The Princess of Las Pulgas (39 page)

Juan takes the road that
slopes up to my new home. After he pulls to a stop in front, he
leans across and kisses me. “I’ve been thinking about that all
day.”

“You must have because it
was perfect.” I gather my sweater and fanny pack from the backseat.
“Jeb said he’d have dinner ready about six, and you’re invited. Mr.
Smith’s coming, too. Wait until you hear the stories he’s been
telling us about when he and Jeb were growing up. If it weren’t for
Jeb’s dad Mr. Smith definitely wouldn’t be our teacher.”

“I’ll see you about five.”
He smiles his beautiful sideways smile, and I want it to be five
right now. “We still have that vocabulary to go over, right?” he
asks.

“Yes, we sure do.” I climb
out and wait until he pulls away. There is something I need to do
today after all. I have to review my Spanish lesson from last week,
and find those French CD’s for Juan. We have a deal—he teaches me
Spanish and I teach him French.

I’m barely inside and
taking my CD’s from the closet when the doorbell rings. I open the
door to find Sean standing there holding a Jack-in-the-Box in his
hands.

I throw my arms around him
in a huge hug and say, “I’ve missed you.”

“I had lots to take care
of—finding an apartment for school, easing Mom out of her meltdown
after she met Michael. You know—the usual.” He presses his gift
into my hands. “This is for you. It’s not like the one your dad
gave you, but—well I hope you like it.”

The toy looks a little
blurred, and so does Sean. I don’t bother to wipe the tears
away.

“I can’t stay, Carlie, but
I’ll call you.” He touches my face. “But I wanted to make you
happy, not sad.”

“I am happy. How could I
not be, with a friend like you?”

He squeezes my arm and
kisses my cheek. “Same here, beautiful girl. Save a few boxes for
me to unpack. I’ll come see you next week.”

Once Sean drives away, I go
to my room and put his gift on my bed. I take down my old
Jack-in-the-Box that Keith repaired. I’ve taken it down and held it
so many times these past weeks, but I haven’t released Jack—not
yet.

I wanted to be sure the
miseries were behind me, that I’d finished the journey I started
last year. I glance around me. My bedroom window doesn’t face the
ocean, but it’s a pretty view of wooded paths and quiet spaces by
ponds. I’m not the popular Channing girl anymore, but from this
distance, Channing doesn’t glitter like it used to when I first
moved to Las Pulgas. Now I fit in so much at Las Pulgas High,
nobody even notices when I come into a room and I’m getting used to
being invisible there. Mr. Smith was totally right that night after
the party. My unexpected destination is exactly where I want to
be.

I sit on my bed with both
of my Jack-in-the-Boxes and slowly turn the handle on Dad’s. The
gears engage; Jack jumps from his metal box, his accordion body
dancing free. Just like when I was four, with Dad sitting next to
me, I laugh. Then I cry, and I hear my heart whisper...

“Carlie love. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with
you.”

You’ll always be with me, Dad. Right
here.

I touch my hand to my
heart.

###

The End

About the Author

A native Californian, C.
Lee McKenzie has been a university lecturer and administrator. She
has written and published non-fiction article, both in her field of
Linguistics and Intercultural Communication and in general
readership magazines. For five years Lee wrote, edited and
published a newsletter for U.S. university professors who were
managing global classroom issues.

She lives at the edge of a
redwood forest with her husband and assorted cats; when she's not
writing, she's hiking or practicing yoga.

Other Writing Credits &
Books

Since she turned in her academic hat and began
writing for young readers, Lee's fiction and non-fiction works have
been frequently published in the award-winning ezine,
Stories for Children,
and
Crow Toes Quarterly
has published her ghostly tales. Her first young
adult novel, Sliding on the Edge, will soon be re-released as an
ebook with a new title, Bad Ass Attitude. Her middle grade book,
Alligators Overhead is now out to all major
distributors.

