Althea Parker Stories pt. 6

Tuesday and The Knife pt. 2 (Age 15)

I’m in a room made of liquid. I can dip my fingers into the walls. Coat them with rich blues and greens. Pinks and yellows, so bright that they blast your brain like a gunshot wound to the head.

The floor is like a disco ball flattened out and lit from underneath. If I push my face against the wall I’ll be coated in paint. I’ll drink it and drink it until my insides are covered and I’m not ugly anymore. Until I’m pure and beautiful and all the black, rotting bits inside me are covered in something lovely.

I’m 15 and tomorrow I’m going to kill a man. 

The paint spatters all over my jeans, my black tank top. My skin is flecked in rainbows.

I look like a phoenix. 

My hair is getting stiff from the paint, hanging in multicolor clumps around my face. I take my royal blue hand and press it against the floor, hard.

I was here I am here I belong here I am. Proof of life. Proof of existence. A teenage hand in impossible paint.

I leave the room once I’m nothing but a technicolor nightmare, blotches of bright color covering me from head to toe. I take off my ruined sneakers and toss them down the garbage chute. Odds are they’ll end up in my room anyway. They do that. 

If they don’t Mr. Pinch will be pissed. 

Tuesday and the Knife are coming down the hallway. Usually around them I feel awkward and slow and stupid, with their sleek style and their model perfect faces and the way they smile when I’ve said something clever. 

But I’m covered in an armor of rainbows and tomorrow I will become death, destroyer of someone’s world. I feel free and light and the Nine sings around me in anticipation.

‘You look a disaster,’ she says in admiration. A touch of envy. Like she’d give up her all black ensemble and her ice cool attitude to be covered in a mess of colors. I smile and spin around in a slow circle.

‘It works for you,’ her brother says with a grin. Eyes on me in a way that I’ve seen directed at other people, but never me. Oh gee. ‘Let me walk you to your room.’

As we walk, he tells me how he and his sister hotwired a car outside the restaurant down the street. How they took the ice blue BMW for a joyride through the city to all the dirty dark disgusting places. 

They left the car in a river.

He says I should come next time. We could get ice cream and see a movie and maybe do some pickpocketing.

We’ve been practicing when they hold events in the ballroom, but if anyone finds out we’ll be in deep shit.

It’s nice that he asks, but he knows I won’t. Asks me less and less often these days. He’ll stop soon, start to and stop himself. 

‘Maybe next time,’ I say like I always do. He might step outside into a hideously beautiful city with sex workers and scumbags, murders and martyrs, buildings that touch the sky and sewers filled with bodies and filth, but I won’t.

The only thing outside the Nine for me is a desert. It stretches out to eternity in every direction. There are some dead trees etched into the landscape.

And the bodies. All dead, all in various stages of decay, all on fire. Blackened and rotting and burning and searing and some days I seriously consider becoming a vegetarian. The smell hangs thick in the air, so thick you can almost see it.

Another thing you can’t see that’s real.

That’s what I’ll find outside. 

But if I say stuff like that around Tuesday and the Knife, they start exchanging looks like books like a couple of crooks. The looks adults still give me if I talk too much, the looks I got all the time as a kid for being weird wrong strange sad lost left out abandoned aborted. 

And the voices in my head start to get loud, so loud that I can’t hear people talking to me and they’re all shouting at once telling me to do things see things be things and I cover my ears and close my eyes and sob until the voices fade and all that’s left is a ringing in my ears and a headache from crying.

So I make sure not to say shit like that around them. Around anyone, although most of the time I think Mr. Valentine knows and is just too polite to say anything. 

I make a version of myself like a paper doll, cutting away the bits that no one likes and that I fucking loathe.

I’ve learned I’m very good at becoming other people. 

We make it to my door. I turn to him.

‘Thanks,’ I say. For what? For walking me to my fucking room? He gives a small shake of his head.

‘You’re welcome.’ 

We stand there, the air heavy and strange and awkward and I can taste change in the air and I lean into it, eager for my life to begin.

His lips are soft and smooth, like he scrubs them with sea salt every night. I imagine him on silk sheets, even though I know he uses the same scratchy hotel sheets that I do.

I kiss him back, my mind a total blank. No thoughts no fears no confusion no quiet ache in the chest. Just his mouth moving against mine, using his hand to tilt my head, to guide me. Lips coaxing mine open. His tongue touches mine, once, a tease or a promise.

I pull back and he’s smiling. He has a nice smile. There’s paint on his lips, mint green and baby blue and blood red. I take my thumb to swipe away the mess, but only manage to make it worse.

He laughs and kisses me again. My second. This one is slower, more intense, and I end up with my back against my door and his hands around my waist. My arms are thrown around his neck and when the fuck did that happen.

