Geekomancy (2 page)

Make that “one of the really shy ones.”

Ree waited for a response. A beat passed, and she said, “Let us know if you have any questions.”

She waited another moment for the customer. He was unresponsive, immersed in the comic.

Okay, whatever,
she thought, nonplussed. Some folks just wanted to read in peace. The café wasn’t a library, but if she took to banishing customers for loitering and reading comics, they’d run out of customers pretty damn fast.

Charlie made a sad-angry face at his phone as he picked up Ree’s bake list.

Ree asked, “What’s up?”

“Tweet linking to a news story. There’s been another suicide in town.”

“That’s the second this month, isn’t it?”

Charlie nodded. “I don’t know if these things are happening more or if I’m just psyching myself out by reading all of the news all of the time.”

Ree put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Maybe you don’t need to follow every news outlet on the planet through Twitter.”

“But . . .” Charlie said, then nodded. “Still a shame.”

Ree nodded back at him, ducked down, and turned up the Weird Al a notch. “Maybe put down the phone for a while?”

Charlie laughed, disappearing into the back for the construction phase of the baking. Ree heard the sound of the fridge and freezer opening as Charlie gathered culinary forces to wage delicious war.

Ree killed time by cleaning the espresso machine and the counter, keeping an eye out for movement or indications of help-needing-ness from the silent reader. He eventually replaced the comic and left without a word.

•   •   •

Charlie clocked out at two, leaving Ree to woman the fort by herself.

The alarm for the peanut butter chocolate d6 cupcakes went off, and Ree spun in place from the register to grab the robot-claw hot mitten and shimmy through the narrow behind-the-counter walkway to the oven. The lack of customer traffic gave Ree the chance to slide off her wobbly plateau of emotional stability right back into her least favorite, yet most frequent, train of thought: Jay.

Jay.
The man who had been, up until last Sunday, the love of her life, the guy she thought she might actually marry, against all odds. Instead, he announced that they’d “grown apart,” that he didn’t think they could make it better. And that there was this girl from work . . .

And so Ree had spent each of the last three nights drinking heavily and trying to keep everyone else out of the splash zone of her self-destruction. Last night she’d drunk mojitos until Anya and Priya carried her home so Sandra could stay with her in the bathroom and hold her hair. Ree was, in retrospect, not doing so great.

On top of that, yesterday she’d heard back from the friend of a friend in Pasadena who had pulled some strings and gotten her script,
Orion Overdrive,
in front of Damon Lindelof. No comments, no invitation to send more, just a “no thanks.” She’d spent a year writing and rewriting the script, trying to make something fun, feminist, and optimistic, but so far it had gotten even fewer nibbles than her far-less-awesome but very hook-y SpaghettiWesternCthulhu mashup,
Shibboleth Showdown
.

Even with the one-two whammy of that rejection and Jay’s bombshell, she couldn’t miss work. So this morning, she had picked herself up off the floor, put on her big-girl pants, and dragged ass down to the café.

Ree sighed and checked her hair to make sure it hadn’t spontaneously changed into an Emover.

She set the cupcakes on the cooling rack under the counter and checked on the coffee. It had been on for two hours but was still hot enough to serve. Back at Big Corporate Coffee Land, they’d had strict regulations about coffee rotation, but Bryan wasn’t much of a stickler. They stuck close enough to health code regulations that the place had never gotten more than a warning.

She looked around the empty room and felt the shadow of Jay creeping back in.

This was going to take some intervention. If she was left by herself, alone with the cupcakes, the angst would run on repeat.

She checked her texts.

Sandra:
I’ll be home at 6:30. I can make dinner, or we can go out. I hope things are ok at work.

Priya:
U ok? Sandra said you had a pretty bad night. Movies tonight?

Anya:
Call me anytime. Have laptop, will travel.

Ree looked over her shoulder to check the cupcakes, then texted Anya:
Can you come to the cafe?

Three minutes later, Anya:
What’s up?

Ree:
Tide-y Bowl of Emo.

Anya:
Got it. On my way.

Ree distracted herself with more baking, despite the fact that there were no customers. The food she made today would still be good for Friday, which should be busier. Since Café Xombi didn’t believe in throwing out food if at all possible, anything left over after that would go home with the closer. Conveniently, Ree always made sure there were plenty of treats that she wouldn’t mind eating all weekend if need be.

Hearing the theremin-tune motion detector, Ree looked up to see Anya Rostova (Strength 7, Dexterity 12, Stamina 15, Will 15, IQ 16, and Charisma 15—Musician 5 / Geek 2 / Scholar 3 / Opera Diva 2), wrapped in trendy jeans, a jacket, and one of the fabulous brocade scarves that Ree frequently plotted to steal from her but never quite managed to. Anya was Russian in the way that movies in the ’80s said Russians always must be: thick black hair, sharp features, and an enviably curvy (if short at five-three) figure.

Ree coveted Anya’s curves sometimes, having inherited a fairly sticklike figure from her mother’s side of the family. Ree wore her hair long so she didn’t get mistaken for a boy. It mostly worked. Mostly.

Anya, on the other hand, managed to look amazing every single time Ree saw her, which was impressive and somewhat frustrating, since as a doctoral student, she made even less than a comic shop lackey. But Anya was a diva-in-training, and fabulous was part of that job description.

Ree’s own wardrobe consisted mostly of jeans, T-shirts, more jeans and T-shirts, a handful of skirts, her three “date outfits,” and a smattering of business-wear for her occasional bank-breaking trips down to L.A. to pitch producers or attend conferences to woo agents.

