Chapter 3 #2
For the first time since they’d arrived, they fell into step side by side, leaving the flea market and heading back toward the main street.
Silverton was a few times bigger than Crested Peak—though it was hard not to be—and had much of the same scenic Colorado mountain town atmosphere, its main attractions being the tiny airport, the full-size grocery store, and, of course, the Walmart.
“Almost done,” Niko said. “Still have to get the paint.”
They rounded the corner, passing a hole-in-the-wall burger restaurant just as someone exited. The smell of grease wafting out made Niko’s stomach growl. He checked his watch. It was already almost one.
“Are you hungry? We should get some lunch before we head back.”
She inclined her head, her mouth curling up at the corners to reveal a dimple, though it was probably too subdued to be considered a smile. “Sure. I’m good with whatever.”
He stopped short at a storefront, holding the door open for her. She, a few paces ahead of him, kept walking, then paused when she realized he was no longer next to her. Her eyes flicked across the window before her face cleared in comprehension.
“Oh. When you said paint, I thought—got it.” She ducked her head in embarrassment, walking past his outstretched arm into the art supply store.
He always loved coming here—how colorful and organized it was, the sense of possibility in every aisle. He could lose hours at a time wandering around, but today, he headed straight for the oil paints.
Merritt had already wandered away again, so he took his time selecting his paint, grabbing a new package of palette knives in assorted shapes and sizes, and stocking up on Liquin before he went hunting for her again. He found her in the pen aisle, doodling on the test pad in rainbow colors.
They approached the cash register together, her attention immediately caught by the various knickknacks positioned for impulse buys.
As he laid his purchases on the counter, she reached her hand into a large plastic fishbowl full of toys and pulled out a miniature Rubik’s Cube, weighing it in her palm.
Suddenly, the thought of her being drawn to that silly banana key chain didn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
“Find everything okay?” The cashier grinned at him as she rang him up.
He was friendly with most of the employees there, but he hadn’t seen her before.
She looked like she was around Merritt’s age, with a full sleeve of tattoos, a thick blue streak in her hair, and a sunny grin. Her name tag read Kathleen.
“Fine, thanks.” He looked over at Merritt. “You want that?”
Merritt looked up at him like she’d forgotten he was there, or maybe that she was there. “Hmm? No, it’s okay. But thanks.” She dropped the cube back into the fishbowl and crossed her arms, as if to stop herself from fidgeting with anything else.
When Kathleen turned her cheerful face to Merritt, her expression transformed like she’d been electrocuted. Niko thought he saw her physically jump.
“Oh!” Kathleen gasped, then clamped her hand over her mouth in chagrin. She laughed, a short, nervous peal. “Sorry. I was just—sorry.” She looked back at Niko, her face growing redder by the second. “Your total is $63.47.”
He dug his wallet out of his back pocket, but his attention was on Merritt, who was frozen next to him, smiling benignly down at the ground as Kathleen fumbled with the credit card machine.
After handing him the bag, Kathleen opened and closed her mouth several times, bravery overtaking her at the last second.
“I—sorry,” she repeated, hesitant. “I’m not trying to be weird.
But I swear to god, I’ve been wanting to get a tattoo for you for, like, years, but I could never decide what to do.
Like, a lyric, or the heart, or what.” She reached for a Sharpie and turned her tatted-up forearm over on the counter, revealing the pale, untouched underside.
“Would you…sign me? So I can get it tattooed later?”
Niko was openly staring at Merritt now, genuinely unsure how she would react. But she uncrossed her arms, met Kathleen’s eyes with a warm smile, and picked up the Sharpie. “Of course. I’d be honored.”
They spent a few moments negotiating size and placement before Merritt scrawled her first name in tight lowercase cursive. She crossed the last two T’s with a decisive, unbroken slash, followed by a heart pierced by an arrow. Kathleen looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“I was at your last show, you know,” she said.
Merritt recoiled slightly, enough to make the Sharpie wobble.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath, then returned her gaze to Kathleen. “Sorry about that. I hope you got your money back.” Her tone was airy, but he could sense the discomfort it was camouflaging. Kathleen’s eyes widened, and he could tell she did, too.
“No, no,” she said hurriedly, her face reddening again. “Don’t apologize. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
“It’s okay.” Merritt’s smile tightened. “I’m just glad that wasn’t the last time we saw each other.” She popped the cap back on the Sharpie and gave Kathleen’s arm a parting squeeze before clearing her throat and turning to Niko. “Lunch?”
It was only after they’d gotten their food (tacos from next door) and parked themselves at an open table that he worked up the nerve to ask one of the many questions that had been rattling around in his brain since last night.
“Is it a secret? You living here?”
Merritt dipped a tortilla chip into a tiny cup of guacamole, wrinkling her nose in thought. “No? I mean, I don’t think anybody cares.”
“What about your fans?”
She cocked her head and gave him a searching look. Was she really going to ignore the fact that less than ten minutes ago, he’d seen someone beg her to sign their arm permanently?
He met her gaze without flinching and felt a jolt of electricity travel down his spine. He swore he saw her shiver, too, before she looked away.
“The person they care about doesn’t exist anymore. Or, at least, I hope she doesn’t.” She paused, then ran her fingers through her hair, laughing humorlessly. “Sorry, that was more melodramatic than I meant it. I just…I don’t really want to talk about it. Is that okay? Sorry.”
He expected her to look tense, shoulders set, soft mouth in a firm line.
