The Bar Code Tattoo (5 page)

Red police globes lit the street below Kayla’s bedroom. She sat in the window of the dark room, not wanting to attract any attention. All the lights were on next door and she could see the police ransacking the rooms. In front, Gene’s two roommates were led out in handcuffs.

She pictured Gene, his nervous blink, the unstable way he’d shouted at his dog, his Chinese cigarettes. He was definitely tightly wrapped … but there had also been something she liked about him, something friendly. What had spun him over the edge?

Turning from the window, she went to her bed and wrapped herself tightly in her quilt. The red lights still swirled around her dark room.

Trembling, Kayla began to cry. She sobbed for the loss of her father, and now for Gene. Her tears were filled with loneliness, frustration, and fear. It felt like they might never stop.

A week later, Kayla climbed the metal stairs to the second floor of the Route Nine Motor Inn where Amber and her parents were now living. Amber stepped out onto the metal walkway in
front of her room. “Hey,” she said with a weak smile when she saw Kayla.

“Hey,” Kayla returned the greeting. They leaned their arms against the railing and watched the traffic pass. It was almost night, with the last bit of lavender light streaking across the dark sky.

“How did it go?” Amber asked.

“Nothing,” Kayla reported. She had been on a job search that day. Her mother had lost her position at the hospital two weeks ago — the same day as Kayla’s birthday and the shooting. Since then, money had been very tight. It turned out that her parents had no savings. When her mother’s last e-deposit was spent, all their money would be gone.

“Since I don’t have the bar code, I’m crashed,” she told Amber. “No one wants to even talk to me if they can’t do an ID check.”

“Just get the stupid tattoo,” Amber advised.

“How can you say that after everything that’s happened to you and your family? Your parents’ bar codes have something so banged out in them that even hotels won’t take you guys!”

“Tell me about it!” Amber laughed scornfully. “This place is such a dump they don’t even
have
a scanner. That’s the only reason they let us in. My parents paid with Mom’s mink. Next week her Rolex platinum watch is going. It’s costing us thousands to stay in the creepiest hole in town.”

“Don’t you want to know why this is happen
ing?” Kayla asked. “Obviously it has something to do with the bar code.”

“Of course I want to know!” Amber exploded. “Do you think I like this? Dad has called everyone to try to find out why his bar code is such a bust. And guess what now.”

“What?”

“He’s probably going to lose his job. A guy at work passed him the word.”

“That’s horrible! What will you do then?”

Amber jerked her head toward her father’s Jaguar and her mother’s SUV parked down in the lot. “Everything we own except our furniture is jammed into those cars. I guess we can keep trading it until the stuff runs out. My cousin invited us to come stay with her, but no one wants to go. She’s a member of some new religion that doesn’t believe in fun.”

“No fun?” Kayla asked.

Amber nodded. “No music, no makeup, no downloaded programming, even.”

“You’re kidding,” Kayla said.

“I wish I was kidding.” They watched more cars go by before talking again. “But, you know, Kayla, some people are doing great with the tattoo. You might be one of them. I just read a thing in the paper today. They’re talking about bringing in kids over seventeen if they see them out at night without a bar code. They charge you for not having proper ID.”

“They keep saying they’re
going
to do that, but they don’t really do it,” Kayla disagreed. “They can’t. There’s no law that says you have to get a bar code. It would be illegal for them to just haul you in.”

“Kayla, I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn about this,” Amber cried. “You
need
the ’too. Face it!”

“The shooting at the post office — it was like … like a warning,” she argued.

“It was just a freaky thing that happened!” Amber said. “Lucky for us that you left when you did. We were standing right by that window. We might be dead right now, if you hadn’t taken off. But we’re not. We’re alive, and being alive means you need a bar code.”

“Why did Gene Drake get all banged out over the bar code? Why did he say the people in line would be better off dead?” Kayla challenged.

“I don’t know! Because he was crazy!”

“But maybe he knew something about the bar code that
drove
him crazy. Like … like … my dad.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say your dad was crazy. That wasn’t what I meant.”

Kayla looked away from Amber. “It’s okay. I suppose it’s possible that he was mentally ill. He did kill himself, after all. And I think my Grandma Cathy died in some kind of mental ward. No one talks about it.”

“Would your mother know about it?” Amber asked.

“She might,” Kayla admitted. “But lately she’s either drunk or tranquilized or both. It’s hard to talk to her.”

Angry shouting erupted from inside the hotel room. “We are not living with that old freak!” Mrs. Thorn shouted.

“Fine, maybe you’d rather starve,” Mr. Thorn yelled back. “Jake told me my job is on the line.”

“You’re not losing your job. You’re getting paranoid!” Mrs. Thorn replied. A door slammed and there was silence. Then they could hear the sound of Mrs. Thorn sobbing.

