So much about Las Vegas feels like an illusion. Or maybe it’s just a real-life study in perspective. Whatever. I rode and I rode and I rode and was really relieved to finally get past the big pyramid. But then it was another forever of riding to get to the Mandalay Bay walkway, and then another endless ride past huge waterfalls and little lakes and palm trees galore to get to the actual entrance.
Anyway, what I find inside is a resort like the MGM Grand, only grander. And golder. Definitely not meant for a ragamuffin girl and her skateboard.
Still, I try to walk like I do belong and know exactly where I’m going as I make my way through the Hundred-Acre Lobby. And I figure if this place is anything like the MGM, the thing to do is get to the casino, where there’ll be handy-dandy signs hanging overhead telling me which way to go to get to the House of Blues.
The trouble with acting like you know where you’re going is that it requires speed. You don’t meander if you know where you’re going. You don’t wander or saunter or, you know, dawdle. But walking like you know where you’re going when you don’t can be really embarrassing if you wind up at a dead end and have to make a U-turn. I mean, you still have to act like you went that way on purpose, when anyone watching knows you’re completely lost in a maze of slot machines and poker tables.
But part of the reason I keep having to make U-turns is that there are no signs for the House of Blues. Anywhere! Plus I don’t know what the House of Blues looks like. I’d heard it’s a music place. And I figure it’s in the shape of a house and that there’ll be, you know, blueness involved. So when I finally find it, I’m like, Really? I mean, the only way I can tell it’s the House of Blues is that there’s a flaming red heart above the entrance with HOUSE OF BLUES over it. Which, trust me, should say HOUSE OF MUD instead.
Seriously, the place looks like a big mud cave with a gazillion chunks of … stuff embedded in the walls. Colored glass, pieces of metal, smooth stones, little masks … It’s the weirdest place I’ve ever seen, and there’s absolutely nothing blue about it.
Anyway, I guess I’m gawking because a guy with gauges in his ears and full-sleeve tattoos grins at me as he heads inside. “Cool, huh?”
What’s funny is, I’m actually relieved to see a scary-looking guy with gauges and tattoos ’cause he’s the first person I’ve seen in the resort who looks like he doesn’t belong there, either. So I nod and say, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Outsider art,” he tells me, then gives me one of those cool-guy head jerks that means “See ya” and cruises inside.
I step forward a few feet, but what I see is not a music place, it’s a restaurant. One that looks like it’s been plucked out of a bayou. It’s got a huge tree in the middle of the room, lots of strings of lights, and a whole swampy vibe.
So if the House of Blues is a swampy restaurant inside a mud cave … why would there be a box office?
A waitress with an empty drink tray sees me gawking and calls over, “May I help you?”
“Is there a box office?” I ask her.
She points back out and to my left. “Just around the corner.”
“So you’re a restaurant and … what?”
“A concert hall?” she says, like she’s not sure I could really be asking such an obvious question. Then she adds, “We’re also a gift shop.”
“Oh.” Then real quick I say, “Uh, have you maybe seen”—I dig up my mom’s picture—“this person?”
She comes over and checks out the picture. “No,” she says, shaking her head.
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“When did your shift start?”
“At three.”
So since I can’t think of anything else to ask, I just tell her thanks and head around the corner the way she’d pointed.
I don’t see any box office, but I do see the gift shop. It’s another big cave entrance with weird art all over it, and when I go inside, I see it’s full of House of Blues T-shirts and rock ’n’ roll groupie stuff.
Well, Lady Lana wouldn’t be caught dead in here, but the guy behind the register isn’t busy, so I go up and show him her pictures anyway.
“Don’t remember her,” he says.
So I ask him, “Where’s the box office?” and he points back out the door and says, “Just around the corner.”
So I go back out and keep going, and sure enough, there’s a box office.
The first thing I notice is that there’s no Elvis hanging around.
The second thing I notice is the marquee. It lists six dates, and next to February 14 is DARREN COLE—SOLD OUT.
Just like that, I feel miserable. I mean, talk about whiplash karma. I’m standing at the place where Darren Cole—the guy who wrote Casey’s and my song—is playing on Valentine’s Day?
And like someone going, Tisk-tisk-tisk! right in front of me is a picture of ol’ Darren with his arms crossed, looking tough in front of his band of Troublemakers.
Suddenly all I want to do is call Casey. So I go up to the box office and ask the guy inside, “Is there a pay phone nearby?”
“Right around the corner,” he says, pointing.
So I continue going “right around the corner” but all I see are escalators next to a mini food court. So I keep going and what I find as I enter the mini food court is not a pay phone.
