The Unnoticeables (10 page)

Marco's eyes were the color of dead space.

“Hey,
chica
!” he enthused, practically bubbling.

 

TEN

1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

“Co-wine?” Safety Pins suggested.

Randall shook his head. Disapproval.

“Night cola? Like … Night Train and cola? Cola Train? Train Cola? Tra … la?” Matt knew he was dead in the water before he'd even stopped moving his lips. Randall and I stared at him silently. He hung his head in shame.

“Swine,” Randall said with authority. “Half soda, half wine.”

The man was a goddamned genius. I just wish he didn't know it so hard.

We were trying to come up with a name for our new drink: giant fountain cups from this hole-in-the-wall pizza place, half-filled with soda, half-filled with cheap hobo wine. Swine. Perfect.

The name even tasted spot on: This shit was awful.

But Jesse, the pizza fascist who manned the counter at Fetta! Di! Vita! came around to our table every time we ate here to “check that you guys is doin' okay.” He kicked us out if he smelled hard liquor in our cups, but his soda machine was so filthy and stale you couldn't smell the wine over the expired soft drinks. We didn't have ice at home. And like fuck we were paying a dollar for his crummy beer.

Hence, Swine.

This place sucked: cracked plastic tables, chairs with duct-taped legs, nicotine-stained generic wall art. I swear they sell the stuff in bulk to pizza places worldwide: a few ancient movie posters, a signed photo of a celebrity your dad would almost recognize, some line-art drawing of a fat Italian chef huffing a bowl of pasta like it's cocaine. It came complete with a mustache-wielding tyrant squatting behind the counter. His beady eyes swiveled around just looking for potential offenses, like a fat old plantation owner watching the cotton fields from his porch.

It was easily the worst restaurant I have ever been to.

But it was only a block away from our apartment, and slices were two for one on Tuesday.

It was our home away from home.

Matt had found the guts out of an old, discarded newspaper. He was busying himself drawing giant cocks on all the photos. Safety Pins was carefully pouting. It bugged the shit out of me how she always spent all her time looking good. The fact that it actually did make me want to fuck her just pissed me off even more.
Especially
since she wouldn't go for it. I think she had a thing for Matt. You could see her stick that lip out a little more when he looked her way. She jostled her cup, nearly knocking it over onto the paper. That got his attention for a second, but when he saw it wasn't going to fall, he just put his head right back down to really focus on his news-dicks. He was drawing like a little kid: red crayon clutched in his full fist, tongue stuck partway out of his mouth, eyes crossed in concentration.

I could see why. He was working on a real rager. A veiny, pulsing hose that snaked with sinister sentience from the front of the pantsuit of some smiling local politician. Her throbbing bastard monster of a cock had undulated all the way up to, and was wrapping around the throat of, the man shaking her hand. Rearing back from his face like a striking cobra.

The kid had talent.

Me and Randall were taking turns trying to think up new ways to fill the time. We'd spent ten minutes trying to name our drink. Before that we held an intellectual debate—more of a thought experiment, really—on who would be better in bed, John Holmes or Mister Fantastic. For posterity: We decided it would be Holmes. There's no doubt Fantastic can stretch to be bigger, but nothing says his stretched skin is hard, you know? It probably has the texture of a rubber band.

What could I say? It was kind of a dick-themed afternoon. Most are.

Now we sat in overheated silence. Safety Pins sulking seductively in the corner. Matt scribbling on the Sistine Chapel of cocks. Randall and me poured into our respective chairs, just trying to maximize skin contact with the rotating blast of air that Jesse's fan was dispensing. It carved little narrow channels of comfort from the solid block of heat that was the afternoon city.

“Do you want to go somewhere and fuck?” I asked Safety Pins.

She sneered.

Matt's laserlike focus did not waver.

“Seriously,” I said.

“Seriously no,” she answered back instantly.

“All right. Just thought I'd check in and make sure.”

Randall laughed.

“The answer will always be no. You're gross. You look like that guy from the really old monster movies, only if somebody hit him with a shovel when he was a baby.”

