STELLA
Having sex-shaky thighs and writing on a mirror in lipstick had never been my life . . . until now! I tried to keep my giggle to myself as I unlocked the deadbolt to my apartment, where I was met with the usual Saturday morning routine in apartment 3A. I tried to tame the perma-smile that was on my face, just so it wasn’t blatantly obviously where I’d been. I’d never been much for kissing and telling. And also, I was dying to see how long it would take Roxie to figure me out.
She was on the couch with her legs dangling off the side like Lady Godiva on a fainting sofa. She was wrapped in a skimpy terry cloth robe, her face caked in some very strange mud. Her hair was up in a pineapple, tied with a bright-pink scrunchie. Definite hints of Blondie. Definitely. She was watching house-flipping shows on mute and drinking hard lemonade from the bottle with a pink straw that looped around in the shape of a heart. When she saw me, the straw dropped from her lips and the lemonade zoomed back down the straw. “Well hello, sexface!”
It had taken her all of two seconds. Among her many talents, including making every single man with a pulse forget what he’d been about to say, she could sniff out what she called “man musk” like a bloodhound on a trail. She made a circle with her hand in my general direction and smiled, which made her mask crackle. “Ravaged is a cute look on you,” she said, then hooked her heart-straw with her tongue and took a few long slurps.
Across from her on the floor was Ruth, sitting cross-legged with a steaming cup of tea next to her. Her hair was in its seemingly unalterable straight dark bob; didn’t matter how hot it got or how windy, the bob was unchanged. Next to her on the carpet sat her ever-present green tea; Ruth being Ruth, though, she didn’t drink tea out of a regular mug. It was some type of rare Japanese tea bowl, with special “balance.” I didn’t really know the specifics; what I knew for sure was that it didn’t go in the dishwasher and it most definitely wasn’t to be used for cereal. In her lap was a silver briefcase with a three-digit combination lock built in. It was called a Zero Halliburton. It was what she’d wanted for her birthday, and Roxie and I had pitched in to get it for her. She wore a doctor’s stethoscope dangling from one ear. As she rotated the numeric wheels, she listened to the lock with her eyes closed. And then she smiled, just a little.
The hinges sprang open, and Roxie tapped the stopwatch on her phone, reading out Ruth’s time. “Two minutes thirty-two seconds.”
“Hit me again,” Ruth said, and slid it over to Roxie, who zeroed out the numbers. She pulled a ballpoint pen from her bun, pushed the tip into the reset hole, and clenched her eyes shut as she tried to think up a new combination.
“I got worried about you,” Ruth added as she blew on her tea. “Sidenote, filing a missing person report isn’t really that complicated.”
Oh Lord, not this again. This was the problem with staying out all night only once in, literally, a blue moon. The odds of something truly dreadful happening to me were actually higher than spending the night with a man. Especially a man like Nick. “Please don’t tell me . . .”
She blew the steam away and shook her head, saying to the tea, “Close, though. Called the nonemergency number and everything.”
Ruth and Roxie were the salt and pepper on my chicken breast of life. In some ways, we really were as American as second mortgages and Dunkin’ Donuts. But in other ways . . .
Roxie stuck the ballpoint pen in her bun, scrambled the digits on the combination, and slid the briefcase across the carpet to Ruth. Then she lay back down on the sofa and recommenced her love affair with her lemonade. “I told her not to worry. I said you were probably getting some much-deserved nookie and the last thing you wanted was the cops showing up.” She shuddered with the thought, flaring her nostrils and sighing as she pressed her thighs together and curled her cotton ball–parted toes. “That fantasy isn’t for everybody . . . I guess,” Roxie said with a gasp as Ruth set to breaking into the briefcase again.
. . . we were anything but ordinary.
It was, as Saturday mornings went, pretty much status quo . . . aside from the fact that every single muscle in my body ached. I opened the pantry and took out a bag of gummy cherries from the bottom shelf, which was very clearly marked with a sign that said STELLA’S. Above my shelf was Ruth’s, which featured strange things like gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan black bean crackers, and something that called itself hemp protein but was in fact a sandy, gritty powder created by the vegan cousin of Satan himself. Once, I’d been making myself a smoothie and thought maybe I should get some extra protein in there. What resulted was an entire day of sucking hemp grit out of my teeth and sending frowny emoji texts to Ruth.
