Kiss Kill Vanish (2 page)

I glance around for Lucien.

“He left.”

Marcel. He's slumped against the doorway to the kitchen, cradling a tumbler of orange juice in his hand. I take him in. Black nail polish. Oily blond hair. Long, skinny fingers. Sly and leering.

“He said not to wait for him.”

I shift my bag to my other shoulder, sensing the swing of my cash-stuffed wallet. “I thought he wanted to talk to you.”

“I guess I'm not that riveting a conversationalist.”

“You don't say.”

He sips his orange juice, eyes still evaluating me. “You're not as pretty as the last one.”

I pause, surprised only at how quickly we've descended into insults. I don't know him. Close to a dozen introductions to an inebriated guy don't give you much to go on, and yet, I've always sensed that Marcel and I share a gift for bluntness, bordering on rudeness. Plus, Lucien is gone. This idiot isn't my employer, and he's probably my age.

“And the last one,” I say, “how long did she pose before Lucien got bored? Was it a month? Oh no, it was two weeks, wasn't it?”

He grins, but I'm not entirely sure why. “No surprise there.”

I don't ask. The reminder—that I'm not the first obsession for Lucien's artistry to feed off of—is not upsetting like Marcel thinks it'll be. More a happy reassurance, really, that this creepy excuse for a job is temporary.

“Tell me,” he says, “does he let you keep the feathers and sequins and garters and all that?”

“Let me? I don't want them. I don't wear costumes in real life.” I let my eyes make an obvious sweep of his clothes. He's a cliché of a rock star with the leather pants, tight T-shirt, and lip ring. I'm not scared of him. I knew too many rich boys like him in my former life—gritty and slick, all pretending to hate Daddy while snorting coke paid for with Daddy's cash. “Are you sure he said for me to go? He usually schedules my next sitting before I leave.”

“You know how artists are.” Marcel laughs. It's not a kind laugh. And his eyes aren't kind eyes. They're dark as a bruise, edged with eyeliner that's smudged under his left eye.

“No,” I say. “How are artists?”

“Unpredictable. Flighty.”

Lucien is neither. We both know it, and that's where the humor lies, but Lucien is flawed in too many other ways for me to stick up for him. So we share this moment, Marcel and I, knowing exactly what the other is thinking: Lucien is a joke.

“So why do you do it?” he asks.

“Sit for Lucien?”

“Yes.”

“Are you that naive?”

“Naive,” he repeats, rubbing the pad of a bone-white finger around the lip of the tumbler. “How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen? How do your parents feel about you posing for a twenty-one-year-old
artist
who makes you dress up in costumes so he can stare at you for hours?”

“I'm nineteen.” I find if I deliver this lie with relentless eye contact, it isn't questioned, but Lucien is staring at his ink-black fingernail. Maybe he believes me. “And how old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“I don't live with my parents,” I continue, ignoring how annoying it is that he's actually older than me, “and by naive I mean you obviously don't realize that some people have to survive without billion-dollar trust funds. Unbelievable, I know.”

His eyes are flat, registering none of the shame he should be feeling, or even annoyance.

I did exaggerate. It's unlikely there's a billion dollars sitting in his trust fund. More likely it's just many millions for the second son of a soap tycoon. Ironic. Bar soap, body wash, liquid soap, hand sanitizer—I wonder if suggesting he use the LeBlanc family products from time to time would be taking our mutual rudeness too far.

“This is a business transaction,” I continue. “Something I do to make rent. Are you familiar with the concept of rent?”

He narrows his eyes. “Are you?” That bruised gaze sees something it shouldn't, and the sudden spinning in my gut tells me he knows. His eyes say
liar
and he's right, because I'm not what I'm pretending to be. Not at all.

I take a steadying breath through my nose so he won't see that I'm rattled. Marcel is nothing but a drunk sack of dumb. The only truth he might guess is that I'm a runaway. I'm poor and desperate—the hallmarks of runaway-dom—but he can't possibly know that the precious three hundred dollars in my wallet would have been a single shoe in my old life. Lunch on South Beach with my sisters. A trim and blow-dry at Petra's.

