The Painted Boy (4 page)

“We have this, um, superstition in my family,” he finally said. “About blue trim on doors.”

Anna raised her eyebrows.

“It’s just,” he went on, “we think it’s bad luck to go in unless someone actually invites us in.”

“You’re shitting me. What are you, a vampire?”

“Walking around in the day?”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll give you that. But do you know why so many houses in this part of the country have blue on the windowsills and doors?”

He shook his head.

“It’s to keep out the evil spirits.” She waited a moment, then added, “Are you trying to tell me you’re an evil spirit?”

He laughed. “Hardly. And who says the spirits have to be evil?”

“What would be the point of keeping out good spirits?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“So, are you coming in, or what?”

“Are you inviting me?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come in, come in, already. You’re one weird dude, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told.”

But as soon as she spoke the words, he could cross the invisible barrier. He dropped his knapsack by the door and looked around. The trailer wasn’t much on the outside, but inside it felt bigger than he thought it would and it was tidy. The furniture was all mismatched thrift store finds, but Rosalie obviously had a good eye and managed to bring harmony into what might have been chaos.

“And here come the cats,” Anna said.

Jay turned to see a gray tabby and a slinky black cat coming down a short hall. They stopped when they saw him, hissed, and fled to the room at the far end.

“Good with animals?” Anna asked.

“Not so much with cats, I guess.”

“The shower’s through there,” Anna said, pointing to a door down the narrow hall. “She keeps her spare towels on the shelves behind the door. Use whatever you need.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll go play with the dogs. Unless you need me to invite you into the bathroom before you can use the shower.”

He smiled. “No, I’m good.”

He waited until the door closed behind her before he went into the bedroom. Staying in the doorway, he knelt down on the carpet. The two cats were under the bed. A third, a striped orange-and-white tom, glared at him from the windowsill.

“Okay, tiger brothers,” he said. “Can we have a truce here? I promise not to hurt you or Rosalie. I’m just staying for a couple of days and then I’ll be out of your lives again. What do you say?”

The cat on the sill continued to ignore him, but the gray tabby came out from under the bed. It sat and regarded Jay for a long moment, then began to groom itself. The second one emerged as well and jumped onto the bed. They weren’t friendly, but at least they appeared to be willing to keep the peace while he was here.

“Thanks, guys,” Jay said.

He stood back up and went into the bathroom.

 

 

It felt great to be clean again. He let the water pour down, relaxing under its spray until he started thinking about the gangbangers who’d been chasing him. There were gangs in Chicago. Crips and Bloods, the Latin Kings. The Chinese and Vietnamese kids had their gangs, too. But it wasn’t hard to stay out of their way. Jay had always found it easy to stay off anyone’s radar. Like the little lizards back at La Maravilla’s patio, he just faded into the background. It was only when he spent time with people who didn’t know his secret that they usually got uncomfortable.

But here he seemed to be the focus of everybody’s attention. The gangbangers. Rosalie. Anna.

He turned off the shower and toweled himself dry.

He liked both girls, but the gangbangers worried him. Maybe they were the reason Paupau thought he should be here, but this whole gang business seemed much too big for him to deal with.

“We can’t protect everything,” Paupau told him once, “so we must make our choices count.”

She kept the peace in Chinatown, but it wasn’t through confrontation. He wasn’t entirely sure how she did it.

A finger on a map had brought him here, but now that he was here, he had no idea what to do next. One of Paupau’s proverbs popped into his head:

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back
.

It was sensible advice, except how did you know who’d already gone ahead, and who was to say they would even be coming back?

He sighed and went to get dressed, then realized he’d left his knapsack by the door. He wrapped the towel around his waist and poked his head out to check. Good. Anna was still outside. He went and got the knapsack and was on his way back to the bathroom when the front door suddenly opened. He tried to turn around, but he was too late.

“Are you about done?” Anna was saying as she came in, then her eyes went wide. “Holy crap! That is some serious ink.”

The dragon image took up most of his back, a complex pattern of swirling golds and yellows, the dragon outlined in black: limbs, head, horns, tail. The detail was so intricate that you could almost think you saw each individual scale. The head lay across his shoulder blades with the curling tail disappearing under the towel at the small of his back. It had grown in size as he’d grown, always taking up the same space on his back.