Above Ruth’s shelf was Roxie’s, jammed all the way to the tippy top with every conceivable salty snack food. Every flavor of Goldfish. White cheddar popcorn. Macadamia nuts. Pretzel sticks. Rosemary and olive oil Triscuits. Enough peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers to see an army through a war.
I kicked off my Converse, feeling the tight warmth that was still pulsing through the inside of both thighs, and headed for the couch. I shifted Roxie’s feet onto the coffee table and flopped down next to her. On the screen, a big, burly guy in a tiny tank top was trying to maneuver a couch through a slightly-too-small doorframe. “Smells like man!” Roxie said, resting her head on my shoulder. “And looks like man!”
I jammed four gummy cherries in my mouth and touched my throat. It was tender under the pressure of my fingers. A hickey. A hickey? I hadn’t had a hickey since I was sixteen with a mouth full of braces.
But Roxie was on it, as ever. “A gentle brush with a toothbrush followed by a little ice. I swear. Works every time.” She raised the remote in a modified Scout’s honor move, and then she turned up the volume on the TV. With my mouth full of gummy goodness, I walked over to the safe in the corner, disguised as a side table. I opened it up and took out my notebook, going backward and forward and backward again over our plan.
Everybody thought we were dog sitters. Everybody thought we really were good girls. Everybody thought we were best friends. All true.
But we were also known as the Shimmy Shimmy Bangs. We were the Lady Robin Hoods of the American Southwest. And we were going to do one last jewel heist. The biggest of them all. The North Star.
It would be our final job, the biggest payoff, and it would set the three of us up forever. No more risks, no more worry. Whatever we dreamed would be ours.
We knew what we were doing, and we had each other’s backs. But the plan was a tricky one. And so I pushed aside my thoughts of Nick to focus on the plan, while on TV a lady swung a sledgehammer into some drywall and bellowed, “I am woman! Hear me roarrrrrrrrr!”
We hadn’t started with jewels; we’d started with a pair of secondhand bifocals when we were twelve years old.
Ruth, Roxie, and I grew up in a suburb of Denver called Aurora, the sort of place that always felt like it was not quite anything at all. Not quite suburb, not quite city. Not quite dangerous, not quite safe. Not quite good, not quite bad. In the afternoons after school, our parents would pack us off to the ice rink. We didn’t have particularly happy homes. Roxie’s looked normal, but when we’d be there for sleepovers, we’d hear her parents fighting when they thought we were asleep. Ruth had been adopted into a family that seemed to treat her like a visitor; she called her parents Sally and Michael instead of Mom and Dad. My mom was sick a lot, and my dad did his best to take care of me. Ruth, Roxie, and I couldn’t always be sure about things at home, but we could always be sure about each other.
The ice rink was where we were happiest. There, we’d free-skate for hours in rented skates mended with duct tape, like glamorous bowling shoes, with tattered laces. The day it happened, we were in sixth grade; it was a cold afternoon, and the streets were blue with chemical ice melter. We were sitting rink-side, on one of the worn old wooden benches, catching our breath and drinking boxes of apple juice that Roxie’s mom had packed for us. On the far side of the rink, a clump of older boys skated together. Bullies, all three of them.
On our end of the rink, the new boy from our class tottered onto the ice. Gus was pudgy and kind, and he always had a little smudge of snot on his sleeve from his constantly running nose. He’d had trouble making new friends, and he wore glasses so thick that the lenses made his eyes look two sizes too big for his windburned face. Clearly, it was his first time on skates. With his arms out like a mummy, he was so focused on staying upright that he managed to get himself turned around and began to slide along with outstretched arms against the free-skate current.
And the bullies were skating right toward him. Two of them linked arms and sped up, getting ready to clothesline him.
“Uh-oh,” Ruth said softly next to me.
Roxie put her hand to her mouth and grimaced.
