Page 13 of Base Block

“I’ll be ok. I went to LA with a bag full of clothes and pictures instead of trash, but I got robbed really soon after I arrived. I still managed to make it, even without anything to my name except what I was wearing and some change I found on the ground,” I said, to comfort him.

It didn’t work. “Hell,” he muttered. He thought for a second. “I can give you—”

“I won’t take money from you.” This wasn’t like how Sage and I had sometimes dipped into Damian’s wallet. He had owed us but Callum had done more for me than I deserved. “Let’s go to the bus station,” I directed.

He started the car and I thought that was where we were heading. I had already decided that I would sit in that nice plaza for a while before I determined what I would do next. There weren’t a lot of choices, so it wasn’t like I would have to ponder it very hard. But then, when I looked through the window at the highway, things seemed wrong.

“You’re not going the right way,” I told him. “You made a mistake.”

“No, I didn’t. We’re heading back to my house. I’ll drop you there and then I’ll go to the gym. You could help me pack and meet up with my neighbor when he comes by to get his broken ATVs out of my garage. After I’m done with my workout, we can sit down and come up with a better plan for what’s next.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, I kinda do,” he told me. “There has to be a better option than leaving you like this and saying ‘good luck.’” He glanced over at me and smiled. “You seem shocked.”

“You’re the nicest person I ever met.”

“Then you need to get out more,” he recommended.

I had been out a lot, but I’d never come across anyone like him. I made a decision as we drove: I was now his entourage, but I didn’t expect to receive clothes or drugs. I would help him as he had helped me and my payment would be watching him succeed. Hopefully, I’d also get some meals, since there also wouldn’t be money changing hands.

He left me at the house and I got to work. There was plenty to accomplish before he returned, including dealing with his neighbor who needed to pick up his machines. I had projects for myself, too, because I knew that I didn’t look good. Millie would have called me a hag and told me to fix my ass up, and I planned to.

By the time Callum got home, there had been a lot of changes. For one, the garage was empty—of the ATVs. There was still a lot of stuff around, like jars of rusty nails and screws, large puddles of oil and automotive fluids, stacks of old magazines, paint cans, and a pile of tools. I’d found a pair of gloves and organized a little, but most of my work had been inside.

He noticed that right away when I met him in the driveway. “You look different,” he stated. He didn’t mean my flip-flops.

“I made some makeup and I worked on my hair,” I said. I had found what had to have been his grandma’s old hot rollers and those had given me an unexpected amount of body and curl. I had burned a bunch of matches and taken some ancient hot chocolate out of a cupboard in the kitchen. Then I’d combined the ashes with petroleum jelly I’d discovered in his old-time first aid kit. That made eyeliner. Next, I’d used a mixture of the jelly and cocoa powder as eye shadow.

“Do you know if the berries in the back yard are poisonous?” I asked.

“What?” He was still staring at me, looking confused.

I hoped that they weren’t, because I had crushed those for the juice and made lip and cheek stain. I needed color on my face to combat the orange of my dress. “Come see what I did,” I told him. I took his hand and pulled as I hopped back to the kitchen.

“It’s pretty empty,” he commented, but it already had been because he’d gotten rid of a lot on his own. I had discovered a plate sitting on top of one of the cabinets, though, so now we could each have our own dish.

“Sit down,” I urged, directing him to a chair. “Watch the video I made.”

“What?” he asked again. Now he stared in confusion at the phone I had left on the table. “Where did you get that?”

“Your neighbor gave it to me when he took his ATVs out of your garage. He has a cell phone business, too, and he said he can fix anything.”

“Bryan gave you a phone,” he stated, but then shook his head. “He’s usually a dick. Why did he do that?”

“I had to give him something in return. Not what you’re thinking,” I added, in case he had jumped to the idea of me sleeping with his neighbor. “It was just my foot.”

“What?” He rubbed his hand over his face. “What about it?”

“He has a foot fetish and one of mine is still looking good.” I had gotten a pedicure in Chicago before we’d left and even the woman at the nail place had commented on what nice arches and toes I had. “I put on a little show for him. Just my foot,” I reiterated. “He gave me a phone in exchange.”

“I don’t like that,” Callum stated flatly.

“I needed it. I don’t have a SIM card and there’s no Wi-Fi here, but I could still make a video. Watch.” I played it before he could say anything else.

It opened with me posing next to the closet across from the bathroom, where he’d hung my towel on the knob the night before. “Hi guys!” video Rainey said brightly. I mouthed the words along with her. “I’m Rainey and my boyfriend Callum Frazier and I are getting ready to head to Michigan for his Woodsmen football tryout. But before we go, we’re cleaning out the house that used to belong to his grandparents. I found some very interesting stuff.” Video Rainey gleefully tapped her fingers together and smiled.

The rest of it was short clips of me “discovering” various items, things I’d found around the house and in the garage and then put in that closet. There were very old pennies from the nineteen-sixties, which I displayed in my hand. There was a robe with a marabou collar which I modeled, vamping for the camera. I showed the prehistoric medicine kit, a pile of very-expired chocolate bars, and a creepy doll.