Tessa was in one of San Diego’s downtown Internet cafes, surfing the web and thinking about the kind of tattoo she wanted to get, when Patrick called. “Hey, Tessa, how are you?”
“Good.” She shifted the phone to her shoulder so she could keep typing and clicking through websites.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just checking my email.”
“Are you at the hotel?”
“Naw. I’m at this Internet place nearby. You’d like it. They have all this weird-sounding coffee from Central America.” Tessa was glad to see that the cafe also had printers. That way she could print out exactly what she wanted.
“I’ll have to check it out,” said Patrick.
“How’s the case?”
A pause. “Honestly, the farther we move into this thing, the more tangled up it gets.”
“Well, at least it’s interesting, though.” Tessa thought she knew which image she liked best, but she scrolled through one more Edgar Allan Poe site just to make sure.
“That’s not exactly the word I would use. People’s lives are in danger.”
“No, that part’s horrible. It’s just, I mean, pain-that’s what’s interesting.”
“What are you talking about, Tessa?”
How to put this without sounding unfeeling?… “I mean, think of a good story. It’s only interesting if something goes wrong. No one wants to read a story about someone who always does what she should and gets what she wants. So like, Poe’s stories are interesting because all sorts of bad things happen. In The Pit and the Pendulum, things just get worse and worse all the way through right up till the end, so it’s great.”
“I could deal with things not always getting worse and worse.”
“It’s not that I mean I want people to get hurt…” She scrolled past Poe’s short stories to his poems. She knew what she was looking for, but the setup of the website was lame. Very twentieth century.
Hard to find stuff. “It’s just when you read a story you want to worry about the main character. You want to wonder if he’ll catch the bad guys, if he’ll get the girl, if he’ll survive at the end of the book. It doesn’t always happen, you know. The more danger the more interesting the story. We want things to keep getting worse.”
She thought about that for a second. “Maybe we like stories so much because there’s something in us that just wants to see other people suffer.”
Patrick was slow in responding. “That’s a very troubling thought.
Let’s hope you’re not right.” He took a breath. “I’m sorry I have to change the subject, but I don’t have a lot of time here. I’m wondering, when do you want to meet for supper?”
She paused the cursor in the middle of the page. “Um… yeah
… Could we, like, make it late? I wanna go for a walk, maybe visit Balboa Park or something.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She did want to go on a walk and she did want to visit Balboa Park before leaving San Diego; it just wasn’t all she wanted to do.
“Balboa Park, huh? That’s where I’m meeting Dr. Werjonic tomorrow morning.”
“Dr. Calvin Werjonic?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“You wrote about him in your books. In the parts where I…”
“Didn’t fall asleep.”
“Right. Maybe I could meet him too. If it’s OK.”
“Well, we’ll be talking about…” Patrick paused and then must have decided to change what he was going to say because he actually agreed to her request. “Yeah. That would be good. I’m sure he’d like to meet you too. So you’re going to go on a walk this afternoon, then?”
She decided on the tattoo she wanted. There. Yes. It was perfect, really, for a bunch of reasons. Tessa sent it to print and started gathering up her things. “Yeah, or maybe check out some stuff downtown. Then we’ll have supper.”
Silence. A bit too long. “OK. That’ll work. I’ll call you later to figure out a time.”
“OK.”
“Have fun. And be careful.”
Tessa’s friends had told her that in the last couple years tattoo studios were getting all uptight about making kids get their parents’ permission before letting them get inked. Someone’s mom must have freaked out and sued a tattoo parlor somewhere because her kid came home all tatted up. Because of that, and since Tessa wasn’t eighteen yet, she’d need to go to a certain kind of tattoo studio-the kind that wouldn’t require a parent’s signature; the kind of tattoo place that definitely wouldn’t take checks or credit cards. So, the first thing she needed was cash. A couple hundred dollars probably.
She stopped by the counter. Waited for the printout.
She’d saved up almost two hundred dollars from helping edit other kids’ term papers back home-three dollars per page to clean up the manuscripts. Not cheating or anything, just helping them make their writing sound halfway intelligent. It was amazing how bad most of the kids in her class were at writing-and how willing they were to pay someone to fix it. Anyway, if she worked at it, she could probably make back the money in two or three weeks.
OK, so visit an ATM.
She paid for the printout, the coffee, and the computer time and stepped outside.
An hour ago when she’d entered the cafe, she’d seen a bank halfway down the block. They should have an ATM machine. She started for the bank and peered up between two towering buildings at the narrow strip of Southern California sky above her. Then she pulled out her notebook and wrote, “Strands of future rain scratch at the sky as the concrete rises up to meet my feet.”
Yes. She could tinker with the wording later, but it wasn’t bad for a first draft.
Tessa found the ATM machine, slipped her card in, punched a few numbers, and retrieved her cash.
OK. Time to cover up some corrupted soil.