And I watched in utter horror with my straw pinned between my teeth as the bullies sent him flying, and he landed flat on his back with a horrible whump. The chatter of the rink went silent, leaving only the tinny and faraway sound of the radio playing over the PA system. The bullies’ laughs ricocheted around the rink, no longer boyish giggles but something sinister and vengeful. They circled him once, then again. Like wolves. The biggest of the boys gave him a kick on his side, the teeth of the skate tearing into his parka. One of the supervisors blew his whistle and began to skate over to help, but in the scuffle Gus curled up in a ball and lost his glasses. Before the supervisor could step in, one of the bullies crushed Gus’s beloved glasses with two stomps of his hockey skates, then sprinted away.
Some people say rage is a red haze. Mine is a magenta mist. It made my ears hot and my face tingly. It was overpowering; I could feel my heartbeat behind my eyes. My cheeks got sweaty, and my fingertips got cold. I felt sick and shocked. It had been so brutal, so fast, and so awful. And there I’d sat frozen, clutching my stupid juice box.
The rink supervisor helped Gus off the ice and sat him on the other end of our bench. A man with a dustpan and broom followed with the remnants of Gus’s glasses, which he put in a pile on the rink-side bench. The adults left Gus there, all alone. For a moment, he stared straight ahead. Stunned. Shocked. Then he hung his head and stared into his lap. And began to sob.
Roxie was closest and scooted down the bench first. She wrapped her arms around him. I remember the way his chubby body shook as he cried. Ruth and I joined them, our steps unsure on the rubbery mats that lined the concrete. As Gus cried with hoarse, barking gasps, I stared at the bits and pieces of his glasses. At useless remnants of the thing he needed to live in the world.
Even then, so young that I slept with headgear and needed a night-light, I understood that it was not only wrong but unjust. What had happened was unfair and terrible and cruel. Random and violent. I gave the bullies the stink eye as they looped around the rink, but they didn’t even see me. One of them wore his hair in a terrible rattail, and I thought about how much I’d like to snip it off with the scissors I carried in my pencil bag.
“We can call your mom,” I told Gus softly as his sobs became less jagged. “She can come get you.”
But Gus shook his head at his lap as a bubble of snot popped under his nose. “I have to take the bus,” he said, through racks and heaves. “Without my glasses, I don’t”—he sobbed—“know”—he sobbed even harder—“how.”
Ruth’s eyes met mine, and Roxie looked at us from over Gus’s tattered winter hat. I felt so helpless, and I could see that Ruth and Roxie did too. That was when the real problem came into focus for me. Calling his mom could wait. Taking vengeance on the bullies could wait. Right then, right there, only one thing mattered: Gus needed to be able to see. We had to do something to help him.
I took my second designated juice box from Roxie’s little cooler, jabbed the sharp end of the straw into the little foil circle, and gave it to Gus. While he let his tears tumble down onto his snow pants and drank his juice, I thought about what in the world we were going to do. How to help. How to make this right. How to undo what had been done. How to fight back.
Then, just as I was putting the lid back on the cooler, I saw it. The Lost and Found desk. All manner of things lined the shelves. And right in the center, I saw a cardboard box, marked on the side with the word GLASSES.
The rage subsided just a little. Magenta gave way to more of a rose pink. I pulled Ruth and Roxie into a huddle. “I’ve got an idea,” I said.
And so, with Ruth and Roxie beside me, I marched over to the Lost and Found. It was manned by a great big guy reading a magazine with a muddy truck on the cover. He was bearlike, in a plaid shirt that was so tight across his chest that the fabric puckered around the buttons. He reminded me very much of Smokey Bear. “Help you?” His voice was deep and booming. And sort of scary.
“Yes,” I said, swallowing my fear and lifting my chin. I hadn’t lied a whole lot in my life; it made me feel a little wobbly. But I held on tight. For poor, sweet, half-blind, snot-bubbling Gus. “We’ve lost some glasses.”
“All of you?” said Smokey. He narrowed his eyes, glaring at me especially. It was my first lesson in being the front woman; even then, I knew it didn’t matter how scared I was. All I had to do was seem like I was fine. Next to me, I heard Roxie make a gulping sound, and Ruth gripped my hand a little tighter.
“Just me,” I said. “I lost my glasses.”
“And it takes three of you to come ask about them?” He set down his magazine and studied us. “What do these glasses of yours look like?”
