Strange Girl (7 page)

“It’s okay,” Aja said without raising her voice. “Everything’s going to be okay. Where you’re going tomorrow—none of you is going to die.” She paused and repeated herself but somehow, with the repetition, an odd power entered her voice. “No one dies,” she said.

That was it; that was all she said. Then she stepped down from the table and offered her hand to the guy Mike had attacked, the one who’d taken a bottle to the head. He was bleeding freely from a nasty scalp wound but didn’t hesitate to take Aja’s hand. The second he stood she carefully touched his cut and the whole Roadhouse seemed to sigh. It sounds crazy but that’s what I heard. One huge blissful sigh . . .

“Feel better?” Aja asked the guy.

He nodded. “Thanks.” He spoke louder, to the crowd. “I’m okay!”

Aja nodded toward Mike and Dale and without another word the guy helped them to their feet. All around, people began to mutter and pretty soon everyone was talking at full volume again, but more civil, less wild. A few called out for songs they wanted us to play.

Shelly and I exchanged a look and shook our heads, not sure what had just happened. I mean, wow, Aja says a few words and now suddenly everyone’s acting like they’re on ecstasy? No, actually it was weirder than that. Because I recalled how the crowd had fallen silent even before she’d spoken.

Mike and Dale climbed back onto the stage. Both were bruised and bloody but they assured us it was nothing serious. We all agreed we should keep playing. Before we did, though, I searched for Aja in the crowd. But she had disappeared.

• • •

It was four in the morning when I heard the soft knock on our motel door. I appeared to be the only one who heard it. Nearby, Janet and Shelly slept soundly on one bed, while on the other Dale lay like a dead man as Mike snored loudly. At the knock, I sat up on my foldout bed. I didn’t mind rollaways. If I was tired enough, I could sleep on the floor. Pulling on my pants over the gym shorts I’d been sleeping in, I slipped from beneath the sheets and answered the door.

“Hi,” Aja said and smiled. She had on the same dress she’d worn to the Roadhouse. Her hair was wet, though, as if she’d just showered, and her feet were bare. I saw no car. I assumed she’d walked over from her own nearby motel or hotel.

“This is a surprise,” I said. It was so good to see her I feared I might still be asleep, dreaming the whole thing up. “What are you doing here?”

“Want to go for a walk?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

I glanced at my friends; they were still out. “Give me a second, let me find my shoes and a shirt,” I said.

Minutes later we were strolling along the cracked edge of an asphalt road beside a twenty-foot fence, topped with barbed wire, that surrounded the base. The town was silent as Elder usually was at this time of morning. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

The air was heavy with moisture and the ground was damp; clouds had chased away the stars. It made me wonder if it had been raining and if that was the real reason Aja’s hair was wet. Had she been wandering around in the dark since we’d last seen her? I asked and she nodded.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “You should have hooked up with us hours ago.”

She shrugged. “You were playing and the place was noisy. Besides, I like to take walks late at night.” She glanced over. “You look surprised.”

“I’m surprised you’re here. What made you come?”

“You invited me to hear you play. You remember?”

“Sure. How did you get here? Did Bart bring you?”

“I took a bus.”

“Why didn’t you come with us?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Let me get this straight. You rode here all alone, across half the state, with only the clothes on your back. And since we last saw you at the Roadhouse, you’ve been wandering around in the dark—barefoot—in a strange town all by yourself.”

“No.”

“What part are you saying no to?”

“My shoes.”

“What about your shoes?”

“I brought shoes. But I got tired of wearing them.” She added, “They’re sitting on the hood of your RV.”

“Well, that’s a relief. You’ve got your shoes to protect you. Honestly, Aja, you can’t behave like this, not in this country. You’re too pretty a girl. Anything could happen to you.”

“Anything can happen,” she appeared to agree, before adding, “Don’t worry about me.”

I shook my head. “I do worry about you.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . maybe where you come from it’s safe to wander around at night. But this can be a violent town. You saw those guys at the club. They were ready to kill Mike and Dale.” When Aja didn’t respond I looked over at her. “But they didn’t because you showed up. How did you get them to stop?”

“I didn’t do anything. They were afraid, that’s all. They didn’t want to hurt anybody. And when they understood that, everything was okay.”