And now, well, if Lucien hadn't seen me busking outside the Metro that day two months ago, if he hadn't stood and stared, leaning his shoulder into the wall, leaning his eyes into me for an hour before walking up and sliding a crisp hundred-dollar bill in my open mandolin case, I wouldn't have lasted another week. I was down to my last few dollars. I'd have had to . . . I don't know. Not go back to Miami.

Marcel's still staring like he knows exactly what kind of money I came from.

“Am
I
familiar with the concept of rent? Are you kidding me?” I snap.

“Don't get all riled up, sweetheart. I only meant you seem a little above it.”

“You don't even know my name. You definitely don't know what I seem.”

“Sure I do, Jane,” he says, a smirk on his lips. No hesitation, no head scratching, no fumbling through June-Jenny-Joan first. “You seem bored. I guess a little
angelic or sexy or whatever it is that gets Lucien's artistic juices flowing, but mostly just bored.”

“Bored and getting paid for it,” I spit back.

He stops and grins, showing his teeth—perfectly aligned and nicotine gray. “That's something to be proud of.”

“I just pose. He doesn't—”

“Oh, you don't have to tell me what he does and doesn't do,” he interrupts. “If you were sleeping with him, you'd be gone tomorrow. Lucien's a freak. His muses are only good as long as they keep their halos intact. That what's-her-name before you, she was gone two days after I walked into the kitchen to find her making an omelet wearing half of his pajamas.”

“I'm going.” I don't give him the satisfaction of seeing me shudder, or ask him to pass on a message to Lucien, or let his slimy eyes touch mine.

“She was gorgeous, though, whatever her name was,” he mutters before I slam the door shut behind me.

I'm waiting for the elevator, trembling with anger, when I hear Marcel's voice calling from the far end of the hall. “What do you play, anyway?”

I pass my bag to the other shoulder again, considering how deep today's humiliation really needs to go. I've never told Marcel I play anything. That means Lucien's sitting around talking about me, which makes my armpits sticky and the skin on my stomach itch. “Music,” I say, and step into the elevator.

The skinny corridor separating us is too long to see his expression. The elevator doors close between us.

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E
ight minutes.

I shut my closet door behind me and sink to the floor. It's the small pockets of time that kill me. Eight minutes isn't long enough for a nap, but it's long enough to remember things that make me want to rip my eyes out, so I'm careful. I stay in the here and now.

Closet is a misnomer. It's the size of your average walk-in, but if you define a space by what you do in it, this is my bedroom. I sleep here. On this cot, under this synthetic blanket, I read and have nightmares and stare at the backs of my eyelids. I undress here, in the tiny space that I'm sitting in now, between the foot of the cot and the door. It's dim and drab, only big enough for the cot, a suitcase, a mandolin, and my body. But it's mine. I pay for it, and the money is clean.

Seven minutes.

The clock glows at me from the upturned crate beside my bed. I'm only on the floor because I'm too tired to move the suitcase off my bed. Maybe it's ridiculous—being here three months and still living out of a suitcase—but buying a dresser would be settling in. I don't want to be settling into this closet, this apartment with five roommates packed like pickles in a jar, in this run-down building in the most decrepit neighborhood in all of Montreal. I want to be passing through. Quickly.

I should be eating before I have to leave again, but Xiang is in the kitchen frying more garlic than has ever been fried at one time and in one place, and the unholy stench will permeate my skin and I will smell like garlic forever if I walk in there again. And I used to like garlic. Or garlic in Cuban food—black beans and
ropa vieja
and ceviche—where garlic belongs, swirled with cilantro and salt and lime. I don't know if this stench is worse or better than when Françoise and Nanette let those potatoes turn to mush in the cupboard last week. Worse, I think.

How Xiang's garlic escapades are deemed less offensive than the delicate
plunk
s of a mandolin, I don't know. And yet, I can't practice here. Too loud. The vote was five to one, and I voted. Reasons stated: apartment is too small, walls are too thin, we said no to Pierre's trombone, and Françoise and Nanette have occasional night shifts at the hospital, so they have to sleep during the day.

