Darkest Fear (11 page)

“I'll go bang on doors,” Tink said, and lumbered out of the kitchen.

“Get out into the world?” I asked.

Aly nodded, and Matéo went back to the stove. “You don't leave the house much, sweetie. New Orleans is such a neat place; there's so much to explore. Seems like it might be good for you.”

Well, that was putting a fine point on it.

“I go running sometimes,” I said. “I've run all the way to Bayou Saint John. That's miles.”

“Did you interact with anyone?” she asked kindly.

“Um.”

“Uh-huh.” She gave me a knowing look. I considered mentioning going to the grocery store with Matéo, or going out to dinner with them, but the look on her face stopped me.

I thought about it all through dinner. Tonight it was six of us sitting around the long wooden kitchen table: Matéo, Aly, me, Dana, Suzanne, and Tink. My whole life, dinnertime had been the three of us: Mami, Papi, and me. We had always eaten at the dining room table with a tablecloth and candles and wine for the grownups, except for movie night, when we ate on trays in the living room. Papi and Mami both cooked, and in the last couple of years I cooked sometimes too. Jennifer loved eating at our house, with the table set and the candles lit. At her house people ate when they wanted, wherever they wanted, and Mrs. Hirsch hardly ever made an actual dinner. They had a lot of takeout. So mealtime at Jennifer's house was fun for me.

Now dinner was different almost every day—sometimes just me, sometimes all of us, sometimes just a few. Sometimes we would go out—there were so many great, not too expensive restaurants. But nights like this were my favorite: people sharing in the cooking, a bunch of us here. Mostly I ate quietly while my roommates took turns talking about school or work. At twenty-four James was the oldest, and though he was kind of shy, he told amazing stories about the weird stuff he encountered during his various medical rotations. I loved hearing about his hospital shifts, but he was
rarely here for meals. Suzanne was twenty-three, and had stories of her own about law school. She was in her second year, but had already decided to focus on business law, which I thought sounded intensely boring. But after hearing about some of her international cases, I decided that even business law could be fascinating.

Coco was twenty-two and had been working in restaurants since she was fifteen. She was already saving money to open her own café someday, and we'd had a lot of fun conversations where we planned the seasonal menus.

Then there were Aly and Tink, whose jobs had the most potential for drama. Aly's office had just raided a Mardi Gras krewe for undeclared taxes, but it had turned into much more when they'd found drugs hidden inside some Mardi Gras floats. Aly had actually had to pull her gun, and my mouth dropped open as she described slamming a guy against a wall, kicking his feet apart, and cuffing him.

And just last week Tink had busted some Vietnamese fisherman netting undersized alligators. It was legal to take alligators of a certain size, but apparently some Vietnamese restaurants thought younger gator meat was more tender.

Aly, Tink, and Matéo were only three years older than me, but next to any of my roommates I felt like a lost kid, not knowing what I wanted to do or be. I had no direction, as if the death of my parents had permanently derailed my future and made all my plans pointless. Now I realized that living in a house of interesting people had made it less necessary for me to be interesting myself. Not that
working in a coffee shop would make me interesting. But being here all the time felt like hiding, and was definitely not putting me on the path to having a life. And I needed to make a life—re-create it. My life had gotten stripped away. I didn't have any choice—I needed to create a new one.

The next day was Saturday. Bravely I plugged the address of the coffee shop into my GPS and headed uptown. I'd driven around with Matéo, but uptown was still new to me. New Orleans reminded me of the Roman two-headed Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, past and future. So much of this city seemed to look to the past: the beautiful Victorian houses, cute streetcars, Southern graciousness, and old-world charm. But there was also a modern sensibility and an acceptance of differences that helped me understand why so many haguari would want to settle here.

Like Matéo's neighborhood, uptown was a collection of grand streets with large, beautiful houses next to streets with small, sometimes run-down houses. They were stitched together block by block, all kinds of people living literally next door to one another. In Sugar Beach, neighborhoods had been more all of one thing or all of another. New Orleans was less homogenous.

