Night Owls (10 page)

“My dad ran off with a strip-club owner a few years ago.” I was surprised the words came out of my mouth, because I only talked about Dad with Heath, never with my friends, and
never,
ever
with Mom.

“Yikes. Classy.”

“Right? I have zero contact with him, so don’t ask me to get you free passes,” I joked. Of course, right after I said it, I realized that this wasn’t exactly true
anymore—the zero-contact thing. That carved artist’s mannequin was currently stuffed in the bottom of my Ikea wardrobe under some shoeboxes. I hadn’t decided what I was going to
do about it yet.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said in a low voice that made me feel self-conscious.

“About what? He’s an ass, but our lives went on without him. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Everyone expects me to be crying over the fact that I don’t have a father
figure in my life, like I should be screwed up over it or something. But I never even really think about him.”

I shrugged as Star and another server climbed the stairs to our platform carrying two pots of tea: one made of black ceramic, and the other glass. With those came a long tray overflowing with
hummus and roasted eggplant and olives and plump dates filled with feta and garnished with flower blossoms—flowers!

“I’m suddenly starving,” I murmured.

“I could eat all this by my lonesome, so we’d better get something else. Cheese or sweets?”

“Hmm, tough choice.”

“Bring both,” he told Star.

“Just so we’re clear, I’m not paying for any of this, rich boy.”

“That might be a problem since you have my wallet,” he reminded me as he poured steaming cups of the most amazing-smelling mint tea I’d ever inhaled.

“In that case, drinks are on me.”

Everything tasted amazing, even the tea. And the flowers were edible. They tasted like nothing, but still. As we stuffed ourselves with finger food, I stretched out my legs beneath the table
alongside Jack’s. It took only two bites of a honey-drizzled date stuffed with feta for me to end up pressed against him from hip to ankle. He was warm and thrillingly solid, and maybe it was
because I was small and he was tall, or maybe it was the fact that I had his wallet in my pocket, but I couldn’t remember ever feeling so . . . well,
safe
was the wrong word, because
I was still nervous around him. I don’t know. Maybe I was content—who knows? Could’ve just been that I was relieved to have some food in my stomach after what had happened at the
anatomy lab.

We laughed at each other’s stupid jokes and discovered we had a few things in common: We were both born in the city; we both had been to Alcatraz on school field trips and hated it; and at
Amoeba Music, we liked browsing the movies and retro rock posters more than the actual music.

Once I was sure no one was listening to our conversation, I said in a low voice, “Since I’m the only one knows your secret identity, I think I need to know why.”

“Why I haven’t told anyone else?” he asked.

“Why you’re doing it.”

His brows lowered, and for a moment his eyes were shadowed so deeply by his dark lashes that they disappeared, and he was a faceless ghoul with empty, dark sockets. Then he turned his head and
pretended to smile. “It’s not important.”

“Just something you do for kicks?”

“No, not that.”

“Daddy issues?”

Jack snorted. “If he ever finds out, I’ll have some issues, all right, because he’ll disown me.” His upswept hair was wilting in the steam rising from our teacups. He
pushed a lock of it out of his eyes. “My dad lives for work. Family comes—well, not even second. My mom’s pretty high up there, but I’m probably tenth. And if I ever
publicly embarrassed him, he’d send me away somewhere before I could open my mouth to apologize. Military school or Russia, probably. Not even kidding.”

“To be fair, the stuff you’re doing would probably land you in jail, so you wouldn’t have to worry about being sent away.”

“Good point. If I get busted, will you smuggle a sharpened HB inside a cake for me?”

“Maybe if you’d stop vandalizing, you wouldn’t have to shiv your way out of San Quentin with a pencil.”

He rubbed his cheek against his shoulder, and his face came close enough to mine that I could smell his lemony hair wax and the mint of the tea on his breath. I barely heard his whispered reply
beneath the sound of footsteps racing toward our table.

“I can’t.”

Before I could ask him why, the table exploded.

PLATES AND DISHES SLID, HUMMUS SPLATTERED, AND
Jack’s pot of Japanese green tea tipped over and splashed across my face and his shirt. It
wasn’t hot anymore, but that didn’t stop me from crying out in shock as if I’d been scalded. With soccer-mom swiftness, Jack’s arm shot out in front of me like a shield, but
the damage was already done.

“Oh, God! I’m so sorry!”

I wiped tea off my face and looked up to see a girl squatting beside me to help straighten the table. She was thin and small, but not as short as me, and she had asymmetrically cut hair that was
black on the short side and streaked with purple and pink on the fringed, longer side.

“My toe caught on the reed mat,” she explained in a tiny, high voice that didn’t match her wild hair. “I’m such a klutz.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said in strained voice, using his shielding arm to push our plates back from the edge of the table before they dumped in our laps.

“My cousin Trevor lives on the next block—you know, the one in college? Anyway, I saw your hair through the window when I was walking past. I couldn’t believe it was you, but
it was and—excuse me.”

She leaned over me to hug Jack’s neck.

“Uh, Beatrix,” he said, clearing his throat. “This is my friend Sierra.”

“Hi there,” she said to me, putting her hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she sat back on her heels. Was she drunk or something? She smelled funny. “He’s being
modest. We’re more than friends.” She bit her bottom lip and grinned at Jack.

