“Oh, no, it’s all right. I don’t want to horn in on your date or anything. I mean, I saved the bus fare up here, and I’d planned to stay overnight. I’ll be okay.” She put a hand on his arm and smiled reassuringly.
“Aw, hang around anyway. You can meet Janet and we can all walk in together. I can at least keep them from cheating you too bad when you rent your hostel room. Oh, ’scuse me.” He left her and walked over to a plump, middle-aged woman with a clipboard and a little red wagon with a bucket half full of water.
Cally went back to Marilyn’s romance novel on her PDA while Reefer and the restaurateur dickered and made their trade, leaning against the van as strains of music came drifting through the open window… dog has not been fed in years. It’s even worse than it appears but it’s all right. Cows giving kerosene, kid can’t read at seventeen…
After a bit the older woman dragged her wagon back off, bucket sloshing a bit as she went. Reefer stayed in the back, fiddling quite a while with the tanks while the afternoon sun sank to the edge of the mountains. Finally, he sighed and came around to her side, scratching the back of his head with one hand and looking up at the impending sunset.
“Um… look, it would be like a major favor if you could wait here for Janet for a minute while I go sign up for tomorrow’s convoy. I mean, like, she knows the van, so if you see her… uh, like she’s tiny, okay? And she’s got straight black hair about down to here, looks about your age. Do you, like, how do I say this? Have you ever heard of the Goths?” he asked.
“What, you mean European Franco-Germanic barbarian tribes from the dark ages?”
“Um… no. Not like that at all. Just… she wears a lot of black, okay? And silver jewelry. She’ll probably be wearing, like, lots of silver jewelry. And she has this really cool Celtic knot kind of bracelet tattooed around one wrist. Like, left, I think. You can’t miss her. So, if she like shows while I’m gone, which she probably will, could you tell her I’ll be right back?” He bit his lip and craned his neck back over towards the Urb entrance as if he could make her appear just by looking often enough.
“Sure, Reefer, I’ll tell her you’ll be right back,” she said.
“Awesome. Thanks, man.” He walked off towards the pack of semis that had made up the front of the convoy from Charleston.
The clouds had turned to brilliant splashes of hot pink, vermilion, and orange by the time Reefer got back with his convoy slot number for the morning. His face fell slightly when he saw there was nobody but Cally at the truck.
“Bogus,” he muttered softly under his breath as he opened the driver’s side door and grabbed his backpack. “I guess I made us wait for nothing. Sorry, Marilyn. I didn’t mean to be a dweeb. Uh, let’s go, I guess.”
Cally grabbed her own pack without comment and followed him towards the door of the Urb. The parking lot was cracked and pot-holed in places and clearly needed resurfacing, but the freshly painted lines on the faded asphalt suggested it wasn’t on the schedule anytime soon. Even from a distance, she could see that the walls of the entry level of the Urb were covered with graffiti, some fresh, some of which had flaked and started to peel over time, along with the building’s own paint.
As they approached the door, a couple in faded jeans and artfully ripped black T-shirts came out and started walking towards them. Reefer seemed to recognize them and missed a step, recovering and starting forward easily. As they reached each other, Cally noted the strain in the smile on his face.
“Well, like, cool. More people. Hi, Janet. Janet, this is Marilyn. Marilyn, Janet.” His voice had a slightly desperate edge to it. Cally stepped to his side and put an arm easily around his waist. Least I can do. He gave me a lift and he didn’t do anything obnoxious on the way. Besides, Marilyn’s sensitive.
“Oh, pleased to meet you.” Janet tilted her head back to look up at the skinny boy next to her. “Thad, this is that guy I was telling you about, Reefer. He’s a really good guy. Reefer, this is Thad.”
The kid unwrapped his arm from around her waist to shake Reefer’s hand. “Oh, like, cool. Janet says you’re a pretty rad painter, dude. Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, sure.” He clutched the hand Cally had put around his waist and shot her a grateful look. There was an awkward silence as they looked each other up and down. Thad’s red goatee clashed wildly with the electric blue spikes in his black hair. One shoulder, bared where the sleeves had been ripped out of the shirt, sported a tattooed head of a Posleen God King, crest erect, snarling. His forehead tattoo was a bright, metallic gold lightning bolt. His skin had the clear complexion typical of a generation that viewed acne with the same skepticism their grandparents had held for tales of walking through the snow to school in the mornings.
Cally broke the stalemate by pinching Reefer’s butt soundly and grinning when he jumped. “Hey, babe, we gonna grab some eats, or what?”
“Hey, Marilyn, like, I appreciate the support but you don’t have to do this.” Reefer nuzzled her ear, whispering, as they walked down the residential corridors to Janet’s suite, staying three steps behind his ex-girlfriend and the new guy.
“Shhh,” she placed a finger over his lips, “it’s allright.”
“We can just go up and check into the hostel, separate rooms and all, and if I look like a dweeb, well, you got me through a real bummer of an evening…”
“Shhh.” She stopped him again and nipped his ear whispering, “I’m not offering to do the deed, but I need a place to crash, you need some moral support, just chill out and shut up, okay?” And not having to check in anywhere is good tradecraft.
“Hey, you two, get a room,” Janet called back over her shoulder.
“We are. Yours,” Cally grinned back. “Well, okay, your futon, anyway.”
Beyond the inevitable futon, the first thing Cally noticed about the apartment was that the smoke detector inlet had been covered with duct tape, and filters cobbled together over the air vents. The second thing was the portable air scrubber over in the corner, plugged into the wall. The small den was shrunken even further by the dark holographic posters of various musicians and groups that papered most of the wall area. The exception was the square meter on which the thin vidscreen was hung. Black, red, and silver “fantasy fish” with various motifs programmed into their scale patterns swam back and forth in the screensaver program. Cally spotted an ankh, an elder sign (complete with electric blue flame), a spider’s web, and a star of David in a circle before she shook herself slightly and resumed cataloging the details of the room.
The futon was set up in couch mode against the wall opposite the monitor. Two rooms led off from the den. One was clearly the bathroom, from the bare Galplas floor. The other had to be the bedroom. A small makeshift kitchen sat on and under a desk in the same corner as the air scrubber. Microwave, big bowl, and gallon jug of water on top, small refrigerator underneath. Various convenience foods were jammed in a mishmash in the shelves of the desk. A clutter of dirty laundry, empty food wrappers, empty cans and bottles, and cube cases covered the floor.