The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 2

  I ventured out now. Guests in sailor suits danced while a woman pecked out the theme to The Love Boat on the marimba—which is to say that things were just getting started. Charice was making drinks for a boy who, from the looks of it, had dressed as flotsam. Even if my parents had been right about my needing to get my name out there, it’s hard to know what you’ll gain by networking with flotsam.

  I passed by the driftwood and headed straight to Charice. I didn’t turn any heads, which is good, because I felt underdressed. This is a Dahlia Moss superpower. With my “quiet girl at the library” look, I am genetically suited to not being noticed at parties. In my best moments, I think I look like Carmen Sandiego, with long wavy brown hair and sunglasses and a fedora. Setting aside the fact that I don’t wear a lot of fedoras. In my worst moments, I think I look like Roz from Monsters, Inc., but maybe everyone thinks that.

  “Did you put Jonah Long up to that?”

  “No,” said Charice. “Put him up to what?”

  The question must have taken her by surprise, because it was not in Charice’s nature to deny involvement with anything. Most of the time, this was simply because she was involved, but even in the rare case that she wasn’t, it wasn’t like her to just say no. More often you would get a raised eyebrow and Mona Lisa smile, suggesting that she was possibly involved, even if she didn’t know precisely what you were talking about.

  Charice was the head-turner at parties, by the way. I like to think of Charice as a jolie laide, which is my way saying that I don’t really understand why men constantly throw themselves at her. She’s not really—a jolie laide is supposed to have a “flaw” that somehow makes her more beautiful, like a big nose that’s somehow entrancing and perfect. Or snaggle teeth. Or alopecia, although you see that one a lot less. But I couldn’t tell you what Charice’s flaw was. She looks like Peppermint Patty, but grown up and with 0 percent body fat.

  I parried her question for now, but I knew that I would have to answer her eventually. “How well do you know him?”

  Charice poured a sludgy red substance into a pink plastic cup and slid it over to me. “Drink this. It’s my special mix.”

  Despite some long dark nights of the soul caused by Charice’s special mixes, I gave the sludge a swig. It was just the sort of terrifying combination of fruitiness and liquor that I expected.

  “How well do you know Jonah?” I asked again.

  “Not well. He came to my Seed Time party a few months back. Great fun, but I never saw him again. A shame, because he’s a good person to have around at parties. A gentleman of leisure.”

  I remembered that party. Charice had been inspired by Harold and Maude and sent people in teams to plant saplings all over the city. I remembered two biologists getting into a fistfight over a cactus, but I couldn’t recall Jonah at all.

  “What you mean by ‘gentleman of leisure’? He’s rich? What do his parents do?”

  “His parents don’t do. They own. A pharmaceutical, I think. Anyway, he called me last week and asked me if I had any parties coming up. I told him about this one, and he showed up in that fantastic outfit. I thought we were in for a grand time.”

  “But?”

  “He only wanted to speak to you, Dahlia. He was barely here before he went into your room, and when he came out he bailed on me altogether. What did you do, punch him?”

  “He gave me one thousand dollars.”

  Charice considered this. “I didn’t realize you would turn out to be such a high-class hooker.”

  I noticed that flotsam boy was taking quite an interest in our conversation, and I brought my voice down to a whisper. “Charice, he hired me to be a detective. You didn’t feed him lines about how I worked for an agency last year?”

  “No,” said Charice, her face practically splitting in half with delight. “A detective? That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I often ask myself why I’ve gone so long without finding work. Real work—not census taking or working a part, part-time job at a frozen-yogurt place. It’s not a question I have a definitive answer for, aside from not interviewing well and, of course, my hideous facial scarring. (I’m kidding about the scarring. But not the interviewing. Jesus God, not the interviewing.) Probably I’m too contrarian for my own good. I don’t know where it comes from. I was never one of those rebellious girls in high school. I didn’t wear the super-short skirts my parents forbade. I never dated a “bad boy” or wore heaps of black eyeliner. I looked and acted boring. I always have. My destiny probably involves me knitting tea cozies.

  And yet, I’ve got a certain rebelliousness I just can’t shake. What was the one thing that Jonah asked me not to do? Talk to his guild mates. And what was I doing? I was logging in to Zoth, for the first time in two years, looking for a member of the Horizons to talk with. This is not the behavior of someone who aces interviews.

  It wasn’t hard work. Most of the trouble was loading the hours’ worth of patches to the game since I had played last. I knew the name of Jonah’s guild, so I just looked them up online. It’s not like there was any secrecy. They had their own webpage. Once I figured out who I was looking for, it was just a matter of typing in names in a /whereis routine until I found someone in a zone nearby.

  I had hit the Random button on character creation until I entered the world as a male elven archer with a blue pompadour. That might sound interesting to you, but in Zoth, this was the equivalent of wallpaper paste. I would blend in anywhere.

  After a couple of false starts, I eventually learned that someone named “Tambras” was afk—away from keyboard—in a pub not too far from where I entered the world.

