Nice Girl
When Alex Whittman escapes her overbearing mother to take a desk job at a Los Angeles escort service,
she discovers she’s not the small-town loser everyone thought she was.
Chapter 1 – Alex
A prehistoric aloe plant hid the cerulean mailbox, where a bejeweled turquoise mermaid sat sidesaddle. From one of the mermaid's hands, a Neptune fork caught the mailbox's metal fish-shaped latch. Alex smiled for the first time in forever. Over three days, she’d been assaulted by wind and carbon monoxide from truckers who played musical lanes as she’d raced her 1973 Caprice convertible along the otherwise deserted highways that brought her from New York to LA. Below, the highway’s roar faded to white noise behind high notes of birds and the voices of people going about their day.
The aqua stucco ranch sat back from the road. More prehistoric plants flanked its entrance. The front door was composed of twenty small, carved panels of dense, dark wood. The doorbell echoed into emptiness. Alex stepped back. She held the tattered postcard in her hand. The address was correct. She tried the door. It cracked it open to a tiled foyer. “Hello?”
Beyond spread a cavernous, carpeted living room. A stone fireplace grew up the center of the far wall. The air tasted at once sweet and musty, as if recently occupied by someone drenched in floral perfume. A lone beige, push-button phone sat at the room’s epicenter. Its cord snaked out of sight. The room seemed like a stage set recently struck down and abandoned. Light flooding in through naked windows appeared more golden and glowing than back east. Alex walked to the sliding back door. The city spread out in the distance beneath a yellow-gray cloud. She turned back to the living room. “Hello?”
A half-open door led to a room, where a colorful tangle of clothes, shoes, and jewelry covered every inch of carpet. Sunlight from jalousie windows cast bright stripes across the chaos. In a bathroom, the perfume smell intensified. Spent tubes, jars, and compacts holding traces of makeup littered the counter. Another door led into thick darkness. A figure struggled up from the floor.
“Shit,” Alex stumbled backward. “Sorry.”
“Alex?” The half-smile and raspy voice of her childhood friend were unmistakable. Naomi shoved a ruffled eye mask to the top of her high forehead as she stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her. Dark hair circled her angled face in rough, wavy chunks. She wore a short, transparent nightshirt over her boyish body. “You look like hell.”
Alex bent to hug Naomi. The fleeting tangle of arms and hair sent the odor of perfume deep into Alex’s head—floral and musky, like carnations and roses mixed with wet earth. The last Naomi had always carried, but the perfume was new.
Naomi stepped back with her hands on Alex’s forearms and surveyed her. “You look like you’ve been run over.”
Alex flinched. Naomi couldn’t know how hard those words hit her. In a dark patch above Naomi's shoulder, a vision of Bertha's face appeared with its thin trail of blood filling the cracks between her teeth. Could Alex ever escape what she’d done? Edessa’s most notorious homeless woman had risen from the sidewalk, in full view of a dozen barflies, and swan-dived into her car’s front end. Yet no one had cared except Alex. She couldn’t keep images of Bertha from her head, but she’d tell no one about what happened. If Alex followed Naomi into a bright unknown future, the images of Bertha would surely fade. “I drove here straight from home.”
“I’m starved.” Naomi stripped off the mask. Her reedy limbs appeared at once adolescent and celestial—a graceful, deliberate composition of muscle and bone topped with a mane of wavy black hair. Her only physical faults, which made her appear stronger, were a Roman nose and a jaw that jutted forward like a child’s rendering of a witch, both inherited from her nuclear physicist father.
“It’s four o’clock.” Alex had been so obsessed with outpacing Edessa’s living and dead that in three days of travel, she’d only stopped when the car insisted on gasoline and her body on coffee, water, food, and a bathroom.
"I’ll wake up Burton," Naomi had called Burton “boyfriend” since he became her guitar teacher when she was fourteen. She pointed her chin at the phone. “Pick that up if it rings, okay?”
Alex sat on the floor beside the solitary beige device, too tired and hungry to think beyond guarding its heavy plastic buttons and handset with its six-foot curling cord. A silence crept in. With it came flashes of Bertha’s flight from the sidewalk to the Caprice’s front end, the trickle of red from her ghostly lips, the horrible sensation of a ton of metal hitting flesh, the grip of the dying woman’s hand on her wrist. It didn’t help that her leg ached from the drive—the kind of ache that nothing could remedy except complete, and elusive, stillness. She wouldn’t share anything about that accident either.