NORTH HOLLYWOOD
Air is a soup. It’s how planes can swim through the sky. With Charlotte in the house now the soup of the air had thickened almost to jelly.
Polly and her dad still trained in the morning. But it was different now. Charlotte watched them. Polly could feel her eyes. Polly’s punches missed more and her chokes weren’t as tight.
Ruined.
He made a bed for himself on the couch so Charlotte could take his room. A dumb lie told for nobody. Polly could feel unsaid things in every word between the two of them. A language she almost understood, but didn’t quite.
Charlotte kept her distance from Polly. She smiled those big dumb smiles adults used on kids when they didn’t know how to act around them. Her voice too loud like little ears couldn’t hear as good.
At night there were no more hunts. They ate takeout dinners. They had the money from Tiny Tim’s backpack, enough to last them months easy.
“But it’s not about money,” Polly said on the second huntless night, as Charlotte spent the forever she always spent in the shower. “It’s about making them quit, you said.”
“It’s time to change plans,” he said.
“Because of her.”
“No,” he said. “’Cause of Chinatown.”
“I won’t do it again. I promised already. I said I was sorry.”
He looked at her that old way, that I’m grown-up and you’re not way that made her want to scream.
“It’s time to change tactics,” he said. “Way back at the beginning, you said if Crazy Craig was the president of Aryan Steel and he was the one who wanted us dead, we should just make him not be president anymore. Remember?”
“I guess.”
“Well, you were right and I was wrong. We can’t keep trying to bleed them out with little cuts. I can’t have you in the line of fire anymore.”
“I want—”
“I can’t have it,” he said with eyes like do not push it.
“So what then?” Polly asked. “Time to go to Perdido?”
“I don’t even know if Perdido is real,” he said. “Could be just a dream.”
“We can find out,” she said.
“There’s someplace I’m going,” he said. “Someplace you can’t go.”
“You promised,” Polly said. “You promised we’d stick together.”
“Where I’m going is just a bar,” her dad said. “No kids allowed. That’s all.”
“So I won’t go inside. I’ll hide under a blanket.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Because you promised. You promised we were a team.”
For a long time there wasn’t anything between them but the shower’s white noise and thick, thick air.
“Yeah,” he said. “I promised.”
And she knew he meant it but she also knew there was something else, some other deeper lie beneath it.