Six minutes.

I lean my body into the side of the bed and close my eyes to shield myself from the glare of the clock numbers. My blanket smells like Nanette's detergent. Which reminds me, I need to buy myself the same detergent and sneak a few scoops back into her box. I doubt she noticed any was gone, but still. She might be the closest thing I have to a friend here. As in, I think she would do CPR on me if I needed it, and not just to practice her nursing-school skills.

Real friends are another luxury I've left behind. Drea. Cameron. Kim. Tony. I miss them but not like they deserve to be missed, not as whole people, but as pieces, fragments sewn together into a patchwork of mindlessness and recklessness and fun. I miss Drea's fearless purple streaks. (When Lola told her they looked ridiculous, she laughed in Lola's face.
Nobody
laughs in Lola's face.) I miss Cameron's inexhaustible devotion to cutting class. And Kim's flask of mostly
Dr Pepper. And Tony's horoscope obsession. The sadness of losing them all is easier to take like that, in one sewn-together clump of memories. Even still, it's lodged in my chest, and it hurts. To think of them as entire and separate people that I'll never see again, that would be unbearable. I can't.

They must hate me for disappearing. I wonder what they think happened.

Five minutes.

The real reason I'm not moving the suitcase: if I lie down, I will fall asleep, and if I fall asleep, I won't wake up, not even when the alarm on my cell rings in four and a half minutes to tell me that it's time to go.

Nanette's uncle locks up his café, Soupe au Chocolat, at exactly midnight. If I miss him, I lose my only chance to practice, and if I don't practice, I lose the music Emilio taught me. It's our only link. I know it's irrational, but when I'm not playing I feel like the notes are fading from my memory and that the next time I get to play my fingers will stumble around the melodies but never actually find them. That can't happen. I'll never see Emilio again, but the music gives us a heartbeat.

It's his mandolin. I stole it, and I don't feel bad about it. When I cradle and pluck it like he showed me, the notes sound like raindrops, and I see his eyes. It's worth the exhaustion of staying up all night.

I should've come straight home after leaving Lucien's. At least I could've slept for a few hours then, but getting onto the Metro I could still feel them, the rich boys, like a film on my skin. They'd both been so unnerving in their own way—Lucien with his adoration and Marcel with his insults and innuendo. Creepiness to expunge, I got off at Station Place-des-Arts for the cleansing power of back-to-back Japanese samurai films at Cinéma du Parc. That did the trick, burned off the grime of both sets of slimy blue eyes on me.

Four minutes.

I didn't buy the clock. It and the cot were the only things in the room when I moved in. I hate them both. Every time the numbers on that clock change I'm a whole minute closer to outside.

I shiver again. Last month, a wet chill pushed its way up the Saint Lawrence River. It howled up the streets of Old Montreal, through the cracks of this decaying apartment tower, and into my bones. It lives there now, probably forever.

My stomach grumbles.

The palmeras!
How did I forget? I root around in my purse until I find the white paper bakery bag miraculously uncrushed, the two coiled pastries still intact. They're perfect: golden and glossy with the sugar glaze. I bought them on the way to Lucien's as a reward for afterward, then forgot they were there. The first bite is almost too much. Butter and honey melt together into sunshine. The sign said
PALMIERS
, but I know better.
They aren't French. The French can claim every other pastry in the world, but I grew up on these. When I close my eyes and chew, I could be in Little Havana, at Versailles Bakery with Papi and my sisters picking out freshly baked pastelitos.

The palmera is so sweet I want to cry.

Three minutes.

I didn't choose Montreal so much as it chose me. My pawned jewelry hadn't been enough for a last-minute ticket to Spain, and standing at the airport ticket counter trying to digest that information, I was too crushed and drained to form a new plan. I asked the lady how much tickets to France were, thinking I could make my way west by train, but they were even more.

“A ticket to Montreal is only half that,” she said with one of those effervescent airline smiles. “You get the foreign experience without the overseas airfare.”