It had been Jaws who revealed a detail in his always joking way. “Guess that’s what I get for letting them put acid under my eyelids.”
None of them had spoken right away, and then Casey had nodded. “Me too. They did it to me too.”
“It’s worse for us,” Sandy had said. Her eyes looked yellow, her skin the color of wax beans. “Isn’t it, Riza?”
And Riza had known then that the doctors didn’t just experiment on Sandy, they used her for other things, sick things that no grown man should do to a twelve-year-old girl.
Now, wearing only her underwear and a t-shirt, Riza sat in her chair and started typing: ‘It’s me, Alley Cat. I can meet you. Tell me the time and place.’
3
Riza took a deep breath and pushed open the door at the Sugar and Spice Cafe, known, according to a sign out front, for their world-famous blueberry pancakes.
The restaurant was abuzz with patrons, and had he not stood and waved at her from a small table in the back corner, Riza would not have recognized Casey, aka JunkyardDog13.
A man with a full head of dark brown hair had replaced the freckle-faced, lanky teen she’d known as a child. He stood tall and broad. Muscles showed beneath his Rebel with a Cause t-shirt.
Riza’s appearance had changed little—same thin, boyish frame and short, choppy hair. The woman at the salon called it a pixie cut, but Riza never felt even remotely fairy-like when she looked in the mirror. Punk was the label people had attributed to her most over the years, but Riza had no interest in fashion statements. She’d learned on the streets that long hair was a disadvantage.
When she reached Casey, he didn’t shake her hand, but pulled her into a hug, lifting her slightly off her feet.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said, eyes shining. “Come on, sit. I ordered us both pancakes and coffee.” He gestured at the food on the table.
She sat and wrapped her arms across her chest. “I don’t drink coffee after noon,” she told him.
“No big deal. You want decaf?”
“No.” She wanted coffee. She wanted something that could make her eyelids not feel like two bits of sandpaper rubbing her eyes into bloody nubs. Riza hadn’t slept the night before. Junkyard Dog’s words had played out in her head on a loop that left her exhausted and spiked with fear. Now she sat looking at the man who’d written those words, his eyes free of bags, his smile easy and warm. Why didn’t he look the way she felt?
“What’s the point of the forum, Casey?” The forum had taken her perfectly peaceful life and chewed it into a mass of sleeplessness and disturbing memories. If she could delete it from her mental hard-drive, she would.
His eyes grew brighter, and he gestured at her. “You’re the point, Riza. I started it to find you. And Sandy, but it was you I was after.”
“But why?”
“Because we’re not done. Because someone is after the Six. It’s different now. We have resources. We can end this once and for all.”
Riza shook her head and stood up. “No. No way. I’m done with all that, Casey. I’ve spent years getting over the shit we did. I just want to forget it.”
His eyes went wide and the laugh that erupted from his mouth sounded angry. “How’s that working out for you?”
“It’s working,” she shouted, hands turning into fists at her side.
Other customers turned to stare at them. The waitress, who’d been walking toward their table, paused and quickly filled water glasses at a booth a short distance away.
His eyes flicked down to her fists. “I bet.”
“You don’t know me, Casey. That was over fifteen years ago. I’m a different person.”
“Looks like same old Riza to me,” he said.
His words infuriated her. His tone, his casual, laid-back demeanor brought a rage she hadn’t experienced in years boiling up.
More than a decade before, she’d loved Casey in that intense, irrational way that teenagers fall in love. Lust and fear and desperation all tangled together. They’d never said ‘love,’ never done the normal love things teenagers did like dates and promise rings and high-school dances. They’d rocked between love and hate, always walking the line, often stepping too far into one or the other.
She turned to flee for the door, but he was on his feet. He grabbed her hand. “Hey, I’m sorry. Sit down, okay? You came to talk, so let’s talk.”
She allowed him to guide her back to her chair. She raked her knife across a pancake, and jabbed it into her mouth. She had no excuse for her anger, but it continued to simmer as she looked at him.
“Did you end up going to high school?” she asked after several seconds of indignant chewing.
He smirked. “Walked in and enrolled myself? Gave the address for the former asylum? No.”
“GED?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t need it. I learned how to tile and plaster, started working, end of story. None of us were destined for the Ivy League, Riza. Maybe if we’d been born into other families, people who gave a shit… But”—he shrugged—“I don’t really mind anymore.”
“You don’t mind that your mom took off and left you with your alcoholic dad to beat the shit out of you every day?” It was a low blow question. She expected his face to grow red, his eyes to narrow like they had in their younger years. Any mention of his mother used to trigger an explosion.
“She didn’t.” He continued to gaze at Riza with unwavering eyes. “My dad strangled her and threw her in a garbage dump. His brother, my uncle Gary, came clean eight years ago. He’d helped to dispose of the body. My dad went to prison. Still there to this day as far as I know.”
“Shit,” Riza mumbled, embarrassed that she’d provoked him.
“Even if she had left, who could blame her? He beat her far worse than he beat me. Obviously.”
“That sucks,” she said, remembering Casey’s resentment of his mother for having abandoned him with his abusive father. All that time he’d thought she was living the high life somewhere without him when in fact she’d been rotting in a garbage dump. Riza set her fork down, the pancakes too sweet in her belly. “Tell me about the years in between then and now.”
“Ice and I stuck together for most of it. We broke into empty houses or abandoned places. Eventually, I met a man who owned a tiling company. I started working.”
“That’s it? No drugs? No bad behavior? You left the asylum and turned into Mr. fucking Rogers?”
He chuckled and cocked an eyebrow. “We’re five minutes into our conversation and we’re sharing those stories? Okay, sure. Let’s see, I drank myself sick until I was about twenty. Blackout drunk at least four nights a week. Got arrested a few times, spent a lot of nights in the drunk tank. Got in a fight during one drunken night and got my nose broken and shoulder dislocated. That’s when I got hooked on Percocet. That lasted about three years until Roger Whitney, the owner of the tiling company, drove me to a rehab and shoved me through the front door. I spent six months in there getting clean, moved into a halfway house. Roger hired me back as a grunt guy and I worked my way up. I bought the business off of him two years ago.”