The coffee shop, Ro's, was on the corner of Magazine and Leevey Streets, about six blocks from the Mississippi River. It was much bigger than I expected and had its own parking lot in the back. It looked like it had once been a store, a grocery store maybe, with large plate-glass windows and weather-beaten doors with glass insets. Two bow windows in front had tables
nestled in them, complete with comfy-looking padded chairs.

My chest started to feel fluttery as I circled the block and parked in the parking lot. “Quit being such a weenie,” I told myself. “You're eighteen and this is a coffee shop, not NASA.”

Before I had time to chicken out, I got out of the car and headed purposefully for the sidewalk. The low idling of an engine made me pause, and I looked back to realize with amazement that I hadn't turned the car off. I grabbed the door handle and found that I had hit the lock switch on the door without thinking. For a moment I stood there, stunned at my stupidity, and then I remembered that unless I clicked the lock thing on the key fob, not all the doors would be locked. Sure enough, the back passenger side door opened, and I climbed in, reached to the front, and turned the engine off.

I locked the car and put my keys in my purse. Once more into the fray. My first big step forward was marred by the long strap of my purse getting caught on the side mirror and yanking me back.

Vivi, please,
I thought. I stood quietly for a minute, getting a grip on myself. I'd never applied for a job before. The only summer jobs I'd had were for my parents, working in their offices or helping them around the house for minimum wage. Once Jennifer and I had tried to open our own snowcone stand with her dinky toy snowcone machine. We tallied up how many snowcones we'd have to sell before we'd be rich enough to retire forever. It was five hundred. At ten dollars a snowcone. We were nine.

Our business was ill-fated.

There was a back door leading off the parking lot, but I didn't know if it was for customers or just employees. Probably safer to go around to the front. The sidewalk leading to Magazine Street was narrow and broken, disrupted by thick tree roots that made the concrete buckle dangerously. A thin strip of neglected grass separated the sidewalk from the street, and I thought how pretty it could be if someone planted something there.

At the front doors at last, I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The scent of coffee tickled my nose, along with the smells of cinnamon, floor cleaner, and sugar. There was one main room, filled with small, square, dark tables, each with two or three chairs. Most of the tables were filled. Some people had pushed two tables together to sit in a group.

The back wall was divided in half by a hallway that I guessed led to the parking lot. It was painted with warm ocher tones, stippled and overlaid with darker colors to make it look old. On the left-hand side was a long counter framed by glass-fronted display cases of baked goods: muffins, cakes, pies, scones. The wall behind the counter was mirrored, and
What We Got
was written on the mirror in colored markers. Beneath that was a list of drinks and food items and their prices. A heavyset girl with short, dyed black hair and a nose ring smiled at me as she wiped the counter. Several tattoos showed from beneath her striped T-shirt. “Hi. What can I get you?”

I held up the flyer. “I'm here about the job?” My cheeks burned, and I felt awkward and inexperienced.

But she just nodded. “Cool. I'll get the manager.” She lifted a
hinged part of the counter and went down the hallway toward the back of the building. A minute later she returned and smiled again. “Manager's office is the second door on the left.”

“Thanks.” I should have asked if the manager was nice. I should have asked if she liked working here. I should have asked—

The hallway was dimly lit. Two bathrooms were on the right. The first doorway on the left was open and seemed to lead into an unused kitchen. The second door was closed, and I knocked on it, feeling like I had a small apple lodged in my throat.

Someone said, “Come in.”

Slowly I opened the door, intrigued by the voice. I didn't know what I was expecting, but somehow I was surprised to see that the manager was a young guy, maybe in his early twenties. Twenty-one? The instant impression he made was that I was looking at the devil—that this coffee shop was managed by a beautiful, angry, seductive dark angel. Seeing his perfect, sculpted profile, I blinked: I hadn't known that guys came in this format. In the few seconds before he looked up at me, I devoured him with my eyes, picking up on heat, tension, a faint scent of spices, and a complete lack of friendliness. The desk he sat at was old, metal, and covered with papers. Finally he looked up at me, but didn't smile.

