remember the last time I ate. I buy a hot dog at a cart and walk down to the edge of the water.
I watch bodysurfers paddle out into the turquoise waves. Down the beach a boy is flying a kite, and a man is anointing his tanned, muscled body with oil.
“Read your palm?” someone says, and I look up. Blue-eyed surfer, straight out of a magazine. Shirtless, bronzed muscles, long blond hair, puka beads.
“Is that your line?”
“Line of work.” He sits down next to me. “You look like a girl who needs answers.”
What the hell. “How much?”
“Five bucks.”
“Seriously?”
“Can’t make a living selling weed alone.”
I roll my eyes, take one of Raoul’s bills out of my pocket, and hand it over. He pockets the five and takes my hand. His fingers are calloused and warm.
“Look at you,” he says. “Wow.”
“You tell that to all the girls?”
“Nope. You see this line?” He traces a long crease that crosses my palm. “This is some gnarly shit, girl. Serious destiny.”
“Serious destiny,” I mutter, mimicking his surfer’s drawl.
“Oh, girl. Who did you piss off? You doing battle with some dark forces or something? This line says your life is about something way bigger than you.” I scowl. Whatever, that’s a thing you could say to anyone. Make them feel important. “This one,” he continues, touching a different line now, “This is love. You got it bad for someone, right? Follow them to the ends of the earth, that kind of thing? This is a strong palm, sister. A strong, strong palm.”
“I’m not your sister.”
“You want me to read your palm or not?”
“Sorry.”
“You’re determined, right? You have a lot of anger. A lot of strength. But maybe too pigheaded. You have to learn to apologize.”
“
“You get in a fight with someone you love? Maybe it’s your fault, maybe it isn’t. Is it worth it to lose someone over the details? You are someone who has trouble letting go. You know that thing they say. Love something, set it free, it comes back to you maybe, maybe it goes for a trip. Outside your purview, sister.”
I stare at him. He’s serious. He’s also totally stoned.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask him.
“Come on, girl. I can’t tell you that. I can only tell you what it says here. Something about a dad, right? You looking for a dad?”
“I don’t have a dad.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re not looking for one. But I think you’ll be fine. Also, this line here? This one means you have stomach problems. You need to eat more yellow vegetables.”
“Yellow
“You know. Like squash. Butternut. Spaghetti squash is good too. Has to be vegetables, though. Bananas won’t work.” He gives my hand a squeeze and gets to his feet. “Here,” he says. “My compliments.” He produces a joint out of nowhere and tucks it behind my ear. “Good luck, sister.” I’m still staring as he saunters away down the beach.
The sun is warm on my back. I squirm out of my leather jacket and take out my sketchbook, draw the boy, the kite, the sunbathing man—who’s stretched out now on a towel, glistening like a rotisserie chicken—the edges of the waves. Water is hard to draw, like any malleable thing, fickle in its lines and shadows. I think I’m catching it, but when I look at the page I’ve made it insipid and lifeless. Stupid. High school. It’s hardest when what I want to put on the page is so much bigger than what I’m capable of, when I know how it should look but not how to make it that way, because I’m nowhere near as good as I need to be.
I turn the page and draw a beer bottle sticking out of the sand, a dead crab, an empty shell. I draw until for hours, until the sky blazes around the sinking sun in a gory, gorgeous mess like ink blowing out of a tattoo. I remember reading somewhere that pollution makes for better sunsets. I haven’t eaten since the hot dog, who knows how many hours earlier. I stand up, my legs creaking in protest. I have to pee, and I’m so hungry I can barely walk. I give the surfer’s joint to a homeless guy with a baseball cap upended in front of him on the sidewalk. “Hey, thanks,” he says, surprised.
I walk away from the beach, with its fancy glass-fronted restaurants, elegant people inside sipping wine from goblet-sized glasses and daintily forking a bite or two of salad into their mouths before pushing their plates away. All the women here look hungry. I see a divey Mexican restaurant wedged between two clothing boutiques. It’s well lit and noisy, and even from the sidewalk I can smell the siren scent of cumin and fryer grease.
I order cheese enchiladas, and they come on a platter half the size of my table, swimming in mole sauce. The lady at the cash register brings me chips and guacamole and an apple soda in a glass bottle. I don’t think there’s any way I can fit all that food in my belly but I do it, scooping up mole and avocado with my chips and wolfing down the enchiladas. I watch the families around me, children running amok between the tables and begging scraps off their parents’ plates when they’ve polished their own clean. No one looks at me. The restaurant is so normal, so cheerful, so full of people and light and chatter. When I finish eating I show the cashier the poster. “Is that near here?” I ask her, pointing to the club’s address.
She looks at me for a while before she draws me a map on a paper napkin. “Not too far. Be careful there.” I ask her what she means. She touches Raoul’s rosary where it peeks out from my collar. “Be sure you take this with you.”
Minos’s club is near the water. I can’t see the ocean, but I can smell it, and the air here is lighter. The club is a big, windowless building at the end of a dead-end block. The other buildings on the street are lifeless and dull: another warehouse, a shabby cinderblock building with a dirty white sign that reads ORTIZ’S MEATS. There’s an alleyway cluttered with Dumpsters, next to an empty lot full of scraggly weeds and ringed in chain-link fence topped with razor wire. So this is what rich people go for. Real authentic.
Outside Minos’s club, the street is alive. Sleek black cars disgorge sparkling women and men clad in leather and metal, spiked collars at their throats and spurs on their pointy-toed boots. Across the street, I lean against a wall and pull my hood up around my ears, watching as the squat building swallows skinny, sad-eyed girls with their hair spiked into Mohawks, skeleton charms dangling from their tiny wrists. Many of them are in costume: gossamer-wrapped fairies whose naked bodies are clearly outlined underneath yards of sequins and tulle; gore- spattered zombies draped in bandages; ghouls in sleek white, knotty hair hanging to their waists. I catch a glimpse of furred haunch and lean forward. It’s the goat-limbed man from the rooftop party, wearing a feathered mask. He stops as if he can feel my eyes on him and turns, searching the darkness. I shrink back into the shadows and turn my face away, hoping the alleyway is enough to hide me. Finally he goes into the club. Some of the girls could be the blood-covered dancers I saw at the penthouse party. I thumb Raoul’s rosary and shiver.
I wait until the flood of people slows to a trickle. At first I think there’s no sign, but when I get closer I see that EREBUS is painted in neat red letters on the door. There’s a bored-looking guy in sunglasses and a knit hat leaning against the wall. He’s casual, slouching, but I can tell under the facade he’s paying attention.
I knot my fists in the sleeves of my hoodie and walk up to the door. The bouncer looks me over without expression, looks away. “Not your kind of place.”
“My friend is playing.”
“You don’t have friends here.”
“I have to go in there,” I say. “You don’t understand.” He’s already waving forward the people behind me, holding aside the velvet rope to let them in. I chew the inside of my lip in frustration. He’s too big for me to get past him. I take out the wad of Raoul’s money and offer it to him. “Look, little girl,” he says. “Go back to Kansas.” I can feel the lump of Cass’s quartz in my pocket, digging into my thigh.
“I have to get in there,” I say again.
“I don’t care what you think you have to do. I’m not letting you past this door, and in a minute I’m going to