When we break apart, breathing hard, it’s only because we hear the elevator.

His mouth is a Jackson Pollock. 

‘Your sister will know,’ I say. Stupid stupid stupid what a stupid thing to say. I’m drunk on hormones and anticipation. 

He laughs, and there’s a hint of teasing in it, but I don’t mind. His hands are moving in slow circles around my hips and it’s very distracting.

‘She knows I was planning this,’ he says. I want to ask when he started planning. I want to ask him why he likes me. What he sees worth liking. Do you see a person or a thing do you see the way the walls bleed and the sky goes black with dying birds do you see the truth or something better?

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘I think she’s jealous,’ he says.

‘Oh,’ I say again. I don’t ask of who, or why. 

I need to watch more teen comedies. Coming of age shit. Take some notes.

‘Good luck tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I know you’ll do great.’ He pauses, looks down the hallway. A woman in a long cloak opens the room two doors down. She’s followed by a man with a tremendous hunch on his back lugging a pile of luggage.

‘Thanks,’ I say. The Nine pushes at my back. Go. Do it. Don’t be scared.

Is it me or the Nine talking? Does it matter.

‘You wouldn’t want to hang out the day after, would you?’ I ask. ‘We could go explore the room with the tunnels some more. I got more markers.’

He smiles, and my heart sings and my cheeks flush and Kid Althea would be horrified by what a fucking sap I’m being.

But I’m happy. It’s fragile and unexpected, a gift I want to give him in return.

‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’ll bring some weed. We might as well be high in case we die.’

He’s still smiling, so I kiss him again, a bit more confident but still scared shitless. He kisses me back but it’s harder because he’s still smiling.

‘See you then,’ he says. Ambles down the hallway on long skinny legs with his hands in his pockets and a psychedelic stain across his face.

I go into my room, lock the door, and throw myself onto my bed. I look at the ceiling and my face aches from smiling.

Tomorrow a man is going to check in. He’ll be short and fat with a handsome face and a charming personality. Walks with a cane he doesn’t need. Rolls his ‘r’s.

I’ll follow this man from the lobby. Watch him check in. Track him when he goes to dinner. Sit at the table beside him. He’ll have fancy clothes, a suit with a tail, but it’s shabby and frayed at the edges. He’ll order steak which is smart considering our kitchen, and stew which is not. He’ll drink while he eats, two gin and tonics followed by hot coffee and a piece of the Sister’s questionable cherry pie.

We never have any cherries in the kitchen. 

I’ll slip away when the pie comes to the table. I don’t want to watch him eat it anyway. 

I’ll pick the lock to his room just like Mr. Malick taught me. Lock the door behind me. Case the joint, like Mr. Bishop says in his terrible fake American accent. Take care of any weapons. Set the scene.

I’ll be in the closet when he gets home. Wait until he’s in bed, comfortable and safe. The minute the lights go out, I’ll move. 

I’ll have a syringe. Filled with my very own special concoction. Extremely painful. Feels like that eats you from the inside. Goes in the bloodstream and tears at you until you’re writhing and gasping. 

Of course, he won’t be able to scream because his throat will be closed.

I’ll stand by his bed like an avenging angel like every mistake come to call like the worst nightmare he never dreamt of.

The Proprietor told me he’s a very bad man. That I need to eliminate him. 

Eliminate. I love that word, like satin on the tongue. 

The first shot paralyzes. The second shot hurts. The third shot kills. Slowly. There’s a lot of time for the second shot to work.

The Proprietor didn’t tell me everything, but he told me enough. 

This is someone with debts. 

There will be a creature crouched in the corner of the room. Black like ink like sleep like death skinny and too tall, squatting low on clawed feet. Forked pink tongue tasting the air like a snake. 

The creature will leave no marks, it’s assured me. What it has to feed on can’t be seen by the eye.

Lots of things can’t be seen with the eye. Fourth of July shoo fly did I die. Love and air waves and some deadly gasses.

He’ll promise that it hurts. A lot. 

I’ll watch him feed. The man’s eyes will roll back in his head. His body will seize and twitch and twist like a fish despite the first shot.

I’ll have to remember to tinker with the levels. 

I’ll watch him die. He won’t be the first person I’ve seen die, not by a long shot. But he’ll be the first person I chose to destroy. The first life I chose to end. The first time I, Miss Althea Parker, make a mark into this miserable dirty shithole of a world. 

I will change things. I will end things. 

There will be an absence because of me.

Of course, they’ll say it’s a stroke.

Stroke of genius, maybe.

And I’ll get paid, because it’s a real job. And I’ll be on the books.

The Alchemist.

Tomorrow I will be a killer. And I’ll be that way for the rest of my life.

But for now I’m just another teenage girl, lying in bed with an idiot grin staring at the pale green glowing stars on her ceiling.