Had I brushed my hair today? Or even yesterday? I didn't know.

“Hi,” he said, his glance flicking over me. “Hayley said you're here about the job.”

“Yes,” I said, sounding weirdly breathless. If he smiled, would I see fangs? How did he do on a full moon? “I saw your flyer.” Now what?

“Okay, why don't you sit down and fill in this application?” He pushed a clipboard toward me, and I sat in the metal chair next to his desk, trying not to gape at this stunningly attractive person. He looked back at his papers and started entering figures on a large, old-fashioned adding machine that spit out tape. He was a devil consigned to accounting hell. Or something.

I bent over the clipboard, taking the opportunity to examine him through my eyelashes. He really was unusually good-looking. Almost too good-looking for a normal person. Everyone has a little something wrong with their looks or their hair or their bodies—I have good hair and skin, but my mouth is freakishly wide, so when I laugh it looks like my head is hinged, like a Muppet. And my shoulders are broad, which fits with the whole girl-athlete thing I have going, but my wide hips and too-big chest do not. I'd always envied Jennifer's slim, narrow frame, and she'd always wanted what she called “the Féliznundo booty.”

This guy actually seemed to have nothing wrong with him, though he was sitting down and I couldn't tell if his body was as perfect as his face. I would bet money that it was.

Busily I wrote my name, Viviana Neves (Vivi), and my birth date, May 28. Matéo had said I could use his address, and I put down my cell-phone number.

I had no experience. Should I be honest and hope he would give me a chance? Should I lie and then maybe get caught?

I was tapping the pen against my lip, pondering my integrity, when the manager shifted in his chair and my nose caught
an intoxicating scent of . . . coffee? Sandalwood? Cypress? What was his name? Had he said it? Had I already spaced it? Glancing up quickly and, I hoped, surreptitiously, I saw that his hair was a deep, lightless black, straight and quite short on the sides, a little longer on top. Suddenly he met my eyes, and, embarrassed, I went back to work on the application—but not before noticing that his were a fascinating light, clear green with a thin rim of gold around the iris.

Heat rose in my cheeks, and I pushed the clipboard back to him. This was dumb. I couldn't do this. I wasn't ready to be around regular people. Being out in the world was making me feel horribly and unexpectedly vulnerable. Matéo's house was a cocoon that kept me from dwelling on myself. But here I was, applying for a job, and I don't know why, but it all came roaring back to me right then: My parents were still actually gone, dead, and weren't ever coming back. My life from here on out would be me applying for jobs, without them, forever. My eyes filled with tears.

He glanced at my information, his beautifully angled black eyebrows framing those icy green eyes and long black lashes. “You didn't fill in the ‘experience' part.”

“I'm not experienced. I mean, I don't have any waitressing experience,” I amended lamely, and gave a little
hmph
to clear my throat. Since he wasn't looking, I quickly brushed my hand over my eyes to get rid of the tears.
Come on, keep it together, Viv.

“How come you're applying here?” His nose was thin and straight and arrow-shaped, the nostrils flaring to the sides, and his
sharply angled jaw balanced his strong chin. What had he asked me? Oh—why I'm applying for the job.

Because my cousin's girlfriend told me to.

“I can do it,” I said, surprising myself. “This is a nice place. I can do the work, and it will be good for me.” I hadn't meant to say that. Now that I was facing him, I saw that he had beautiful, symmetrical bone structure. High cheekbones like blades, a chiseled mouth. Clear skin, paler than I would have expected for summertime. Maybe he was a vampire. Ha ha ha—that would be crazy, right? Things like that don't exist! Next we'll believe that some people can turn into jaguars! I focused on a tiny scar right at the corner of his mouth, a paler curving line like the outline of a nickel. In summary, I was tearing up and gazing at him like he was a hamburger and I was starving. I'd blown this.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded. He hesitated as if he wanted to contradict me, but just said, “What do you mean, good for you?”

“Good for me to get out,” I said, and sniffled. “Instead of sitting around.” Could I sound stupider? No. I did not think so. I never should have come.