Alexa steps back from the carving.
“Don’t you think you should think about it?” she asks. “This feels kind of fast.”
“It doesn’t matter that it’s fast,” Meg says. “It’s perfect.”
“Maybe you could think about it for the next couple of days, though. You might regret it. This is your body and your body is sacred.”
Meg shakes her head as though she is hearing crazy, incomprehensible things.
“But, Alexa,” she says, “the beautiful thing about me is that I never regret anything. Ever. If I had gotten your question last night I would have disappointed all of you.”
Meg looks at me. She looks at Bev.
“Guys,” she says to us. “Help a girl out.”
I can see that Alexa’s worried, so I feel like an ass**le when I say it, but I can’t lie.
“I think it’s rad,” I tell Meg. “I think you should do it.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Bev?”
Bev leans against the wall and contemplates. I follow her gaze as it moves from Meg to the carving and back to Meg. She takes a slow sip of coffee and swallows.
“Yeah,” she says. “It suits you.”
“All right!” Meg smiles, triumphant. “It’s three against one. Jasper, here I come.”
The conversation shifts to the carving itself, and how Meg will need to bring it with her, and how it will probably require stealing—a prospect that in no way excites Meg, who never steals and never lies and believes wholeheartedly in karma. I don’t listen that closely, though, because I’m busy watching Bev lean against the counter and sip her coffee, not sure how I feel about this small agreement.
Finally, Alexa stands on her tiptoes to reach the carving, and, sighing, removes it from its hook.
“Done. Okay?” And she shakes her head as if to ask if she really has to do everything for us.
The tattoo parlor is in the upstairs of an old building with high ceilings and shiny white walls. Huge windows open to telephone wires and blue sky. Meg plops down on a couch; Alexa and Bev and I grab binders of tattoo designs; and a skinny kid walks out from the room in the back and says, surprised, “Hey, I know you guys.”
He has full-sleeve tattoos and a lip ring and, despite these things, he looks young and wholesome, like a twelve-year-old in a really good Halloween costume.
“I was at your show last night,” he adds. “You guys were awesome.” He sort of falters when he says the word awesome, and smiles wider to appear more convincing.
“Are you Jasper?” Meg asks.
“Yeah,” he says, still smiling and bobbing his head. We all shake hands, and I’m amazed at how good even shaking hands feels now that we’re away from home and on our own time and old enough to get tattoos if we want them.
Before Meg disappears into the back room with Jasper, she turns to her little sister and says, “Lex, it’ll be okay. People get tattoos all the time.”
And maybe it’s because Jasper is so chill and approachable, or because his voice doesn’t falter at all when he tells us that the Good Morning, Sunshine design is going to make “like, the most kickass tattoo ever,” or because when sitting on a couch in a tattoo parlor with designs hanging on the wall and cataloged in books, getting a tattoo seems entirely natural—Alexa says, “Oh, I know. I can’t wait to see it.”
Bev takes Meg’s seat on the couch and I sit across from her in a red chair, and for a while we just flip through the binders and listen to the buzzing of the needle and Elliott Smith playing faintly in the back room. Alexa takes a collection of one-act plays from her purse and reads, absentmindedly twisting her brown feather earring when she isn’t turning a page.
I find a stack of calendars on the table, hand-stapled and unevenly cut. Each month features a client’s tattoo, obviously shot with some cheap digital camera. Now that my days aren’t dictated by school bells and homework, I could really use a calendar.
“Hey, Jasper,” I call. “Are these calendars free?”
The buzzing of the needle pauses.
“Yeah, bro, help yourself. January and March are my designs.”
Buzzing resumes. I flip to the months. January: a necklace of leaves. March: an owl. Meg got lucky; his work is really good.
Alexa hands me a pen and tells me our plan for the rest of the week. This afternoon we’ll drive to Arcata for a show at a bar called The Alibi. Tuesday morning we’ll head east to Weaverville for an afternoon café gig. Then we’ll make our way north, toward Oregon, and stop somewhere off the highway.
“What should I write for Tuesday night?”
“Hopefully Yreka or something, but I don’t know yet. We could end up anywhere.”
“I can’t write ‘anywhere.’”
“Write ‘Unknown Motel,’” she says. I do.
From there we’ll go to Ashland, where Meg and Alexa’s aunt and uncle live, and spend the night with them. And then, we’ll drive to Portland for The Disenchantments’ last show, and move Meg into her dorm room. We’ll drive home after that, in one ten-hour day.
“Then what?” Alexa asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
I glance at Bev. She’s flipping through the binder pages, pretending not to hear us.
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I say.