“Step one: Can I get a chai?” Anya asked.

Ree nodded and grabbed a mug off the top of the espresso machine. “Done. Step two?”

“Step two happens when you’re done here, but step one and a half can be where I tell you about how crazy my show is.”

Ree listened while on chai autopilot. Café Xombi used a chai concentrate, which made the drink comically easy to prepare. Since Anya had forsworn real dairy in her drinks, Ree started steaming some soy milk. Ree spoke up to be heard over the machine. “I do so love wallowing in the misfortune of others.”

Anya cracked a smile. “It’s one of your best qualities.”

“True story. Now spill.” Ree leaned over the counter, chin resting on one fist.

“So we’re doing
Carmen,
right?”

Ree nodded. Since she’d met Anya, Ree’s opera knowledge had gone from 0 to no more than +4, but even she knew
Carmen
.

“We’re doing it Steampunk-style, so the toreador is fighting a steam-bull, right?”

Ree nodded. “Perfectly reasonable.”

Anya continued. “And the director wants me to wear a corset so freaking tight, I can barely breathe. Then she yells at me when I can’t hold the notes.”

Ree raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t she know that corsets do that? And that’s it—a corset? Don’t you at least get a clockwork arm or something?”

Anya chuckled. “I get a fan. As Madame Wesselmann reminded us, ‘I performed the role of Papagena wearing a corset that brought my waist down to 18 inches—and we got rave reviews in Chicago.’ So I get to ‘suck it in.’ ”

Ree made a sour face while giving a thumbs-down, and Anya nodded.

“How was I supposed to know I should have been deforming my organs since I was twelve in order to properly function in my first operatic leading role?”

“That’s really the kind of information they should put in your grad packet, at least, right?” Ree mimed a neutral voice-over tone: “ ‘As a part of the University of Pearson vocal performance program, here are some tips on how to best abuse your internal organs. Remember, organ failure is temporary, but glory is eternal!’ ”

Anya laughed.

At that particular moment, as Ree was happily settling into Listen-and-Support mode, a clear key-shift away from her post-breakup funk, the door burst open, hitting the near wall before the door chime could finish. Through the door lurched a scruffy man in a dirty black trench coat that Ree could have sworn was
smoking
. The man grabbed the door and slammed it behind him, muttering something under his breath. He was around six feet tall and looked somewhere between forty and fifty-five. He had a couple days’ growth of beard and, oddly, several bruises on his face. The biggest bruise swelled one of his Capital-G-Green eyes nearly shut.

The man leaned back against the door to keep it barred. Then he looked to Ree and asked, breathless, “Do you have any Grant Morrison
Animal Man
trades?”

Ree had seen some rushed customers before, but this guy was asking about a comic book the way a Western hero who’d just walked ten miles through the blazing sun asked for water.

Ree casually scanned the wall for the section with Morrison’s work and said, “Um . . . sure. I can get one for you, but they’re on your left, between
Seven Soldiers of Victory
and
Batman & Robin
.”

He turned to his left and pawed at the trades with gloved hands. His left glove was bloodied, several of its fingers torn and hanging off his hand.

“Is it less than twenty dollars?” he asked, fumbling with his wallet.

What the hell is up with this guy?
Ree wondered. “19.95 . . .” she said.

The man pulled out a crumpled twenty and slapped it on the counter, leaving blood on the bill and the glass. “I don’t need a bag, thank you.”

He turned on his heel and pulled the door open, rushing out of the store while flipping through the book.

When the door was shut, Ree traded a
WTF?
look with Anya and said, “There’s my crazy for the day.”

“You get one of those a
day?
” Anya asked.

Ree shrugged. “Most of the customers are nice, but there are some weirdos. He at least was in a hurry.” 
The real winners are the ones who corner me to talk about their RPG characters for hours, don’t let me get a word in so as to actually participate in the conversation, and then leave without buying anything.

A minute later, once Anya had resumed ranting about the mad antics of her director, Ree heard a
BOOM!
from outside. Ree guessed from the echo that it came from the alley by the gallery, but mostly, she focused on the fact that there was a
BOOM!
at all in a neighborhood/age where/when one should not hear a
BOOM!,
especially one that sounded more like a bomb than a backfiring engine.

“The
hell
?” Anya asked.

“Watch the store for a sec?” Ree said more than asked, grabbing the crowbar from under the counter. Said crowbar had
+2 N3wb Bane
engraved on the back, one of Bryan’s many personal touches. She rolled back the comics shelf and strode out of the store, past the gallery, then into the alley, scanning the street as she went to look for shady people who looked capable of making a
BOOM!

The usually boring alley was fifty feet deep, holding several Dumpsters and ending with a tall wooden fence that was the other side of a local church. There was no immediate evidence of a thing that would have gone
BOOM!

Instead, Ree saw, halfway down the alley, a pile of colorful shredded paper that looked not quite like newspaper. She approached and looked over the pile and saw that it consisted of shredded snippets of a graphic novel. Several strips of comic page were plastered to the wall, with what looked like bloody prints on them. Ree walked over to the wall and saw from the slivers of art that they were pages from the book she’d just sold.

Ree tried to add up the situation and make it resemble sense in her mind:
So this guy comes in looking like he’s a Backstreet Boy in ’99 chased by crazed fans, buys a graphic novel in a crazed rush, and then runs out to shred the comic in an alley, does something to a wall, and somewhere in there, there’s a
BOOM!

Ree shrugged. “Above my pay grade,” she said to the alley, and then walked back into Café Xombi.