With the Light in Our Eyes
By Neko Kuroban and Sister Grimm
Dedicated to MyPenIsSharperThanYourSword
Chapter III:
All that Glitters
All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes, a fire shall be woken; a light from the shadows shall spring. Renewed shall be blade that was broken. The crownless again shall be king.
"You do realize that we've just walked something like five miles, all of them uphill, don't you?"
"We're only still at the base of the mountains," Thalia responded. "And going uphill is a good thing in L.A. It means that you're getting further away from the parts that you wouldn't want to be in."
Luke sounded more amused than he should. "What — if we go downhill, we're in the projects?"
"Worse: if we go downhill from here, we end up in Santa Monica. It's a resort town," she added, solely for his benefit. "The poor areas are deeper in the Basin, in the Valley, or closer to the water. Gentrification took over in west L.A. You saw Ladera Heights and Inglewood while we were on the bus. Do you really think any of the people we saw ended up there by choice?"
"I'm sure the drunk outside the strip club did."
"I'll give you that," she conceded. "He didn't look like someone brought him to a bachelor party at gun point."
The problem with Brentwood, she mused, was that it looked exactly like what people expected Los Angeles to look: shiny, new buildings in commercial districts along the highway and narrower residential streets lined with low structures, made of white stucco and capped with a red tile roof. New apartment buildings and rowhouses designed to look weathered were nestled beside the townhouses and single-family homes of the 1930s. It was a neighborhood of hanging Spanish mosh, vivid flowers in bloom, and wisteria climbing up trellises, but it was impossible not to admit that it had its own kind of seediness — little violent crime, many more sins of over-entitlement and mindless self-indulgence.
"This is where you grew up."
Whatever else he might have been, Luke Castellan was perceptive.
Thalia stepped on a crack. "You could say that. Formative years, anyway."
What she did not tell him was that it was fairly recent. Until a few years ago, she had lived in the gated heights of Bel-Air, although she had been born in the Hamptons. In honesty, Thalia actually preferred Brentwood, the neighborhood she had dragged Luke to following their sojourn to Rodeo Drive. A village within a city, it masqueraded as modest yet elite, but the truth was that it was a pocket of affluence barely tempered by urban reality. Settled half-way up the Santa Monica Mountains, it was a neighborhood of independent political bookstores, designer boutiques, and quirky, overpriced cafes, bordered by the Platinum Triangle neighborhoods of Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Bel Air.
Thalia knew the network of the streets here as well as she could read an analog clock. In the early morning light, sights she had long been inured to appeared almost pretty. Beneath the rising winter sun, the colorless concrete pavements and white homes were bathed blood-orange. The glittering ocean, only just visible behind them, seemed darker in the crimson-hued light. Flowering erythina blazed, even in December. The fan palms and magnolia trees, still flourishing in the seventy-degree heat, seemed charming instead of simply garish. Even a handful of stray broken glass on the sidewalk glittered.
"This way," Thalia said, grabbing Luke's arm to cut across the street at the intersection. The traffic signal had not yet changed, and a blue Mercedes, one of the few cars on the street at this early hour, blasted its horn. Thalia flipped the driver off without so much as a glance. "I need to get some stuff."
"And you needed to bring me with you?" He asked when she released him.
She stopped to look up at him. "Would you be able to find your way back to LAX without me?"
"You've appointed yourself my guide, haven't you?"
"You'll have to ignore the lack of Star Tours. Those cost extra."
"A modern-day Sacagawea."
The term made her think — not without some remorse — of her friend Daniel, who was always dubbing her with whatever random nickname that came to mind or fit the situation. They had been best friends since grade school, but they had been drifting apart as of late, mostly due to his newly discovered desire for popularity. She didn't understand his social climbing, and her social isolation (self-imposed, or so people were constantly telling her) was a burr in his side. Daniel had chosen his new friends over her, but did that mean he didn't care? Would he be hurt that she had left without so much as a note?
