The Tell-Tale Con

by Aimee Gilchrist

  “Yeah, I’m great in a pinch.”

  I had no idea why his words pissed me off, but they did. Maybe it was the whole money thing again. I really hated feeling guilty. I didn’t wear it well. We started across the parking lot side by side while I got increasingly more annoyed. I didn’t feel like I could tell him to go away, but I didn’t want him there either.

  Every reason we had for being together was now over. I needed to ditch him somehow. I did not need a friend, and I certainly didn’t need anything else either.

  “Talia, listen…”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what he was going to say, but then it didn’t matter anyway. He shoved me hard out of nowhere, knocking me down. I would have yelled at him, but, oddly, I was too busy screaming and getting all the air smashed out of me. When I thought I could start breathing again, Harrison’s heavy body landed on mine.

  Whatever air I had left pushed out in a hard whoosh and dirt and rocks peppered us as a small, red car kicked up debris from the parking lot as it roared by. I heard the tires squeal as the vehicle sped away.

  “Did you see that coming?” I wheezed out.

  That was a question from the land of the obvious.

  Unless he just liked jumping on chicks randomly in parking lots, it was a pretty good guess he’d seen it coming. I asked a more reasonable question. “Are we going to assume this isn’t a random accident?”

  He shook his head, his eyebrows drawn harshly together. “Talia…” This close I noticed his pupils were streaked with a lighter brown in the middle, the caramel again.

  He met my eyes and whispered, “I’m pretty sure my leg is broken.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rules of the Scam #15

  Know which tools to use…

  As it turned out Harrison’s leg was not broken. His shin bone was badly bruised, however. I knew this because we were in the same emergency room separated only by a thin, rough looking blue curtain. He would have to stay off the leg for three days to a week and keep it elevated, or he ran the risk of a stress fracture, which would require a cast.

  He clearly didn’t want that information.

  Neither of us wanted to be at the hospital, but the ambulance hadn’t offered us a choice since we were under eighteen. And we’d had no choice about the ambulance coming, since someone else had called for it, or the police, who were also called by someone else.

  We definitely wouldn’t have called them.

  By tacit agreement Harrison and I didn’t tell the police anything that some random witness wouldn’t be able to tell them. I had elected long before I was interviewed to say nothing. If Harrison wanted the cops to hear our convoluted story he would tell them himself. Which he didn’t do.

  We both stuck to the basics. A car had been speeding through the parking lot. It had missed us only because Harrison had seen it coming and pushed me out of the way. His own attempts to get out of the way weren’t entirely successful because the car clipped his leg on the way down.

  I couldn’t provide any description besides small and red, though I could have detailed the rush of dust and gravel as the car sped away. Harrison described it to the police as a small, older model foreign car. In a high school parking lot this was a pretty useless description. Sort of akin to describing a suspect in an elementary school parking lot as driving a blue minivan.

  Besides having a bruised butt and a bruised ego, I was unhurt. The cops grew bored of me pretty quickly when they figured out that I hadn’t seen the car, and bored with Harrison not too long after that. It was obvious that they thought this was a matter of some kid driving too fast on school property. Maybe it was.

  But probably it wasn’t.

  I had no intention of correcting their assumption. I needed the cops gone. Like yesterday. They finally gave both of us a card, asked us to call if we remembered anything, and left us alone in the emergency room. Once they were gone, Harrison yanked the curtain open. “I think the driver was a girl.”

  That was information he hadn’t given the police. “Really? Did she look familiar?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. She was coming at me awfully fast. I didn’t get a lot of details, you know.”

  He’d gotten enough to stop us from getting run over. And that was worth a lot. “Hey, Harrison, thanks.”

  He seemed confused. “For what?”

  “Uh, for pushing me out of the way of a speeding death machine?”

  His mouth pinched. “I’m thinking that if not for me it wouldn’t have happened at all. So let’s skip the gratitude.”

