Tattoo Thief (BOOK 1) (3 page)

“Meredith. It’s good to see you.” Dan’s eyes crinkle as he smiles but she huffs and stalks into the kitchen, so angry her face is purple.

“Um, not a good time right now. We were just talking about New York.” I remember my manners and hope he’ll take my side in this fight. “You want to come in?”

Dan hesitates as he enters our apartment, as if a lion might be lurking around a corner. He’s half-right—my mom can be pretty fierce when she’s angry. I guess I prefer angry to the years when she was withdrawn or just plain sad.

Dan turns and hands me the bouquet of daisies he’d hidden behind his back. “You’d better hold onto these, Berry,” he whispers. “If I give them to your mother, she’ll probably throw them in my face.”

My mom rounds the corner from the kitchen, her face pinched with anger. “What makes you think you can just come in here and take my daughter away? What makes you think you can fly back into our lives after all this time?”

“I tried to call you,” Dan protests.

“And I didn’t call you back. That should have been all you needed to know.”

“Meredith, I didn’t mean to disappear. When I came to Eugene, you wouldn’t see me.”

“But then you stopped coming. Or calling. So what makes you think I want to see you now?” My mom’s blinking fast and I can tell she’s trying not to cry.

Dan raises his palms in surrender. “Meredith, I didn’t come to fight with you. You were one of my best friends. I wish we were still friends. I wish—a lot of things. And so I came to promise you I’d take good care of Berry if she wants to come to New York.”

“Beryl.” My mother and I correct him in unison and I give her a tiny smile of gratitude. Then I look at the flowers I’m holding guiltily, as if I’ve already accepted his offer to go to New York.

In my mind, I have.

“Sorry, Beryl. And Meredith, I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first. I honestly didn’t expect to run into Beryl at the coffee shop, but when I heard she was stuck here—”

“Wait. What? Stuck? Beryl isn’t stuck. She’s just figuring out her next opportunity.”

My mouth forms a surprised O. My mom has given me endless grief for working at the coffee shop instead of going back to get a master’s degree in
something,
but now I’m hearing her defend my two food service jobs as if I weren’t marking time toward a life of ordinary.

“Maybe this is it, then,” Dan says gently. “I wanted to give Beryl a chance to try something new. You know New York was a great move for me. I regret the way things ended between us, Mer. There’s no reason we should have stopped being friends after Clint died.”

“Friends.” My mom is still suspicious.

“Mom, I need a challenge. And if it sucks—”

“If it sucks,” she grimaces at the word, but I can tell Dan and I are winning this fight, “will you promise to come home?”

“Yes.” I promise. I don’t know if that’s a lie.

***

I fire up my laptop and buy a plane ticket that kills off a quarter of my savings. It’s late, but I take a chance and call Stella. She answers on the third ring and I can hear her voice echo above loud music.

“Sorry to call you so late.”

“Honey, it’s early!” Stella shouts in my ear. “So what’s the story?”

“I’m coming. I’ve got a plane ticket and enough money to last until my first paycheck.”

“That’s fantastic! How did your mom take it?”

“She wasn’t thrilled. You could have guessed.”

I think of my mom’s strangled expression when Dan and I piled on the promises that I’d be safe to finally convince her. I could have played my “I’m an adult, you can’t tell me what to do” card, but ultimately I wanted her blessing.

“Do you have to pack much? When do you get in?”

“I get there Sunday morning. I’m taking a redeye. That means I’ve got four days to pack, quit the coffee shop, quit the brewpub and I’ll show up for work with Dan on Monday.”

“I’ll message you my address.” I hear pounding in the background. “I gotta run. Somebody wants in the bathroom. Text me if you need help.” Stella abruptly clicks off the line.

Help? I need help in about a million ways.

Before my dad died, we flew a lot. Any beautiful day was an excuse to go up in his little plane, gliding low and slow over the patchwork quilt of Willamette Valley farms that ring the city of Eugene.

That quilt is tucked up to the forest’s chin, from the rugged Cascade mountain range in the east to the gently sloping Coast Range in the west. From my apartment, an hour’s drive can take me to the beach, the mountains, several rivers, or the state capitol.

My favorite trip is the ten minutes it takes me to drive a little canoe to the McKenzie River that winds its way through the valley. I spend hours floating, thinking and (on hot days) checking out the nudists.

