Held: A New Adult Romance (3 page)

 She’s sitting with her feet in the water, smoking a cigarette. Her head whips round fast as a deer’s when she hears my footsteps. I can’t quite make out her face – her hand’s shading her eyes – but her hair looks like gold fire in the late afternoon light. They named her just right. Amber.

 "
¿Donde es Esteban?
" she says, catching me by surprise. I’m not used to hearing it from a white girl, and her accent is weird – European, maybe. Like she learned it in Madrid or Barcelona.

  "
¿Habla usted Inglesé?
" she asks. A reasonable question, since I’m standing here like a moron.

 I hear Pops’ voice in my head – “White girl speaks better Spanish that you, Jaime,” – and automatically correct him. She doesn’t. She’s got her forms of address all wrong. Even I know that.

 "
Usted?
" I say. "Isn't that kinda formal?"

 She does this funny little one-shouldered shrug. I still can’t see her eyes for the shadow of her hand but her mouth is thin lipped, bow shaped. Her chin and jaw look like her old man’s – strong, maybe too strong for a girl. "I was being polite,” she says, and I can’t place her accent.

 "Technically, I'm your servant,” I explain. “So a
tu
will do. I think."

 "You
think?
"

 "I don't speak much Spanish,” I say. She kind of rears back from me and I see the tip of her tongue touch her lower lip. The water is moving in tiny ripples, like the breeze was stirring it. But there’s no wind. I realize for the first time that she’s breathing way too hard.

 “You must be Amber, right?" I say.

 She swallows and scrapes her hair back from her face with her hand. For the first time I see her full face. She has wide, high cheekbones that perfectly balance her jaw. Her eyes are deep set and frightened. "Where's Esteban?" she says, with a kind of breathless desperation that makes me afraid for her.

 "He's moving on,” I say. “Got a new job. I’m replacing him."

 Amber closes her eyes like she’s been gut-shot, her hand on her ribs below her breasts. She draws her breath in a long, shuddering gasp and then sinks back onto the tiles. Her feet are still in the water; she’s the one making the ripples. She’s shaking that hard.

 I don’t think. I should have thought twice, but I’m here to protect her, right? I lean over her. For a moment she’s looking right up at me and I see her eyes are blue. She’s incredibly pale, like one of those Goth kids who never opens the drapes.

 "Are you okay?" It was just a touch on the shoulder. That was all. I swear.

 I’ve never heard a woman scream like that before or since. And I’ve heard a lot of screaming women. My female relatives are not what you’d call cool-headed. But the sound that comes out of her is just...panic. Total fucking terror. Like she’s so frightened she can barely force the air from her lungs.

 She leaps away from me like I’m on fire. I hold my hands up where she can see them.

 Amber draws in another couple of shuddering breaths, closes her mouth. The effort of breathing through her nose makes her nostrils flare.

 “I’m sorry,” she says, swallowing. “I’m so sorry. I get these...um...it’s...ah....panic attacks.”

 “Oh. Sorry. Those can be nasty, right?”

 Amber nods. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t need to. Her eyes say ‘No shit, Sherlock’. 

 “Is there anything I can do?” I ask.

 For a moment she shakes her head, her long hair swaying, but then there’s a different light in her eyes, a kind of calculation, maybe. “This is gonna sound so stupid,” she says, and I realize why I couldn’t place her accent. I was expecting her to sound British like her Dad, but she’s all-American. “Could you get me some cigarettes?” she asks.

 Huh. I’m sure I heard somewhere that nicotine increased the heart rate. Last thing you’d need during a panic attack, surely? “Do they...help?” I ask.

 She looks at me in weary desperation for a long moment. “I’m crazy,” she says, like it explains everything from the Big Bang onwards. “Crazy people love cigarettes.”

 Chapter Three

Amber

I never meant to study in California. When I applied for colleges I'd barely grown out of my 'L.A. Sucks' phase. I thought it was a shithole, a whiny enclave of self-regarding morons who pissed away their money on flotation tanks and plastic tits and terrible movies about dogs.