  At that moment my ride showed up. The hospital wanted to release us to our parents, but there was no way my mom would close up the shop. She’d promised to send someone, and I wasn’t surprised the someone was Mr. Wong. It wasn’t like we knew a lot of people. But Mr. Wong had his own family and his own problems.

  Maybe he’d been afraid that no one would ever come for me.

  Right on his heels was a small, grandmotherly Asian woman in a dumpy pantsuit. For a second I thought she was with Mr. Wong, but she didn’t look familiar to me. It was only when she pointed a bony finger at Harrison and demanded, “Why you always in trouble?” that I realized she must be My Sharona.

  Mr. Wong didn’t seem to notice her at all. He was honed in completely on me. “Talia, this is the result of your mother’s indifference. Look at you here. In this hospital bed. You need to get a real future. Get a nice job, like in a laundry.”

  I pulled myself out of bed, while My Sharona began cussing Harrison out in Japanese. Well, I didn’t know what she was saying exactly, but it wasn’t praises. I slid on my shoes. “I’m still in high school Mr. Wong. I don’t need a job yet.”

  “If you had a job, you wouldn’t have been cruising in the parking lot with bad influences.”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “I was going to class, Mr. Wong. It was the school parking lot.”

  Next to me, My Sharona was on a tear, and she didn’t seem to care that Harrison didn’t understand her. Or maybe he did. It wouldn’t be the most shocking thing in the world if Harrison knew Japanese or Russian, American Sign Language or the Morse Code.

  Mr. Wong muttered something in Chinese, which I definitely did not know, and reached for my coat. My eyes met Harrison’s, and from the quirk of his mouth and quick shrug, he didn’t miss the absurdity of the situation, both of us in the emergency room getting yelled at by angry, aggressive, elderly Asian people who weren’t actually related to us.

  What a life.

  I struggled towards the door, and Harrison lifted his hand in the shape of a phone and mouthed, “I’ll call you.” At least that’s what I thought he was mouthing. Really it could have been “I loathe you” or “I’ll kill you.” But I was pretty sure he was promising to call.

  Mr. Wong stopped short of actually dragging me out of the hospital by my ear. It seemed unlikely I could convince him to stop at Taco Grande so I could pick up a burrito, so I didn’t bother asking. But I’d missed breakfast and now lunch. I was freaking starving, and I was sure there was nothing to eat at home. So I was either going to have to suffer or go grocery shopping.

  I was still mentally going through the back of my cabinets scavenging for leftover crackers or old cereal by the time we got back to Mr. Wong’s. I left him in the laundry, the sound of him directing me about my future career paths echoing off the walls.

  Upstairs, Mom was in the main lobby waiting on a client. She was playing solitaire because if she scooped up the cards quickly clients might think they were tarot cards. She glanced up at me.

  “Oh, you’re here. Mr. Wong said you were fine.”

  “Yep. Here I am. Fine.”

  She didn’t look up at me again, just turned over the next card. “We’re out of food.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  I went into our living area and closed the door. I didn’t need a list right now of all the things that she needed me to do. I was too tired. And my butt hurt. The sh
ock of the jolt seemed like it might have jarred my back a little too. My muscles and spine were starting to protest. I dug around in the kitchen until I came up with a can of tuna and a piece of bread that looked a little suspect but would do. After my questionable and pathetic lunch, I took some over the counter pain pills and climbed back into bed.

  True to his word, or his pantomime as it were, Harrison woke me up by calling around six. The silly little walkie-talkie cell phone was still in my pants, and my butt vibrating like crazy turned out to be a bizarre way to wake up.

  I fumbled around for the button. “Lo?”

  “Talia? Did I wake you up?”

  “I guess.” I wiped my eyes. It was dark outside. I’d gone to bed during the day so my room was dark. And cold.

  “Sorry. I was just wondering if you could drive me to school in the morning.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  Where he thought I’d been keeping the car he hoped I would drive him in, I had no idea.

