Page 76 of Deja Who
THIRTY-NINE
Leah’s studio apartment always made her sad, but never more than today. She much preferred Archer’s place. He might be only renting the tower, and his landlord might be gone all the time, and the place might be on the market, but it nonetheless felt like a real home.
Or maybe that was just the Archer Effect. Either way, her small studio (or was that redundant?) seemed to scream “this is the home of someone who does not care, does not anticipate marriage and children, and is only waiting to die.” Maybe it was the beige wallpaper. If she lived through the end of the month, she promised herself she’d repaint everything in Wild Moss. Or maybe Fennel Seed. Wild Turkey?
Her plan—get to a working phone to warn Cat—worked perfectly until she picked her broken cell phone up off the floor. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten such a vital detail. “Son of afuck,” she swore, poking ineffectually at the thing. She hadno landline as they were almost obsolete in the twenty-first century, and even if she did, Cat’s number was stored in the dead phone. She almost never called it, and couldn’t begin to recall what it was. Cat was one of those people who just appeared when they were needed, and existed quietly offstage when they weren’t. Which was a terrible way to think of her best friend, but if she got mired in her faults, nothing would get done.
Dead phone. Hmm. She had another phone. This one wasn’t dead so much as on near-permanent vacation. A homophobic client had not taken well to the news that he used to be Oscar Wilde. He managed to snatch her phone away, then tossed it into the vase of flowers on the small table beside her desk. Unfortunately they weren’t silk flowers but real ones that required water. (She’d never madethatmistake again.)
She’d gone home and plunked her dead phone into a bag of rice, but assumed it wouldn’t work, assumed she’d need another, and acquired a new one. But rather than ditch the old one she behaved the way most people did: tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it. Did the rice work? Or not? Cells being so cheap these days, it didn’t much matter.
She went to the kitchen junk drawer, pawed through the mess of seed packets (she had never planted a seed in her life), Elmer’s glue (she could not remember the last time she used it, literally years and years ago), twine (did people even use that anymore?), expired stamps (or send snail mail?), broken pencils (why in God’s name did she save broken pencils?), and a battered cell phone.
She plugged it in to charge, gripping the thing so hard her knuckles ached, waited a couple of minutes, and then gave it a tentative poke.
“Yes!” Cat’s number, Cat’s number, CatCatCat... “There!” She pressed it at once, hoping she was catching her friend on a rich day, not a park day.
“Have you fucked up this thing with Archer yet?”
She was so relieved she could barely summon the energy to bristle. “Excellent, you haven’t been stabbed.” Then, “How did you know who this was?”
“Who else would be calling the crazy homeless lady who lives in the park? Social services? An Air Force recruitment center? AT&T?”
“Listen, my mother—”
“Should I bother to waste your time with condolences?”
“Probably not. Listen, get the hell off the streets, you understand? Check into the Ritz—”
“No way. They don’t have streaming. After a hard day of panhandling and feeding pigeons, I really need classicDaily Show.”
Ugh.“The Peninsula?”
“Pass. No room service after eleven.”
“Listen, I don’t care where, but donotloiter at your usual haunt, which would make it easy for my killer to kill you. Anybody who’s been watching me for more than a few weeks will know about you and where to find you... in the park. They won’t have a clue you’re the former mayor of the nation’s twenty-first-largest city.”
“Yeah, well. If this were a TV show—”
“TV is getting everything wrong this month!”
“—I’d say something tough yet caring, like ‘I can take care of myself’ and then promptly get my big ass murdered. So to Hotel Felix I shall go.”
“Is that really a hotel?”
“Yes, you plebian.”
“Sounds like the name of a hotel in a cartoon.”
“Wicked plebian.”
“Stop that. Maybe you should leave town altogether,” she fretted.
“If he knows me, he only knows Cat, not Catherine Carey. It’s a good idea, Leah.”
“So you’re going, right? Right now? You’re on your way? Right now?”
“Cripes, you’re a bigger nag than my handlers and my private school tutors combined. Yeah, I’m going.”
