Uncaged (12 page)

“That
is
cool,” Shay said. “You’re in business on your own?”

“Yup. Here, I’ll show you my system for moving around.”

Emily wheeled aside a Radio Flyer wagon plopped inside the door—she used it to haul her “scores” up and down the elevator, she said—and angled between two old dressers. With Shay wading in behind her, Emily reached up and spun a mirrored disco ball hung from a nail in the ceiling.

“I do it every time I come home—I say for good luck, but both my shrinks in junior high would probably blame the OCD. Or maybe it’s the ADHD.”

Shay smiled, and gave the ball another spin. “Same shrinks we had. Every foster kid had something wrong: obsessive-compulsive, attention deficit, serial killer, flesh-eating zombie narcissist klepto cutter disorder.”

Emily laughed. “Whatta you got?”

“Something to do with authority figures.”

Emily raised a palm. “Gimme five.”

They swatted hands and hopscotched their way through the sitting area, past the purple velour couch—“There’s a rumor that it belonged to this old singer, Prince, a long time ago,” Emily said. “Not entirely, you know, confirmed.” And past the beanbag chairs, a dozen boxes filled with old pots, clothes, and paintings. Emily dropped her purse on a table that held two stacked microwaves, a TV, and a box of hair-straightening irons.

“You wanna borrow anything, just ask,” she said. “Don’t get too attached ’cause everything’s got a price. Oh, and not to be a bitch, but … you break it, you buy it.”

“Thanks,” said Shay. “I think.”

Emily pulled open a second door, giving the impression that more stuff was spilling over from the other side. Shay peeked in and her face filled with pleasant surprise.

Neat as a pin, two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, crisp white sheets, a nightstand with nothing on it but a glow-green alarm clock.

Emily grinned. “Scared you, didn’t I? Let me get you some soap and shampoo and shit.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Shay lied.

Shay got her shower in a surprisingly nice women’s restroom with individual shower booths. She wasn’t quick about it. With the sample-sized tubes of bodywash, shampoo, and conditioner fronted by Emily, she stood for ten minutes under the pouring hot water, getting really clean for the first time since she ran.

Her jeans were still questionable, but with a room, access to a decent laundry, and a shower … the place would work.

If only until she could find Odin.

Out of the shower she dressed in her lumberjack outfit, but when she got back to the room, she found Emily pawing through bags of clothes. “The used kind that you’d pay big bucks for down at the resale stores,” Emily said. “Go get undressed. I’ll pass you the stuff.”

Emily passed her stuff for ten minutes, and Shay began to run out of patience. She had never followed fashion, and didn’t care what she was wearing on the hunt for her brother. Emily came in with another dress and started wriggling it over Shay’s head like a stylist. “Really, chica, if I had your assets, I wouldn’t be tenting them in sweatshirts and mom jeans. I’d be working it.”

“ ‘Working it’?”

“Yeah, you know.
It
.” Emily stepped back and looked at the dress. “Acceptable,” she said.

“I don’t think I can stand any more,” Shay said.

“Give me five more minutes,” Emily said. “I’m starting to see you now.”

“You couldn’t see me before?”

“Your Smokey the Bear thing threw me off. Try these on.” She handed Shay a pair of sandals with heels like spikes.

Shay shook her head. “No. Nothing higher than an inch.”

Emily looked at her impatiently. “You’re not making this easy.”

“You’re killing me,” Shay said.

But when Emily had gone again and she looked in the mirror on the back of the door, she thought,
Not bad
.

Emily came back with strappy one-inch sandals. They were acceptable.

“You’re still not L.A., but at least … mmm … you’re in Southern California. So let’s go.”

Emily carefully locked the door behind them, and Shay followed her down the stairs. They went around the corner to the hotel’s tiny—and nearly empty—parking lot.

“This is it,” Emily said. Her truck looked like a cross between a jeep and a fire engine: a red 1977 International Harvester Scout with a missing hardtop, which made it a convertible.

“It’s ugly, but at least it’s unreliable,” Emily said as they got in. “You better do something with your hair, unless you really want that windblown look.”

Shay was twisting her damp hair into a bun as they headed for a freeway when Emily shouted over the wind noise, “Not to be snoopy, but the way you were dressed—where
are
you from?”

“Oregon,” Shay shouted back.