“Bela Lugosi? I'll take that. Dracula was a sex machine.”

“I think she means the other one,” Matt said, working on the shading of a particularly gnarly vein snaking up the shaft of his phallic beast.

“Boris Karloff,” Randall supplied. “I absolutely see it.”

“Nice,” I said. “You're saying you
don't
want to get shafted by Frankenstein, baby?”

Safety Pins stifled a laugh. But she still rolled her eyes when I gestured toward the door.

We fell into silence again. I was about to slap Matt across the face—just because fighting was something to do—when a shadow moved across our table. I looked back and found the prettiest girl I'd seen in a solid year standing in the doorway. She was dripping sweat—I mean, everything was dripping sweat in this heat, even the walls—but she did it in a civilized way. Careful little droplets at the collarbones and temples. It brought to mind morning dew, rather than rancid pig flop. She worked the rolling fields of her hips all the way up to fat Jesse and his cop mustache, planted behind the counter. She ordered a bottle of Coke and turned to face us. We stared back.

Randall and me with thinly veiled appreciation. Safety Pins with not so thinly veiled scorn.

The girl smiled, and it was like somebody flicked a lamp on in the back room: Everything became just a bit brighter, lit from a place you couldn't point to.

She was wearing a Ramones T-shirt. The black one with the seal across the front. The exact same fucking one I was wearing. Hell.
Yes.

“Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me…” I started to get up, but she was already coming over to me.

I told you! I told you some chicks go nuts for a face with character. And that's me: Character fucked my mug right up.

She pulled up a chair, moving like a goddamned river, and straddled it at the end of the table.

Words, now.

 …

Words, now!

“Hi,” I managed, just happy I puked out some English while staring into those eyes.

“I like your shirt!” she said.

“I like yours too,” I replied automatically, then unfortunately added: “Wanna trade?”

Then I noticed that the eyes I was so lost in weren't exactly pointing at me. They were focused a foot or two back. A little to my left.

Fucking Randall.

“Thanks,” Randall said, ignoring my response. “It's my mom's.”

She laughed, but I glanced over and saw it actually did belong to his mother: a purple silky thing he only wore around laundry day, or if it was like a million degrees outside. It was both today.

After a few awkward seconds, she spoke again: “You don't remember me?”

“No. But don't take it personal. I'm drunk a lot,” Randall said.

She laughed.

This girl sure finds unvarnished truth hilarious.

“We met at Hurrah a while back? I wrote my number on your hand, and you said you'd call. You didn't call.”

She even frowned cute. I somehow resisted the urge to smack Randall in his undeserving mouth.

“Sorry.” Randall shook his head, but his eyes didn't leave her while he did it. “Must've been a bad blackout. These fuckers write on me with Magic Marker if I pass out. Probably washed it off by mistake.”

“Well, lucky I ran into you then.” She tossed her hair. Sweat gathered on the nape of her neck. I stared at it thirstily. It looked downright refreshing.

“You wanna grab that Popsicle now, or what?” she said.

Randall's face screwed up in confusion.

She laughed like a chandelier swaying in the breeze from an open window.
God damn it, I'm so horny I'm becoming a poet.

“You really don't remember!” She reached over me and slapped at his arm. Her hair smelled like cut grass.

“I don't,” Randall answered, already standing and coming around the table, “but I will buy you frozen treats now, regardless.”

She laughed again. She laughed at everything he said.
The rotten son of a bitch.

Just before they drifted out, clinging to each other like drunken sailors, Randall leaned down and whispered in my ear.

“Have fun jerking it tonight, sucker.”

I scrambled to kick him in the legs, but he spun away from me too quickly, and then they were gone.

“God damn!” I reached out and swatted the Parmesan cheese over on its side, spilling little flecks of yellow across Matt's newspaper.

He looked up for the first time in minutes. His pupils contracted as they adjusted to life beyond newspaper dicks.

“What's up?” he asked me. A little spit hung on the corner of his mouth where he'd been storing his coloring tongue.

