“Shall I check the oil?”
I dragged my eyes from his lower anatomy to his face. “No, thanks. I already did that this year.”
He smiled. His face wasn’t hard after all. How had this happened? “I was wrong about you,” he said. “You’re a very good girl, aren’t you?”
I winced. Guys did not, in general, fall for very good girls, any more than girls went for very nice guys. I tried to keep the defensive note out of my voice. “Sometimes I leave shopping carts in the parking lot instead of returning them to their racks.”
An eyebrow went up.
“Sometimes I eat grapes in the produce section. I tell myself it’s to make sure they’re not sour, but after the first eight or ten, I lose credibility. Also, I read magazines I don’t buy.”
“Is all your bad behavior grocery based?”
“I don’t rotate my tires.”
We were flirting. How could we be flirting?
He disengaged the gas nozzle from the Integra with a little flip, sending drops of gasoline flying. It struck me how masculine a gas nozzle is, how feminine a gas tank-how had this escaped my attention my whole life, the sexual nature of pumping gas? He pressed a button on the credit card pad, screwed on my gas cap, then took the receipt that popped out of the machine and handed it to me. “Going home?”
“What?” I was completely distracted by the sex act I’d just witnessed.
“Go home. Take Sepulveda; Coldwater’s bad right now, Beverly Glen too. Freeway’s worse.” He went to the driver’s door and opened it.
I just stood, staring.
“Unless,” he said, “you need to stop at the store for a quick crime spree?”
I shook my head, less in response than to disperse the fog of bewilderment. I felt a horizontal gravitational pull toward him. I resisted it.
“Come,” he said.
I stopped resisting. I can’t say why. I got into the car, and he shut the door after me, gently, then leaned down and in.
“Who are you?” I said.
He smiled. That was it. It changed his whole face. “I’ll call you when you’re home,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”
I did not go home. I might’ve had a mental disorder, I might’ve been under the effect of toxic gas fumes, but I’m not a lemming; I don’t just go home because tall, well-dressed strangers with strong opinions about routes tell me to. I went west on Ventura, because that’s the direction my car was facing, coming out of the gas station. When he passed me and speeded up, that metallic sports car weaving in and out of traffic like a movie stunt car, I did a clumsy U-turn and went on with my life.
20
It had been a week since Mrs. Glück’s initial phone call, the one that changed my life. If not for that call, my frog mural would be finished, I’d have studied for my math-assessment test, I’d certainly have had more rest. But Monday night found me fidgety, distracted, and sleep deprived, facing work on Biological Clock, a show that had once seemed merely seedy and now looked sinister.
The setting didn’t help. RockiSushi was on south La Brea, a block where you took everything of value out of your car after parking it, then considered removing your tires. Fredreeq and I arrived an hour before the B.C. shoot to do hair and makeup, and Joey, as producer, came to ensure that the restaurant was open for us. On a real TV show, Joey said, there would be a makeup trailer at the location, a generator to power it, transportation people to help you park, and a catering truck with coffee and food for everyone. Low-budget reality TV was a lonelier affair. “Paul said they were expecting us,” she said, peering through a window, “but is this place even in business?”
The door was unlocked. We walked into a room empty of people and smelling of fish. Through a curtain a man moved toward us as if through a fog, intoning, “Table for three?” Joey introduced us as B.C. people. He sighed and showed us to the restroom.
Fredreeq stuffed Kleenex around the neckline of my raw-silk blouse while we filled Joey in on the day’s events. I did not, however, mention the tall man. “This Führungszeugnis-” I said. “I think someone discovered that Annika had a police record and threatened her with deportation, which is maybe why she needed a lawyer. And Marie-Thérèse’s e-mail implies that someone on the show was making her life hell, enough to make her quit, and even disappear. I don’t want to offend you, Joey-obviously I don’t suspect Elliot, but since he and his partner hired everyone-”
“Listen, if it’s good for business, Elliot and Larry would make their own mothers disappear. If they weren’t already dead.”
Fredreeq sponged foundation on my face. “Could they make mine disappear?”
“Speaking of mothers,” I said. “First Mrs. Glück calls me every day, twice a day, and now-nothing. Your child’s missing, what’s the first thing you do when you walk in the house? Check your messages. You’d never leave your phone machine off. So why can’t I reach her? Speaking of phones, would you go in my backpack and make sure mine’s on? P.B.’s been trying to reach me.”
Joey emptied out my backpack. “What’s Algebra, Geometry, and Beyond?”
“Seventh-grade honors math.” Ruby, my almost-stepdaughter, had sent it to me from Japan a month earlier, with instructions to skip the boring parts and go right to the “and Beyond.” Her confidence in my ability was touching, albeit misplaced. “I thought I’d take another stab at that math placement test next week.”
“Next week’s the eclipse,” Fredreeq said, powdering me. “You can’t pass a test in the shadow of the eclipse.”
“I have to. There’s a registration deadline. What’s a shadow of an eclipse?”
“Astrology. Take the test tomorrow, before the eclipse effect kicks in. I happen to know, because I’m comparing your chart and Savannah’s, that you have Mercury trine Saturn tomorrow. A one-day-only transit. A trine like this, you can ace any test.”
“I can’t take it tomorrow,” I said. “I’m not nearly ready.”
Joey flipped through the book. “You can be. I’ll coach you: what’s an integer?”
“I can’t focus on math tonight. Someone on this show was tormenting Annika. Bing, Paul, Isaac, any of us contestants-”
“I think you can leave yourself out of the lineup,” Joey said.
“Hold the phone.” Fredreeq stepped back, hands on hips. “You know my theory on this: I wouldn’t put anything past the saboteurs, but you can’t go acting like you’re on America’s Most Wanted. Savannah and Kim come on like sex kittens, with their capped teeth and collagen lips, and here’s you making citizen’s arrests-”
“Okay, but-”
“No. Joe Friday is not attractive. Hold still while I tweeze your eyebrows.”
“So let’s get back to integers,” Joey said.
“I have no idea what an integer is,” I said.
“A number without a decimal or fractional part,” Fredreeq said.
“If a vertical line can be drawn through a graph that intersects that graph more than once, can the graph in question be a function?” Joey asked.
“No,” said Fredreeq.
“Correct.”
I let my friends talk math in the small bathroom, wondering how so many people in the world understood something so foreign to me. I needed Annika. She had a gift bigger than Isaac Newton’s: she could explain Isaac Newton. She coaxed comprehension out of me the way you’d coax a cat out of a tree, and I doubted I could pass an assessment test without her. It bothered me that my feelings for Annika were not without self-interest. One more crummy thing I’d discovered in the past week.
Vaclav Gadosh, the third male contestant on Biological Clock, greeted me with a wrestling-hold embrace. He was my height and a few pounds lighter, with a model’s chiseled face. He had a scrappy attitude with men and a flirtatious one with women. I found him engaging in a dissipated sort of way.