Hanging by a Thread (4 page)

The Chamber of Commerce website said that the local population of 2,100 swelled by thousands because of tourists every summer, but I was pretty sure they hadn’t updated
the site since the murders. I had checked the website to find out if it really was true that hawking merchandise without a license was punishable by jail time. We were told this once by the cranky, chain-smoking man who owned Seaside T’s and Gifts when he told us to get lost. It wasn’t—but there
was
a town ordinance and a fine of $250, a fact that was confirmed by the cop who stopped us as we came out of Earl’s Old-Tyme Barber Shoppe after having been turned down yet again for our request to set up shop out front.

“But what you
could
do,” the cop said as he stared at Rachel’s bikini top, “is if you could find someone to sponsor you, and if you stayed on their property, well, I doubt we’d have a problem with that.”

Sounded good to us, except that turned out to be an even harder sell to the merchants of picturesque Winston. With business down already, they didn’t want to do anything that might put off potential customers.

Until we got to the Shuckster. As we’d climbed the steps to the broad wooden porch that day two weeks earlier, Rachel had put a hand on my arm to stop me. “Wait,” she’d said, chewing her gum fiercely. Rachel might have looked like a Victoria’s Secret model, but she could be surprisingly clever, so I waited patiently for her to think through whatever she was scheming.

“So here’s the deal,” she said after a moment. “The guy who used to own the Shuckster—Mr. Price? He’s like a hundred. His son runs it now. He’s a
major
creeper. I mean, he’ll probably let us set up here, but he’s a huge lech.”
She shrugged. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

I looked through the open door into the dim interior of the restaurant. I couldn’t see much inside, other than a few neon beer signs and the bar itself, quiet now during the afternoon lull between the lunch and dinner rushes.

“So you’re saying … I have to let him grab my ass if we want to set up here?”

“No, not at all. Just that you’re going to have to stay on your toes. Oh, and Cee-Cee? He looks just like the Hoff.”

“The who?”

“Hasselhoff. David Hasselhoff? You know, the disgusting guy from TV? He was on
Dancing with the Stars
a few years ago?”

And Mason Chase did resemble a young Hoff, with masses of messy brown hair and a leering grin and baggy, wrinkled surfer clothes. I figured he was about thirty years old, but you got the feeling he’d done enough partying for a lifetime. When he shook my hand, his eyes lingered on my body, and as he listened to our business proposal, he actually winked at me.

But Rachel assured me that we could handle him, and so, after exhausting every other possibility, we opened for business last Saturday and made almost three hundred dollars our first day, of which Rachel took sixty. She was content with twenty percent of the profits since, as she pointed out, I did all the design and sewing and her job was mostly to sit in her chair looking hot and talk to the customers. In fact, she offered to work for free because she didn’t need the
money, but I wasn’t comfortable with that. I wanted to run NewToYou like the real business I hoped to own someday, when I would design my own line of clothing. If that meant sharing the profits with my employee and putting up with a difficult landlord, I’d do it.

And now it was my turn to pay up. Our “landlord” didn’t charge us rent, but he said we should check in with him a few times every Saturday to let him know how it was going, which seemed to mean that he would pretend to talk business while he stared down our shirts and tried to accidentally brush against us as he offered us sodas.

I groaned, hauling myself up from one of the two folding chairs we dragged out of the Shuckster’s storage shed.

“Wish me luck.” I sighed theatrically.

“Luck,” Rachel answered, already popping in her earbuds.

Inside, the restaurant was cool and smelled of stale beer. The floor was sticky, even though the late shift had supposedly washed it last night, and the Garza brothers were taking the chairs down, the sound system playing techno music.

What a life
, I thought—setting up the bar each day, hauling in the ice, stocking the oysters and shrimp and crab, manning the hot grill, serving the sunburned tourists, listening to the same endless loop of music over and over again, finally going home smelling like beer and sweat,
only to take a shower and come back to do it all over the next day.

But was it really so different from my mom’s job? Every day she put on the same boring clothes and went to her tiny office and worked on her computer and dealt with her clients, none of whom she seemed to like very much, squinting through her reading glasses and adding up columns of numbers on her spreadsheets. At night, after we had dinner, she’d often take out her laptop and do more of what she did at the office.

The same thing, day in and day out. It was not the life I dreamed of. I wanted to design clothes, to work with models and manufacturers, to go to the shows and spot the trends—no,
set
the trends—and never, ever be bored. I wanted every day to feel like an adventure, and I’d work as hard as I had to, do whatever it took, to make sure that happened.

I told my mom I was saving for a car, and I was—but I had something else in mind too. I was determined to go to the Los Angeles Fashion Institute after high school. The problem was, my mom didn’t think that was the same as college. She said a two-year associate’s degree program wasn’t a real education, and that she hadn’t been building my college fund since I was two years old just to see me “waste it.”

Okay, she’d only said that once—and she
did
apologize afterward. But I wasn’t sure I could count on her support if I decided to go to the Fashion Institute over her objections. Besides, unless my dad started making good money again, he wouldn’t be helping to pay for college either.

Inside the filthy little windowless room that Hoff used for an office, it smelled like an overdose of cologne with a hint of industrial cleaner, and I hesitated in the doorway.

“Cee-Cee,” Hoff said, his eyes going straight to my body. It made my skin crawl, the way he looked me up and down, not even trying to hide it. “I was just going to mix up a couple of cold ones for you girls. Got this new one, we’re calling it the Winston Wallbanger—vodka, orange juice, and a splash of Amaretto.”

“I’m underage, Mason,” I said for the tenth time. I was always worried I’d slip and call him Hoff. “I just wanted to say thanks for letting us set up again.”

“How’s business today?”