“You didn't see that shit?” I gestured out the door at the disappeared Randall and his pet sex goddess.

“See what?”

“The girl that just practically talked Randall off into his jeans, just now?”

“What girl? I didn't hear anything. There was somebody here?”

I laughed and pulled the paper out from beneath his elbows.

“You were so far gone into your penis-world—this is a masterpiece, by the way—that you missed the hottest girl I think I've ever seen practically Hoover Randall's junk into her mouth.”

“Oh, yeah?” Matt sat up straight, swiveling his head around, trying to spot her outside the windows, “What did she look like?”

“She…” I racked my brain. “She was really … pretty.”

Safety Pins gave me an odd look.

“Yeah,” Safety Pins agreed, “she was. But what did she look like?”

“She was gorgeous. She had this hair, and … eyes. They were blue? Green? What color was her hair?”

“I don't know!” Safety Pins snapped. She was still burnt with jealousy, but I could see she was rattled now, too.

Shit.

I got up and ran to the door, but I couldn't see them. She must've had a car.

When I sat down again, Safety Pins was staring glumly out the window at nothing. Matt waited for me to speak, concern stitching his eyebrows together.

“I'm sure it's nothing,” I told him. “Too much Swine.”

He gently, wordlessly tugged the newspaper away from me and started a new dick.

 

ELEVEN

2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.

I dropped my pad.

The black leather case plopped open, spilling pen, paper, and hastily scribbled reservations across the smooth bamboo floor.

Plastic smile. Never moving. Never blinking.

Marco was waiting for me to respond.

“I'm calling the cops,” I finally rasped.

“Ha-ha! You are a funny girl. I find that I'm liking funny girls!” Marco carefully gestured with his hands as he spoke. It was stilted, precise, and rehearsed. Like he was giving a presentation to an elementary school assembly.

“Seriously, get out or I'm calling the cops to pick up what's left of you after the guys in the back finish beating you into a liquid.”

“That's getting old.” Marco dropped the bubbly talk-show persona. His voice went flat. His features lost tension somehow, slackening into an inhuman mask. “Don't say it again.”

His face seized painfully and twisted back into the eager Marco simulation.

“You should get some new material!” he practically screamed.

“What are you, gonna rape me right here in an open restaurant? Customers will come through that door any second. There are twelve guys with knives in the kitchen, dipshit.”

“Rape you?” He said the word like it was nothing. Like he was ordering something foreign off the menu. “Ha-ha! Why would I do that,
chica
?”

I moved to leave, but the second I started to turn I saw his arm reflexively shoot out to the side. It was an alien gesture, more like a spasm than a conscious movement. His whole body convulsed and then he was abruptly standing a few feet closer. I barely saw him move.

My dad had a gardening shed back in Barstow. During the summer, you'd get these big black spiders. When you opened the door they would skitter, just an inch or two, and then stop. They were so fast. Watching them traverse that tiny distance, you knew immediately that they were too quick for you. You could never reach them in time to swat them.

I had that same feeling just now, watching Marco take one short step closer to me. There was a good fifteen feet between us, and only a few from where I stood back to the wait station—to the kitchen doors and to help.

I would never make it.

“I'm famous.” His voice lost intonation again. His face and body like an abandoned puppet propped up in a corner. “I am very rich. I am attractive and fit. You have a deformity and are a waitress. You are honored that I am speaking to you. You are flattered. You want me. You are ashamed of it. It is okay. I will take you. Just ask. Ask me, Kaitlyn.”

I could barely hear him. My pulse throbbed in my ears. A dull, resounding bass that drowned out everything else. I couldn't expand my chest enough to get a full breath.

I'm so goddamned stupid,
I thought, glancing down at my pad scattered across the floor. That pen was the closest thing I had to a weapon. I had nothing else on me. Nothing even close to me. And he was so fast. He was just waiting for me to do something, those non-eyes unfocused in my direction. They tracked me vaguely without actually seeing me, like a predatory bird watching a still lake for signs of movement.