“They fight all the time now,” Amber told her. “God, I hope we don’t have to go stay with my cousin Emily. She’s from the planet Bizarre. Besides that, she lives in Nevada.”

Kayla locked her hand around Amber’s wrist. “Nevada! That’s too far away. I’ll never see you again. No, you can’t go. You could live with me.”

“What would your mother have to say about that?” Amber asked.

“My mother wouldn’t even notice that you were there!” Kayla assured her with scornful laughter. “Half the time she doesn’t know
I’m
there.”

“That’s too bad,” Amber said softly, “because I always liked your mother. I thought she was nice, you know.”

Mrs. Thorn came out onto the walkway, her
eyes red-rimmed. “Amber, your father and I need to speak to you about something.” She noticed Kayla and nodded. “Sorry, family emergency.”

Kayla once again job hunted on the way home from school the next day. No one seemed too enthused about employing a girl without a bar code.

“It’s not just the bar code itself,” the manager of a diner told her in a smooth, confident tone. “It’s what it represents, what it tells us about the kind of person you are.”

“Obedient, compliant,” Kayla offered. She meant to be sarcastic, but her irony was obviously lost on the manager, who smiled and nodded.

“Exactly,” the woman agreed. “A get-along kind of team player — that’s the kind of gal we’re looking for. Come back and see us when you get your tattoo.”

While sitting on the bulletbus, heading home, Kayla thought of one more place where she could apply for work. She got off the bulletbus at a stop in front of Artie’s Art, a scruffy store where she usually bought her art supplies, and went inside. “What can I do for you, kiddo?” asked a skinny man with a shaved head.

“Could you use some extra help, Artie?” she asked. “I need a job and you know I’m here all the time, anyway, so you’d barely have to train me.”

“Got a ’too I could scan?” he asked.

Her heartbeat sped up, but she fought to seem casual. “No — I don’t believe in them.”

He stared hard at her for a long moment. “I’ll give you eighteen an hour.”

“That’s minimum wage!” she objected.

“It
would have been
minimum wage if they hadn’t done away with it last year,” Artie corrected her. “And one
reason
they did away with it was so small-business types like me could hire teenagers like you — ones without bar codes — for cheap. Twenty-two dollars an hour, but you have to go outside and hand out flyers when we’re slow.”

Kayla stretched her arm across the counter to shake. “Deal!” she agreed excitedly. As they shook, she saw that he didn’t have a bar code, either.

Kayla calculated her earnings all the way home. Though it wouldn’t be much, it meant she and her mother could eat.

At her front door she took out her keys, but the door swung open when she touched it. They always locked the doors when they came and went. Something was wrong.

Cautiously, she stepped into the front entryway to the living room. Some kind of motor was running. No. Snoring. It was snoring.

Following the sound, she found her mother passed out on the sofa, her left arm dangling off the side. Her bar-coded wrist had been rubbed
raw. A nearly empty bottle of vodka sat on the low table beside the couch.

Kayla dropped into the easy chair across from the couch. At least the snoring told Kayla her mother hadn’t overdosed on Propeace and vodka. Not yet, anyway.

“Hey, Mom, I got a job,” she spoke bitterly to the sleeping figure. “Isn’t that great! Yeah. I knew you’d be excited.”

Entering the kitchen, she found an egg in the refrigerator and scrambled it. There was no bread for toast. Fortunately, a box of saltines had been pushed to the back of a cabinet and been overlooked. Saltines and eggs — egg, actually — wasn’t a bad dinner. As she ate, she surveyed the messy kitchen and considered cleaning it.

The phone rang. “Hello?”

On the other end, someone emitted an anguished sob.

“Amber? Is that you? Amber? What’s wrong?”

The Thorns were stuffing the last of their belongings into the SUV when Kayla got there. Amber ran to meet her as she walked from the bulletbus stop into the parking lot. “Dad got fired. We’re leaving!”

“Did you ask if you could come live with me?” Kayla asked.

Amber nodded tearfully. “I asked but they said no. Like, really no. My mother’s not speaking to me. She’s mad that I even asked. I know it hurt her feelings but I can’t stand this. I can’t leave you and school and all.”

“I got a job today,” Kayla told her.

Amber wiped her eyes. “That’s great.”

“Maybe we could find a place together. I mean, I’d have to give my mother some money, but we could find some little dump down by the river. We’d be okay.”

Amber pressed her forehead on Kayla’s shoulder as sobs shook her body. “I have to go with them,” she spoke through her tears. “They need me or they’re not going anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

Amber held out her wrist. “This is the only bar code that works at the gas pump.”

“Are you kidding?” Kayla cried. “Don’t they have e-cards?”

