“We need to talk,” he said, turning his attention back to Violet. “Alone.”
“Sorry. I can’t do that. Anything you have to say to me, you can say to James too. He’s with me,” she said, raising her right hand over her head—hard and in a sudden jerk to show Arun the invisible leash—and shooting bolts of electricity through my forearm.
Fuck!
The next thing I knew, I dropped to the ground. Never in my life had I felt so incompetent as I did that moment, spilled on the shiny club dance floor. Well, other moment...
NINE YEARS AGO: BEFORE Jenn’s death
The rain fell in a mist just light enough to cause large droplets of water to drip from her chestnut brown bangs. They sagged over her forehead like strands of seaweed sweeping up from the ocean floor, swaying here and then there, held prisoner to tidal currents.
Across the street she looked through plate glass windows as if spotting something irresistible. Hands clasped together, she bounced on her tiptoes and smiled. "Can I go inside?" she begged.
I smiled. She knew I could never say no to her, but she always asked anyway. "Go," I said.
She dashed inside and disappeared.
Twenty minutes later, she came rushing back into the mist. Darting across the street, she stood at my side and held up an old clock that appeared to have been broken for decades. It was made of some sort of dull finished dark wood. It was chipped, scarred, and scratched from years of abuse.
"Look!" she exclaimed as if she had found some great treasure and hadn’t forgotten another only a day before. She was distracted easily. It was something that drove me crazy about her. "Only five bucks. Pretty good, huh?"
She looked at me with those big, blue, compassionate-when-she-needed-to-be eyes of hers. She was the perfect girl next door type. "It looked so sad sitting there all alone, I just had to have it," she said. I tried not to think about her upcoming death. I believed there was a way to change it. I really did.
It was so like her to pick the very thing that nobody else would think about. In that way, Jenn was different than any girl I’d known before.
"The man in there said it's been there collecting dust for the past ten years. Poor thing, all alone like that." She spoke of it as if it were a living thing, and, I suppose, in her simple way, it was. She laced her arm around mine, looked up at me, and smiled, “Can you fix it James?”
I couldn’t hide my frown.
“It's a real clock with real time. Just think of it, I could keep up with things better. I could even know when it's my real birthday without you having to tell me." She looked down, concentrating on her thoughts and the argument she wouldn’t need to make anyway. "Tell me again James, how old am I? I always forget."
I smiled and put my arm around her to protect her from the cold. She always asked the same stupid question. I never knew why. It was just one of her stupid quirks.
"Twenty," I said, "almost twenty-one."
Nothing had changed in the months I had known her. I met Jenn a year ago on a beach near San Diego on the most unfortunate of days in the worst of circumstances. She was there with her aging mother, Jane, feeding the “poor seagulls” popcorn. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was not the healthiest diet for a bird. And, fuck, I was supposed to be on vacation. I was trying to start over in a new place, to invent another world far away from county jail. But Jenn and fate had other plans in store. It didn’t take long for me to learn about her everything I didn’t even ask to know. She rambled and had a way of giving out too much information to even the least interested of sorts.
Jenn was a late child, coming into the world when her mother Jane was in her late fifties. She was one of those miracle-type children. By then, her mother Jane was getting older, too old for the task of raising a child alone. She could barely care for herself, let alone Jenn. Her husband had died a few months after Jenn’s birth, and Jane and her new baby were left with not much to live on. Fortunately, she found a job as church secretary. It didn't require over burdensome skills and was not too physically challenging. It didn't pay a hefty salary, but it did help pay the bills by month's end. That was all that mattered, Jenn had said. I hadn’t argued and even agreed with her.
She rambled away. I was transfixed. I will never forget it. She looked like an angel that day; her damp hair stuck to her face but with the most flawless skin and those round, curious eyes. I watched as Jenn walked the beach where the shoreline met the cold water’s edge. I winced, trying not to think about how she’d die in a drowning incident.
I, myself, hardly looked good and was certainly not prepared for a first meeting with a girl I’d grow to become so fond of in too soon of a timeframe. No. Instead, I was running around like an idiot in a sleeveless San Diego Chargers T-shirt trying to catch the attention of any young lady who might, for some strange reason, cast her glance my way. Once a con, always a con, I guess. I hated myself for not bothering to shave that day.
Eric was with me too. He and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember. He was a good guy most of the time, but sometimes a bit lacking in common sense. Eric, not unlike me, wasn’t exactly perfect. He was also noted, to some mild degree, to be a bit of a bully. I had to admit, I found it disturbing but figured it my job to teach him humility. Even a con like me could have morals. I knew that and he knew it too. He had, in the past two years, been trying to control his impulse. It's like I said, he was a pretty good guy, most of the time. He wasn’t a hoarder like Ray. He lived outside of L.A. but spent most of his off time on the beaches near San Diego. He had dreams and was the best shot I had at reinventing my life.
However, there were times when his evil nature got the best of him. I had no way of knowing this would be one of those days. It wasn't known exactly what triggered his bullish behavior, but it always seemed to occur at the worst of times, and today was no exception.
He saw Jenn walking the shoreline and took aim at her head with the Frisbee. It was no ordinary Frisbee; it was large, heavy, and hard. It was the real deal: The professional type.
It hit Jenn square on the forehead, knocking her to the ground. She let out a loud cry as she plunged face-forward on the sandy beach. I ran to her side, begging forgiveness and apologizing profusely for the reckless behavior of my friend.
There was a small cut on her forehead where small droplets of blood oozed.
I looked up in time to see her mother, Jane, grabbing her chest and collapsing to the ground. I needed no sort of abilities to know what was coming. Had I not been so focused on Jenn, I might even have known and been able to stop it.
"Jesus! Someone call an ambulance,” I yelled to Eric. “I think that lady is having a heart attack!"
"You have to help her, hurry please. My mother’s not well," Jenn begged, explaining that her mother was too frail to recover from another incident.
I took off running toward Jenn's mom when I stopped and shouted back to her, "Call 911."
"Can't," she said, "Don't know how."
I looked at her with a crazy look on my face.
"What moron doesn't know how to dial 911?" I asked, totally unaware that I sounded exactly like Eric.
"Me," she whimpered childishly.