  “I don’t want you to give me a ride, I want you to drive me. Like in my car. I’m not allowed to put any weight on my right leg, and if you don’t drive me, My Sharona will.”

  I smiled slightly, struggling to sit up under my mountain of blankets. “She seemed pretty pissed at you earlier.”

  “Apparently I’m a trouble maker. I’m always the last to know.”

  “Well, she did say you’re always in trouble.”

  “Evidently. Who was that man who picked you up?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer him. Who knew what he could infer from Mr. Wong’s position in my life, but it seemed like a giant blinking neon arrow pointing to my mother’s disinterest and my father’s absence. But it would be doubly bizarre if I tried to dodge the question. “That’s Mr. Wong. He owns—”

  “Mr. Wong’s?” Harrison volunteered.

  “That’s the one. You’re a regular psychic.”

  “Haha. Tell your mother to watch out.” He was silent for a moment. “How did your mom end up as a psychic anyway?”

  Now there was a question I had no intention of answering honestly. Mom becoming Mystic Madam Megdala was actually a direct result of my actions, not hers. With Dad in prison it seemed expedient to find a job that was at least somewhat respectable. Sadly, however, Mom had zero skills for anything but grifting. She also had no skills for finding work. So it became my job to find her a job. There were a lot of things she could do that rode the fine line between conning and a touch of legality.

  She could sell things from home—makeup, cleaning products, clothing—in programs that were hardly short of pyramid schemes. She could “help” people “work from home.” We even tried Mr. Pete’s for a bit, but we all knew how that had ended up. In the end I gave up on craigslist and went with her strengths: telling people what they wanted to hear and pretending. I was even the one who had picked out this space above Mr. Wong’s. She went along with my plans and signed on whatever dotted lines I showed her.

  That wasn’t a story I was going to tell. So instead I went with something the child of a Hollywood producer would understand.

  “My mom’s best skill is acting. She has a talent for being anything people want, but she couldn’t find other work.” Individually, every one of those statements was the truth, but together they created a lie. It was another skill I had learned at the knees of grifters.

  As suspected, Harrison knew enough failed actors that he didn’t falter. Just made a noise of easy agreement and let me move on to another topic. “Do you think the driver of that car was trying to hurt you?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidences, and that was no kid. She was old. Like at least mom aged. Maybe older. Talia, I think I spoke too quickly earlier. About giving up. I think I want to make sure that it was Nate.”

  I considered the words. “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. I guess that we try…” He stopped. “Hey.”

  I realized, after a moment of confusion, that he wasn’t talking to me. A notion which was further reinforced by the fact he covered the mouthpiece or moved it enough away from him that his words were garbled nonsense on my end. Finally he said, “I’m going to have to talk to you later, Talia. Thanks for the ride tomorrow.”

  He sounded utterly disgusted, and I figured whatever was going on over there, I was lucky that he’d muted the phone.

  After he hung up, I tossed the phone on the bed and pulled on a jacket. I had no choice but to go grocery shopping. Otherwise no one would be eating tonight. I slid on my shoes, bounded down the steps and out into the cold and momentarily considered ignoring the fact we needed groceries and seeing if my mother would eventually get desperate and shop. But since I liked eating better than I liked being passive aggressive, I trudged three blocks to the nearest store, that wasn’t Wong Jr.’s, since he was closed on Mondays, freezing my bruised butt off the whole freaking way.

  I bought the essentials—ramen, bread, peanut butter and diet soda—before heading back home. Some drunk guy and his two friends tried to pick me up in front of the sushi bar on the corner, no doubt too inebriated to realize that I was seventeen. I ignored them. Two of them turned away from me, but one of them followed me to the street across from Mr. Wong’s.

  Sigh.

  I turned and evaluated him, deciding which tactic to use. Mid to late twenties, he was wearing the same rumpled suit he’d had on all day. He’d come out of a trendy sushi bar that was uber hot right now and would probably go out of business in three weeks. He was a professional, with aspirations to grandeur. He had a girlfriend who starched his clothes for him. He wouldn’t want legal trouble.