"If you promise to never call me that again, I'll show you where Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple lived. I could even point out where Joan Crawford beat her kid with wire coat hangers and where everything happened with O.J. and Nicole."
Luke gazed down at her, and, reflexively, Thalia swallowed. The red-gold light danced off of his pale, delicate features and tangled in his white-gold hair. She had to admit to herself that he was one of the best-looking boys she had ever seen — and there was far from a shortage of good-looking youths at the private school she went to, although she reviled most of them. He had a graceful, elegant way of moving, but his body language was as closed as hers was. It was something more than his finely carved lips or sharp cheekbones or long lashes that drew her to him, some intangible aura. It was not charisma. She knew the effects of that well enough to spot them.
It was greater than that.
I've seen better, she tried to tell herself. And most of them have turned out to be assholes who feel like the world owes them something by virtue of being wealthy and attractive. Just because he's nice to you doesn't mean anything. His haircut screams private school, and look at his clothes. He's probably running away because his dad kicked him out for being gay.
"I'll settle for Cole Porter," he told her.
Yeah, Thalia decided. Luke Castellan is definitely gay. All gay, all day, everyday. That confirms it. How many straight guys make musical theater references? "And here I was ready to bargain up to Harrison Ford's new place. Guess you're not one for space cowboys."
"We should probably steer clear, unless he wants to come outside to find 'Han shot first' written in spray paint on the street." He paused for effect. "Outlined in gasoline." Another beat. "On fire."
She could not help but laugh. Okay. Maybe not gay. "That would make more of an impact than the cookies my friend tried to Fed Ex. Together, they spelled out the same thing. Or 'has fist thorn' or 'shan't first ho.' It depends on how you anagram it."
"Or 'harsh fist ton.'" Luke flashed a self-indulgent smile. "I went to school with Milo and Louis Gibson. After the fourth Lethal Weapon movie came out, everyone was just kind of embarrassed on their behalf. My friend anonymously sent them a sheet cake."
Thalia had to know. "Did it say anything?"
"Well," Luke drawled. "'Sorry your dad has no problem being an asshole' was my suggestion." His expression was one of impossible innocence. "Curiously, she didn't take me up on it. It probably wouldn't have fit."
"That is just the message I've always wanted to receive written in frosting on chocolate cake," Thalia noted sarcastically. "Ideally with sugar-spun flowers."
"Weirdly enough?" Luke asked. "Me, too." He laughed, but there was a sharp, bitter note to it that crawled beneath her skin.
"This way," she said, indicating a side street lined with tall fan palms. "My house" — she did not, could not, say home — "isn't far. Where are you from?" She tried to sneak the question in, hoping to get it out of the way without raising tension.
The shadow that crossed his face told her she had failed.
"If you don't want to talk about it..." He had started walking faster; she had to quicken her steps to keep up with his longer stride. "We don't have to."
And then — later, she would scold herself for it — Thalia reached out with her fingertips and grazed the fabric of Luke's sleeve. The barest of touches...and yet he halted where he stood. She let her hand fall to her side, feeling heat come to her face.
"No, it's fine," Luke answered after a moment, and he fell back into step beside her as if nothing had happened, as if that darkness she had seen there had never existed. "Greenwich, Connecticut."
She dismissed it as having been nothing. "My west coast kicks your east coast's ass," she claimed, trying to keep her tone light.
"We have better pizza," he protested, the mischief returning to his blue eyes.
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. "But you can't find decent sushi, Mexican food, or their bastard love child: fish tacos." She smirked at the expression of slight disgust on his face. "Don't tell me you haven't had fish tacos."
"I can't say I have — and my life has probably been richer for it." He shook his head. "Do your fish tacos come complete with mercury poisoning and salmonella?"
"Only the ones at the pop-up taco cart." God, why did she feel like smiling all the time when she was with him? She almost never smiled. "The nicer places just give you tapeworm that destroys your organs," she added wickedly. "Up here."