“Pretty good. Made a few sales.”

“Hey, you know what you oughta do, you ought to start up a men’s line, you see what I’m saying? Maybe do Hawaiian-type shirts, surf theme—”

“Thanks, Mason,” I said quickly, “but I do all custom work. A lot of embellishment. Men aren’t into that.”

“Yeah, yeah, right,” he said, as though we hadn’t had this conversation before. He hauled himself out of the chair and came around his cluttered desk, so I started backing up.

He might have only been fifteen years older than us, but he hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in a while, and he’d been helping himself from the bar and the grill on a regular basis. The net effect was that he moved like a guy twice his age.

That gave me an advantage, and I was halfway to the door by the time he caught up with me, handing over a couple of cold bottles of root beer. I closed my hand around
the necks and dodged out of the way of his playful “hey buddy” slap on the back—the kind that if you didn’t move fast enough turned into a sweaty hug—and was out the door, blinking from the sun.

Back at the stand, Rachel was talking to a boy I hadn’t seen before, not someone from the crowd she usually ran with. He was at least a few inches taller than me, and I’m almost five nine, and had hair so dark it was nearly black, with glints of red-gold where the sun hit it. He was wearing a faded green T-shirt with a San Francisco State logo, and as I watched them talk, he crossed his arms and the sleeve slid up his bicep. I instantly learned two things: first, this boy worked out, and second, he looked great with or without the deep tan that ended where his sleeve did, the skin above his tan line golden and the skin below a burnished brown.

When I stepped in front of the stand, he pulled his sunglasses off and smiled. His eyes, big and brown with long lashes, were lit with a flicker of amusement, and for a moment I thought he was laughing at me. I hoped Rachel hadn’t told him I was the person behind NewToYou and that he thought my stuff was ridiculous.

It wasn’t just insecurity making me feel that way. I mean, it was, but I had my reasons. Not everyone loved my work, and even though I knew I had to get used to criticism, it was different here. At Blake, we were all into art. There were kids who did stranger things than fashion design—think sculptures made of lightbulbs and toilet paper, or digital “music” that included dolphin sounds and cowbells—so I
felt relatively normal by comparison. But now that I was selling the things I made, I sometimes overheard things I wished I hadn’t. One woman said “I wouldn’t dress my dog in that,” and a girl about my age told her friend it looked like we’d raided the Salvation Army, which was actually close to the truth, though I got my materials from all over the place—garage sales and thrift stores and friends and family.

I was working on not caring what people thought, but it was an uphill battle. I would never tell Rachel how glad I really was to have her around, because no one from Winston High would ever dare say anything negative when she was there.

“Cee-Cee, guess who came by—this is Jack Dimaunahan, remember? The one I was telling you about?”

“Um. Sure.” Rachel had never mentioned anyone named Jack, but it was so like her to pretend we’d been talking about him just to flatter him. She couldn’t
not
flirt; flirting was in her DNA. The trouble was, I had no idea what she had told him about me, if anything, and she wasn’t above lying to make things more interesting.

“You went to Los Angeles Fashion Institute?”

Ah
. Well, at least now I knew. I threw Rachel a glare, and then smiled sweetly at Jack. “Actually I only went to a summer program there, last year. For kids. You know, like camp? But I’m hoping to go there for real when I graduate next year.”

Jack leaned his elbows on the wooden counter. He was close enough that I could smell him—salt and soap and a
hint of sweat. But in a good way. I could see the faint shadow of his beard along his jaw, and he had a pale scar under his chin.

“I don’t know much about fashion or design or whatever.” He gave one of the small purses a shove, a square one made from a tweed jacket I’d found in a thrift shop in Oakland. I’d added red buttons in different shapes and sizes, sewn on in the shape of a heart. I’d been thinking someone might choose it for a little girl, but so far no one had shown much interest in it. “These are really … different.”

He hated them, I was sure of it. My heart sank, even if he wasn’t exactly my target audience.

“Jack plays soccer,” Rachel said in a bored voice.

“What position?” I asked, then realized I didn’t know if they even had positions in soccer. I’d been to exactly one game, when the Blake School lost to Ford Hills by a final humiliating score of five to zero. We were the zero, which you’d know without being told if you spent five minutes in the halls of my old school. We weren’t exactly bursting with athletes, so it was quite a feat even to get enough kids together to make a team, and the only reason anyone went to the game was that the coach—who was also our art history professor—threatened to dock our grades if we didn’t show up to cheer them on.

Jack shrugged indifferently. “Forward. But I’m not going to play this year.”

“Why?” Rachel slipped the straps of her tank top down her shoulders—she was always concerned about tan lines. It was a move that usually got attention, but Jack kept his
gaze on me, which gave me a shivery feeling. He wasn’t smiling, but there was something in his expression, something more than idle curiosity.

“Well, for one thing, I’m not allowed back on the team since I got suspended. And besides, I need to work at my uncle Arthur’s clinic.”

“Huh. That’s too bad.” Rachel yawned, covering her mouth with her perfectly manicured fingers, clearly tired of the conversation. Probably because she wasn’t the center of it.

“What kind of clinic?” I asked, wondering what he’d been suspended for, and figuring it must have been bad if he couldn’t return to the team. But I didn’t want Jack to leave. Rachel was signaling that we were done with him, as far as she was concerned. I glanced across the street and understood why: a green Land Rover LRX was pulling into a parking space—specifically, the green Land Rover that usually held Hopper Messerly, Rachel’s current boyfriend, and Ky Muse, the boy she had a crush on. But they didn’t see us and headed into the skateboard shop instead.

“Vet.” For a second, Jack’s scowl lifted. “North Shore Veterinary, out by the Beachview shopping center.”