Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(42)

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I noticed the smell of curry and heard some muffled cursing from the kitchen. Not a good time to ask Teo for help. But I couldn’t get the wheelchair on my own, and I wasn’t comfortable rolling around by myself in South L.A. looking vulnerable anyway.

I looked back at the man on the sofa. He was dressed in a faded, mustard-yellow T-shirt and threadbare jeans. I felt intimidated, then guilty about being intimidated, torn between the white liberal fantasy of color-blindness and the stereotypes I’d been fed my whole sheltered life. For God’s sake, Millie. He’s reading a book and petting a cat. How much less scary can a person be?

“Hi,” I said. “Do you think you could help me get my wheelchair down the stairs?”

He lowered the book and fixed me with a flat look. “What did you take it up the stairs for?”

I found myself momentarily floored by the question. “Well—that’s where my room is,” I said lamely. “But I need to go to that ATM over by the ice cream place, and one of my legs is too messed up for a prosthetic today.”

He sighed, set aside the book, and headed for the stairs with an air of resignation. I wasn’t sure of his age, but there was a world-weary quality to his annoyance. Monty moved to sit in the warm spot he’d left, and I tilted my head to read the title of the discarded book: Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman.

Aspiring screenwriter, then. Now there was a stereotype I was comfortable with. They say in L.A. you can ask anyone on the street, “What’s your screenplay about?” and get a polished sales pitch.

I called up the stairs after him. “I’m in the room that used to be—”

“I know where you are,” he called back. In a few minutes he came back down carrying the chair and even helped me unfold it.

“I don’t suppose you’d walk with me to the ATM,” I said.

“In case you run into some black people?”

My mouth went dry. “No.”

He looked me over, one brow lifting. “Nobody’s gonna bother you. Dressed like that, with that castoff-looking wheelchair, all you’re missing is a cardboard sign.”

“I might look a little less like a bag lady when they see me taking fistfuls of twenties out of the ATM. Will you please come with me? I’m Millie.”

“Tjuan,” he said, pronouncing it like the last half of Antoine. “I’ll go if you get me some ice cream.”

“Uh, okay.”

“I’m just f*cking with you. I’ll go.”

“Okay then.”

Although his long legs could have eaten up the distance between the house and the shopping center in about two bites, he kept pace with me as I wheeled myself along. The silence started to get to me; I remembered I wasn’t supposed to ask him anything about himself, which meant he couldn’t ask me any of the usual small talk stuff either.

“So!” I volunteered. “This is my third day. So far everyone seems pretty nice. But I get the feeling Gloria doesn’t like me very much.”

“You are not wrong.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, not without asking a question, so I floundered for a bit. When we got to the intersection across from the shopping center, he hit the button and we waited for the light.

“You were reading a book on screenwriting,” I said. I figured a declarative statement was within the letter of the law.

“Yeah.”

“I’m a director. I’ve done a few features. One of them, The Stone Guest, was screened at the Seattle Film Festival. It’s about a retired porn star who abandoned her daughter as a baby, and then the girl shows up—”

“I know. I’ve seen it.”

Christ. Had they had a special screening or what?

I shifted my weight. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn blared out the opening notes of “La Cucaracha.”

“I’m curious about you,” I said, “but I’m not supposed to ask anything.”

“That’s right.” I waited for more, but he just turned in a slow, casual circle, as though taking in the scenery.

“If you’re wondering about my legs, I fell off a seven-story building. They say a tree partly broke my fall and I dropped from it feetfirst. I guess I hit at just the right angle for my legs to act as a crumple zone and save the rest of me.”

He didn’t say anything. The light changed, and I shoved the chair across the street as fast as I could while a column of drivers glared at me, waiting to turn left. When we got to the parking lot of the shopping center, Tjuan scanned the area, that same slow circle, and something in his wary expression paradoxically made me feel safe.

“Did you really want ice cream?” I said as I wheeled over to the ATM. “I’ll get you some if you want.”

“Nah.”

I glanced at him before entering my PIN, but he had his back to me. There was a tension in his stance that I couldn’t interpret until I’d taken a couple hundred out of the machine, stuffed the bills into my shorts pocket, and wheeled back close enough to hear him murmur under his breath.

“Look right at me,” he said. “Just keep looking at me and keep smiling when I say this.”

My gut knotted up. “When you say what?”

“Somebody followed us.”