Chapter 2
THE ALARM bleated a call that could easily wake the dead. Lucy rolled over and squinted at the clock. She’d managed to sleep through twenty minutes of its racket, yet didn’t feel a bit rested. What she did feel was sore and old. She pulled herself up in bed and turned the evil alarm clock off instead of punching it, hard—the damned thing had cost her twenty-three ninety-five, plus tax. She looked around at what had been her bedroom for the last six months and once again felt poor.
Sore and old and poor... life was good.
It was a room in her Gram’s house, actually the room her mother had grown up in. It had one little window, which she had forgotten to draw the curtains on, so now the afternoon sun was making the generic white walls glow like halogen floodlights. Her private bathroom had been bigger than this room.
She kicked off the covers and stumbled over a pair of black Dr. Scholl’s sneakers, and then walked gingerly on her always aching feet to the Smallest Closet in the World!
Of course, she was reminded, as she opened its door to the half-dozen mix-and-match Wal-Mart sales rack outfits that comprised her entire wardrobe, that she really didn’t need the space.
When the FBI and the IRS had returned to Lucy’s family’s house three days after they’d taken her father into custody, it hadn’t been to tell them why they’d taken him—though they’d found out at the arraignment that he was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, extortion and, on a horrifying side note, immigrant slave labor trafficking.
No, they came for the house, the cars (including her red Mustang) and then went room by room and took anything of value. In her case she lost absolutely everything. Every piece of jewelry, cell phone, and every item of clothing and pair of shoes—even her damn socks had been designer label. She got off with the tank-top/sweatpants ensemble she’d been wearing only because she was trying to work off some of her worry on the treadmill in the home gym.
They also froze all of her father’s assets, so all her mother left with was three hundred dollars in cash, no mode of transportation, and a suitcase of clothes that were deemed to have no value.
On the other hand, Lucy’s brother Seth left the house with almost everything he owned, including some of his video games.
She stood out on the sidewalk in front of their five-hundred-thousand-dollar Spanish villa style house with her mother and brother, waiting for the taxicab an agent had taken pity on them and called.
Her mother, Lila, had had two choices as she’d stood there waiting for the taxi. They could have probably afforded to stay in a fleabag hotel overnight, and then they’d be flat broke in the morning. Or, they could take a cab to the bus station and buy three tickets to her grandmother’s place in Four Corners—a tiny town about an hour east of their home in San Bernardino.
Standing in her bedroom in Four Corners, California, she took in the blue and yellow uniform that hung in her closet (replete with a tacky sun visor emblazoned with The Golden Arches) and was reminded again that she worked at McDonald’s.
Her father had rolled over on his law partners, to secure a ten-year prison sentence served in a minimum-security facility. But that deal hadn’t included Uncle Sam returning any of her father’s assets to the family, so her mother was now a cocktail waitress in nearby Barstow, and Lucy had to take the bus just to get to work every day.
That alone had been an all too humbling experience, and the only thing she clung to now was the hope that one day she’d be able to buy herself a used piece-of-shit car. That way she could drive herself to McDonald’s for the next ten to twenty years.
Dreams of marrying a multimillionaire or going to a good college had gone up in smoke months ago when she’d first taken the bus to work, had missed her stop, then had scrubbed a public toilet as her initiation into the fast food service industry. She had felt that her life had gone down that toilet the instant she’d flushed it.
And now, as she pulled her uniform on (amazingly Gram always seemed to be able to get the grease stains, and most importantly, the smell of McDonald’s out of her uniform), her heart sank and shrank in her chest.
Today was her eighteenth birthday.
Happy Birthday!!!
As she pulled her still long, yet not nearly as radiant, hair back in a tight ponytail, she considered for the hundredth time just calling off. But truthfully she had nothing else to do, and no one to do it with. She had no friends to go out with. She’d gone from teen queen to a complete nobody in her new high school—the new girl with a mean chip on her shoulder and discount clothes on her back. Her mother was working her usual Saturday night shift, and her grandmother was busy at a church bake sale. So calling off would mean being completely alone on her birthday.
And anyway, she had already seen the ugly truth: her life was pretty much over, and working on her birthday was just one more thing she’d have to get used to.
She trudged downstairs and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot her grandmother had made fresh before she’d gone out. She was tempted to just drink it black. There would be no more apropos symbolic gesture for the turn her life had taken. But the mere thought of coffee without cream and sugar made her want to gag. So she made her coffee just as she always did—some milk and three sugars—and stood leaning against the worn metal and Formica kitchen counter, taking in the tattered yet spotless old kitchen, and the lonely silence of the house. Even her loser brother had friends in Four Corners, and he was staying the night with one of them as she sipped her coffee.
Another thing she’d lost that he hadn’t.