This was the secret he couldn’t share.

When he was eleven, it would have brought Children’s Services in to investigate, because what kind of parents would tattoo their child like this? Keeping it hidden meant he couldn’t go to gym, couldn’t go swimming, couldn’t get naked with a girl—though that had been more his frustration than anything his parents or Paupau would have sympathized with.

Six years of keeping it hidden like he had some kind of stupid, secret identity—can we say Dragon Boy, anybody?—and now, because he’d let down his guard for just a moment, all the alienation he’d had to suffer was for nothing.

Oddly, the only thing he felt was relief.

“It’s not a tattoo,” Jay found himself saying before he could stop himself.

“Yeah, right. And I’m so brown-skinned only because I take the sun so well.”

“No . . . I mean . . .” Jay let the words trail off.

“So what are you? Some kind of painted boy?”

Jay didn’t know what to say.

“That is so freaky,” Anna went on, then her eyes narrowed. “You’re not one of those ninja Yakuza guys, are you? Because I saw a movie about them.”

Jay shook his head. “Yakuza and ninjas aren’t the same thing, and they’re both Japanese. I’m Chinese.”

“So it’s some kind of Chinese gang thing. That’s why the
bandas
are after you, isn’t it? You’re part of the Asian invasion into their turf.”

“How do you even know about that kind of thing?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You have to be informed. How else do you know who to avoid?”

When she put it like that, he understood. It had been the same back in Chicago. But here the necessary knowledge didn’t appear to just let you survive high school. Here, apparently, you lived or died by it. Literally.

“Well, I’m not in a gang,” he said, “and it’s not a gang tattoo. It’s an image of a dragon, nothing less, nothing more.”

Anna studied him for a long moment.

“I don’t know why,” she finally said, “but I find myself wanting to believe you.”

“That’s good, because I’m telling you the truth. All I am is another kid—just like you.”

When Anna grinned, he knew that she was going to let it go. For now, anyway.

“I’m no kid,” she shot back with some of her earlier friendliness. “I’m a rock goddess. Or I could maybe be if we can ever get this band off the ground. We’ve got a zillion MySpace friends but it’s still hard to get a decent gig.”

Jay imagined her onstage. If she played half as good as she looked, she was probably right.

“I should get dressed,” he said.

“Don’t feel like you have to on my account.”

He raised his eyebrows, but she only smiled and waved him off to the bathroom.

Don’t get too excited, he thought when he closed the door behind him. She was only flirting—like she had when they first met. Though now he could sense a reserve that he was pretty sure hadn’t been there earlier. Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed. Rosalie, he realized, was naturally cheerful, but Anna had to work at it. There could be any reason for the melancholy under her jokes and flirting—from distrusting a stranger to having to deal with the loss of her brother on an ongoing basis—but this wasn’t the time, nor was it his place, to talk to her about it.

Everybody had secrets—some bigger than others. Like the image of a dragon he carried on his skin.

He considered asking her not to tell anyone else about it, but that would only feed her suspicions. Besides, he was seventeen now. Lots of kids his age had tattoos. It was no big deal, unless he made a big deal out of it.

He dressed quickly, stowed his dirty clothes in his knapsack until he could get to a Laundromat, and rejoined Anna in the living room.

“All set?” she asked.

He nodded. He dropped his knapsack by the door again and followed her outside where the dogs were waiting quietly—almost in deference—for them. For him.

It was a weird feeling, and one he hadn’t experienced before.

 

 

It was one of those nights at La Maravilla. The middle of the week, but between the steady flow of
touristas
and their own regulars, they’d been nonstop busy ever since five. They had to close the patio because with every inside table occupied, they didn’t have the staff to deal with the overflow.

Jay waited on tables with Rosalie because Tío had no time to show him around the kitchen where he and the dishwasher Paco dealt with the steady stream of meals going out and dirty plates coming back in. It wasn’t until almost ten o’clock that Tío was able to leave the kitchen and lean on the counter beside where Rosalie was making out a bill.

“” Tío said, motioning to where Jay was cleaning a table.

“” She looked over at her uncle. “”