could find that wife and kids thing a lot of places other than here, if you put that in the deck above money, sex and fame.”

  “I like playing other people,” Steven pulled his arms close to him, hugging himself against the wind that blew in off the ocean. “You know? Acting … I really love it. The actual work. Have since I was a kid in a school play. Even the physical part of it, there’s this satisfaction to getting in there in your stunts—”

  “Yeah, I don’t need to hear about that,” Scott said, looking at the dark horizon. “I’ve done enough stunts of my own for one night.”

  “Jumping off a building without a wire or a parachute,” Steven said, cocking his head, “that’s a new one. I think I would have let my double handle that one.”

  “I don’t have a double and this isn’t a movie,” Scott said. “Maybe you should go home.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Steven said.

  “We came here in your car,” Scott said dismissively. “You just go over there and start it up, drive off. I won’t mind, I promise. This isn’t your deal.”

  “It’s not yours either,” Steven said. “This guy—Redbeard or whatever—he’s not even after you.” Clayton stretched, then shivered. “Man. This weather.”

  “Too cold for you?” Scott asked.

  “It shouldn’t be,” Steven said. “I’m from Alaska. We have summer nights colder than this. But I’ve been down here a few years now, and maybe my blood got thin or something … I dunno. I guess I adapted. But one thing that hasn’t happened, in all the time I’ve been here … I haven’t forgotten how I was raised.” He looked straight at Scott. “Bad things happen every day. Here, in this city, elsewhere in the world. It’d take a mightier man than me to feel like he could jump in and change things everywhere.” He shook his head. “But this guy, Redbeard … he’s killed people right in front of me. I don’t need to feel like I can change the world to know that I’ve crossed him, I’ve hurt him, and this problem—this one, singular problem—I can help solve.”

  “This isn’t going to go down like you think it will,” Scott said. “These fights … they pretty much never get settled by straight up gunplay. It comes down to it, it’s almost always powers that win the day.”

  “Well, I don’t have powers,” Steven said, “but I do have a gun and I’ve wounded this guy a few times with it. If I can wound him a little more, maybe open up the field for you guys … I’d consider that my civic duty. And I can’t walk away from it.”

  “You might end up regretting that,” Scott said, looking out over the ocean and extending his hand, subtly drawing water out and toward him. Better replenish the stock, he figured.

  “I think I’d regret it more if I didn’t see this through.”

  Scott blinked. “Yeah. I think I feel the same.” Even knowing Sienna is in this.

  79.

  Kat

  The house was a dive, a dump, a craphole. It didn’t look like it had been redone since the 1970s, with its crappy, faded wood paneling on every wall, and baseboards that looked so weathered they might have been carved a century before the house’s construction. She sat in the front room staring at the house across the street with Augustus, whom she had certainly heard about on TV and whatnot, though she hadn’t met him until a few minutes earlier. He was a handsome enough guy, though really young, and he was obviously trying hard to split his focus between watching the house across the street and paying attention to her. Which was cute.

  “So you’ve been working with Sienna for a few months now?” she asked, really pouring the honey into it.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding, glancing at her and then back to the house. They were looking out on the street through a gap in the curtains occupied by white sheers. “When did she come to Atlanta? June, I guess … anyway, not long.”

  “Mmhmm,” Kat said with a nod, like she knew something he didn’t.

  “You know, my mom watches your show,” Augustus said, looking out of the corner of his eye. “I, uh … I’ve watched it, too.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said. “We really work hard on turning out an entertaining product.”

  “Well, you nailed that,” Augustus said, staring out the window. “Lots of people must be watching.” He fiddled with a pair of binoculars on a table, nearly knocking them over through nervous clumsiness.

  She giggled disarmingly, trying to get him to relax. He looked up sheepishly. “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to be nervous. I don’t bite.” I’m not Sienna, she didn’t say.

  “Naw, I know that,” he said, taking her seriously. “I, just, y’know … you’re famous and stuff.”

