Zelda
November 29th
“No heart,” I whispered into my coat collar.
Icy wind howled down the crowded New York City street, whipping my long black hair behind me, and ripping the words from my mouth. My eyes stung but it was just the wind. I never cried. Never. Not even after being rejected by three of the biggest graphic novel publishers in Manhattan. My eyes were watering from the wind.
Three rejections in two days. The managing editors at each publishing house bled together in my memory to form one composite bastard, his smug, indifferent eyebrows raised over my work. Mildly impressed, but not impressed enough.
“Interesting concept and excellent art. But…pass.”
The third pass from BlackStar Publishing came with a tiny glimmer of hope, though. The managing editor wasn’t interested, but as the meeting ended, his assistant pulled me aside. Iris Hannover looked hardly older than my twenty-four years, with dark hair, red lipstick and a hard look from behind her stylish glasses. A hard look, but not a mean one. As if she were sizing me up.
“It’s not even December and everyone’s in vacation mode,” Iris had said. “If you can make some revisions and get me the storyboards within the next few weeks, I’ll make sure my editor takes a second look.”
“What kind of revisions?” I said.
“You have something here.” Iris tapped my portfolio. “Your art is fantastic, but the story has no guts. It’s all premise, no pulse. No heart. Find the heart.”
“No heart,” I whispered again.
I blinked hard, glancing at 6th Avenue where a slow train of cars and cabs made its way uptown. Everything was gray. The sky, the pavement, the buildings. A drab cityscape sketched in charcoal and black ink, where the only thing the colorist remembered was the yellow of the cabs. Pedestrians jostled me, bundled against the chill in hats and scarves. Their stride was brisk. Unlike me, they knew where they were going, and what came next.
I clutched my portfolio tighter. My soul was inside it. The mock-ups for my graphic novel, Mother, May I?
And it has no heart.
I could admit it wasn’t sentimental or emotional. No romance or tears. It was pure violence and action. A dystopian time-travel story of blood and vengeance. My heroine’s quest was to murder pedophiles and kidnappers before they could act. To save her soul from the guilt and regret she’d lived with since the murder of her own child. There was no knight in shining armor swooping in to do it for her.
Isn’t that what audiences wanted? A Jessica Jones or a Black Widow? A tough heroine who kicked ass and didn’t need a man to save her?
No, they wanted heart. Good fucking luck with that. My heart had been ripped away from me when my nine-year-old sister, Rosemary, was snatched in a Philadelphia grocery story on a summer afternoon ten years ago. A horrorshow that unfolded between the aisles of breakfast cereals and soups. I’d watched it happen and I couldn’t stop it. I failed her, and the guilt for that failure had been eating away at me from the inside out like a cancer ever since. Mother, May I? was born of that howling pain.
It was either draw or lose my fucking mind.
Iris, the assistant at BlackStar, wanted revised storyboards in a couple of weeks. But I had no clue how to find the heart of the story, and no good place to work on it. Over the last three days, my food, cab fare, and rent at the shithole youth hostel where I was staying had eaten through my savings like a plague of locusts. I could go back to Vegas, but it felt like utter defeat.
I needed a quiet place to think and sort this out. This corner of 6th Avenue wasn’t the place to do it. I wiped my stinging eyes on the back of my sleeve—stupid wind—and stepped to the curb, hand raised to hail a cab before I remembered my dwindling funds.
No more cabs, Miss Money Bags, I scolded myself. I’d have to brave the subway system or figure out the bus.
I crossed the street to the subway station and took the staircase down. It was a short ride from Midtown to the hostel near the Port Authority. I emerged from the subway and walked along a busy sidewalk fronting adult stores, smoke shops and bail bonds outlets.
The Parkside Hostel wasn’t anywhere near a park, but sat above a tiny shop that sold NYC touristy kitsch: sweatshirts and snow globes, key chains and Statue of Liberty piggy banks.
When I first got out of the cab three days ago, all the touristy junk made me smile. Like the naïve dumbshit I was, I’d bought a tacky postcard that screamed “Makin’ it in the Big Apple!” across the top. It was cheesy as hell, and after one of the publishers wrote up a contract for Mother, May I? I was going to send the postcard to Theo, my friend and boss at the tattoo shop where I’d worked in Vegas. He’d get a laugh out of it.
Two steps inside the hostel’s grungy foyer with its dirty tile and flickering fluorescents, and I could already hear loud talk, shouting, and blaring music coming from the upstairs hallways. I could hardly sleep here, never mind work.
My first night at the Parkside had been roommate-free. I spent the long hours like Tom Hanks in Big: rickety dresser pushed up against the door and me curled in a ball on the bed. I tried to make myself as small as possible while watching a roach scuttle along the floorboard against the wall. Scared shitless.
But I didn’t cry.
I unlocked the door to my room. The bright red and yellow of the postcard I bought for Theo was the first thing that caught my eye. The second thing was that every item of clothing I’d brought to New York, minus what I was wearing, were strewn all over the floor, along with travel-sized bottles of shampoo, soap and lotion; even my little box of birth control pills. The room had a bank of four lockers. My assigned locker’s door was bent and hanging off one hinge. The second night of my stay, a roommate had stormed in, grunted her name—Jane—and dumped a ratty-looking sleeping bag onto her bed. She stuffed a blue duffel into one of the room’s two lockers and took off. I hadn’t seen her since.
Now, all of her stuff was gone.
“The hell…?”