Samples of her work and
contact information can be found at
http://[email protected]

Sample Chapters:Bad Ass
Attitude

Chapter 1

Shawna

Something’s wrong. It’s not a heart-grabbing
noise like when somebody jiggles the doorknob to see if it’s
locked. It’s not a bitter smell like the electrical short we had
last month, when all the breakers popped. No. It’s something in the
air, something like a ghost making its way through the room. And it
can’t be Monster, not after last night.

I squint into the morning light, then roll
onto my back and blink at the damp veins in the ceiling. The toilet
in the apartment above us flushes twenty-four seven. There must be
ten people living up there, and our ceiling takes the brunt of 4B’s
high-density living.

The air conditioner isn’t humming. Is that
what woke me up?

My hair is plastered to the side of my face.
I paid the electric bill. I’m sure I did.

Did I
?

The hands on our wall
clock
chunk
,
chunk
around to eleven. I pull on my jeans

and my bra, then dig under the roll-away and
haul out the rest of my clothes from yesterday. Mom’s bedroom door
is closed like always, so I tap on it and wait. When she doesn’t
yell at me to go away, I knock again, harder. Then I twist the knob
and push. It’s usually locked, but today it swings open.

The sheets twisted together in a heap on the
bed look like they’ve killed each other. The dresser drawers stick
out like stair steps, their insides scooped clean. I pull the door
shut and roll my forehead back and forth against the peeling paint.
I’m in free-fall, clutching at clouds.

Four steps across the hall and I’m in the
bathroom. It’s been stripped. The clutter of Mom’s bottles and
sprays, mascara tubes, and nail polish, all gone. My toothbrush and
a crushed, half-empty toothpaste tube curled up on the back of the
toilet make a lonely still life.

I splash my face with cold water, then lean
against the sink and hold on with both hands. More than anything, I
wish I could crawl in and swizzle down the drain along with the
water.

What’s she up to this time?

The face in the mirror doesn’t have a
clue.

In the kitchen the sink full of take-out
containers are losing their battle to mold. We’ve lived here three
months, a record. The mold, on the other hand, was a tenant before
we paid our first rent check. It has been around so long, it’s
immune to bleach. I gave up after the first week.

A folded piece of paper
sticks out from under the greasy skillet. When I tug at it, a bus
ticket and a hundred dollar bill flutter onto the linoleum
floor.
Where did she get a hundred? . . .
And how? . . . damn.
I kneel and scoop up
the money, then stare at the piece of paper next to it. At the top
is Casino Royale’s logo, with show girls playing cards and roulette
wheels down the side. Royale is one of her favorite gambling
places, one I can usually stake out at about six in the morning
when I need to get lunch money from her. There’s a note on the
piece of paper, but I don’t pick it up. I don’t want to touch it
and I don’t want to read it.

The clock keeps
chunking.
My knees go
numb. Upstairs 4B’s toilet flushes. I turn my head so her words
aren’t sideways.

She starts with “Shawna sweetie, Dylan and
me are going to New Jersey to try our luck at some other
tables.”

Huh?
I squeeze my eyes shut then open them. There’s more. I pick
up the paper and get off my knees.

“
He bot you a tiket to
California and left you a hundred (he’s a sweet heart, right?).
Your granma lives in a place called sweet river. Its close to
sacamento in California. Go there so I can get in touch once were
settled, hon.

Jackie”

In the bottom corner of the paper Mom
scribbled something else, but while her writing is hard to make
out, her scribbling takes code-breaker training. I don’t bother to
try.

Instead, I read the note one more time and
turn it over, in case she added more on the back. Like, “I’ll miss
you.”

No. The back is blank.

I hang over, resting my
head on my knees.
Don’t get the shakes.
Don’t get the shakes. You know what happens when you get the
shakes
.

I wish I could be five again . . . I wish
she would prop me up on pillows like she did, then, and feed me ice
cream . . . and I would lick the spoon and she would laugh and I
would laugh and she wouldn’t leave until I slept.

