The People We Keep(52)

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The next day, when we’re almost through the morning rush, Carly takes a break and has coffee with two guys and a girl at a table in the corner. The girl has a lip ring. One of the guys has bleached white hair with dark roots and skin so pale you can almost see through it. The other one looks like James Dean with black lipstick. They talk in hushed tones that grow into bursts of laughter, then drop to whispers. I can’t tell what they’re talking about. By the time I finish with one customer, they’re being quiet again. When they’re loud, I’m taking another order.

After they finish their coffee, they go out for a smoke. Right by the front door, where Carly always tells Bodie he’s not allowed to smoke. At first she’s just taking drags off James Dean’s cigarette, but then the girl with the lip ring offers Carly her own and when James Dean finishes his, he steals Carly’s for a few puffs. I wonder if he gets black lipstick all over his cigarettes. I’m not close enough to see.

The pale guy is telling a story and suddenly slaps his palms to his chest and his whole body shakes. He looks like he’s exploding and they all laugh so hard they have to lean on each other to catch their breath.

The four of them seem like they belong together. Like they’re an advertisement for combat boots or hair gel. I wonder if they found each other because they look like that, or if after they met, James Dean borrowed black lipstick from Carly, Lip Ring convinced Pale Guy he needed peroxide, and who they are now isn’t who they would be if they’d never crossed paths.



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When her friends finally leave, Carly comes back in and we rotate the stock of flavored coffee on the shelves. I kneel on the counter and she hands me new bags from the cabinet below.

She isn’t chatty like she was with her friends. She looks weary, as if she’d rather be wherever they were headed next.

“How much vanilla is left?” she asks.

“Two bags,” I say, and I want to crack a joke, but I can’t think of anything particularly funny about vanilla. She hands me two bags to tuck behind the old ones.

“How much cherry?”

“Why would anyone want cherry coffee?”

“It’s not bad,” she says.

“Oh. Three bags,” I say. “Did that crazy girl come back today?”

“Which one?”

“Nipple ring?”

“I don’t think so.” She hands me an extra bag and her bracelets slide toward her elbow. I see a tattoo on her wrist I hadn’t noticed before. A thin black line looped into a knot. “Hazelnut?”

“Four,” I say.

“Caramel?”

“Three.”

She hands me one. “Ugh. The caramel smells so bad.”

“I know,” I say. “It doesn’t smell like caramel.”

“It smells like vomit,” she says.

It’s stupid, but I love that we’re agreeing. We might be headed toward a real conversation.

“Mocha?” she asks.

“One.”

She hands me the rest. I put them away and jump down from the counter. She yawns and stretches, watching people walk by outside like she hopes someone interesting will show up.

“I think I want to get a tattoo,” I say. And really it isn’t a thing I thought about, but as soon as I say it, I do want one. A mark to prove I’ve changed, that I’m not the same sad old April in the motorhome.

Carly perks up. “Nice. What are you going to get?”

“Not sure,” I say, feeling the wobble of nerves in my belly.

“There’s a place right on The Commons,” she says. “They’re pretty good.” And before I know it, she’s arranged for Bodie to cover for us, and for the Lettuce Murderer to come in early to cover for Bodie, so we can take our lunch break together and go to the tattoo shop. It’s this spiraling thing where my random thought becomes what I’m actually going to do and it’s so exhilarating I forget to be nervous.

Bodie spends the rest of the morning sitting in the kitchen with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, sketching on a napkin. We don’t know what he’s drawing. He won’t let us see, and it’s hell to get him to fill orders, but when he’s done, he gives the napkin to me. “Just an idea,” he says. “For your tattoo.” It’s a white flower with a yellow center and five pointy petals like a star, streams of every color shooting out behind like it’s zooming through space. It’s beautiful and I can’t believe Bodie drew it just for me.

Carly says it won’t hurt. Like at all. “It’s seriously like not even a big deal, April. You’ll be fine. You’ll love it.” She holds my hand and swings it back and forth as we walk across The Commons to the tattoo store. But when I’m in the chair and I’ve flashed my chalked ID and signed all the papers, I ask her again, and she says that it does hurt, but it’s good hurt, like when you have a sore tooth and you can’t stop poking at it, which sounds a hell of a lot less appealing than she seems to think it does. At the very last minute, while Carly is squeezing my hand and the needle is buzzing right next to my hip, about to sear Bodie’s drawing into my belly forever, I wimp out.

The big, hairy tattoo guy gets crabby. He got the ink and the needles ready and now I’m not even going to pay. It makes me nervous to make him mad, so I blurt out, “Nose ring. I want a nose ring instead,” because it’s one quick jab instead of a billion little ones.