  A few minutes later, I entered the Pirate’s Mead Tavern. As digital bars go, it was jolly. There were parrots, the sounds of loud, boisterous laughter and drinking—even though there weren’t too many people around—and a tall, bald man playing an accordion. It’s the kind of place that would be utterly aggravating to visit in real life, but translated to a computer monitor, it seemed cozy and fun. In real life, that bald guy would be looking at my breasts and would eventually expect a tip.

  I found Tambras leaning against a wall, tossing knives into the air. He looked like a smooth operator. He was a high-level character, decked out in patterned nubuck leather, and looked like he could have been the front man for a medieval rock band. He had an interesting face—not one of the defaults. He’d put some time into it. And his hair—it was thin white stuff that was not your classic fantasy trope. Even the knife routine was cool, some sort of custom idle animation that I assumed he had paid extra for. I knew this was the guy I was looking for, not just because he looked like a Tambras but because the game told me that was his name, in a big serif font floating above his head. Even I couldn’t mess that up.

  Tambras was still away from keyboard and so, just like on the cop shows, I went to get food. I suppose the classic foodstuff for a stakeout is greasy takeout, but I had a Fresca and some Saltines. No self-respecting private eye would imbibe this combination, but then neither would they be piloting a pompadoured elf in a half-empty pirate bar. A half box of Saltines later, Tambras packed away his knives and was on the move.

  “Oh, hey there, Tambras!” I typed.

  Tambras turned around. His eyes were different colors, I noticed, now that he was looking dead at me. One blue, one purple. Someone was a Bowie fan?

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “A friend of mine is trying to get me to join your guild. Do you have a second?”

  “Who?” said Tambras. “What friend?”

  It’s important to point out here that this is all just typing—there’s no actual conversation. But I felt as though I could hear the skepticism in Tambras’s voice. Who would invite you?

  “His real-life name is Jonah Long,” I told him.

  Tambras frowned at me. Literally, the character frowned—and he had to type six extra characters to express the emotion.

 
“Why did I have to ask?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I told him. “Do you not get along with Jonah?” This was the wrong question, I instantly realized. The most important thing was to get Tambras talking to me. It’s not like real life, where people have an obligation to communicate. One wrong word and our knife thrower would be on his merry way, especially this early in the conversation, when I was just another generic elf. But despite my wincing, he stuck around.

  “That wasn’t what I meant, but now that you mention it, no. I don’t. Jonah is not my favorite guy.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  There was a pause, at which point I felt sure that Tambras was going to leave. But it didn’t happen, and so I asked:

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “Jonah just invites everyone into the guild. Almost everyone knows him personally. “

  “Do you know him personally?”

  “Well, no, not me. Just all the new folks. And maybe Orchardary. But it’s like a disease. Eventually his mother will be playing with us.”

  “rotfl,” I typed, even though this wasn’t particularly funny. Mrs. Dalloway I wasn’t, but Tambras kept looking at me. “He’s really more of an acquaintance anyway.” I told him. “But he was telling me something about some kind of theft?”

  “Hrmph.”

  Who types “hrmph”?

  “I don’t want to join a guild where you might get stolen from by your own teammates,” I said to Tambras. “Does that kind of thing happen all the time?”

  “I don’t know, he’s your friend.”

  “Acquaintance,” I repeated, because it seemed to me that if I wanted to keep talking to Tambras, acquaintance was the way to go. And it was true, anyway, not that it mattered.

  “What was he doing, bragging?” typed Tambras.

  I stopped for a second, because it seemed like the conversation had made a turn that I didn’t follow. It’s like when you’re talking to your aunt about the new Spider-Man movie, and everyone is suddenly saying that it tastes like blueberries. A beat has been missed.

  “Bragging about being my acquaintance?” I asked, though I knew this couldn’t be right.

  Tambras /scoffed at me. He had quite the glossary of emoticons.

  “No, you nitwit,” he said. “About the theft.”

  Yes, this was all tasting like blueberries. Nothing to do but soldier forward, though.

  “He seemed really bummed about it. He couldn’t believe that someone would steal the spear.”

  Tambras looked at me blankly. “Jonah stole the spear.”

  “What?!”

  “What.”

  “He told me it was stolen from him.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Tambras. “Maybe you should talk more to your acquaintance about it.” And, yes, he actually put the italics there. The boy was a wordsmith. But then he took off.

  I went to bed troubled. The warm glow of having money for rent and food didn’t last nearly as long as I had hoped.

  I woke at eight and began the laborious process of putting myself together for a job interview. At this point I regarded job interviews less as a means to get a job and more as a ritualistic process of destroying the ego, the way some religions believe suffering brings you closer to God.

  I had a particular outfit I used for these sorts of thing—my navy blue dress suit, which barely showed ketchup stains at all, and which Charice described as “thready.” And also, lately, a pair of black high heels, because my mother insisted that interviewers like to see women in high heels, and at this point I would try anything. The heels were a recent addition to my arsenal, and I didn’t really have the knack for them.