“Ah,” Emily said, nodding as if that answered everything.

Semitrailer trucks, hot rods, pickups, limousines, and practical sedans being driven by little old ladies whipped by them on the Santa Monica Freeway. Emily’s vintage truck screamed with pain every time the speedometer touched sixty.

As Emily laughed off a bald guy in a Maserati who was giving them the finger for slowing down his lane, Shay took in Emily’s appearance, which was anything but lumberjack. She had flat-ironed chin-length hair tipped with electric blue, emerald-green eyes magnified by thick false lashes and brown winged eyeliner. Her small,
pouty mouth was kept constantly peachy with a tube of Nars Orgasm gloss.

“How old are you?” Emily shouted over the traffic.

“Almost seventeen,” Shay shouted back.

“I’m almost eighteen,” Emily said. “How’d you meet Twist?”

“Uh, I just met him last night.” She didn’t mention the fight in the alley. Then, “What’s he like?”

“He’s like … Mother Teresa, if she were an outlaw biker with a big fat bank account and a taste for Hollywood starlets.”

“Oh,” Shay said.

The REI store was all the way across town, practically on the beach. They could have stayed on the freeway, but Emily wasn’t feeling the love from her Scout’s transmission, so they got off on Santa Monica Boulevard at what felt like a walking pace, getting to know each other.

Emily had dropped out of school after tenth grade but, at Twist’s insistence, had gotten a GED and now was thinking about a business degree in college, but only “after a couple more years of this. I’m liking what I’m doing right now, but people I trust tell me that I’ll burn out on it.”

Shay wasn’t sure about a GED: “I’d like to get back in a real school, and finish there.”

“Hollywood High—that’s your school,” Emily said. “Probably the most famous high school in the country. I’ll consult on your wardrobe.”

“You know where I’d like to buy a complete wardrobe?” Shay asked.

“Where? Maybe Wasteland? We could run over …”

“There,” Shay said, pointing.

The REI store.

After the confusing morning, the outdoors store on Santa Monica Boulevard felt and smelled familiar, and Shay took charge. She said to Emily quietly, “Stay behind me, look interested, but don’t stop walking. I need to find a particular guy.”

“What guy?”

“I don’t know yet,” Shay said. “I’ll know him when I see him. I don’t want to get the wrong clerk. They can stick on you like sandburs.”

They wandered past the bikes, the camping gear, the kayaks and paddles, past a couple of racks of climbing gear, and checked out lug-sole boots. Emily found a bin of tights—for men. “Awesome,” she muttered, fingering the material.

Then Shay spotted her guy. He was kneeling by a display rack, sorting and folding T-shirts on a messy shelf of sale merchandise. He was short, with heavy shoulders, long hair, a tanned face and arms, and a silver hoop earring. Shay moved in, with Emily a few steps behind, and said, “Hey.”

He looked up, nodded. “Can I help you?”

“I need to find some climbing gear,” Shay said. “You look like a climber.”

He checked her out in her new used clothes and asked skeptically, “You’re a climber?”

“I did Jacob’s Nose in a day and a half, on lead the whole way,” she said.

He stood up and said, “Uh, you don’t look like …”

Shay was wearing an ivory-net top over a soft, flesh-colored camisole that looked like nothing at all, a pale blue skirt that came to midthigh, and the one-inch-high sandals that precisely matched the net top.

“My friend just did a makeover on me,” Shay said, tipping her head at Emily. “An hour ago, she said I looked like a lumberjack—with pinecones in my hair.”

“It’s true,” Emily said, giving her gum a vigorous snap. “Pinecones.”

The guy still wasn’t sure, and Shay could see it. She stuck out her hands, palms up. “Don’t look at the clothes. Look at my hands.”

He reached out and took her fingers, felt the calluses, and said, “Jacob’s Nose, huh? What is that? 5.11?”

“More like 5.10, not terrible,” Shay said, taking her hands back. “But it was sleeting most of the time.”

He smiled now. “Okay. What’re you looking for?”

“I’ll be teaching some kids up around Big Bear,” she said. “We’re gonna use a top rope, but I left all my stuff in Oregon. So I need like a climbing harness, maybe a hundred and ten meters of PMI E-Z Bend eleven-millimeter static line … couple good rappel devices.”

“Pretty much everything, then.”

