The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(6)

“Absolutely not. If you mail something, I will dump it in the garbage. Do you hear me?” Her voice bounced past my room as she headed into the kitchen. Jars rattled. She was in the fridge. Oh! She gave her lunch to Panhandler Will. Guess she was foraging for a replacement. “Too bad. Nothing’s changed. Stop trying, and you won’t be disappointed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m actually working here. Enjoy your flight from London.” She enunciated the city in a mocking tone. A muffled bang ended the call.

Whoa. She was seriously pissed.

Footfalls squeaked past my room again. “May your plane crash into the f*cking Atlantic,” she mumbled to herself before jogging down the stairs again. A minute later, the paddy wagon’s engine roared to life and she was gone again.

Mom rarely gets angry. Honestly, she pretty much never gets emotional about anything. Ever. It’s one of the things I’ve inherited from her—a no-nonsense personality. No drama, no tears, no yelling. We both operate on a nonemotional setting, unlike Heath, who operates on an unhealthy decadence of shifting highs and lows. He got that from our father, who up and left us three years ago for a strip-club owner he met on a business trip to Southern California. We hadn’t seen him since, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t miss him.

Sure, there was a lot of yelling before he left, but after he was gone, Mom pulled herself together pretty fast. She didn’t cry when the divorce went through, and she didn’t bad-mouth Dad when he never made a single child support payment. The last time I remembered her getting emotional was a couple of years ago when Heath and I suggested we legally change our last names to her maiden Adams out of solidarity.

Anyway, the only person who ever put her in a remotely bad mood was my dad, and as far I knew, they didn’t have any contact. She wasn’t dating anybody—she was “done with men”—and none of her friends were in London.

So who was she yelling at on the phone?

I cracked open one of the X-ray doors when Heath bounded back upstairs. He held out a palm as he passed, and we high-fived. “Live to puke another day,” he said cheerfully, striding back to the bathroom.

“You’ve got glitter on your nose,” I answered.

Whatever smart-ass answer he gave was out of earshot. I had more pressing concerns, so I ignored him and curled up in bed with my laptop. It took me only a few seconds to find what I was looking for—a post on a local city blog luridly titled: “Golden Apple Street Artist: Poet or Attention-Mongering Vandal?”

The blog post detailed what I already knew, but I learned a couple of new things—like that the “burners” or “pieces” (short for masterpiece) were executed with both a professional airbrush and a specialty graffiti spray paint that’s illegal to sell in the city. I thought of the fancy can in Jack’s backpack—definitely not something you could buy at the local home improvement store—and my stomach went a little flippy.

Five words had been painted over the last couple of weeks: BEGIN, FLY, BELONG, JUMP, TRUST. Begin was, aptly, the first word, painted in ten-foot-high letters on the pavement around Lotta’s Fountain, the oldest monument in the city. The most recent word, trust, had been stenciled across the ticket booth roof at the San Francisco Zoo entrance.

The post quoted a police officer in charge of the SFPD Graffiti Abatement Program. He warned that the difference between graffiti and art is “permission,” and pointed out that since the cumulative cleanup costs were over four hundred dollars, the artist who painted the golden words would be facing a felony charge.

But that wasn’t all. The artist signed all the words with a small golden apple at the bottom of the last letter. And this made the blogger wonder about a connection to a local anonymous “artist collective” called Discord.

Not good.

Members of Discord were known for engaging in antagonist behavior toward the mayor’s office and had done tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public property: breaking windows, trashing stores, setting things on fire, and pouring paint on a bronze statue of Gandhi outside the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. The blogger speculated that the golden graffiti’s signature might be a nod toward the Apple of Discord from Greek mythology, which was inscribed with “the fairest” and started a catfight between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena.

Thinking about all this made me feel as if I were on one of those pirate-ship rides at a carnival, swinging back and forth between excitement and the nagging fear that a bolt would break and the whole thing would slingshot into the sky.

My brother was right about one thing: I didn’t really know how to be bad. So maybe I should have just put Jack out of my mind and gone back to my boring sunless, friendless summer.

But that was easier said than done.

The next afternoon, while Mom and Heath were both still sleeping off their respective graveyard shift and club-hopping, I took the regular Muni train to Irving Street, a short walk from the southeast entrance to Golden Gate Park … and one stop from where Jack got off the bus the night before.

It was also where I worked part-time as a glamorous checkout girl in an upscale gourmet market called Alto’s. Because we catered to the upper crust, everyone but the meat and fish counter employees had to wear a white button-down shirt, black pants, a black tie, and a store-issued black Alto’s Market apron, which made me feel like a high-end restaurant server—without the benefit of high-end tips.