Eugene’s been called “Blue Jean, Oregon” for attracting hippies, and you can’t throw a rock without hitting a Deadhead, a natural foods store, or a university student.

Sometimes I’m tempted.

But today, the pace of life moves from placid to light speed. I take a Greyhound bus to Portland, then the MAX light rail to the airport. I wander Portland International Airport, trying to figure out where to check in for my first-ever commercial flight.

Every airline’s check-in station is crowded, with harried attendants and ticket counters that look like they were designed by the DMV. But my airline, Virgin America, is actually kind of cool. They have fresh flowers, chatty attendants, and pop music pumping from a little stereo on their desk.

I think I know what flying will be like from movies. But boarding the plane is like walking into a nightclub—the whole cabin is white, with black leather seats that feel like Jeff’s Mustang. Neon violet and fuchsia tubes light the ceiling and there are video touch-screens in the back of every seat.

Color me impressed.

I shove my backpack in the overhead bin and a messenger bag at my feet, ready for my first real adventure to begin.

***

The taxi stops on a gritty side street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side between a Chinese restaurant, a Dominican restaurant, and a candy store.

“You sure this is the right place?”

“Yeah, yeah, this,” the cabbie says with a thick Middle Eastern accent, gesturing up the street. A dozen doorways line the sidewalk and my eyes search frantically for the right number.

I pay him and reluctantly step out of the safety of the cab, tripping on an uneven sidewalk panel as my scary-big suitcase swivels drunkenly behind me.

I feel sweat blooming under my arms and my eyes are gritty from sleep deprivation. No wonder they call it the red-eye. I’m wearing my fat camping backpack and bouncing a messenger bag along on my thighs.

Everything about me screams tourist, and yet I am not.

I am a New Yorker!

How awesome is that?

I don’t feel like a New Yorker yet, though. My outfit, which was boho-chic in Eugene, feels country bumpkin next to the relentlessly polished women who pass me. I might as well be wearing overalls and gingham.

I bump along the sidewalk with a suitcase that was just under the airline’s weight limit, feeling my gut clench uncomfortably with a need to pee. Each apartment number is wrong. I find the numbers close to where Stella’s apartment should be and swallow my rising panic.

It’s not here. Why didn’t she come get me? I haven’t heard from her since Friday and her last Facebook update was some cryptic song lyric about bad boys being so good. The reference was lost on me.

I check my phone again and the map says I’m in the right spot. So I look again, and then—relief!—I see that I’m on the odd side of the street, not the even. I squeeze between parked cars to cross the street for the right entry.

See? I can do this. I can.

I lean on a buzzer, and when Stella doesn’t answer, I hit a half-dozen more for good measure. Finally, the outer door buzzes and I drag/bump my enormous suitcase, which I am rapidly growing to hate, up each of the twenty-seven steps to Stella’s apartment.

I have to take a breath just to get the energy to knock on her door.

No answer.

I knock again, listening. It’s Sunday morning—what if she stayed out late? Somebody told me bars here close at 4 a.m. What if she went home with someone?

I sink down against the hallway wall in despair, wondering if she even got my email with my flight details. I
really
have to pee, so in about fifteen minutes my “wait it out” strategy is going to get desperate or messy. And I’d rather wet myself than bump my ridiculous suitcase packed with Bumpkin Fashion down twenty-seven stairs.

And back.

So I pound on Stella’s door some more, hoping she’s just, oh, passed-out drunk but coming to; wearing noise-canceling headphones while writing a story for her indie newspaper; or wrapped up in some glorious yoga pose that demands uninterrupted meditation.

As my mind spirals to worst-case scenarios involving
Law & Order
opening sequences, I hear a rustle, a click, and see the door handle twist.

I am saved! My bladder does a dance of joy and I nearly pee myself.

A guy with spiky black hair and three facial piercings stares at me. My mouth kicks in before my brain does.

“Hi! Are you Knyfe? I’m Beryl. Stella’s new roommate.”

I ditch my stuff in the hallway and plow into the guy, making a beeline for what I hope is the bathroom. I don’t even get its door all the way shut before I’ve dropped trou and peed, like, a hundred years’ worth of in-flight beverages.