She brought him to a complex of nine Spanish-style townhouses built to frame a central courtyard. The large, bright houses were all alike: crisp, clean white with vivid red accents, three stories high, large windows with plantation shutters, red-tiled balconies with narrow balustrades. The property was entered through an imposing-looking wrought iron gate. Los Angeles was a city of fences, both literal and symbolic.
Did she even want to do this? She drew in a breath to steady herself and reached for her two keys, which she, sick of losing it in the chaos of her school bag, usually wore on a chain around her neck, hidden beneath her shirt. Her fingers touched only bare skin. She swore beneath her breath as she remembered exactly where it was. She had taped the two small keys — chain and all — to a mirror in her mother's bedroom, where it stood as much a silent comment on the woman's vanity as it was Thalia's final fuck you.
"Something wrong?" Luke prompted when she did not take action.
"Forgot my keys," she mumbled beneath her breath. "I guess—"
He set his bag on the sidewalk and then knelt beside it, rifling through its contents. Finally, he withdrew a plain white envelope and rose. He pulled out of the packet a long, slender wire. She tried to watch his hands as he worked it into the keyhole and manipulated it, but his fingers' movement was too subtle for her to catch the nuances of what he was doing. After several seconds that seemed like minutes, the gate swung open on silent hinges.
She raised an eyebrow. "How very criminal of you."
"Let's just consider it a very useful life skill." He shoved the envelope into the back pocket of his dark jeans and grabbed his duffel, throwing it over his shoulder with ease. "Which one's yours?"
"On the end." She indicated it with a tilt of her head. "You'll need to teach me that trick."
"Maybe someday," Luke answered lightly. Thalia felt oddly pleased by this statement, even though she knew that it was far from likely that this day would come to pass. He probably won't be in my life after the next few hours anyway. "Is the front door alarmed?"
"Technically," she granted. Off his look, she explained, "It's alarmed in as much as that there is an alarm and that the company sends a bill once a month, but it's never set. With my luck, though," she continued, more to herself than to him, "this is probably the only time she remembered."
"She?"
Apparently, it was too much to hope that he had not heard her. "My..." The word mother caught in her throat. "My sister," she lied. "I live with her."
He knew she was lying — she could see that in his eyes — but he pretended to believe her.
She liked him for that.
Instead of trying the front door, she brought Luke around to the back, where a narrow fire escape climbed the back of the building. They were common in most places in the city, physical manifestations of intangible fears of earthquakes and wildfires. It was almost a necessity in a part of the city where people could still remember the Brentwood-Bel Air fire a generation ago.
Thalia went quickly up the stairs, Luke at her heels. Her bedroom was on the third story, although the fire escape continued up to the flat sun deck on the roof. It would have been easy to pick a lower window, but the one in her bedroom that overlooked the narrow walkway would be the simplest to break into. She never closed the wooden blinds, and she never locked the windows. How many times had she slipped out her window on nights when sleep eluded her?
And, with some luck, no one is going to check my bedroom for a very long time, she thought grimly as she forced it open. There was a trick to applying pressure to it, but, after it had lifted the first inch, the window was easy to push the rest of the way upwards.
She could feel Luke's disapproval behind her. "You live in a city of three million people...and you don't lock your bedroom window at night."
"It's closer to four million," she corrected, before dryly adding, "But thanks for your concern. Honestly, though?" Why was she saying this? Why was she willingly making herself vulnerable for some boy she barely knew? "I've never had any feeling of security in my life. I doubt that locking my bedroom window at night would help."
With that, she crawled through her open bedroom window, calling for him to join her over her shoulder when he did not immediately follow. When he actually did come in, however, it struck her that she could count on one hand the number of people who had ever been inside her bedroom, and, of them, the only boy had been her friend Daniel. She was not prone to fits of girlish insecurity, but she suddenly wondered what her bedroom looked like to a male gaze.