My heart began to pound, and I backed straight out of the room, heading downstairs to the front desk, which resembled more of a subway tollbooth. I rapped on the plexiglass with a shaking hand to get the attention of the manager. He was a bored-looking guy with a balding head and potbelly. He rifled through a nudie magazine and puffed a miniature cigar, the smoke of which filled the box and seeped out of the round hole cut at the bottom of the glass.
“My room,” I said. “Someone broke into my room. They went through my bag. My roommate is gone and so is her stuff. Maybe it was her?”
I don’t know what I expected—the same level of outrage maybe. Or at least mild concern. Instead the guy heaved a sigh and tossed his magazine down. “Christ. Did you remember to lock the fucking door on your locker?”
I stared. “What…? Yes. Of course,” I said, anger burning up some of my fear. “Yeah, I locked the damn door but someone tore it off.”
“Shit,” the guy said. “Did they steal anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of freaked out. I didn’t stick around to look.”
Of all the stupid things I’d done since getting here, leaving my money in that hostel room was not one of them. I kept my stash tucked into a wallet that attached to my belt loop and fit under my black pants. I carried my laptop with my art portfolio. The only other items of value were my art supplies…
Oh my God.
I felt the blood drain from my face, like a sketch leeched of color. “Oh no. Oh shit, no.”
Panic drove me back upstairs, vaguely aware of the manager’s heavy tread on the stairs behind me. I rifled through my stuff, feeling ill that someone else—some stranger—had had their hands on my clothes. My underwear. But they’d left it all. The only clothing items of value were my pea coat and boots, both of which I was wearing. But my art supplies were gone. My fold-up, portable desk, my pens and pencils, my Canson drawing pad…
Why? Why would anyone steal pens and paper?
Because they were the best kind. My prized possessions. The tools by which I created my art. I felt as though I were missing fingers from my hand.
“Anything taken?” the manager asked.
“Everything,” I said, my stomach clenching so hard I could barely breathe. “They took everything.”
The manager made a disbelieving hmmph. “Doesn’t look like it to me. You got stuff all over.”
It’s over. It’s all over.
I swallowed down tears and began throwing my clothes into a pile.
“Are you going to call the police,” I muttered, as I gathered my stuff. “Or do all of your guests get free access to other guests’ personal belongings?” I stopped, glanced around. “Wait. My suitcase. Where the fuck is my suitcase?”
My black, brand-new rolling suitcase—a gift from one of my roommates when I left Vegas—was nowhere to be seen.
“They took that too,” I said. “They took my suitcase and they took my art.” I spun around to glare at the manager. “Not they. She. The girl you put in here with me. It had to be her, right?”
“I suppose so.” The manager sighed and pulled a smartphone from his pocket.
Two police officers arrived thirty minutes later. I waited in the lobby, the rest of my clothes and toiletries in a black trash bag on my lap. The cops took my statement and said they’d searched the rest of the rooms but didn’t find anything.
“Roommate checked-in under the name Jane Doe,” the manager said. “As in D-O-U-G-H.”
“Jane Dough?” I pinned the manager with a hard look. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The guy shrugged. “She paid cash. She could call herself Mother Theresa for all I care.”
Mother Theresa had checked-out sometime this morning and was now long-fucking-gone.
“We’ll let you know if anything turns up,” one of the policemen said. His smile was kind, but I could hear the subtext. Don’t hold your breath.
The manager held up his hands as if to show how empty they were of responsibility. The liability waiver I’d signed upon check-in covered his ass, and he knew it. But after the cops left, he looked at me sitting alone with a goddamn trash bag on my lap, and his face softened a little.
“Hey kid,” he said. “How about a free night? Least I can do, right?”
I nearly told him where he could put his free night but the sun was sinking fast. Where was I going to go?
Philadelphia’s only a two-hour train ride.
“Fine,” I snapped at the manager, cutting off the thought. “I’ll take the free night, but I want a single room.”
He scrubbed the bristle on his chin with fat, stubby fingers, then nodded. “Yeah, yeah, okay.”
In my new room, I threw the garbage bag on the full-sized bed and took stock. A tiny desk and chair were in one corner, but no pen or paper in the drawer.
I have no pen or paper.
Blinking hard, I used my phone to calculate my options. I had $700 to my name. If I went back to Vegas—Don’t even think about crying, Rossi—$300 would get swallowed by the bus ticket. Then another $300 would have to go toward the room I was renting.
If I stayed in New York, my $700 wouldn’t last twenty-four hours. A deposit on an apartment would wipe me out and I wouldn’t survive the rest of the month. And there was no way I could stay at this hostel instead and try to rework my graphic novel.
“And rework it with what?” I reminded myself with a bitter pang. My art supplies were gone. The thought struck me in the chest every time, followed by the more practical ache that it would cost at least $50 to buy pens and paper that didn’t totally suck.
I tossed my phone onto the stiff orange bedcover, calculations done. The upshot: I was fucked. Failed. I’d have to go back to Vegas, to my old room in the over-crowded apartment, with a rotating door of roommates. I was sure Theo would give me my job back at the tattoo place, but I didn’t want it. I was tired of tattooing. I hated watching my art get up and walk out the door, never to be seen again. I wanted something to hold in my hands. Something the entire world could see…
Your stupidity is matched only by your pride.
Tears threatened and I hurled myself off the bed before they could take hold. I stuffed the trash bag of my belongings into the locker and slammed it shut. It was dinnertime.
I had to admit defeat, but I decided the city owed me one decent meal before I left for Vegas. I grabbed my portfolio and headed out.