She said quickly, “Listen, I was hoping I could get sale stuff. I’m light on cash. If you’re not having a sale for a while, I could wait.…”

“Looking for a deal—now I know you’re a climber,” the guy said. “My name is Jonah. Let’s go over here. So what else have you done?”

Shay mentioned a few Oregon climbs she’d been to with her foster parents, including one that Jonah had done himself, though he’d gone a different, harder route up the same face.

He was still feeling her out, and she said, “You took the hard way. There’s that overhang going up the left fork, I can’t get over it yet. That knob hits me at my collarbone, and I can’t get my foot on it without coming off.”

He grunted and said, “That’s tough. You need to work on your fingers, is the trick. You gotta hang, and do a one-handed pull-up, just a short one, just a grunt, then reach up about another eight inches, there’s a better hold there, off to the right. You can’t see it, you gotta feel around. When you can pull yourself up, you can get high enough to get your foot on that knob.”

“That’s what I can’t do yet,” Shay said. “Don’t have the finger strength, the upper-body strength.” Making him feel a little superior, a bit manly.

They went off on other details, standing by a rack of climbing equipment, while Emily appeared to be falling asleep on her feet. Jonah said, “Your friend doesn’t climb.”

Emily woke up enough to say, “Only in and out of a truck.”

“Well, you got a truck, anyway,” Jonah said. Satisfied with Shay’s credentials, he picked up a brand-new hundred-dollar Black Diamond women’s climbing harness and said, “This is a little shopworn. I can give it to you for half price …”

She got the harness, three descenders, two ascender devices, locking carabiners, and 110 meters of rope for three hundred dollars, including tax, the prices manipulated by Jonah to the amount Shay wanted to spend. He threw in a box of Power Putty so she could work on her finger and arm strength, an eight-dollar value for, um, nothing.

Shay shook his hand as they left the store and said, “Thanks for all this, Jonah. I’d like to climb with you sometime. If you have an email.”

They exchanged emails, and out in the truck Emily said, “Man, if I could work a guy like that, I’d be rich.”

“I didn’t work him—he’s a climber,” Shay said defensively. “He was helping me out. Climbers stick together.”

“You got five hundred dollars’ worth of gear for three hundred,” Emily countered. “You knew
exactly
what you were doing. If you were a short, ugly, male climber—or even a slightly overweight female with a terrific personality—you think he would have helped you out that much?”

Shay smiled at Emily, then said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, my large pink butt. There’s no way,” Emily said as she fired up the Scout. “But it’s for a good cause, so you’re forgiven.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got time to stop at one more shop on the way back. You made me think about Wasteland. I got an idea about a really fantastic climbing outfit for you. If we hurry …”

“Oh my God,” Shay said.

No one who lived at the hotel had ever seen where Twist actually slept. The kids who worked the front desk said the man came and went at all hours, sometimes with Dum and Dee, sometimes not, sometimes with his art, sometimes with any number of beautiful women.

Now here Shay was, her first day at the hotel, climbing gear looped over her shoulder, standing behind Twist as he unhooked a key ring from his belt loop and inserted a key into the steel security door built into the studio’s only interior wall.

Emily had begged Shay to memorize everything in Twist’s bedroom so she could relay every weird and exotic detail. Emily was betting on a mahogany four-poster bed with mother-of-pearl inlays and sweeping silk canopies fit for a sultan.

Maybe that’s what it was, but all Shay could see was an entry room six feet by ten, with a scuffed oak floor, a rug, a non-Twist landscape, and a daddy longlegs making its way up one of the cloud-white walls. An archway, draped with a beaded curtain, cut
through one end wall, with an exterior window on the opposite one. Shay leaned toward the beaded curtain, maybe even craned her neck a little; all she could see was darkness.

Twist said, “The fire escape’s over there.” He was pointing at the window.

Of course it is
, she thought. “You don’t sleep here?”

“You see a bed?” said Twist. “C’mon, let’s see what you got.”

He walked over to the window, flipped a lock, and pushed it open. Shay pulled her climbing harness on and, carrying her rope, stepped through to the metal fire escape and felt it rattle beneath her weight. She was standing on the back side of the hotel, seven stories above the parking lot and the loading dock she’d seen earlier.

“You coming?” she asked Twist, who was standing a foot back from the door. “Or you going to stand there like a lamppost?”