A positively horrified look crossed his face. He moved his mouth as if he were going to say something but couldn’t force the words out.

“Hey, it’s cool,” she said. “We’re not together or anything. Jackson doesn’t do the couple thing, as I’m sure you know. Do you go to his school or
something?”

“No.”

Someone tapped on the window. A silhouette of a man.

“Shoot, I’ve got to go. Hey, you guys wanna come hang with us? We’re going to a party in Rincon Hill.”

“No, thanks,” Jack said testily.

She shrugged and stood. “Give me a ring sometime. Maybe you and Andy and I can hang at his mom’s place. God! I almost tripped again—you guys need to do something about this
mat,” she said to the waitress who had rushed up the stairs with kitchen towels to clean our table. “See ya, Jackson!”

WE HELPED STAR CLEAN UP THE TABLE. JACK APOLOGIZED
to her and later to me on the way back to the Inner Sunset. Our connecting bus was crazy full, and
we had to stand. But once we’d gotten a seat together on the N train, we talked a little.

“Thanks for being cool about Sierra,” he said quietly.

“One freak-out a day is my limit, and I’d already used it up at the anatomy lab.”

“Oh, good.”

“But while we’re on the subject, are you and Sierra . . . ?”

He looked me in the eyes and said very seriously, “Absolutely not. Sierra and I are just friends. That’s all we ever really were. Well . . .” He shook his head and glanced out
the darkened window. “It’s complicated. Or it was. But now it’s simple, and we’re friends.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” he repeated, brows drawn together.

I pulled a wet tea leaf out of his hair and smiled weakly. “Okay.”

After I returned his wallet, we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and work schedules. I thanked him for not making fun of me outside the anatomy lab. He thanked me again for not
freaking out about getting splashed with tea. When we got to my stop, I wouldn’t let him walk me home. I can take care of myself, first of all. And second, no one had ever walked me home. Not
even Howard Hooper. (And that’s not some veiled reference to sex, because Howard and I had plenty of that—well, maybe not
plenty
, exactly, but
some
. And anyway, it was
100 percent in his car . . . and 100 percent disappointing.)

Besides all this, I wasn’t sure I wanted to chance running into my mom on another unplanned shift break at home, mainly because I’d have to lie when I explained that, no, Jack had
nothing to do with graffiti in the museum, and gee, I’m not sure why I failed to mention that I’d met him on the Owl bus in the middle of the night when I was sneaking off to do
something
I was specifically warned not to do.

I don’t like disappointing her, so I disappointed Jack instead. Not that I was conceited enough to assume he’d planned to throw me down on my front steps and kiss me like there was
no tomorrow. But it was pretty obvious that I’d hurt his feelings when I wouldn’t let him walk me the measly block and a half from the Muni stop.

“It’s not because I don’t trust you,” I told him before I left, but I don’t think he believed me. And that made me feel kind of rotten, especially when I turned
around at the bottom of the street and saw his silhouette standing below the fog at the stop, watching me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back, and my rotten feeling slipped into a general
all-purpose melancholy.

When I made it back home, I discovered that Heath was out with Noah. Good thing I didn’t need him to utilize Jack’s driver’s license, because not only would it be hours before
he even noticed I was gone, but the photo I texted him was so out of focus, I couldn’t read half the information on it. Still, I remembered Jack’s street name and searched for it
online. It was on the western side of Buena Vista Park, and the houses there ranged in price from five hundred thousand to several million.

I wondered which one was his.

We used to live in a nicer place in Cole Valley, back before my dad took off. He was VP of academic affairs at the university hospital. That’s how my parents met. So, yeah, he made a
crap-ton of money and couldn’t be bothered to pay child support. Heath and I pushed Mom to take him to court, but she went ballistic and screamed at us about how she didn’t need a
handout from a cheater and a liar. Hey. No need to tell us twice. We never brought it up again, not even on the occasions when both Heath and I had to pitch in our own money to pay an extra-high
electricity bill, or whatever. It wasn’t often—maybe a couple of times a year. And the three of us are all living here together, using the electricity, united in our stance against
taking handouts from liars and cheats. So I didn’t complain.

I just wasn’t quite ready to look at Minnie again, so after stashing my sketchpad, I stripped out of my clothes and dug out the artist’s mannequin. Dad might or might not be a bigwig
VP anymore, but this thing wasn’t cheap. I turned it over in my hands and thought of everything Heath had told me about the card he found in the trash. Heath couldn’t remember the
Berkeley address, but it was surreal to think that after not seeing my dad for years, he might be an hour away, just across the Bay.

I flipped over the hanging tag. Telegraph Wood Studio. A quick Internet search pulled up the contact information, including an email address for inquiries. I doubted artist mannequins sold like
hotcakes, and surely whoever carved it would remember the name of the client. The studio might even have an address on file. What harm could it do to ask?

Before I lost my nerve, I sent a quick email.

There. Either Dad had sent it, or he hadn’t. And if he had? Well, I’d cross that bridge later.

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN I CLIMBED INTO BED,
mulling over everything that had happened that day. My session in the anatomy lab. The aftermath. The
calm and patient way Jack had coached me to breathe. How warm his leg had felt pressed next to mine . . .

My phone buzzed with an incoming text message. Jack. Already? I halfway expected him to follow the usual pattern—that is, I wouldn’t hear back from him for days.