 From the age of about twelve I was enrolled in an exclusive private school, where we were allowed to wear our own clothes and curse and cut classes in the interests of 'free expression'. We were encouraged to learn, but only about things that interested us, which meant there were a lot of classes devoted to that one girl's erotic My Chemical Romance fanfiction, or weepy teenage poetry about black-winged angels and unfathomable pain.

 "I know it's not like people like us will ever have to work for a living," Everglade once said during one of these 'sessions' (that's what we called them – ‘classes’ smacked too much of structure) "But do you have to be
so
committed to turning us into morons?"

 That earned her a positive report for challenging authority, and pissed her off twice as much. Rebellion is no fun when it’s listed as an extra-curricular activity.

 She was one of the reasons why I chose to stay in California. The other was a shady but substantial impression that I might not be able to hack it anywhere else. Everglade got that. Her mother, once one of the original riot girls and the voice of the anti-establishment, was now so Hollywood that even Everglade called her Kiersten. The first time I met Kiersten she offered me a cigar and then told me - no holds barred - about Everglade's conception, in Paris on an iron-framed bed, with a now dead junkie boyfriend who was 'trying out the Jim Morrison thing'.

 "He killed himself when I told him I was pregnant," she said. "Or that's what the coroner's report said - suicide. They wanted to make it less embarrassing for his family; it was actually auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong."

 "Amazingly they managed to keep that secret for all of about four weeks," said Everglade. "Which is like some kind of record for Kiersten."

 "I'm a very open person, baby. You know I like to share."

 "Yeah - the trouble is you share everyone's shit and not just your own. Most times without asking permission." She jerked her head towards the door and I got up from the garden table where I'd been sitting. "Sorry, Amber. I guess now you not only know my dead Dad wasn't circumcised but that he also had a Prince Albert, right?"

 I followed her back into the house where the college prospectuses waited. "Is she always like that?" I asked.

 Everglade pulled a face and yanked open the fridge. "Nope. Sometimes she's worse. You want OJ, milk or a beer? 'Cause Kiersten doesn't give a shit."

 We pored over the prospectuses for hours, learning where to get the best kimchi in San Francisco or where to find the best thrift shops in Portland. Nothing much further east than Nevada - but Everglade said if we wanted to go to Vegas we could just go. No point signing up for four years then discovering that it sucked. Everywhere else we looked at was within shaking range of the San Andreas; it was like we were rooted to the crack in the earth we called home.

 "San Diego," she said. "Wasn't that where they filmed that old movie - back when men were men and vampires were vampires?"

 "What movie?" I said, pushing aside a UCLA prospectus. They had some interesting electives but I knew if I looked into it I'd never get out of the house. I wanted to live on campus. I wanted the real world experience, outside of the celebrity bubble I'd lived in my whole life.

 "You know. Kiefer Sutherland." She took a long pull of beer and slammed the bottle down hard on the table. "The Lost Boys," she said, triumphantly. "Eighties movie; there's like a hot biker vampire gang and a giant fairground on the boardwalk." She sighed hard enough to ruffle the pages on the table. "I was so born in the wrong decade."

 "That was San Diego? I thought it was Santa Barbara?"

 "Nah. SD, I'm sure of it. We should go. Check it out."

 "All I know about San Diego is the zoo."

 "Babycakes, that's not a zoo. That's what they call the University." She grinned like an alley cat. "All the more reason to take a look, wouldn't you say?"

 The next weekend we packed our bags and headed down the coast. A quick internet search revealed that Santa Cruz was the place where they'd filmed the movie, but I'd seen a psych program I wanted to check out and Everglade grudgingly agreed the San Diego boardwalk was probably 'okay', even if it wasn't the glorious, vampire-ridden funfair of Santa Cruz.

 It was better than okay; it was awesome. We got henna tattoos and ate cotton candy. At one point the tattoo artist looked at Everglade and said "Don't I know you from somewhere?" but it turned out he was only harmlessly hitting on her and not about to start yelling that she was Kiersten Rowe's daughter.

 As we were walking back along the boardwalk, in search of one the bars we'd read that were popular with USD students, we passed a stall selling biker scarves and goth jewelry. "Wait," said Everglade, and dragged me over to look at these pewter dragon pendants - kind of tacky actually, but that was what she liked. The woman behind the stall was a ruined beauty - you could see it in the streaked curls of her thick hair and the dark depths of her large eyes, but life had dragged down the corners of her lips and scratched worry into her wide brow. Her figure was impressive - a wasp waist in a leather bustier, long legs, torn jeans and a tan, rose tattooed cleavage that jiggled when she moved.

