Night Owls (22 page)

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, taking it all in. His Golden Apple signature demurely sat to the right of the last letter.

He slung his arm over my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek, utterly pleased with himself, and rightfully so. “It went twice as fast with you helping. Oh, hold on. Photographic evidence.
For Jillian.” He stripped off one glove and navigated to the camera on his phone before snapping several photos.

“I wish we could see it when the escalator is on,” I lamented. “Maybe we should come back tomor—”

Static crackled from inside the station.

We both froze.

It was a two-way radio, sputtering instructions. And footsteps. And voices that said, “
Blah blah
junction box
blah blah
escalator—”

BART guards patrolling the station? Was it already time for them to open it back up?

“Crap!” Jack snatched the backpack out of my hand, stuffing his head-mounted light and the rest of the supplies inside. He pushed me up the stairwell, and we took the stairs two at a
time, racing to the top—

—only to hear the
beep-beep-beep
of a truck backing up to the curb right outside the temporary plywood walls that covered the street exit. And another two-way radio. And male
voices talking about disassembly and barking directions to workers about where to barricade the sidewalk.

These were not BART guards. It was the freaking escalator repair company, coming to reopen the subway entrance and conduct final tests on the escalator before the station opened.

We couldn’t go back down, and we couldn’t leave the way we’d come in.

We were trapped.

Jack zipped his backpack and strapped it on. Then he pulled up my hoodie and whispered against my ear, “Get ready to run.”

Was he serious?

Oh, hell—he was!

As voices approached the makeshift plywood door, Jack reared back, lunged, and slammed his shoulder into it. The door flew open, smashing into one of the workers. Shouts of surprise ballooned
behind the door as Jack grabbed my hand and jerked me through the opening.

“Hey!” someone roared as we bolted along the sidewalk. “We got transients!”

I didn’t even look at their faces. I just booked it as fast as I could go. Chilled air knifed through my lungs. The rubber soles of our shoes slapped against the sidewalk, the sharp sound
echoing off the buildings and the cars rushing past.

“Hustle!” Jack shouted.

Stupid short legs. I was slowing Jack down, which made me a lousy getaway girl. At the end of the block, Jack pulled me around a corner and straight into a covered alcove that harbored a
café delivery door.

He held up a finger in warning and then stuck his head around the corner. My heart hammered. Images of being chained at the ankles in a female prison flashed in front of my eyes, along with my
life.

Jack turned back around and grinned at me with breathless delight. “That was, I believe, what you’d call a close one.”

We’d made it? They weren’t going to chase us down with guns and crime-sniffing dogs? I peered around the corner to see it with my own eyes, and Jack was right. We were in the
clear!

I stood on tiptoes, fisted the front of his coat, and pulled him down to kiss him—firmly, wildly, until our teeth clinked and I nearly bit my own lip. I didn’t care. I was high on
adrenaline and in love. I felt invincible. Like the entire city belonged to us. Every fog-ringed streetlight, every neon sign, every jagged crack in the sidewalk. All ours.

“Thank you,” I whispered, smiling against his mouth.

“For turning you on to new criminal possibilities?”

“For making me feel alive.”

“Alive is good,” he said, offering me his hand. “But let’s get you back home before they call the cops.”

IT WAS A MIRACLE MOM DIDN’T CATCH ME SNEAKING
in that night, because she was still up at 4:45 a.m.—which was when Jack left me in front of
my house. I stayed up long enough for him to text me Good morning instead of “Good night.” And then I slept like the dead until almost noon, when Mom woke me up for our lunch date.

Thankfully, her gift of condoms was not a topic of conversation. The graffiti on the BART escalator, however,
was
.

The escalator repair workers had apparently found Jack’s graffiti after we ran off, and told the police that we were the Golden Apple vandals—
we
being two guys dressed in
black, one tall, one short. I’d have been insulted if I wasn’t busy freaking out.

The local radio station debated the incident while Mom drove us to the Mission. One DJ thought it was a “crying shame” that a brand-new escalator had been defaced. Her partner said
it was “urban art” and “inspirational.” And squirming in the passenger seat of the paddy wagon, I embodied both viewpoints, in turns horrified and giddy. In the middle of
all this, Jack texted to tease me about my new status as “the short male suspect.”

On top of that, Mom asked me a lot of questions that made me sweat. Like about the student art contest. She wanted to know what I was submitting; the deadline was quickly approaching. But a
paranoid part of me was convinced she knew about Minnie, too, and was giving me a chance to confess that I’d blatantly disobeyed her in pursuing the cadaver drawing. It made me realize that I
really needed to be more careful. She worked only a few buildings away from the Willed Body lab. All it would take was one ill-timed break on her part to see me with my portfolio, strolling into my
next drawing session, and my entire summer’s work would be ruined.

While she ran her errand—picking up some custom-size discounted blinds to replace the ones in our house that had fallen apart from old age—I made a rash decision that had nothing to
do with Minnie or my new criminal standing. Maybe it was all the leftover adrenaline from the night before rotting my brain—I don’t know. But I pulled out my phone to email the lady at
the wood-carving shop in Berkeley. Yes, I actually
would
like to meet with the guy who carved my artist’s mannequin, I wrote her. Why not? In a week, I’d be too busy getting
ready for the art contest. Besides, if my dad thought he could start up a conversation with me on his terms, he could think again.

And while I polished off half an overstuffed carne asada Super Burrito with Mom, I got a speedy response from the shop in Berkeley: Could I come by at one the following afternoon? I texted
Jack, and he said he’d gladly drive me.

“Sometimes I think you’re full of secrets,” Mom said wistfully, eyeing the leftover plastic cup of salsa verde on the table like she might ask for a to-go lid.

