Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Lemon
The saltwater air kisses my cheeks as I glide down the boardwalk near the Centerville Stadium. My bright yellow roller blades with tiny black lemons inked across the sides shine in the morning light as the sun peeks over the ocean horizon.
A rush of brisk air launches into my body, filling the empty spaces with satisfaction. My feet turn out of their own accord into a spread eagle, and I throw my head back, soaking up the energy of the coastal town.
Another adventure in the books.
I slipped off the bus with the sunrise to work in a skate session before I scoop my luggage and check into Papa’s hotel.
A sense of relief settles within me at the thought of starting fresh. Maybe I’ll take up counseling. At least then my sociology degree wouldn’t go to waste.
I shift into a move my old figure-skating coaches would have chastised me over forgetting the name of, as I was never much good on ice. Too much precision required.
But on the rough tread of pavement, I move with the world, not through it.
My foot goes back, and my body snaps into position.
I glide, skating dangerously backward over the floating docks and twisting in a double lutz that has the shipyard boys whistling and howling, as I shimmy my hips and throw them a kiss.
Eventually, I reach an opening, a wide marketplace just past the boardwalk. I veer toward it in search of new charms for the bracelets I never remove. My mother, whomever and wherever she may be, got the first for me when I was seven.
Just before she left us and never returned. Sometimes I hate the bracelets, for all they represent.
Lies.
“Every charm you add is a new adventure, Lemmy,” she’d said, adding an apple for the day we’d spent at the orchard. “One day, you will have a whole set of adventures to remember. Never settle for a life you don’t love with every breath.”
Then she left.
No note. No kiss. Just a goodbye to my father in the night, as he ran after a car she smashed through locked gates.
I don’t remember much about her.
Or that night.
Just the sound of my father sobbing while she yanked her roots from his heart and never looked back.
Guess she only loved us with half her breath.
That was in the past, but I still wear the bracelet.
And her words still haunt me, too.
I’m aware it’s psychologically questionable, but I wear this dumb metal loop around my wrists like a shackle. And every day, I put it back on, adding adventure after adventure as I go, in the form of little charms like this stupid fucking rhinestone apple.
I finger the faded gem that represents the last happy memory I have of my mother, and I swallow my grief back down where it belongs. Papa and I fared perfectly well without her, anyway.
I have four full bangles now. I wear two on each wrist, and I dare a motherfucker to tell me it’s stupid. These are my adventures.
My proof you can do whatever the hell you want and still stick around maybe? I don’t know.
I’m proving something at this point. I’m just not sure what.
I skid to a halt by a tarot card stand with rows of hand-made jewelry, some of which are tiny silver charms. One of them is a guitar, which could work, but it’s not the first band I’ve toured with, and it probably won’t be the last, so I pass it by, scanning the booth for something more specific.
One of the guys is nicknamed Onyx, for the dark onyx gauges he wears in his ears, and that could be a unique way of honoring this adventure, but my heart tugs a little when I think about him.
I told the guys I was ‘breaking up’ with them, so to speak, last night. Honestly, it’s not a breakup when you’re just messing around on a tour, and most of them were privy this would come to a swift end when we got to the next city, as most tour-bus relationships do, but Onyx was different.
He got glassy-eyed when I broke it off, informing him I’ll be staying in Centerville when they leave tomorrow.
Darkpath is a great band, its members all gorgeous, seasoned rock gods, but Onyx is a baby compared to the others, a replacement for their retired drummer. He’s only twenty-three.
And his puppy dog eyes cast little daggers at my soul when he looked at me like I’d stolen the heart right out of his chest.
He seemed fine after we talked on the boardwalk, with the others still passed out on the bus and immune to long-term relationships, like me, but I can tell he’s not over it.
He’s one of the good ones.
Not for me, that’s for sure.
He’s a settle-downer, even if he is a rockstar.
And I’m not the girl who will be waiting for you in the bus for the rest of your life while you enjoy all the fun, I assure you that.
Still, I find myself picking up the onyx charm shaped like a puppy and smiling at the sentiment.
I glide on my skates toward the vendor, an eccentric woman with silver curls bouncing around her face and bright, rosy cheeks.
Rows of rings line her fingers, half of her head woven with haphazard braids and colorful feathers.
“How much for the dog charm?” I ask.
“The dog?” She closes her eyes, humming before she answers me, and I find myself looking around to see if anyone notices her odd behavior, but the streets are too busy.
Her eyes snap back open, locked on me. “Not for sale.”
“What?” I scrunch my nose. “It was sitting on a platform that says Charms for Sale.”
She lowers her glasses on her nose, squinting curiously over the rims. “And yet, it is not.”
I know I shouldn’t care. I could find another charm at one of the hundreds of tables lining the boardwalk, but you haven’t met me if that’s where you think we’re going with this story.
“I’ll give you whatever you want for it. One hundred bucks.”
“No.” She shuts her cash box.
“Three hundred.” I raise a brow.
She considers this a moment, but still, she refuses.
I chew the inside of my lip, angry and revved up to win a competition I’m not even sure I entered for a charm that definitely isn’t worth more than a steak dinner, yet here I am treating it like a whole fucking cow at an auction. “Six hundred dollars.” I grind out, and the old woman finally breaks.
“Deal.”
“Wait, really?”
I’m not sure what happened.
Did I just agree to spend six hundred dollars on a dog charm representing a man-boy I dumped last night?
She laughs as though she can hear my thoughts.
“Are you sane?”
“Not one bit, dear.” She cackles, using a shaky hand to reach out and place the onyx dog before me on a velvet display.
“But you aren’t either, I see.” She points her knobby finger at my bracelets and brushes it through the charms, the hundreds of adventures I hold against my mother clanking together.
I snatch my hand back as she laughs again, noting that the charm is no longer on the velvet display, but somehow…it’s already dangling from my left wrist.
And next to it is another charm.
One I find my eyes drawn to like a hunter to her prey, curious and hungry. My eyes dart to hers. “What’s this?”
The crazy woman smiles at me, her cackling turning into a singsong of sorts as I finger the new charms that brush my skin.
“That is my one stipulation.” She grabs the bills I produce from my foot pack and tucks them, one by one, into her cash box with a wink. “Think of it as a buy one, get one free.”
“Free?” I balk, staring down at the new charm I didn’t ask for, that doesn’t represent any adventures and therefore, doesn’t belong on these shackles…
I mean…bracelets. “I didn’t even want this charm.
How can you charge someone six hundred dollars for one they want and then give them something entirely unsolicited of the same quality and size, free? It makes zero sense.”
“The apple,” she taps the charm my mother gave me, “doesn’t fall far from the tree then, now, does it?”
I yank my arm back, turning away from her as goosebumps prickle my skin.
A loud crack sounds through the darkening sky and the clouds split above us.
“Perhaps a lemon won’t fall at all. Maybe it needs to be plucked.”
I whip around to face her, my body zinging with electricity and, quite frankly, the heebie-jeebies at the fact she knows my name. Who even is this woman? A friend of my father’s? I recall the tarot cards at the edge of her display. A psychic?
But I’m stumped when I find nothing more than an empty booth where the odd woman was once standing, the only evidence of her existence, a box of charms under a sign that reads Free to a good home.
Every last one of them.
What the hell?
I stand in the square, turning on my wheels as I search for the wild woman who just ripped me the fuck off and knew far too much about me for comfort, but she’s gone.
Aside from the charms, it’s if she was never there in the first place, and I’m left to my own, stunned, drenched, and fiddling with two new charms.
A black dog.
And a silver fox.