  She puffed up a little bit at that. “You seem awfully sensible,” she said with a smile, “and I’m not just telling you that because you’re a fan.” She put a hand on his arm and ran it down to his elbow. He looked like he might jump out of his skin, and she lowered her voice. “Why’s a bright guy like you in this?” She tilted her head toward the back of the house. “You know … with Sienna.”

  He stared at her blankly. “Well … because she’s a hero, of course.”

  Kat’s smile fled, and she snorted inadvertently. “Oh,” she said, not really sure what to say. “Okay. That’s it?”

  “Well, the agency’s paying for me to go to college,” Augustus said, “but … yeah. Financial incentive aside, I believe in what we’re doing here. I believe in Sienna, in what she tries to accomplish.” A hint of uncertainty ran across his young face. “Why did you leave?”

  Kat felt herself slip into a performance answer that had nuggets of honesty couched in it. “You don’t get what you want when you’re running with her.” A bristling feeling ran along her back and down the hairs on her arm that didn’t even exist because she had them waxed off, dammit. “With Sienna it’s all sacrifice and the job and doing …” She drifted off and lost the thread.

  “What’s right?” Augustus asked, filling it in for her. He raised an eyebrow. “That’s so horrible,” he said, letting it drip with irony.

  “I don’t mean it like that,” Kat said, shaking her head. “The way she does things, the way she runs things … it’s like living in hell. You don’t get to live your life—”

  “It’s not been so bad for me,” Augustus said with a shrug. “Though I tend to miss some classes here and there on assignment.”

  “Well, it was that bad for me,” Kat sniffed. “You’re not going to get rich working for the agency.”

  “Most people don’t get rich at all, statistically speaking.” He smiled. “Most of us are content to try and live our lives and hope to get merely ahead, rather than rich.” He nodded deferentially. “Present company excluded, of course. I mean, obviously, you figured it out, cracked the ‘rich’ code.”

  “Yeah, I, uh,” Kat fumbled, “I … things are going well.”

  “You got what you wanted,” Augustus said with a nod and a smile. “Swimming pools and, uh … reality TV stars, I guess. Do you have a Ferrar
i? Because I would maybe consider selling out a little bit for—”

  “No,” she said, thinking of Taggert. She shuddered mildly, which was strange. “My agent has a … he’s got a … I don’t know, it’s a Ferrari. He took me for a ride in it a few times … before.” She blinked. “When we first got to know each other and …”

  “Oh, that sounds impressive,” Augustus said. “It’s cool that he’d do that for you. Sounds nice.”

  “Well, he’s …” Kat’s lip twitched. “I think he was just trying to … impress me in order to …” She rubbed her forehead.

  “You okay?” Augustus asked.

  A cold, clammy feeling ran down Kat’s entire body. “I’m being used, aren’t I?” It wasn’t a question.

  “Uhhh …” Augustus looked around like he was in the middle of an ocean, sinking, and he needed to find a life preserver. “I don’t … uh …”

  “He used me,” Kat said, a nauseous feeling crept into her stomach. “He used me and I let him. I let him because I thought—I thought—that I’d get what I wanted. That he’d make the connections, the introductions, that I’d have a career, and everyone would know me, that they’d …” She felt cold chills run down her back. “I thought … it would feel different. That this change would be … that this time it would feel … more right.”

  “What’s wrong about it?” Augustus asked. “You got, like … a dynamite house—”

  “It’s cold,” Kat said, staring out the window.

  “I … never heard that about California—”

  “It’s me and a film crew and a bunch of people that rotate in and out of my life on filming days and never show up when the camera isn’t rolling if they don’t want to talk about a business deal.” Kat swallowed hard. “Days when there’s no filming, it’s like …” She rubbed her face. “I tweeted that I was … hanging out down one of the local restaurants … just hanging out … because I …” Her face crumpled, though she tried to act, tried to keep it straight, “… I didn’t want eat lunch alone again. I just wanted people to … anyone to …” She rubbed her eyes. “And people showed up, thank God, because … we hadn’t been filming for a month, and—and—and … I don’t think I had a conversation with anyone other than my driver during that time, and it was before the Bruces, my bodyguards …”