The Throwback List Page 8

“Is she wrong?” Birdy had learned to ask questions rather than outright agree with someone on the opposing team. It had been an important lesson for him to grasp before he’d been upgraded from boyfriend to husband. “Don’t you think Autumn’s used to having more than one friend? What about all those people she used to hang out with in LA?”

  “Some friends,” Bee sneered. “They all dropped her the second she moved back here. That girl she lived with didn’t even invite her to her wedding!” She tugged a wrinkle out of the duvet. “I don’t want Jo to hurt her. It’s that old best-friend thing.”

  That untouchable thing, she mentally added. It was something that Autumn and Jo had that Bee couldn’t reach: shared history. Sure, Autumn and Bianca had grown up in the same town, attended the same schools. But they’d been in different classes, different social clubs, cared about different school functions.

  Jo had deep-sunk roots in Autumn’s life. Bee couldn’t trust that Jo wouldn’t rip them all out again.

  “I was there the first time, too,” she said. “They were like the best friends in a toy commercial. Linked arms and finishing each other’s—”

  “Sandwiches?” Birdy asked innocently.

  “Please don’t be cute when I’m ranting.” She frowned at him. “Autumn puts a lot more faith in Jo than I would. I don’t want to see her get her hopes up.”

  “You gotta trust people, wifey,” Birdy said with a yawn. He placed a clumsy peck on her cheek before disappearing behind his e-reader. “They won’t all disappoint you.”

  Not using one of her many useless swimsuits to strangle him made Bianca the queen of restraint. She had an inbox full of disappointments as honeymoon refund confirmations continued to pour in.

  Bee slept between long, imagined fights with Jo and Autumn. Twice she woke up, sure she could hear Lita yelling downstairs, only to find her snoring peacefully when she got up to check. The second time, Lita woke up long enough to swear at her for shuffling around like a hungry ghost.

  By the time Bee made it to the shop Thursday afternoon, she had been up since predawn and was on her fourth hairstyle—she’d hated the first two and had briefly fallen asleep on the third. She walked into the tattoo parlor with her travel mug already half-empty and her hair up in a try-hard ponytail.

  The Salty Dog sat atop the Park Place of the Sandy Point Monopoly board—right at the end of boardwalk—in the last building facing the beach next to the big parking lot. It was sunny inside, thanks to the picture windows at each station. Each black foam-padded chair faced the ocean lapping at the sand.

  The navy had dropped Bee’s Tito in Washington state. Once he was discharged, he and Lita moved a couple hours south to Sandy Point, where he’d set up an open-air stall on the other end of the boardwalk. The building they were in now was the culmination of the Boria family dream—beachfront body art, sending people back to shore with permanent memories of the sea.

  Between the buzz of the needles and the crash of waves outside, the shop was certainly more relaxed than most of the other tattoo parlors Bianca scoped out.

  “Morning, all!” Bee called as the warped door jangled behind her. She forced it to latch with a practiced tug.

  There was a chorus of “Morning!” from around the shop, even though everybody knew it was afternoon.

  Jogging up the stairs behind the counter, Bee could see that most of her artists were in a lull, waiting for either appointments or walk-ins. Except for Dez, grinding out an image on the leg of a customer with the salt-crusted hair of their usual clientele.

  Kooks pay the bills was a classic Tito aphorism—less popular than the others because it sounded vaguely like an old-timey racial slur. Kooks were newbie surfers. The whole boardwalk catered to them.

  Surfers came to town, braved the icy waves, and passed the Salty Dog on the way to their car. Nine times out of ten, they wandered in, rinsed off in the surf shower Lita had installed in the customer bathrooms, and got inked with whatever wave, surfboard, or Live like you’re dying flash art the artists dreamed up.

  The artists called the room upstairs the manager’s office, but to Bee it would always be Tito and Lita’s apartment. Even now that it was empty. It was a waste of money to have a room in the shop nobody utilized, but going into the upstairs room broke Bee’s heart. The discolored patches of floor where her grandparents’ furniture had been. The phantom cologne and hair pomade in the air. The broken rubber on the threshold that Lita had tripped over, leading to the fall down the stairs that changed all of their lives.