But her face was slack and expressionless.
Something about her body language reminded him of his favorite pair of sweatpants, the way the elastic had slowly loosened over the years until he couldn’t put them on without them immediately slipping back down over his hips.
His first at bat, and he’d struck out. She didn’t want to talk.
Niko drenched his tacos in multicolored hot sauce, relieved to have something to do to occupy himself amid the awkward silence. He was startled when she spoke again.
“What about you? How did you end up out here?”
Her question came on the heels of his taking an overly ambitious bite of carnitas. He forced himself to chew as slowly as possible, so as not to choke to death while attempting to answer five seconds faster.
“Followed a girl out here. My college girlfriend. The plan was to come out for a year or so, do the ski bum thing, then go back home and start our real lives.”
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “Where’s home?”
“Florida. Tallahassee. That’s where we went to school.”
“And things didn’t go according to plan?”
He took a long drink of water before responding. “Not exactly. She didn’t like it as much as she thought she would. The whole lifestyle. I think she’d maybe…what’s the word. Romanticized it. She got tired of roughing it pretty quickly.”
“Makes sense.”
“She was ready to leave after a month, and I wasn’t. So we said, okay, she’ll go home, and I’ll meet her there when the year’s up.” He shrugged. “We broke up pretty soon after that. That kind of distance is tough, especially when you’re that age.”
The edges of her lips quirked up in a knowing smile, but she said nothing, popping the last bite of her taco into her mouth.
“I know what you’re thinking. She met someone else first.”
She raised her hand defensively, but her smile turned mischievous. “I wasn’t assuming anything.” She gathered up her second taco out of its foil shell. “So what made you stay? After the year was over.”
Niko did the same, picking the slices of radish off the top first. “I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Or, anywhere I wanted to go. I never liked Florida much. None of my family lived there anymore, by that point. And I was happy here. Still am.”
“Do you think you’ll stay forever?”
He felt pinned by her stare, unsettled by the intensity in her dark eyes, even though the question itself was fairly tame.
He shifted in his seat. “I don’t know. I guess I always assumed I’d settle down somewhere else once I was ready to move into the next phase of my life.
Start a family and all that. It’s kind of hard to do that here unless you’re… ” He hesitated.
“Rich?” she supplied, punctuating it with the crunch of a chip.
“Yeah,” he said. “No offense.”
Her lips pursed like she was trying to suppress a smile. “None taken.”
“I got lucky with my situation, but it’s crazy how expensive things have gotten just in the last few years.”
When Niko had moved to Crested Peak eight years ago, he’d spent his first three months sleeping in a barely converted closet in an unheated, uninsulated house with more people than he could count.
He’d eventually graduated to the floor of a shared bedroom, then, at last, to a bed.
He hadn’t minded. Cheap housing was hard to come by, and besides, it was just a place to crash.
Nobody came to Crested Peak to spend time indoors.
That house had been torn down a few years back, replaced by a sprawling vacation home that sat empty most of the year.
The place he lived in now was an anomaly.
Perched at the edge of town, it was as quaint and cozy as a rental house—but occupied all year round.
Their landlord discounted Niko’s rent in exchange for maintaining it.
He’d also allowed Niko to transform the garage into his workshop, where he’d built an ever-increasing portion of the house’s furniture.
Over the years, Niko had built up his business, in demand enough for handyman and light construction gigs (plus the occasional furniture commission) to be able to get by without having to get another job on top of it.
Still, his savings account never had more than enough to cover a round of drinks at Off the Rails, his checking wasn’t much better, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d fully paid off his credit cards.
It would be hard to support anyone else with his current lifestyle—and homeownership was out of the question.
Still, he’d lived in Crested Peak longer than he’d lived anywhere else, and the thought of leaving made his chest ache.
“My mom keeps trying to get me out to Tucson,” he continued, “to work for my stepdad. He owns a business out there. Life insurance, I think. I’ve been telling her ‘next year’ for about the last four years. But that’s probably where I’ll end up.”
Merritt nodded slowly as she chewed, mulling it over. He opened his mouth to ask her why she’d left LA, but she inclined her head toward the bright-yellow plastic bag on the seat next to him. “Did you study art in school?”
Niko shook his head, swallowing his bite. “Nah. I thought about it, though.” He hesitated.
The only person who knew he’d considered going to art school was his high school art teacher, who’d put the idea in his head in the first place.
She’d filled his backpack with glossy pamphlets for conservatories and specialized programs, which he’d hidden under his mattress, thumbing through them furtively in the middle of the night like old porn magazines.
Though it was a small thing, years buried, mostly forgotten, he felt an odd flash of relief at sharing it with someone else.
The handful of people back then who knew he liked to draw wouldn’t have thought to ask.
It wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.
Too impractical, too self-indulgent; you were better off burning your money.
Unlike the so far completely useless general studies associate’s degree he’d barely scraped together enough passing credits for.
He’d only gone to college at all because he’d sworn up and down to Yiayia that he would.
“Mostly I was afraid I wouldn’t want to do it anymore if it was something I had to do. Something I was doing for the approval of other people, something I’d get graded on. I kind of liked having it be just mine, you know what I mean?”
She nodded slowly, taking a sip of seltzer. “Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.” And just like that, her face was blank and closed again, her sunglasses like the darkened windows of a vacant storefront.
The questions he’d wanted to ask her withered and died on the vine, and they finished eating in silence.