Blood is backing up behind my eyeballs. I
need oxygen, quick. I straighten up and walk to the air
conditioner, giving it a hard smack on the side. The blades inside
crank over and cool air fans across my face. I stand there,
thinking about my mom, writing the note while I was asleep, leaving
without saying something.

Like “Good-bye.”

“
See ya.”

“
Be careful.”

And I know Dylan watched
her write that note. She never calls herself Mom when he’s
around
.

Finally, I study the tight scribble in the
bottom corner. “Kay Stone” and a phone number. Below that is, “ps
you gotta sneak out of the apartment. Rents over do.”

“
Oh, man, not again.” My
voice sounds whiney—like I’m six, not sixteen.

On the calendar hanging
over the hot plate, I’d scrawled
“rent
due” in purple marker across the first week. The rent was due last
Saturday, so I figure I have about an hour before Tuan bangs on the
door.

I gotta lie down.

Gotta think.

I sprawl across the roll-away and bury my
head under my pillow. Mom could come up with doozies, but this one
is pretty big. She’s skipped out for a few days at a time before,
but she’s never left me a ticket or a grandmother to go and stay
with.

And what about this Kay Stone? That’s a new
name on the family tree. I don’t remember ever hearing the name
Stone.

And why should I go, anyway? I can make it
on my own without some granny minding my business. It would serve
Mom right if I just cashed in the ticket and stayed right here in
Vegas. She’d never find me here, and I can take care of myself. Get
a job.

“
Screw her!”

I hurl the pillow across
the room, knock over the bullet lamp, and send it crashing to the
floor.
Great, now Tuan’ll come pounding on
the door to see what kind of damage I’ve done to his
furniture
.

I wrap Sweetheart’s
hundred and the ticket inside the note and jam them into my jeans
pocket. I skim my hand over the top of the fridge and reach to the
back, feeling for the goods I’ve hidden there. The envelope is
dirty and torn, so I take care to fold it over the cards inside,
then slip the packet into my hip pocket. Then I find my thin
treasure, one of Dylan’s razor blades wrapped in toilet paper. As I
pull it forward, my hand knocks over a small plastic bottle. It
falls and rolls across the floor. I scoop it up. It’s Mom’s
sleeping pills she got after a guy named Regan dumped her. Just
thinking about him makes my flesh creep.
Guess she doesn’t need these anymore, now that she’s got old
Dylan.
I put the razor blade and the pills
inside a paper bag.

Packed
.

Now, all I have to do is escape without
making Tuan suspicious, but that’s not going to be easy. Sour Puss
Tuan circles his apartments like a reconnaissance plane every day.
My only hope is to do like Mom taught me.

“
The best way to bail out
on your rent,” she’d say, “is to act totally normal.”

So I bounce down the stairs like always, and
check my expression in the mirror outside Tuan’s apartment door. On
it is a tag fluttering from a piece of string: “ForSale/$2.” Tuan’s
been trying to sell that cracked glass since we moved in. If I
stand so the crack cuts my face into two pieces, I actually look
kinda interesting. If I stand on one side and get my full face, I
just look dorky. No sixteen-year-old looks like me in Vegas, except
for the Keno players’ kids from Kansas.

“
Somebody’s got to be able
to work a regular job. And that’s gotta be you,” Mom would say,
jabbing her finger into my chest.

Once a month, sometimes twice, like in the
summer when school’s out—that’s as regular as it gets with Mom and
me—I play a lost teen, asking for directions at the casino door
while Mom lifts tourist wallets, and, I have to say, she’s pretty
good. We’ve never been busted. A couple of close calls, but the
cops have never booked her.

The door opens and I jump at Tuan’s sudden
appearance. He’s armed with the paintbrush that I see him use every
day to cover up graffiti. We live way too close to Morrie’s
Hardware, and all the taggers test their Krylon spray nozzles on
our wall before they head for their real targets downtown.