“They didn’t work when they tried them,” Amber replied. “My code works, though. Dad had his last e-deposit sent into my account. Mom dumped all her accounts into it, too.” She laughed miserably. “Hey, they’d better be nice to me. I have all their money.”

“This is so banged out!”

“You don’t even know! You haven’t met my cousin Emily.” Amber spoke in gasps. “She belongs to this really strict religious group. It will be so horrible.”

Kayla remembered Nedra’s piece in
KnotU2
. “Some people think the bar code is the mark of the devil. Does she have one?”

Amber looked up at her. “Oh, she’s got one. And it works just fine. I guess her beliefs don’t include worrying about that.”

Mrs. Thorn stood by the SUV. She was crying just as hard as Amber. Mr. Thorn washed the windshield of his Jaguar, his face a blank.

“
I’ll
ask if you can stay,” Kayla pleaded.

Amber wiped her tears with her sleeve as she shook her head. “Don’t bother. They’ll just tell you we’re a family and we have to stick together.”

Kayla rubbed Amber’s back. “It’ll be okay.” She didn’t know if it would be okay or not. Somehow she doubted it, but what else was there to say?

Both of the Thorns’ cars started up at once. “Amber, come on,” her dad called.

Amber threw her arms around Kayla and squeezed tight. “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening,” she murmured.

“Amber!” her father shouted again, this time with an edge of annoyance in his voice.

Amber let go and her face was soaked and red. Her nose and eyes were swollen from crying.

“Send me your new web address. I’ll e-mail you all the time,” Kayla promised.

Amber nodded, then ran across the parking lot and climbed into the front seat of her father’s car. Kayla waved as the cars pulled out.

It would be a long drive to Nevada. Kayla had never been west. Amber might as well be relocating to the station on the moon.

When they were out of sight, Kayla stood another moment, feeling a hole rip open inside her. This afternoon she’d had a best friend. And now Amber was gone.

How had all this happened to them? The Thorns’ lives were ruined. Her own family’s, too. Her father dead, her mother completely messed up. She’d gone from having a family to feeling completely alone in the world.

This awful loneliness was new to her. At first she didn’t even recognize it for what it was. She only knew it as a gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach. As she stood there, though, the ache transformed
into an overwhelming fear, the feeling that she was vulnerable to some unknown danger and there was no one to help her. She had no one to turn to and she wasn’t enough on her own, wasn’t strong or smart enough for all the challenges.

Although she was on a busy roadway, Kayla felt completely alone. It was the last thing she wanted to feel. She needed to be around people, even if they weren’t people who cared about her. But where?

A car pulled up to the light on the road behind her. Loud rock music blasted from inside. As the light changed and they drove off, she saw them veer up a side road going toward the warehouse district down by the river, near the nuclear reactors, where the hottest clubs in the area were.

The city bulletbus pulled to its stop half a block away. On impulse, she dashed for it, using her school pass to pay the fare. Fifteen minutes later, she got off at the GlobalTrac station down by the river.

She began walking along the river, which was turning orange in the setting sun. It wound down to the warehouse district.

Geese flew overhead, returning for the spring. The old song her mother had been singing came into her head, the part about not knowing where her soul was.

What was a soul, anyway? People talked about the soul all the time, but she had no idea what they meant.

It was almost dark by the time she reached the warehouse district. The lights of the nuclear reactors illuminated the whole area, but the warehouses below them didn’t emit any light. They were mostly windowless and had no identifying signs. You had to know where you were going in order to get there.

Kids at school said that the warehouses contained clubs that ran all night, even though the local law said clubs had to shut down at twelve. There were rumors about guns and the newest drugs being available down here. She wasn’t looking for trouble, though — just to be around people.

She’d heard of one club called Lobo2MeClub. Kids at school went there because there was supposedly no bar code check at the door. It was easy to get in if you were under seventeen and could make yourself look old enough.

With no idea where the club was, Kayla moved through the dark pathways winding through the square brick buildings. Occasionally, a door opened and someone swung out, an explosion of blasting rock music hitting the street for a moment and then shutting down as the door closed again.

Kayla intended to ask for directions but the people all exited too quickly into waiting cabs or cars. She kept walking until she reached a very dark end of the cement pathway. Even the lights from the reactors didn’t shine here.

Another cluster of dark warehouses was just ahead. As she walked, she became aware of footsteps behind her. Glancing behind, she saw a male figure in a dark jacket.

She quickened her pace.

He began walking faster, too.

She didn’t want him to know she was scared, but she could sense the distance between them closing. Her legs began to run, seemingly without waiting for her mental command.

He ran, too. His footsteps pounded behind her. If she screamed, there was no one there to hear.

In seconds he’d be upon her.