I shook my head. “If Shelly had stood on that table instead of you and begged that drunken herd to calm down, they would have beaten the shit out of her. What you did was amazing.”

“Fred.”

“What?”

“I can’t be in danger one minute and amazing the next. You have to make up your mind.”

She had a point, sort of. I was contradicting myself. Not that she still wasn’t acting naive. “What I mean is . . . ,” I began.

She interrupted by reaching over and taking my hand. “I liked when you sang by yourself at the beginning,” she said.

Her hand felt good in mine. “You were there at the start? I didn’t see you.”

“Yes. At first you were nervous, then you relaxed.” She added as if to herself, “You enjoy singing in front of people.”

For such a naive girl, I thought, she was perceptive.

“I do,” I said. When she didn’t reply, I asked, “How have you been this last week?”

“Good.”

“It must have made you mad getting expelled on your second day of school.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be there Monday.”

I shook my head. “I can’t understand why Billard hates you.”

“She doesn’t hate me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s afraid of me.”

“Huh?”

“We met over the summer.”

“Where?”

“At the town cemetery. I often walk there.”

“What happened at the cemetery?”

Aja hesitated. “Better you ask her.”

“Why?”

“She’ll explain.”

I pushed Aja to elaborate but she just shook her head and kept walking. I finally decided to shut my mouth and enjoy the touch of her hand, which was remarkably soothing. I don’t know how far we’d walked when I noticed that I was feeling awfully energized for a guy who hadn’t really slept in two days. More, I felt light, light as a balloon, as if I wasn’t walking but floating alongside the fence. And the clouds in the sky, they felt somehow closer, like I could touch them.

Aja suddenly stopped and faced me, her big, brown eyes bright in the dark night. She reached up and stroked my cheek, my hair, and even though I did my best to stay cool I trembled. She inched up on her toes and kissed me on the lips, just for a second or two.

“Let’s go back to your RV,” she said.

“You mean the motel? You can sleep on my foldout. I can sleep on the floor.”

Aja shook her head and tightened her grip on my hand. She began to lead me back the way we’d come. “I want to sleep with you in the RV.”

I don’t recall much about the walk back. But I do remember lying beside her on the cushions in the rear of the RV, our two bodies barely fitting between the crush of our equipment. We didn’t have sex—we didn’t even make out, nor did she kiss me again.

But she held me and let me hold her and for the first time in my life I felt as if all my hidden fears had been deftly exposed and quietly put to bed, once and for all. I had fought with her that it wasn’t safe to wander alone in the dark, but when I slept with her cheek resting on mine, and felt the brush of her eyelashes as they fluttered during her dreams, I was the one who felt protected.

• • •

The band slept until noon the next day, which was not unusual. Aja and I woke up an hour earlier and had breakfast in a nearby coffee shop. Once again, she ate what I ate: scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. I tried quizzing her about her life in Brazil but she easily turned the topic to our performance the previous night and I ended up doing most of the talking without even realizing it.

Aja was turning out to be a tough egg to crack, I thought.

I still knew almost nothing about her.

Returning from the coffee shop, we found the band loading the RV. I assumed we’d be giving Aja a ride home until the infamous Bart showed up in an ivory Jaguar. Specifically, I met Bart in the motel parking lot while Mike and Dale were collecting clothes from our room and Aja was talking to Janet while Janet settled our bill at the front desk. It seemed Mike had raided the minibar—which, technically, was supposed to be locked and off-limits to us “kids”—earlier and we owed more money than our original deposit.

“You must be Fred. Aja’s told me a lot about you,” Bart said as he climbed from the Jaguar and shook my hand.

The man was coal black with a handsome face and a thick Jamaican accent. He wore a flowered shirt, white slacks, and wooden sandals that looked as if they might have been carved on a Caribbean island. He was short but robust. With his strong features and smooth skin it was hard to place his age. I would have said he was in his midthirties but a tinge of white in his black hair made me wonder if he was a lot older.

“She’s told me about you,” I replied.

Bart glanced around. “Is she here?”

“She’s with my friend Janet. She should be here in a few minutes. Don’t tell me—Aja snuck out on you and her aunt.”