What did her room say? She was hardly the kind of girl who needed flowered wallpaper to match the carpet and the bedspread. She did not keep boy band posters hung on the ceiling nor trophies lined up on her desk. Most girls her age had childhood remnants still strewn about, a few treasured things alongside the teenagers they were beginning to change into, but she had never had the patience for dolls, even when she was much younger. Even Daniel's sprawling bedroom in his parents' Pacific Palisades home bore the stamp of his personality: every inch of available wall space was covered by wall scrolls from his favorite animé series and posters for movies and video games, the surfaces cluttered, and everything kept in a perpetually haphazard state.
The girl who had lived in this third-floor bedroom existed only as a figure in the minds of others.
Her bedroom was not small, but it did not have the cavernous, empty feeling that Daniel's did. It was a space where it was possible to close the door and shut out the rest of the world. It wasn't as careless as Daniel's, either. At least my mess is an organized one. The hardwood floor was visible, though there were a few errant clothes and books and papers strewn about. There were things she needed to be precise and exact about, but she had a tendency to tidy only when she was tired of looking at it or trying to locate a particular thing. (The housekeeper was not permitted in her bedroom. Thalia couldn't abide the thought of someone else going through her belongings.)
The once impersonal white walls were painted blue, a shade her mother would have referred to as Tiffany blue, and the high ceiling was green. The two colors almost contrasted, almost complimented one another, and she quite liked the inversion. One wall was striped, blue alternating with green. The far wall was filled with a watercolor mural that had never been finished — and, now, she realized, it never would be. Another was filled with photographs she had taken herself, which she had arranged in a staggered pattern, the way someone else might lay bricks. The small gaps between the photos were filled with writing in silver and black ink: doodles, notes, poetry, song lyrics, anything.
The two large windows both had plantation shutters that she never closed. Wooden blinds looked nice, but they only softened the way the light streamed in instead of blocking it. Instead, over the window she and Luke had entered hung curtains that one of her nannies (she thought it was the third, but it might have been the fourth — she had had six or seven in all) had fashioned out of a turquoise blue sari, stitched with threads of green and gold and darker blue, on a whim. A prism caught the light in the opposite window, reflecting shards of early morning light.
She couldn't remember the last time she made her bed. A full-sized with an ornate wrought iron frame, it had once been draped with a translucent canopy, which she had long since taken down. The cotton sheets were tangled with one another, and there was a bundle of cast-off clothes, her school uniform, balled at the foot. The white duvet was spilling onto the floor; she had a habit of kicking it off while she slept in favor of the lighter fleece blanket.
She glanced at the boy in her bedroom and used the toe of her boot to discreetly nudge a pair of panties underneath her bed. Just in case. It was not as if everything else — books, CDs, homework, toys for the pet cat she no longer had — did not end up there.
Her nightstand held a stained glass reading lamp she rarely used to actually read. She had replaced the regular bulb with a black light that cast the room in a queer ultraviolet glow. The book she had been reading (Forged by Fire, her place marked with a dog-eared corner) a few nights before sat beside her CD player and headphones. There was an uneven stack of CD cases beside it, most of what she had been listening to lately — Green Day, Blink 182, Sevendust, Pennywise, Less Than Jake, Dropkick Murphy, and others. The top drawer of her nightstand contained more CDs; the others were much more random in contents.
In one corner rested her violin in its stand, although she had not so much as picked the instrument up, even to tune it, in nearly three months. Thalia had been good — better than good, or so she had been told — but she had lost interest in it once her skill had begun to develop to the point where more and more people had started to take notice. Their attention had ruined the appeal. She no longer had the violin she had first played on, a simpler student instrument. The one she had kept was Lott's version of the del Gesu.