Tom Hanks has nothing on me.

(Seriously. You haven’t seen
A League of Their Own
? Go rent it. I’ll wait.)

(OK, now that we’re all caught up on
culture…
.)

So I’m peeing, and then I’m washing, and I wash my hands and my face and my neck and it feels so damn good that I’m thinking I might just strip down and jump in the shower,
my
new shower, right this moment, when Knyfe pushes on the door I didn’t quite latch.

“Are you done yet?”

Rude, much? “Sorry, Knyfe. I’ll be out in a second.”

“It’s Blayde.”

“Right. Sorry. I’m Beryl.”

“You said. You’re that girl from Oregon?” He pronounces my state like a geometric shape, an octagon or a polygon. I don’t bother to correct him. Yet.

“That girl.”

“Right. Well, Stella and I broke up and I live here now, not her. So you can’t stay here.”

OMG! WTF? WTFFFFFFF!!!!

I splash more water on my face and dry off on what I hope is a clean towel. I pull open the bathroom door and see a stack of boxes in the living room. What’s happening here?

“Look, Blayde,” I say in my best calm-the-customer voice—practiced from years of handling freak-outs when people didn’t get their lattes
just the way Starbucks makes them
—“I’m sorry you guys broke up, but
I
live here now. This is half my apartment. I already paid.”

I go to the hallway to retrieve my stuff and Blayde makes no move to help me.

“No, you don’t,” he says. “My name’s on the lease. You can’t live here. Go talk to Stella.”

“Where is she?” I demand.

“Out,” he says, and slams the door in my face.

I hear the locks click and sink down to my favorite spot in Stella’s apartment hallway, put my head in my hands, and cry.

I kill most of the charge in my phone calling Stella incessantly (and—let’s be real—Facebooking my ordeal). I call Dan but when it goes to voicemail, I don’t want to leave a message.

I’m a big girl. I should be able to figure this out. So I find a hotel with a price-auction app.

It takes me ten tries to hail a taxi but some guy finally takes pity on me and takes me and all of my junk across Manhattan to a sketchy-looking place with stained awnings just north of Hell’s Kitchen.

I get my key from the hotel clerk after five minutes of back-and-forth over whether I can go to my room
right now
since it’s not check-in time yet. But I’ve got to. I think I might die if I spend one more minute in these clothes while hauling this suitcase around a city that smells like urine and hot garbage.

Currently, I do
not
heart NY.

My negotiating skills prevail and I squeeze into a claustrophobia-inducing elevator that I’m sure was last serviced before I was born. I find my way to a room that just chewed through another significant slice of my savings.

I will not think about the stains on the carpet.

Or the stains on the bedspread.

I will not. I will not.

I plug in my phone, take a lukewarm shower while wearing flip-flops, and change into a new pair of clothes. Finally, I perch on a rusty folding chair and call my mother.

“Beryl?” Strain and sleeplessness cloud her voice.

“Hi, Mom. I made it to New York.”

“I saw your flight landed safely. Was it OK?”

Of course she’s thinking of the perils of air travel on a big flying bus, not the real perils I’m facing with flagrant health code violations right here in my hotel room. But I don’t want to freak her out.

“Yeah, Mom, the flight was fine. Not even bumpy. And I’m here in my room. I’m fine.”

I don’t want to tell her yet that “my room” does not equal Stella’s place. That would generate an “I told you so” so loud I’d hear it all the way from Oregon.

She sighs. “I’m glad you’re safe. So what do you think of New York?”

Right now, my primary impression is that it
is
scary and dirty and every-man-for-himself, but I want to put her at ease. Instead, I tell her about the one awesome thing that’s happened to me so far.

“When I was walking here, you’ll never guess what happened. Some guy with a headset came up to me and said—” I hear a sharp intake of breath, but I plow on. “He said, ‘Can you please move to the other side of the street? We’re filming a movie here.’”

I hear her exhale with relief. She probably thought I’d already been mugged.

The first human who spoke to me in New York was actually polite. And when I walked past him, I saw a huge camera boom, studio trucks and dozens of people milling around. I tell my mom I saw a guy in tight black pants and a weird vinyl bird mask, and with a little snooping on Twitter I found out that Edward Norton and Bruce Willis are starring in
Birdman
, the movie.