Bart nodded. “It’s a habit of hers. But I had a good idea where she’d gone. She told me where your band was playing this weekend.”

“She—or you—should have called. We could have given her a ride home.”

“I didn’t have your number,” Bart said before changing the topic. “How was the show?”

“It was going great until we had a riot. Then it got pretty ugly. I’m not sure any of us would still be alive if Aja hadn’t intervened.” I added, “I’m not joking.”

Bart appeared to take it all in stride. “It’s a good thing she came.” He turned toward the motel office. “Let me check and see what’s keeping her.”

I stepped in front of him. “She’ll be here in a minute. Anyway, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions.”

He hesitated before flashing a smile. “Shoot.”

“Aja told me Mrs. Smith isn’t her real aunt. That the two of you ran into her in a small town in Brazil when she was a kid.”

“That’s true. We were staying in Selva—that’s a tiny town in South Brazil—when we met her. She was eight at the time.”

“How did that work? I mean, was she living on the streets or in the jungle and you saw her and took pity on her and adopted her?”

“Pretty much. She was homeless.”

“What about her parents? Where were they?”

“Her mother and father were killed when she was much younger. The locals—there’s conflicting stories about what really happened. All I know for sure is there’s no point in asking Aja about them. She won’t discuss it.”

“But you assume it was something traumatic?”

“I have no idea,” Bart replied, giving me a penetrating look. “You like her, Fred, I can tell. I’m glad. Growing up, Aja hasn’t spent much time with people her own age.”

“Why’s that? Why wasn’t she in school?”

Bart shrugged. “She didn’t want to go to school. Not until recently.”

“When the three of you moved here?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you move here, if I may ask?” When he didn’t answer right away I added, “Was it because she wanted to?”

Bart chuckled, keeping his eyes on me. “Good, that’s good. You’re beginning to understand her. Most people never do.”

Janet and Aja returned right then, followed shortly by Mike and Dale. Mike had a black eye and Dale a swollen lip but no one was complaining. Burrito Bill had tipped us an extra two hundred, all of it in cash.

Yet I was disappointed Aja wouldn’t be riding back with us. I’d been looking forward to having a long talk with her. However, I could see Aja was reluctant to have Bart drive home all alone after he had come so far to find her. I couldn’t blame the girl for being polite. She squeezed my hand as she was leaving, which felt nice.

“I’ll see you tomorrow at school,” she said.

I smiled, although I hated to let go of her hand. Again, I wondered why I cared so much. And again, I told myself that I hardly knew her.

“Have a safe drive back,” I said.

Aja gave Bart a quick glance—as if to check with him, I thought—before she went up on her toes and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. To my surprise no one said a word, not even Mike. Moments later Bart and Aja pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the interstate.

Janet was watching me closely. “Are things good?”

I watched as the Jaguar turned onto the interstate and vanished. “I’m not sure,” I said honestly.

CHAPTER FIVE

MONDAY AT SCHOOL felt like a roller coaster.

Since I didn’t share a class with Aja anymore, I figured I’d talk to her at lunch. But on the way to her locker I was stopped by Nicole Greer. She wanted to talk, which I found odd because she hadn’t said two words to me in the last six months.

Nicole had been my first real crush, the first girl I’d asked out on a real date. My infatuation had been intense, feverish. When she’d broken up with her boyfriend—a guy named Rick Hilton—and I’d finally managed to build up enough courage to call and ask her to a movie, and she said yeah, sure, she’d love to—I swear that had been one of the happiest days of my life.

Unlike Aja, I’d had my eye on Nicole for several years and knew her pretty well, or at least I thought I did. She was very cute: dark blond hair, hazel eyes, round face, upturned nose, brain-blowing smile. Mike went so far as to say she was the prettiest girl in the school, and it wasn’t like I was in a mood to argue.

She was sweet, too; she seemed kindhearted. Our first few dates, I felt on top of the world, especially when we made out, which we did often, usually at my house, in my bedroom. We even came close to going all the way. Nicole made it clear she wanted to but it was I who held back. But it wasn’t because I was a prude or lacked in horniness. Hell, I was a walking hard-on when we were dating. No, the problem was Nicole. She still talked about Rick. She talked about him a lot, at least from where I was standing.