I balled up my napkin and stuffed it inside the cup so I wouldn’t have to eat it on eggs the next morning. “None of them are all that interesting,” I assured her.

THE NEXT DAY, JACK PICKED ME UP AT ELEVEN THIRTY
in the morning. My whole body went haywire when I saw him in the doorway as I peered over my
mom’s shoulder. Chills. Warmth in my chest. Jackhammering heartbeat. I practically swooned.
Swooned!
This couldn’t be good. Everything felt . . . intensified. Like, overnight.
Magically. I quietly prayed he couldn’t tell.

Or Mom.

If I were going to
his
house, and his mom had just presented
him
with a hundred condoms, I think I’d rather jab a screwdriver in my ear than face her. But Jack greeted
Mom like they were best friends.

“Prince Vincent,” she said before I could step around her. “Where are you two going on this fine foggy morning?”

His lie was smoother than smooth. “We’re heading over to the East Bay for lunch. I wanted to check out a record store.”

I’d pretty much told her same thing an hour before; how come it sounded so much more natural coming out of his mouth than mine? And Mom smiled at him like he was charm incarnate.
“Just make sure she’s back in time for work,” she told him.

“I will. Don’t worry.”

“I’m taking my uniform with me,” I added with forced casualness, patting the red bag I normally carried back and forth to the anatomy lab. “My shift starts at
four.”

This definitely mollified her. Because if I was going to work, I surely didn’t have time to get into trouble or pull any “shenanigans,” as she said when it was Heath doing
something behind her back. Little did she know, I could cram a lot of shenanigans into a short span of time.

She watched us jog down the stairs. “Take care of my baby,” she called out. If she knew I was headed into enemy territory, she probably wouldn’t be so cheery.

But when she went back inside the house and we were safely out of her range, Jack reached for my hand, and I said, “I’ve missed you”—as if it had been a week, not a day,
since I’d last seen him. And just like that, we fell on each other like rabid dogs, kissing against the passenger door of his car until someone passing by on the sidewalk made a rude
comment.

“Yeah, maybe we will,” Jack called to the pedestrian’s back after she was too far away to hear him.

I smothered a laugh into his shoulder. He pretended to bite my ear and growled against my hair, which only made me laugh harder. I hugged him tighter and sighed into his neck.

“God, I’m crazy about you,” he whispered. “If you don’t stop me, I’ll be begging to see you every day, because I can’t stand being apart from
you.”

“Oh, good. I thought it was only me.”

“Not just you,” he said, kissing the side of my head.

I clung to him for a moment and then pried myself away, clearing my throat.

“Right,” he said, blowing out a long breath. “Let’s get on the road before we get arrested for public indecency.”

“I believe that’s the least of our potential charges.”

“How does it feel to have aided a wanted felon?” he murmured as he unlocked the car door.

“Exhilarating,” I whispered back.

Maybe I was better at being bad than I thought.

The drive to Berkeley took only a half hour, and we rolled down our windows when the sun chased away gray skies over the Bay Bridge. Jack had gone back to the scene of our crime and shot a
one-minute video of the escalator in action. I’d already seen a couple of videos posted online, but it was so much more exciting watching it on his phone.

“A spokesperson from BART said they’ll be closing it down for cleanup in a week,” he told me as Ghost’s motor rumbled through my seat. “I think that’s the
longest one of them has ever stayed up. And it’s easy to clean metal. I’m betting foot traffic will wear the paint off the tops of the steps in a couple of days.”

“Has Jillian seen it?”

“Yeah,” he said, lips curving. “I showed her the video last night. She couldn’t stop smiling. We used to go to the main city library across the street from that BART
station, and Jillie always headed for that looping stair sculpture on the fifth floor. You know what I’m talking about?”

I hadn’t been there in years, but I knew which one he meant. “The stairs that lead nowhere.”

“Exactly. That’s what she said when she saw the video, and that the stairs to nowhere matched up nicely with ‘rise.’ I hadn’t even remembered how much she liked
those stairs. I was only matching up the word to the escalator.”

“A happy coincidence.”

He shook his head. “Everything’s connected, Bex. Whether we understand it or not.” He drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, tapping out a happy rhythm. “She
asked about you.”

“She did?”

“I told her you helped me. I was worried it might upset her—that she might get jealous, or whatever. Change stresses her out, and Dr. Kapoor has been monitoring her since your
visit. No—don’t be worried,” he said when I groaned. “It wouldn’t matter if it was you or someone else. Little things set her off, and she’s been juggling meds
since the seizure. But it’s cool. She likes you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and he grinned at me, squinting over the top of his sunglasses.

The address for the wood-carving shop was near the edge of UC Berkeley’s campus. Jack parked Ghost on a side street just off Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks away, and since we still had
forty-five minutes to waste, we strolled past bookstores and cafés and herb shops until we found a curry place that had a bunch of vegetarian dishes, where we ate a quick lunch (validating
our lie). At exactly one o’clock, I strode by a blonde in a green Jaguar who stared at me so hard I gave her a dirty look, and marched through a glass door into Telegraph Wood Studio.

True to its name, it smelled strongly of wood shavings. The front of the shop was cluttered with totem poles and carved fireplace mantels. Sculptures of dancing women. A solid-wood globe. Even a
mermaid figurehead dove out of a wall, looking as if a ship might crash through behind it at any second. A long counter separated the front from the workshop, where multiple tables stretched around
carving equipment and large pieces of furniture.

“Whoa,” Jack said in a low, reverent voice. “Check out the old cable-car replicas. They’re gorgeous.”

I looked at the handwritten price tag. “Fifteen hundred? That’s one hell of a toy train set.” And it wasn’t half as detailed as my artist’s mannequin, which lay at
the bottom of my red bag. I didn’t think the guy who’d made it would need a reminder, but just in case . . .