Serious Moonlight(2)

Personality traits: Shy but curious. Occasionally cowardly. Excellent with details. Good observer.

Background: Mother got knocked up by an unknown boy when she was a rebellious seventeen-year-old, disappointing her small-town parents. Mother dropped out of high school, left her sleepy childhood home on Bainbridge Island, and crossed Elliott Bay into Seattle with her childhood best friend, Mona Rivera. The two friends raised Birdie together until the mother died unexpectedly when the girl was ten. She was then taken in by her grandparents on Bainbridge Island and homeschooled, causing the suspect to develop a profound sense of loneliness and rabid curiosity about everything she was missing. Her only refuge was Mona Rivera, who moved back to the island to be closer to young Birdie. When Birdie’s strict grandmother died six months ago of the same weak heart condition that took her mother, Birdie was sad but also relieved that her grandfather realized she was eighteen and couldn’t stay trapped on the island forever and granted her permission to get her first real job in Seattle. Abusing her newly earned freedom, the suspect promptly engaged in lewd and lascivious acts with a boy she met in the Moonlight after her first job interview.

“No suspects tonight,” I told Aunt Mona, pushing away a plate of lacy hash browns indecently smeared with ketchup. “The Moonlight is free and clear of any ne’er-do-wells, hoodlums, and crooks. Which is good, because I probably should be heading to work soon.”

She shook her head. “Not so fast. If there’s no suspicious activity and you aren’t worried about your first night on the job, then what in the world is going on with you?”

I groaned and laid my cheek on the cool linoleum tabletop, staring out a plate-glass window flecked with raindrops at the people beyond, who were dashing down the sidewalk in the twilight drizzle as streetlights came to life. Gray May would soon be turning to June Gloom, which meant more drizzle and overcast skies before summer truly arrived in Seattle.

“I did a stupid thing,” I admitted. “And I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Bumblebee nails gently moved mousy-brown hair off my forehead, away from the ketchup-smeared rim of my unfinished plate, and tucked it behind a single lily I wore in my hair behind one ear. “Can’t be that bad. Fess up.”

After a couple of long sighs, I mumbled, “I met a boy.”

“O-o-h,” she murmured. “A boy, you say? A genuine member of the human race?”

“Possibly. He’s really beautiful, so he may be a space alien or a clone or some kind of android.”

“Mmm, sexy boy robot,” she purred. “Tell me everything.”

“There’s not much to tell. He’s a year older than me—nineteen. And a magician.”

“Like, Las Vegas performer or Harry Potter?” she asked.

I huffed out a soft laugh. “Like card tricks and making a napkin with his phone number written on it appear inside the book I was reading.”

“Wait. You met him here? At the diner?”

In answer, I held up a limp fist and mimicked a head nodding.

“Was this when you were interviewing last month?”

“For that part-time library job.” That I totally thought was a sure thing . . . yet didn’t get. Which was doubly depressing when I later realized that my misplaced confidence was one of the factors that led me to get carried away with “the boy” on that unfateful day.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Aunt Mona said. “Birdie! You know I live for romantic drama. I’ve been waiting your entire life for one juicy story, one glorious piece of top-notch teen gossip that will make me swoon, and you don’t tell me?”

“Maybe this is why.”

She pretended to gasp. “Okay, fair point. But now the cat’s out of the bag. Tell me more about this sexy, sexy cat—meow.”

“First, he’s a boy, not cat or a robot. And he was charming and sweet.”

“Keep going,” she said.

“He showed me some card tricks. I was feeling enthusiastic about the library job. It was raining pretty hard. He asked if I wanted to go see an indie movie at the Egyptian, and I told him I’d never been to the Egyptian, and he said it was in a Masonic Temple, which I didn’t know. Did you? Apparently it was—”

“Birdie,” Aunt Mona said, exasperated. “What happened?”

I sighed heavily. My cheek was sticking to the linoleum. “So we ran through the rain and went to his car, which was parked in the garage behind the diner, and it was pretty much deserted, and the next thing you know . . .”

“Oh. My. God. You didn’t.”

“We did.”

“Tell me you used a condom.”

I lifted my head and frantically glanced around the diner. “Can you please keep your voice down?”

“Condoms, Birdie. Did you use them?” she said, whispering entirely too loudly.

I checked to make sure Ms. Patty wasn’t anywhere in sight. Or any of her nieces and nephews. There were almost a dozen of those, a couple of whom I’d gone to school with when I was a kid. “Do you really think that me, a product of unsafe teen sex, whose mother later literally died after getting pregnant a second time, someone who had to listen to a thousand and one safe-sex lectures from her former guardian—”

“Once a guardian, always a guardian. I will never be your former anything, Birdie.”