I began squinting, peering around, as if I really was unable to see. “Very thick,” I said. “I can’t remember. Brown. Or black.” I let go of Ruth and Roxie’s hands and pawed out in the air. Fortunately, I had a little bit of experience with this shtick; due to occasional paralyzing stage fright that rendered me totally unable to speak, I had been cast as Helen Keller in our school play. I had the blind flail down pat. “I’ll know them when I touch them.”
Smokey shook his head and turned the page of his magazine, without looking at the images. “Girls. If you can’t describe the lost item, I can’t show you what we’ve got. Rink policy.”
Like paper dolls attached at the hands, the three of us shuffled aside and convened in another huddle around the corner, in a dimly lit cinder block hallway that smelled like wet socks. I remembered that in the Helen Keller play, Roxie had been cast as my sister, who occasionally fainted for no reason at all. She’d been really good at it; every time she did it, the audience would let out a big, dramatic, “Oooooh!”
“Roxie,” I said. “Do your fake faint. Distract him.”
“Definitely,” she said. “No problem. I practice it every week in church.”
“Ruth, you help me look through the glasses,” I said.
Ruth nodded. “They were bifocals. Like the lunch lady wears, but thinner. I remember them exactly.”
I took a deep breath and steeled myself. And then I did something I’d never done before or since, but it just seemed like . . . the thing to do. I extended my left hand, palm down, in the middle of our little triangle. Roxie put her hand on mine, and Ruth did the same. Suddenly, we weren’t three sixth graders at an ice rink. We were the ThunderCats, we were Jem and her crew. We were the Three Musketeers in pastel parkas. We were invincible.
We were awesome.
“All for one!” I whispered as our mittens and gloves crinkled.
“One for all!” whispered Roxie and Ruth together. And all three of us raised our hands at once.
Again, we approached the desk. Smokey lifted his eyebrow and shifted his chew from one cheek to the other. “Back again.”
I pawed around on the countertop. “Is there a phone I can use?” I manhandled a stapler and a roll of tape. “Or maybe you can just dial my dad at work for me? I’m pretty sure about the number. We might have to try three or four before we get him, though.”
“You know . . . oh gosh,” Roxie said, swaying slightly. “I don’t feel so . . .” And then Roxie toppled over. She went right down into a pink-and-purple heap on the rubber mats. It was magnificent. The man behind the desk dropped his magazine and rushed around to help her. It was time for Ruth and me to make our move.
We bolted behind the desk and grabbed the glasses box. Ruth began looking methodically through them one by one, but in the thrill and excitement of it all, I took a different approach and began shoving them all into my pockets. Kids glasses, adult glasses, sunglasses. A pair of safety goggles. Everything. Ruth followed my lead, and we took all that we could carry, jamming them into our parkas like kangaroo pouches.
By the time we got back to Roxie, she had her eyes open but had one hand to her forehead and was making swooning noises. “Do you have a Fruit Roll-Up?” she asked. “Strawberry, maybe? Or grape?”
The man looked from me to Ruth and at our lumpy pockets. At first, he looked really mad. Right then, I was sure we were goners. They’d probably cart us off in a paddy wagon. McGruff the Crime Dog had made that much pretty clear. I had no idea at all what would happen after the paddy wagon came, but I was pretty sure I’d enjoyed my very last juice box. Jail had to be skim milk only.
The man looked over at Gus, who clutched his broken frames. A big wet splotch of tears and snot darkened his parka sleeve.
Smokey scratched his beard, filling the air with a grating sound. He glanced at my jacket pockets and at Ruth’s. He’d been crouching low, but now he sat up slightly so he was at eye level with us. As he did, his flannel shirt shifted on his forearm. There I saw something I didn’t understand then. It was a tattoo in the shape of a spade.
And one day, not so long after, I’d learn that it was the mark of a thief.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said, mostly to me. “Bring your friend over here. We’ll see if any of those glasses help him. The rest go back in the box.”
Ruth, Roxie, and I all nodded in terrified unison.
The man exhaled slowly, then looked at each one of us, very slowly and meaningfully. “Listen. I’m no career counselor, but I’m gonna tell you something for nothing. If you’ve got to steal ever again, I want you to follow three rules. You hear me?”
That time, I couldn’t even nod. I was too scared to do anything but blink.
Smokey lifted his eyebrow and counted on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “One, be smart. Two, do it for a damned good reason. And three”—there he paused, staring me hard in the eye—“never take more than you need.”