(It had been an extravagant gift from her uncle, but why would he give her such an expensive present? She wondered. He may have been the one who paid for her to attend private school — another gesture she did not understand — but it was hardly as if he knew her. She had met the man on exactly two occasions. Once had been when she was a very young child, but the second time was much more recent. About a year ago, she had returned home from school, expecting an empty house, to find a man with her mother's fair hair and green eyes sitting on the edge of the living room sofa. Her mother, who had looked to be on the verge of tears, was curled at the opposite end. Hearing Thalia enter, the man rose to greet her with the false cheer adults used when speaking to very young children. He had left within minutes, and her mother had immediately gone to fortify herself with a neat glass of vodka.)
On her desk chair was a pile of clean laundry Thalia had once intended to sort and put away, and there was a pair of shoes under her desk, left where she had kicked them off a few days before. Her desk drawers may have been filled with half-chewed pens and school papers, hair bands and black nail varnish, but the surface was organized. Three cameras were placed in a neat rank, arranged by size, beside a shoebox containing film that had not yet been developed. Spread out were a few photos that had been developed; they were all the same shot but frozen in different stages of retouching. There were a few half-empty glasses of water and a few drained cups that had once held coffee that had never made it to the kitchen. Why did she have an intermediate French dictionary? (She didn't even take French. Latin had been her foreign language since everyone had been made to choose in first grade. It must have been Daniel's.)
The mirror over her dresser was obscured with more developed photographs, quotations on Post-It notes, and library receipts she had taped up and never took down. The dresser was covered with a synthetic silk runner she had found in Japantown, ironically depicting a popular Chinese motif of a dragon fighting a phoenix over a pearl. The intricate bronze birdcage, meanwhile, had come from a thrift store in North Hollywood. Thalia had removed the hinged doors and turned it into somewhere to hang her necklaces. It worked better than her rarely used jewelry box, where everything had turned into a tangled snarl and she could never find a match to her earring. One of her mother's boyfriends, one of the ones who had tried too hard, had given her a silver-plated set (comb, brush, mirror, perfume atomizer) with her name engraved in curling script. Discarding it was more of a statement than keeping it was. A mug made in last year's art class was filled with half-used eyeliner pencils and dried out tubes of mascara and lip gloss she had broken the seal on to use once and never again opened.
A full-length mirror stood alone with a defeated-looking towel laying in a crumpled heap at the base. The two long waist-high bookcases were crammed with everything: books from Mercedes Lackey to Agatha Christy to Charles Dickens; brightly colored manga; animé tapes (a lot of Japanese-language bootlegs with English subtitles but a number of legitimate English dubs for more mainstream series); a few oversized art books; back issues of magazines. She was not the sort of girl who clung on to childhood, but the large papasan chair, with its round purple cushion and white wooden frame, provided a home for a plush snow leopard that she did not quite have the heart to throw away.
The double doors to her closet had been left open. It was technically a walk-in closet, but it was long and narrow rather than wide. The only posters in her room were on the inside of those two doors; she usually thought they only served to make a room look tawdry and tacky. One door held a large poster of James Dean, looking at his reflection in a frozen pond. The other held a small grouping of glossy pictures, taped in three rows of three to form a square. The Beatles walking across Abbey Road in a single file line. Marilyn Monroe in a low-cut black dress. Audrey Hepburn smoking a French cigarette. Kurt Cobain looking plaintive.
There had once been her own mother as a long-haired, thin-limbed teenage ingénue — a girl looking up through her eyelashes as coy as any biblical temptress; a girl who held herself the way girls who knew they were beautiful did; a girl who seemed so fragile and so unmendable — but Thalia had torn it down, replaced it with Cyd Charisse's white pearl smile and black pin curls and dancing spider eyes.
She turned to face Luke only to discover that he had crossed to her bookshelf, where he was examining the contents. "Overwhelming?" She teased.
"Compared to my bedroom... hardly." He looked up to her, and, God, why did her stomach tighten a little when he looked at her like that? "You're going to have to explain the James Dean thing to me, though. I've never quite gotten the appeal."
"Tragic, cute, died young. What is there not to get? I'll just get what I need, so we can go."
Her own words struck her as being ironic: what she needed, she would never find here.
She knew that now.