  The only furniture left in the room was a shoji screen against the windows and a dusty oak desk with a tall red candle in a glass jar adorned with Our Lady of Guadalupe. From inside the desk drawer, Bee pulled out a fireplace lighter and lit the wick.

  “Buenos días, Tito,” she murmured to the flame. She imagined him greeting her in return, calling her muñeca and reminding her to sanitize the doorknobs.

  She left the lighter and her purse in the drawer and retrieved her work tablet from its dock in the kitchenette.

  “Who’s got news?” she asked the artists as she descended the stairs. She climbed onto the too-tall chair behind the front counter and opened the appointment book on her tablet for the first time in ages. Piercing regulars went to Mo, while Bee took the rare walk-in. Piercing wasn’t a passion of hers, as evidenced by her personal lack of body jewelry other than in her ears. The only reason she had apprenticed with Mo was because it felt ridiculous to manage a business where she couldn’t do any of the work herself.

  As a Boria, you either needed the artistic talent to tattoo, like Tito and Bonnie, or the stomach to pierce and keep track of the money, like Lita and Bianca.

  It was very different from the life of resorts and cozy inns Bee had imagined for herself while applying to grad school for hospitality management. If she were managing a B and B somewhere, she certainly wouldn’t be counting down the hours to stabbing a big-ass needle in Johanna Freeman.

  What was that? An upside.

  Mo, the Salty Dog’s key holder, wandered over, holding a steaming mug. They brushed their white-blond flop of hair to one eye. “Got a résumé. Some girl,” they said, offhand. The building could be burning and Mo would saunter off with a mumble. It came in handy with the occasional nightmare customer. “Does permanent makeup. Told her we didn’t want any.”

  “What?” Bianca dug through the single drawer under the counter. She scooped up the résumé and starting reading. “Why?”

  “Lita said no makeup.”

  There was no one left in the shop who referred to Lita by her given name, Rosa. No one under fifty was allowed to. Mo and Cruz were both in their forties and the last artists hired by Tito. Bonnie had poached thirty-three-year-old Dez from a scuzzy Portland parlor. Lita had okayed Dede as an apprentice from her hospital bed, then yelled at Bianca for letting a future employee see her with her brain-surgery bandaging on. Still, the shop had needed Dede’s young energy, and even Lita knew that nothing said young blood like dimple piercings and a Nicktoons chest piece.

  “No face art, no makeup, no checks,” Cruz said. “We know the rules.”

  “Nothing that goes bad the next day,” chanted Dez and Dede from their shared station. Bee was almost surprised the guy getting tattooed didn’t chime in.

  Tito hadn’t died as much as he’d scattered into sound bites all over Bee’s life. It was just rare for it to be a sound bite she wanted to hear.

  “Yes. Even so, don’t run off people who might want to work here. They might also, you know, want tattoos,” Bianca told the crew at large. “Friendly keeps people coming back for those longer sessions. Don’t you all work on commission?”

  She got to work with the usual pre-appointment sterilizing, guided by the chirps and bleeps of her smartwatch. All week, she had scrubbed, swabbed, and dusted to avoid being nervous today. She knew the store was clean. She knew everything was in its place. If she started re-cleaning, she’d get sweaty, and she had spent too long doing her hair t
o ruin it again. She spent the afternoon inventorying biohazard bags and boxes of gauze.

  At exactly five, Jo appeared in the front window, where she was quickly met and hugged by Autumn.

  Bee tried not to feel jealous. It would only prove Birdy right.

  Sharing friends is normal, she told her pouting inner child. Great, even. When the people you love are happy, you have more reasons to be happy, too.

  I’ll believe it when I see it, said her inner child.

  Brat, Bee chided herself.

  The bell on the door clanged as Jo and Autumn stepped inside.

  “Hey?!” the three of them said in the questioning soprano of three people unsure as to how cool the next hour was going to be. Autumn rushed in to give Bee a hug hello. Jo offered a handshake that was unsurprisingly firm.

  “Thanks so much for fitting me in,” Jo said, peering around the mostly empty shop. Somewhere in the distance, Mo’s tattoo machine hummed. “Sorry, again, about TP-ing your tree.”

  “Of course, no problem,” Bee said, bristling at the again when there had been no original apology. She didn’t trust that this scene wasn’t being directed by Autumn. Her friend’s increasingly wide smile was too proud.