It’s also not Elvis.
It’s the Queen of the Ditch.
The Mama Witch.
The one and only Candi Acosta.
Now, back in Santa Martina I’d have thrown myself in reverse and gotten out of there quick. But here all I can think about is how I’ve been ditched in Sin City by this woman, and for some reason that thought changes everything.
She’s not scary anymore.
She’s pathetic.
Well, she’s also a liar and a sneak and a thief and a coward, but what that adds up to is pathetic. Plus, she’s not looking very scary. She’s sitting in a bistro chair with her shoes off, her hands wrapped around a paper coffee cup, and her eyes closed.
I look around for Heather, and when I don’t see her anywhere, I sneak up to Candi’s table, slip into the chair across from her, lean forward so my face is pretty close to hers, and thump my skateboard on the ground hard to wake her up.
Her eyes fly open, her cup knocks over, and all of a sudden she’s face to face with me. “Aaaah!” she cries, and practically falls backward trying to get away from me.
“You must be so proud,” I tell her, “ditching a thirteen-year-old.”
If this had been Heather, she would have called me a name and made some snide remark. Or jabbed me with a pin. And since Candi seems like she’s just a grown-up version of Heather, I’m expecting her to do something similar.
So I about fall out of my chair when her face crinkles up and she says, “Oh, Sammy! I’m so relieved to see you! I’ve been feeling terrible! I can’t believe … I can’t believe any of this!”
I just sit there sort of mentally shaking out my ears, and finally I squint and say, “She would have killed me, you know.”
“She knew you would move!” Even to her this sounds totally lame, so right away she covers her face and says, “I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.” She drops her hands. “And then I just left you behind! How could I do that? Why do I listen to her?” She shakes her head hard and fast. “I can’t control her anymore! She’s … she’s … I don’t know what to do!”
I lean back a little and snort. “Boy. I know how you feel.”
Then she surprises me again by saying, “I want to know the story of the pin. All I can get out of her is that you’re a liar.” She searches my face. “But if you’re lying, her reaction doesn’t make sense!” She shakes her head. “But her jabbing you doesn’t make sense, either! Why would she do that?”
I study her a minute, then say, “I think it had to do with Marissa and me interrupting a conversation she was having with an eighth-grade boy named Taylor.”
“She jabbed you for interrupting a conversation?”
“It was the first day of seventh grade and Marissa and I were lost, so we went up and asked them where our homeroom was. Heather snubbed us, but Taylor was friendly and helped us out.”
She frowns a little. “Damsels in distress.”
“We didn’t think so, but I think she did, because later in homeroom she started sneering at me and making fun of me, and the teacher embarrassed her in front of the class … which she probably blamed on me. So she came up to Marissa and me at lunch and asked for lunch money—”
“But she has her own lunch money!”
“I’m just telling you what happened. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to, but you asked. And she probably only asked for money because Marissa’s family used to be rich and—”
“Used to be?”
I shake my head. “Long story. But bottom line, Heather asked for money, and when we turned her down, she jabbed me with a pin—which really hurt, by the way—so I punched her in the nose.” I let out a puffy-cheeked sigh. “And that’s how it all started.”
She takes a super deep breath, then shakes her head, saying, “Cute, rich damsels in distress.”
“I’m not rich!”
Her eyebrows go flying. “You’ll pay fifty dollars for a tip without blinking an eye?”
“No! I—”
“It’s okay,” she says, putting up a hand. “It’s just that it’s been a struggle for us, you know? Heather’s very … resentful of people who are in a better position than we are.”
“But I—”
“She’s also very style-conscious, which is expensive, but I think it’s important for a girl to … to develop confidence.” She eyes me. “Obviously you already have that.”
My eyes go a little buggy. “Because of how I dress?”
She gives me a sort of sad smile. “Everything about you says confidence.” She looks at me eye to eye for the longest time until finally she says, “But you’re not at all what I expected.”
“Neither are you,” I tell her, and at that moment it’s true—never in a million years did I think I’d have a conversation like this with Candi Acosta. Then I look around and ask, “Where is Heather, anyway?”
She tosses a hand in the air. “Searching for her father. I just let her go.” She sighs. “You’ve got to be able to admit when it’s over.”
I study her. “But it’s not over. What I said before about you and him is true, isn’t it?”
She looks at me. Looks down. Looks at me. Looks down.
“Why can’t you admit it?”
Her face crinkles up and she blurts out, “Yes, I still love him.” Then right away she covers her face. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“So he doesn’t know?”
“He thinks I hate him. And I thought I did! I don’t know … everything just … escalated.”
“Into a divorce?”
“Yes!”
