Jasmine was flirting with a fifty-year-old stranger. Jasmine had just turned into someone else entirely. Someone Allie had never guessed she could be.
I want to go home, Allie thought. She squeezed her eyes closed. But of course when she opened them she was still in some stranger’s truck in the middle of the night. Or maybe she was in the company of two strangers.
“If you’ll do me a big favor,” Jasmine continued, “it would make it easier for me to figure that out. I have to call my boyfriend and find out where he wants us to meet him. So if I could just use that phone . . .”
The phone was sitting in a cup holder on the dashboard, and Jasmine reached for it and took it into her hands. As if there were no possibility that her request could be denied.
“Knock yourself out. I’m just disappointed you have a boyfriend. If I’m being completely honest.”
Jasmine flashed a set of dazzling white teeth. Allie had never seen Jasmine’s teeth before. Jasmine had never showed them off at New Beginnings.
“Well, don’t be too let down. Victor and I have a good understanding.”
Where am I and what’s happening to me? And how do I get it to stop?
“Victor,” Jasmine said into the phone.
A pause while Victor talked. Allie couldn’t hear his end.
“Yeah, I’m out. Where do you want to meet up?”
Pause.
“Yeah, I think I know that place. We ate there once. Just tell me the street again.”
Pause.
“Okay. Whenever. We’ll eat something while we’re waiting. I’m bringing another girl.”
A longer pause fell. It hurt Allie’s stomach. What a ridiculous idea, to think he wouldn’t mind. Allie had known in her heart such a thing wasn’t possible. Known it all along. It didn’t make any sense. Plus, on a larger scale . . . what if Jasmine was simply . . . unreliable? What if her understanding of the world was not something on which Allie should try to depend?
“I think so,” Jasmine told Victor. “We’ll see.”
She clicked off the call and dropped the phone back into the cup holder.
“We’re gonna meet at Auggie’s. The restaurant. You know where that is?” Jasmine asked the driver.
“I might.”
“You make a right at that next light. Unless you want to drop us off at the corner and we’ll walk.”
“Let me take you to the door. Two young girls in the city at night. It’s safer.”
A silence fell.
Allie broke it.
“What will you see about me?”
“Oh. What I said to Victor? Did you think that last part was about you? No, change of subject. We were on to something else by then.”
“But what did he think about me coming too?”
“He’s totally fine with it. I told you he would be.”
She followed Jasmine and a hostess to a table at Auggie’s, still too stunned to voice her apprehension. It was a fairly nice restaurant. Not dress-code fancy, but not fast food or a dive, either. A real dining establishment.
The hostess handed her a menu, which she took, because that’s what you do in a restaurant, especially when you don’t want to explain that you have not one cent to your name.
Then it was just Allie and her new . . . what? Was Jasmine her friend? Should she be? Did Allie dare be friends with this new person, this strange, bold, flirty girl only just now coming out of hiding?
“He’s coming from Sherman Oaks,” Jasmine said. “So Saturday night traffic and all, we have probably forty-five minutes at least. Maybe an hour. That’s why we’re sitting down and we’re gonna eat.”
Allie leaned closer and spoke quietly near Jasmine’s ear.
“We can’t order food.”
“Sure we can.” Jasmine resumed scanning her menu.
“I have no money. Do you have money?”
“Victor will pay the check when he gets here.”
“How do you know? Did he say that on the phone? Did he definitely say that in words? In those words?”
Jasmine set her menu down. Looked directly into Allie’s face.
“I know because I know him. Because all this’s happened before, just like it’s happening now. Look. Allie. You need to take a deep breath and calm down. We’re fine. You’re letting yourself get all in a panic over nothing. You didn’t eat any dinner and that’s probably not helping. Order something nice. After you eat you might feel better.”
“Oh,” Allie said, and picked up her menu. “That’s a good point, actually. Not only did I skip dinner, but all I’ve eaten for the last . . . I don’t even remember how many days is bread and salad and pasta and oatmeal. All those carbs and no protein. Makes me feel kind of scattered. Makes it hard to calm down.”
Was it possible that all this was okay and Allie just wasn’t able to see that yet?
“Have a good meal. It’s on Victor.”
Allie ran her eyes down the menu. Auggie’s had a whole section of vegetarian dishes, most with a vegan option. It wasn’t just pasta, either. There was a stuffed portobello mushroom, and a black bean and barley veggie burger. There was even a dish called Beans & Greens, with a tahini sauce topping.
“I can’t believe this,” Allie said. “This is amazing. There are three or four things here I can actually eat.”
“Feeling better?” Jasmine asked over dessert.
Jasmine had ordered tiramisu. Allie, who didn’t want to mess up her newly found tranquility by eating sugar, had asked for a bowl of fresh berries.
“I really am. I have to say. It’s kind of amazing how a full belly calmed me down. I couldn’t eat at New Beginnings. Not right, anyway. I’m sorry if I was being weird.”
“No problem.”
“I mean, I still have things I’m kind of worried about. Like, for example, I have absolutely nothing except the clothes on my back. I don’t even own a toothbrush. But I’m not totally freaking out about it like I was a few minutes ago.”
“Good. You’ll get what you need again.”
A silence. A few spoonfuls of raspberries, which were amazingly good. Blindingly good. They forced Allie to realize that she had been shut down to the simple experience of being alive. Those berries woke her up again.
Still, a few details played on a loop in her mind.
“How?” she asked Jasmine.
But it had been too long since the original statement.
“How what?” Jasmine asked around a mouthful of tiramisu.
“How will I end up with everything I need? What do you do out here? How do you buy things? Am I supposed to work some kind of job now? I would. I don’t mind. I’m not lazy. But I’m . . . you know. Fifteen. I’d have to have working papers. Which I don’t have and can’t possibly get.”
“You’re getting all amped up again.”
“Not really. I just wondered.”
“There’s plenty of stuff to do where nobody asks for working papers.”
A shadow fell across their table. Both girls looked up.