  “We didn’t have a chance to really catch up the other day,” Jo continued. “I’m working a project while I’m in town.”

  “Like an ad campaign?” Bee asked. She’d never had a firm grasp of what Jo did in California. Deb Freeman said that Jo tweeted for a living, but that seemed at odds with her charcoal-gray slacks. Who wore business casual when they didn’t have to?

  “It’s more like a photo essay,” Jo said. “Based on a list Autumn and I made in high school—”

  “I told you that we had a time capsule buried behind the doghouse on Main Street, didn’t I?” Autumn asked Bee, whose brain sputtered for a moment over not being included in the we described.

  “It’ll help keep my social media active while I’m between jobs,” Jo explained. “It looks bad for a social media strategist to abandon her personal accounts. Not very strategic. And more followers looks good on a résumé, as stupid as that sounds.”

  Oh, Bianca thought. Unemployment boredom.

  That made more sense. Last year, when Autumn was adjusting back to Sandy Point after Los Angeles, she’d been so bored—and so caffeinated—that she ended up ripping all the carpet out of her cottage in one night. Bee and Birdy had helped lift the stinky old shag into the dumpster behind Days, then drove the two hours with her to the closest Home Depot to pick out prefab flooring and a table saw. All in all, one weird Sunday.

  “So, you want to put a picture of my house on your Instagram?” Bee asked Jo.

  “Just the tree!” Jo said. “Nothing identifiable about the house. I’ll give you right of refusal on the photo before it goes live.”

  “I guess?” Bee said, feeling as though she was being backed into a corner where she wasn’t allowed to be mad anymore. “Why don’t we get started with picking your jewelry?”

  She pulled out the tray of ball-closure navel rings from the lit display counter. Various colorful cubic zirconias glittered up from the tray, in the shape of bows, crowns, flowers, and one seahorse eyeball.

  “They’re all surgical-grade metal,” she assured Jo. “Nothing that’ll turn your belly button green in the morning.”

  “Oh my gosh, didn’t you have a mood ring that turned your finger green once?” Autumn asked Jo.

  “Where did we win those? Oaks Park?” Jo gasped at the reclaimed memory. “I was desperate for a butterfly ring to tell me my own feelings.”

  “You could get a butterfly piercing to match,” Bee said, pointing to a particularly ugly butterfly in the tray. It had sharp blue wings and wiggly antennae.

  “I’m not as wild about bugs as I used to be,” Jo said, appraising the tray. She aimed a finger at a plain silver-and-faux-diamond ring. “This one.”

  The three of them wandered over to the farthest chair in the shop. Outside the picture window, waves broke in green-blue sheets. The rhythm reminded Bee how to breathe.

  “I’ve got my phone, and I am ready to take pictures,” Autumn said. “I’ll try to make them angular and arty like yours, Jo.”

  “Oh. No. I brought my camera. Can I show you how to—” Jo took her camera out of her giant purse and started clicking through settings.

  Bee felt a guilty sort of relief as it became clear that Jo and Autumn didn’t have an easy patter. No sentence finishing. No shorthand. Just the intensity of two people trying as hard as they could. Both of their rigid spines and unblinking eyes screamed, LOOK AT HOW ACTIVELY I CAN LISTEN! Like a first date happening on a prank show. Like best friends who didn’t actually know each other.

  Once Autumn had a basic understanding of how to line up the shot within the viewfinder grid, Jo shimmied down the chair and pulled her shirt up to the unsurprisingly gray cups of her bra.

  Black latex gloves snapped into place, Bianca sterilized Jo’s navel with a swab of surgical wash.

  Jo’s stomach jumped.

  “I read online that tattoo parlors have topical anesthetic,” she said, the quaver in her voice bouncing between the frosted-glass partitions that walled in Bee’s station.

  “For a six-hour tattoo sitting, maybe.” Bee laughed. Then, seeing the tension in Jo’s neck, she asked, “Are you not good with pain?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jo said stiffly.

  Bee set a consoling hand on top of the goose bumps on Jo’s shoulder. “Well, this is as good a way as any to find out. It would take longer to totally numb out your patch of skin here than it would to just pop the needle in and out. Quicker than getting your blood drawn, I promise.”

  “Bee almost became a phlebotomist,” Autumn reassured Jo.

