Page 69 of Missed Sunrise
“I am,” I agreed, having never felt more conviction in that statement as I did then.
She clapped her hands together delicately. “Good. I was hoping the paint on your britches wasn’t merely a fashion statement, though it’s quite a good look regardless. Now, Professor Liem, are you going to do a class for us to help fill these frames?”
I met the eager gazes around her, all of them seeming genuinely excited at the prospect, which was good, as I’d already discussed the idea with Ari. We were going to schedule classes for as long as the usual art teacher was gone.
So, with a hand over my heart, I directed my answer to their leader. “It would be my great pleasure.”
She smiled in triumph. “Good. We’ll be seeing you soon, then.”
Ms. Lenora C. Apworth made that sound like both a promise and a threat.
I adored her.
Once class was overand all participants had secured their frames for safe transportation, I assured Uncle Gil that I could find my own way back to the condo, and then I indulged in my favorite pastime.
Wandering.
The floor beneath my feet started as simple squares, my booted feet filling every one and a half of them as I went. They were so like the floors of the public elementary school I’d attended in Alabama, and I could nearly smell the pencil shavings and construction paper of the art room. It’d been my sanctuary before bullies and Vinh leaving for college made nothing safe. I eventually turned a corner, and the floor abruptly shifted to patterned carpet.
Continuing down the hallway, my steps muffled now, I heard music.
“Fly Me to the Moon”by Frank Sinatra was drifting out of one of the rooms on this hallway, the texture of the sound so rich but with a hewn quality like from a vinyl record player.
I slowed my pace as I approached the room, but when I chanced a look inside, I only saw the casual, communal space of the Locc for a moment before it shifted, and memory took over.
Slowly, the music wasn’t coming from a lone vinyl record turning under a needle.
It was the sound of a live band finishing their set on the stage at a casino bar.
Leaning against the doorjamb, I succumbed to the memory just enough to see its impressions and feel its echoes, trusting my subconscious to have summoned me here for a reason.
Dad had been home from the hospital for two or three weeks at that point, my summer classes had finished, and I’d been slowly tiring of treading the waters of optimism and carrying the morale of my entire family on my back.
I’d been drowning—slowly and quietly.
I’d only felt that way once before, when Vinh had his accident. I’d been dealing with bullies, school being a tough place for basically everyone but especially for a kid like me. Vinh had only been out of the hospital for a few days and had decided to pick me up from school as a surprise. But when he got there, he witnessed a kid pushing me around. It'd taken less than a minute for him to reach us, and when the kids went running from him and the healing burn scars on his arm, I’d nearly drowned then, too, under the weight of that new understanding.
Of that knowledge that life wasn’t safe. That damage could find you anywhere.
It could come at any time, and it could present itself immediately or delay itself until later, and it wasn’t always as obvious as burn wounds.
Or a pair of strangers in an embrace, as was the case the first time I saw Dezi.
The record scratched just as I recalled seeing a mess of dirty-blond curls and heard Dezi’s voice, my heartbeat halting when I realized he was one-half of the couple in an embrace by the stage.
I’d seen him before, of course. Cody’s boyfriend. The first time I’d snuck into the casino bar to meet Cody after we moved to the Coast, Austin had been there. I’d only gone back because I felt the weight of being pulled underwater again, and it had gotten to me enough to want to see my friend Dezi.
And he had asked something of me. It was then that he’d told me he was leaving to work on the cruise ship, and Bree—his best friend he’d told me about on the phone so long ago—needed someone he trusted to look after her while he was away.
That task had eventually given me the lifeline I needed—the connection to someone in this new place that would keep me grounded. Keep me sane.
But that night, before I found and met Bree officially, I wandered.
I wandered Fortuna Casino & Resort, determined to know all its shadowy corners and neon-lit corridors in the fruitless, vague hope that surprise would then be less likely to find me if no places were unknown.
But that dimly lit stairwell behind Bay Hall… I knew it, and it had still managed to astonish me as I ground against the real Cody Desmond, both of our eyes wide open and beautiful, painful understanding between us.
The record spun and spun until I found the strength to return to the now.