 "You ever think of selling that hair?" she said to me, while I tried on a bandana.

 I laughed and she looked at me like I had no idea, which to be fair, I didn't. I'd never heard of such a thing outside of a novel and never imagined real people could be so desperate as to sell parts of their body. Maybe that was why - when I saw the cardboard sign that said TAROT in magic marker letters - that I asked her about the readings.

 "Sure," she said. "Let me get someone to mind the stall. You sure you wanna know your future?"

 "Why not?" I said, half amused. I didn't believe in any of that stuff anyway. I'd been through the occult phase and out the other side - spooky stories, sleepovers, and seeing how many times you dared say Bloody Mary in front of the mirror.

 "Cut the pack," said Rose-Tattoo. "Tap it three times."

 She drew the first card. "This is you," she said. "Queen of Pentacles. Rich kid - but you knew that, right?"

 "Right," I said, biting my lower lip to hide my smile. This was hardly hardcore voodoo. Anyone could look once at my expensively straightened teeth and my good shoes and know I wasn't exactly trailer park material.

 "Your past," she said. "The Empress. Older woman. Mother?"

 I nodded. She arched an eyebrow. "Dead?" she said.

 "Yes."

 "Just like I thought. Your future..." She drew another card. I knew what that meant. The Reaper. Death.

 It was so much like a bad horror movie that I laughed. "You've got to be kidding me."

 She looked up from under her long black eyelashes and I saw once again the beauty she must once have been. "It's all our futures, sugar," she said, in a smoker's rasp. "Man that is born of woman hath but a short time. In itself this isn't a bad card. People think it's the worst, but it's not. Sometimes it just means change. End of one era, beginning of a new one. You got any big changes coming up in your life?"

 "College," I said. "I want to move out of home."

 "There you go, sweetheart. Death of your childhood. Happens to us all."

 I nodded and gave her some more money, even though it hadn't been much of a fortune telling. I don't think I would have even remembered it if it hadn't been for what happened next.

 We found the bar Everglade saw in the student guide. It was packed to the rafters and I knew right away it would make me nervous - I've never been great at crowds. But we looked through the window and saw some girls drinking pink cocktails with dumb little pipe cleaner flamingos perched on the end of the swizzle sticks; "Self conscious kitsch," said Everglade. "My favorite," and so we went in. Funny to think of life's big decisions riding on something as small as that. I wonder about it sometimes - in another universe is there another me who's doing fine, solely because she didn't go into that bar?

The cocktail was just known as The Pink Stuff. I'm not sure exactly what was in it but I think I spotted the bartender pouring in vodka and white rum. It was a pretty motley crowd. There were guys with popped collars and girls with too much tan, but then I saw a girl with a shaved head and a t-shirt printed with a René Magritte painting - not the pipe, the other famous one. The one where the guy has an apple where his face should be. Another girl was in intense conversation with a bearded guy whose t-shirt bore a twelve sided D&D dice and the legend 'That's How I Roll, Baby'. Seems like all tribes were well represented.

 I held onto Everglade's hand as we made our way through the crowd, past the pool table and into a back room that was dark but for the bar and a bunch of weird, luminous sculptures hanging from the ceiling. They looked like someone had tried to make rib-cages and other bone structures out of crappy papier maché and then painted them neon glow-in-the-dark shades - pink, green, electric blue. The plastic cups were the same colors and also glowed in the dark, which was probably the only way anyone could even find their drinks.

 In the distance, above a sea of darkened heads and bobbing, glowing cups, I could see the moving spotlights of a dance floor. The music was deafening - Industrial, I think - the chalkboard outside the door had said 90's Night.

 "Do not," Everglade bellowed in my ear "I repeat - do not tell my mother about this place."

 I laughed. If she came in here would we ever get her back out of the door? I finished my drink and went to find another. The bar in here wasn't nearly so crowded as in the other room. It was also about the only place I could see my hand in front of my face without the aid of a glowing cup of beer.