At around one they sat in some generic corporate coffee house complaining about life on the bottom of the food chain.  Lyla looked away from the guys and at her coffee cup.  Julien had been trying really hard to have her; more coercively than seductively.  Julien his friend, who’s name Lyla caught was Bart, was dragging his fingers across the sparkling clean table until they made a faint squeaking noise.  Julien was snaking his index finger around his ear lobe, looking over at Lyla.  The place was empty, only the night shift zombie and some homeless looking guy took up any space.  The light above their table was flickering. 

            “This place reminds me of being a 16-year-old art fuck.”  She said. 

Julien cracked his neck and looked at her.

            “Do you remember when we met?”

            “Yup.  Your parents’ basement.  Seventh grade.”

            “You must have thought we were a couple of badasses, huh?  We were!  Who else do you know toked up in seventh grade?”

            “Weren't you supposed to be in like 10th grade at the time?”

            "Something like that."

            The turned light over their table turned off, rendering Bart and Julien as the Undead. 

            “Who did you bring with you that night?” Julien asked her.

            She twitched when she heard this and thought about it for a moment. 

            She walked home alone.  Bart and Julien were off to some club, saved by their taking half days the next day.  She got in around two and could hear her roommate snoring through her ajar bedroom door.  The place was pitch black so Lyla lit an aromatherapy candle and laid down on her bed.  The candle was set in a glass mug with a glassed-in photo of a miniature golf party she had when she was five.  The candle lit the mug well enough to see her ten preschool friends in the picture, all wearing gaudy early-90s overlarge t-shirts or acid wash jeans, giving goofy smiles.  Lyla brought the mug closer.  In the back row at the very end next to the twinkle-eyed employee host of the party was a small Korean girl, distracted by something.  What was her name?  It began with an S, she thought, Sally?  Susan?  Suzanne?  She moved away at the end of her seventh grade summer.  They went to different schools, but in seventh grade her moved into the apartment next to her’s and they became friends again for a short while.   Lyla wondered what she was distracted by in the picture.

Chapter Two

            Her alarm sounded off six hours later and completely erased the pleasant dream she was having about leading someone through the woods.  She woke up and noticed that her aromatherapy candle burned down to the bottom of its wick in her old mug.  She stared out her balcony and the world was pleasantly bright.

            She put some Cheerios into a Styrofoam cup, put on her make-up quick, and left with her apartment door wide open by accident.  On her way to work, she put in an old mp3 mix from high school.   This Friday morning sun was an overflowing bowl of banana pudding and the air outside was warm and wonderful.  Summer was coming and Lyla felt almost in control of things.  The sun brought a nostalgic harmony into her old high school car. 

            She was entrusted enough by the owners of Belmont Books to open up every morning.  As usual, she parked her car in back, out by the wooden fence overlooking a shopping mall.  It was a good spot because a wide tree branch there shadowed the driver’s seat for most of the morning.   She lingered at the building’s façade for a little, watching the faces of people in their cars.  One muscular man was yelling at himself while fidgeting with his leather portfolio.  A sixteen-year-old girl lifelessly applied her makeup on the way to school.  Lyla just sighed and jammed her rusty old key into the lock.  She was already expecting it to stick, which it did, so she shimmied the tiny thing left and right until it broke right in half. 

            She held the small key stub up to her eye to check the reality of what just happened.  She screamed “FUCK” and looked back at the road.  Cars were pushing and shoving one another incessantly.  Suddenly, a truck rammed the back end of a Buick that looked about ten years old.  It veered off into the parking lot of Belmont books, the truck sheepishly right behind her.  It was a young girl in a prep school uniform, oddly staring straight ahead in disbelief.  It was a trance devoid of annoyance, fear, or anger.  The hairy young Italian man driving the truck got out first and inspected the damage.  The girl rolled down her window which squeaked on its way down and asked the man if the damage was bad.  He looked at her, trying to figure out if a lie would work here – she may just have the density to believe the words of a perfect stranger.

            “Well, miss, it’s not … terrible.”

            “Is it, like, a dent?”

            “Um, well yeah, it made somewhat of a dent if you want to call it that,”

            The girl sat with that blank stare on her face and looked up at Lyla as though she were her older sister overseeing her actions.  Lyla darted her eyes away at first but then looked back into the young girl’s stark brown, almond –shaped eyes.  She looked familiar.

            “Don’t you think you should check?”  Lyla called out to the girl.

            The man huffed and stood by the large barrel hood of his truck and the girl followed Lyla’s instructions.  Lyla walked over to the backend of the Buick with the girl.

            “What’s your name?” Lyla asked expecting an answer which might ring a bell. 