“But you don’t want to be divorced?”
“No! I wish we could just … erase all the hurt. I wish we could find a way.…”
She just trails off, so I finally ask, “Is there any chance he still loves you?”
“With your mother in the picture?” Her eyes spring full of tears. “I don’t have a chance.”
“But he did love you at some point. And you have two kids together?”
She blots away a tear and shakes her head like there’s no way things could ever go back to that.
“Look,” I tell her. “You probably think I’m talking about this because I don’t want him to marry my mom, but …”
“But what?”
I let out a big sigh. “I went clear up to Circus Circus and clear back down here. It was a long way to ride, but it gave me a long time to think about your family, about my family … about everything.” I kind of tilt my head and ask, “When you split up, how did Heather wind up living with you, and Casey with Warren?”
“That’s just how we divided things.”
I stare at her ’cause it sounds like she’s talking about property.
She must have thought so, too, because she hurries to say, “That sounds terrible, I know, but the kids weren’t getting along, either.” She shrugs. “It just made sense.”
I let this sink in for a minute, then ask, “Have you seen that picture Heather has on her phone?” I quickly add, “The one of her and her dad?” because I know of some pictures on Heather’s phone that no mother would want to see.
She shakes her head. “She won’t let me touch her phone.”
“Well, you need to see that picture for this to make sense, but what I came up with on my ride over here is that maybe Heather felt like her dad chose Casey over her.”
“What?”
“Maybe it made her mad and then insecure. Especially about guys choosing someone else over her. Which is why she got so bent out of shape about Taylor that first day of school.”
“But … Warren didn’t choose Casey—we thought it was better for a boy to be with his dad and a girl to be with her mom!”
“But I don’t think that’s how Heather feels about it. Or felt about it. She was ten, right? Something like that?”
“Eleven.”
“So maybe it made sense to split your kids up like that, but it hurts to feel left behind.”
For some reason saying this puts a lump in my throat. And what I should have done was not say anything else, but all of a sudden it’s like I need to say it. “It really hurts,” I tell her, and this time tears are stinging my eyes.
“But she wasn’t left behind! Warren’s been … involved. And I’ve worked really hard to give her a good home!”
“Look, Heather acts tough, but maybe that’s because she’s hurt. Someone, something, the situation came between her and Warren and maybe that’s what she hates, but since there’s nothing she can do about it, she takes it out on other people.”
The more I talk about this, the more my throat closes up, and I know I should just stop talking. But deep down inside it feels like I’m gasping for air—like my heart is gasping for air—and that the only way I’ll be able to breathe again is to finish what I’m trying to say. So I choke out, “I know it hurts, ’cause my mother chose being a movie star over being my mom. It’s not the same thing, but now that Warren’s moved down to L.A., it’s close, and it makes you feel unwanted and unloved and … and … abandoned.”
And there I am, crying in front of Candi Acosta.
Candi Acosta!
“But … what about your dad?” she asks, reaching for my hand. “Doesn’t he make you feel wanted and secure?”
And I don’t know—maybe it was the stress from the whole trip to Las Vegas. But at this point I’m completely exhausted and hysterical, and she’s holding my hand, and before I know what I’m saying, I blurt out, “I don’t even know who he is!”
Her jaw drops. “You …”
And just then Heather swoops in with “What the hell is going on?” And let me tell you, her eyes are on fire.
I yank back my hand and try to hide the fact that I’ve been crying. “Nothing,” I tell her. Then I pick up my skateboard and whisper to Candi, “Find him and tell him how you feel.”
Candi just stares, but Heather chases after me. “What was that about? Hey! Where are you going?”
“What do you care?” I grumble.
She follows me, demanding, “What were you saying to my mother?”
“We were discussing traffic laws and what kind of jail time you’d serve for running down kids in the road.” I pick up the pace because I’m panicked over what I’ve just told Candi. Besides the whole well-who-does-she-live-with? problem, once Candi told Heather what I’d said, things would get brutal at school. Talk about giving your archenemy an arsenal of ammo! What kind of an idiot was I?
But as much as I want to get away from her, Heather stays on my tail. “What did you really tell her?” she demands, and when I don’t say anything, she grabs my arm and shouts, “Tell me!”
I yank my arm away and keep walking, but then it hits me that she’s worried. Worried that I might have told her mother all sorts of things. Not just about what she’s done to me, but about things like her circulating racy pictures of herself with older guys. Or the fact that she smokes. Or about what really happened to her cell phone that disappeared. Or … wow, there were so many things!
And I’m actually thinking that maybe I could find some way to put Heather in the hot seat …
But then we turn the corner.