  “Are you talking to me?” I requested sweetly.

  He flashed me a smile that his parents had paid big money for. “You bet I am.”

  “That’s awesome. Most grown up guys are totally afraid to talk to me.”

  The smile faltered slightly. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Ha. I wish. I’m practically an adult. I don’t know what the problem is. I mean I’m in high school. Or I will be…next year.”

  He backed away slightly, bumping into a trashcan before righting himself. “Wow. You look…much older.”

  “Right? I get that a lot.”

  “Well, okay. Nice meeting you.” He turned and ran back to his friends, like I was going to pursue him and cover him with the germs of my thirteen-ness.

  I snorted.

  “Nicely done. I’m impressed.”

  Heart tripping wildly, I jerked around and found Harrison sitting on the stairs that led up to The Library’s massive double doors. He had his leg slightly propped on a lower step and was holding an iPad, though he was looking at me instead.

  “Jeez, Harrison. You scared the hell out of me. Why did I never see you before, and now you’re everywhere?”

  It was kind of a rude thing to say, but seriously. Granted he was sitting in front of his own house, so it wasn’t like he was following me around or something, but still, it bugged me.

  “Maybe you weren’t looking before.”

  He was right. Two weeks ago I would never have remotely noticed my lab partner sitting out on the stairs. But now he was Harrison.

  “Fair enough.”

  “I thought I was going to have to play white knight, but you handled that guy with no problem. How’d you know he wouldn’t be into the idea of dating a middle schooler?”

  “I’m good at reading people. I knew he wouldn’t want trouble. Anyway, if he’d have kept it up, I’d have thought of something else.”

  “You’re pretty resourceful.” Harrison didn’t look happy about it. Maybe he was Mr. Wong part two, thinking I wasn’t careful enough.

  Or that I should own a laundry. One or the other.

  “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time.” I didn’t want to have this conversation anymore, so I put the focus on him instead. “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed with that leg elevated?”

 
He shrugged, his demeanor turning sullen. “I needed to be…outside.”

  If he was anything like me, he’d really been about to say, “Away from my family.” Going outside in this weather even with a sore leg was sometimes worth it when it came to escaping family.

  “Understood. Are you in pain?”

  His mouth pressed. I had the distinct impression he was debating whether or not he wanted to lie to me. I was gratified at his decision. “Yeah, kind of. But not enough to keep me in bed.”

  “You shouldn’t be playing He-Man.”

  His brow wrinkled, and I realized, with horror, that he had no clue who He-Man was. “You don’t know who He-Man is? Fur-covered Speedo? Really terrible haircut? His mortal enemy is a skeleton with a whiny voice?” I sighed. “Look it up on YouTube.”

  The corners of his lips hitched. “Yeah, it’s coming back to me now.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t watch old cartoons, as obsessed as you seem to be with eighties TV and movies.”

  “My dad didn’t let me watch cartoons. I cut my teeth on Stanley Kubrick and William Friedkin.” He was quiet for a second, then added, “I’ve seen Scooby-Doo.”

  I had no clue who William Friedkin was, but I knew that Kubrick was one crazy dude who made some crazy movies. “That’s kind of…intense.”

  He shrugged. “If it wasn’t intense it wouldn’t be good enough for Dad. He admires the people who jack with their actors. The more intense the experience, the better. He was a huge fan of the directors of The Blair Witch Project once he found out that they kept the actors out in the woods for eight days with a couple of cameras and almost no information, gradually taking away their food and torturing them at night so they got less and less sleep. Dad thought that was amazingly innovative.”

  “Wow.” I had no idea what to say about someone who thought that was a good idea.

  “Yeah, and he makes everyone do the same scene fifty or sixty times until he thinks it’s perfect. There’s a reason people in the business call him Take-it-again-Van and Prozac Poe. When I was a kid one of his actresses couldn’t finish the movie because she had to spend six months in a mental institution. That’s how he rolls.”