  “Really? You wanted to draw blood all day?” Jo made a face. One big eyeball examined Bee. “Why didn’t you?”

  “My family said it was a waste of my valedictory honors to go to community college,” Bee said tightly. The emotional scab itched. Her family had demanded she go off to college only to demand that she come right back home when she was done. “But if I hadn’t gone to OSU, I wouldn’t have run into Autumn in line for our hall’s bathroom. She tried to pay me twenty bucks to cut in front of me.”

  “And you said no because you’d had three cups of cocoa.” Autumn lowered the camera enough to smile at Bee. “Aww, I love that our friendship meet-cute includes our tiny bladders.”

  “And my super-cool bedtime cocoa habit.” Bee made a mark where she wanted the exit hole of the piercing on Jo’s belly.

  Jo gulped. “You see a lot of tummies in here, Bianca?”

  “Not really. The belly ring isn’t as popular as it was ten years ago.” The second the words were out of her mouth, she remembered herself and gasped. She clapped her hands over her mouth, willing the condescension back in.

  Autumn’s jaw dropped. “Bee!”

  But Jo’s body made an arc like a wave. Knees up, mouth open, she let out a laugh that drowned out the ocean. “Clap back, Bianca Boria-Birdy! Tell me how you really feel. Don’t hold back.”

  “Oh my God, Johanna, I am so sorry,” Bee said, her pulse wild even as Jo continued to snort. “We don’t know each other well enough—and I would never treat a customer—”

  “No, for real, I get it,” Jo said, swiping tears from her eyes. “It’s hella funny, though. Trust that it will be the insta caption. I just won’t add that the literal owner of the shop said it.”

  Bee breathed again.

  “It’s okay, she’s the manager,” Autumn said, talking fast. “The shop is still owned by Lita.”

  “Oh, right,” Jo said. Soberly, she added to Bee, “I heard about your grandfather. I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Bee said, recentering herself in the memory of Tito. Inside the Salty Dog, she didn’t have room to be, well, salty with customers.

  She helped Jo readjust on the chair before reaching over to the instrument table. Wielding her forceps, sh
e pinched Jo’s belly-button skin.

  “Breathe in.” She waited for Jo’s abs to contract before jabbing the needle through. The camera shutter clicked. “And out.” Jo complied and Bee hit the needle with a cork. The ring slid easily into place. With more surgical-wash-soaked Q-tips, she swabbed the top and bottom of the ring.

  “Done. And barely any blood,” she told Jo. “Keep it clean and stay out of the ocean for at least six months. Maybe four if you wear a waterproof bandage.”

  Jo’s nose wrinkled. “Learning to surf is next on my list. I guess I don’t have to go in order….”

  “The list just says learn to surf,” Autumn said. “Maybe you could couch-surf!”

  Jo started to laugh but clutched invisible pearls instead. “Ew. You’re serious. Whose couch would I surf on? I’m miserable enough crashing in my old room.”

  Autumn’s eyebrows went up; somehow she was uninjured. Bee was sure if she ew-ed something Autumn said, there would be a fight. With Jo, she smiled extra hard. “I have a couch, Flo has a couch…” She tried to catch Bee’s eye. Bianca refused to participate. Autumn clapped, changing tactics. “Or we could get a thrift store couch and race them down the hill whilst surfing them.”

  “The whilst really sells it,” Jo said with a chuckle. She hopped down off the chair and adjusted her clothing. “But I need Flo’s generosity for how many different booze milk shakes I’m gonna try. I’m unemployed, remember? My credit cards are already crying.”

  “Have you applied for anything in town?” Autumn asked Jo.

  “At one of your many start-ups in need of a marketing manager?” Jo asked.

  Bee snapped off her latex gloves. “Surfside Café needs a server.”

  “Oh yeah!” Autumn said. “They fired Burps When He Yawns guy!”

  “Finally,” Bee agreed. “He should not work morning shifts. That sound makes it impossible to eat eggs.”

  “I haven’t hit food-service desperate yet,” Jo said, in the tone of someone who had never in her life considered service of any kind. She had no idea what it was like to work elbow to elbow on an assembly line, making sure that every slumber party in town got its cheese pizza. “I don’t think Sandy Point can afford me.”