  So I was teetering around the apartment when there was a knock at my door. The shock of a visitor in the pre-noon hours nearly knocked me over, although my acumen with heels was low enough that I might have just fallen over anyway.

  It was a courier with a package from Jonah Long.

  I thanked the guy profusely, being unable to tip him, and waited until he left to open the package. I don’t know what I had expected to find—I suppose something detective-y. Maybe a clue. But instead there was clothing.

  Jonah had bought me clothes. I read the card:

  Dahlia:

  Just noticed you were looking a little worn, and so I picked up a few things to help you look the part.

  Jonah

  I can’t honestly remember if there was a period of shock before I became angry. There must have been, but I have no memory of it. I just remember thinking, That arrogant little prick. I’m going to break his face.

  And the clothes—please don’t imagine this as some kind of Cinderella / Pretty Woman moment. They just seemed to be a random collection, as though Jonah had stopped by a high-class Salvation Army on the way home. There was something called a “casino tux” jacket, a black-and-white number that looked like something a stylish croupier might wear. There was a gray wool pencil skirt that seemed to be part of the sexy librarian collection and a silver metallic blouse with a houndstooth print. Oh, and a hat, a gray flannel cloche bucket hat. A fucking bucket hat. Was this just stuff from his grandma’s closet?

  It was bizarre, and I didn’t like the notion that Jonah felt that he could dress me up, as if I were now his doll. If he had gotten me a classic detective’s trench coat, I would have been happier, but even then I would have had some reservations. Instead he got me the outfit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in her late seventies.

  I put the clothes on anyway. It was that contrarian bit in me. I’d show Jonah Long. I was going to wear them and look ridiculous doing it. In front of him.

  And for all their inappropriateness, they fit me like a glove. If I’d been more of a detective, I might have wondered why Jonah’s clothes all fit me so perfectly.

  I had some misgivings about this morning’s interview, but the deeper you get into unemployment, the less discerning you can afford to be. Even so, this was going to be the worst. It was a sketchy interview—there was no way around it. First off, it was taking place on a Sunday morning, which ought to make anyone suspicious. More damning was the fact that the interview was for Wash U’s psych department, which, as far as I could ever tell, existed solely for the purpose of punking students in the name of science. Possibly some real learning went on there; I can’t prove it didn’t. But my impression of the place was that at six PM the entire faculty got into their single clown car and drove home, honking wildly and sputtering a trail of seltzer behind them. Probably I would get there and there would be no interview. There would just be money on the ground and a strobe light and grad students observing me through one-way mirrors. It would be like Saw, but with less bloodshed and more humiliation.

  As it happened, there was an interview, sort of. Two grad students read questions to me in a monotone, and then stared at me with their dead eyes as I tried to answer them. I quickly came to the conclusion that: (1) I was not getting this particular job, because (2) there was clearly an internal candidate—what internal candidates beget are weird interview times and dead eyes.

  I would have preferred the money on the floor and the strobe light.

  The thing was a debacle—I’m pretty sure one of the interviewers actually had headphones on—and I wasn’t even halfway through when I decided that I was going to stomp over to Plant and Microbial Sciences to give Jonah grief. For the clothes, not the interview, although my feelings at this point were spilling together a little.

  Jonah had told me he was going to be working with his fellow TAs Sunday morning, and that I could “swing by” if I needed anything. And I did need something: I needed to yell at someone with money. Even if it meant not getting the second thousand dollars, Jonah was getting schooled, Dahlia-style.

  I slammed the door as I came into the place. In part, I wanted everyone to know that I was angry, and in part I was trying to rev myself back up. I’m not a naturally angry person, and when I do get angry, it tends to wear off very quickly.

 
“I’m not your concubine, Jonah Long!” I yelled, hoping for the kind of line that would make an entrance. This worked, although it wasn’t exactly the entrance I had imagined.

  First of all, the place was tiny. I had imagined a cavernous hive of TA cubicles—that’s what we had in business school—where my entrance would have turned a lot of heads. But the place was a cubbyhole, and I was yelling at people who were right in front of me.

  They blankly turned to face me. Two people, neither of them Jonah. There was a tall, bushy-headed kid with brown hair and a blond tank of a girl. I don’t mean to say that she was fat—I mean that she had a scowling face that would have been well suited to extended land battles, and that she looked like she was prepared to trundle over my lifeless body in the name of the greater good.

  The blond girl asked, not at all happily:

  “Who are you?”

  But the guy looked delighted and added, “Aside from not Jonah’s concubine.”

  I was uncertain. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it hadn’t been this.

  “Is Jonah here?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t come in this morning,” said the guy. “We’ve been waiting for him, actually. You don’t know where he is, do you? I’m Nathan Willing, by the way.”

  I liked Nathan Willing. He was affable and cute, at least relative to the tank. I was about to introduce myself to him, but of course the blonde was not having it.

  “Nate, why don’t you finish typing up our project report?”

  “Actually, I’d like to—”

  And she repeated the question, with the kind of force that suggested that this was not a question at all, but more of a galactic imperial decree.