            “Jaclyn.”

            The bumper was had a big pock mark from that behemoth shark of a vehicle. 

            “That’s a good-sized dent.”  Lyla said, looking right at the guy.  The innocent girl felt the dent with her small, dainty fingers. 

            “She can figure this out fine, thank you.”  The guy snapped. 

            Jaclyn could feel the gazes of the two older people on her as she caressed her bumper’s wound.  

            “Well?”  The guy blurted out, scratching the nape of his neck.

            “It’s no big deal” Jaclyn said, barely audible. 

            The guy got back into the truck and roared his way back on to the freeway.  Lyla and Jaclyn watched the truck swim its way through the traffic like a hungry barracuda. 

            “You don’t remember me.”  The girl said to Lyla bluntly. 

Lyla looked back at the small girl apologetically.   “My memory’s awful, I’m sorry!  What’s your last name, Jaclyn?”

“Cho” she said.

Lyla nodded her head but had no idea who this girl was supposed to be.

“Jaclyn Cho,” said the girl, “Shelli’s little sister.  You probably don’t remember me at all since I’ve grown, but you used to come over to my house and paint my toenails.”

The girl got back into her Buick and started to roll her noisy window back up.

“Wait,”

“Yeah?”

“Is your sister still in town?”

“No, but she’s visiting next weekend.”

            Lyla reached into her purse and pulled out her banged-up old cell phone. 

            “Can I get her number off you?”

            The girl pulled out her cell phone and read off her older sister’s number.  The window squeaked until it nestled into the top of the car door and the girl pulled back into the flow of traffic.  Lyla completely forgot about the door and inspected the lock again.  She twisted the little remnant of the key with her bright pink fingernails.  She twisted until the nail just about broke off and it worked.  She let out a sigh of relief and looked at her throbbing fingernail.

            “Shelli Cho.”  She said out loud.

Chapter One

            Lyla looked away from Tod Browning’s Dracula flickering from her plasma and at a white wall, now blue from the TV’s glow.  The room’s mood was low tonight, each shadow in each corner magnified the old movie being exploited by the intrusive nature of the high-def TV.  The movie never looked so bad, she thought.  She also found it unimpressive that there was no music in the entire movie, so when the scared victims look into Dracula’s face all Rembrant-lit, nothing happened but an awkward silence.  This guy isn’t scary, he’s just awkward.  It was scarier when she watched it with some babysitter seventeen years ago, whose name is too elusive for her to bother with.

            Her roommate came into the room and avoided a greeting as usual.  She glided across room and into her bedroom with the presence of a ghost, her energy not affecting the personality encapsulated in this living room.  Maybe it was one of Dracula’s concubines.  She walked over to the balcony overlooking a black sky and a blurry, perverse urban setting below.  ‘As above, so below’ she thought.  Down on the street there was a guy wearing a gaudy leather jacket with heart-with-wings patches and skulls talking to a white Rasta guy.  A noisy wide truck roared by but otherwise it was a quiet night with down-and-outs ducking in and out of the erotic video stores and dance clubs. 

            “Julien!” Lyla shouted “Ya got any pot?!”

            Julien, the Rasta guy, got really defensive and stressed out- looking left and right and left again before he widened his eyes at her.  She laughed at him and walked back inside. 

            The room’s mood was fading into something else; the movie’s setting had changed into an exterior day scene of some kind.  She turned off the expensive TV and sat in the darkness for awhile.  She started thinking about a rant she went on the other day to a friend of hers about how being bored is a self-inflicted wound.

            “LYLA!” Julien shouted from below.  She went over to her balcony and closed the door but could still hear a muffled ‘LYLA!’.  The white walls reflected the street lamps from below onto her face.  She avoided thinking about her previous days’ words and left the apartment.   

            It was chilly outside.  The sky looked like a black roof tonight, she thought, and even though she was out in the street she still felt inside.  She walked toward Julien and the leather jacket guy.  His friend had spiky green hair and a dark, gray complexion.  He looked kind of like a cactus dressed up for Halloween.  Julien looked like Julien: awkwardly handsome, bird-like, angry about something. 

            “You two look like a couple of vampires.”  She said.  The leather jacket guy started telling her about some audition he had in Pheonix for an amateur vampire movie but she didn’t really pay any attention to him.  She just stood there, waiting.  Paul, one of the neighborhood’s homeless guys started inching his way toward them like a stray cat.

            “Talk about vampires.” Julien said nodding toward Paul. 

            Paul looked really strung out and on a mission.  Every time Lyla looked over at him he looked like he was waiting to say something but couldn’t come out with it.  She thoughtlessly looked right past him.