Velvet Static

The first time I saw her, she was shoplifting from the corner store on Delancey, and I was the only one who noticed.

Not because she was good at it. She was terrible, actually. That's what caught my eye. She had this way of moving, too slow, too deliberate, like a cat stalking something only she could see. Her hand drifted toward a pack of black nail polish on the bottom shelf, the cheap kind that chips in a day, and she palmed it with the kind of concentration most people reserve for bomb disposal. The guy behind the counter was watching a tiny television tucked under the register, some game show where people screamed at each other for money. He didn't look up. She didn't look up either.

I was there for cigarettes. A pack of Camels, the soft pack, because I liked the way it felt in my jacket pocket. I'd quit three times that year. This was the fourth. I stood by the magazine rack pretending to read the back of a Rolling Stone, some band I'd never heard of on the cover, all of them looking like they'd just rolled out of bed and into a photoshoot. The goth girl moved past me. She smelled like clove cigarettes and something sweeter underneath, vanilla maybe, or the cheap body spray they sell at the pharmacy. Her hair was black, obviously, but not the flat black of a dye job gone wrong. It had depth. Blue-black, like oil on water. It hung past her shoulders, straight and heavy, and when she turned her head to check the counter guy, it swung like a curtain.

She had a safety pin through her earlobe. Not a piercing stud shaped like a safety pin. An actual safety pin, the kind you use to hold a hem together. It had rust on it.

I should have looked away. That's what normal people do. They see something they shouldn't, and they look away, and they go about their business. I didn't. I watched her slide the nail polish into the pocket of her coat, a long black trench coat that was too big for her, the sleeves hanging past her wrists. She was small. Not just short, but small, like she'd been built to a different scale than the rest of us. Her boots were heavy, combat boots with steel toes, and they made a sound on the linoleum that was almost musical. Thunk, thunk, thunk. A slow rhythm.

She caught me looking.

Her eyes were the color of wet slate. Gray, but not the flat gray of a cloudy sky. Deeper. Like the ocean in winter. She didn't flinch. She didn't hurry. She just looked at me, and I looked at her, and something passed between us. Not recognition. Something else. Something like a question.

Then she smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly what you were thinking and didn't care. She had a chipped tooth, one of the front ones, a small triangle of white missing from the corner. I don't know why that detail stuck with me. Maybe because it was the only imperfection on an otherwise perfect face. Maybe because it made her real.

She walked out the door. The bell above it jingled. The counter guy still didn't look up.

I bought my Camels. I didn't say anything. What was I supposed to say? Hey, that girl just stole something? She was already gone, swallowed by the city, and I was left standing there with a pack of cigarettes and the feeling that I'd missed something important.

I didn't see her again for three weeks.

In that time, I did what I always did. I went to work. I came home. I ate takeout from the Chinese place on the corner, the one with the faded menu in the window and the old woman who always gave me extra fortune cookies. I smoked my Camels on the fire escape and watched the city breathe. I thought about her more than I should have. Not in a creepy way. At least, I told myself it wasn't creepy. I just wondered. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why did she have a safety pin through her ear?

The third week, I saw her on the subway.

It was late. The kind of late where the only people on the train are drunks, night shift workers, and people like me who can't sleep. I was coming home from a friend's birthday party, a thing I'd gone to out of obligation and left early because I couldn't stand the noise. The car was almost empty. A guy in a suit asleep against the window. A woman with a stroller, the baby inside somehow quiet. And her.

She was sitting at the far end, her legs stretched out across the seat, her boots propped up on the armrest. She had a sketchbook open on her lap and a charcoal pencil in her hand. She was drawing something. I couldn't see what. Her head was down, her hair falling forward, hiding her face.

I sat two rows away. Close enough to watch, far enough not to be weird. I told myself I was just tired. I told myself I wasn't staring. I was staring.

She drew for a while. The train rattled through the tunnel, the lights flickering, the whole car swaying like a ship. Then she looked up. Not at me. At the window. At her own reflection. She studied it for a long time, her head tilted, her eyes narrowed. Then she reached up and touched the safety pin in her ear. Just a small touch, her finger brushing against the rusted metal. Like she was checking that it was still there.

The train stopped. The doors opened. She packed up her sketchbook and stood. She walked past me without looking, and I caught that smell again, cloves and vanilla, and I did something I'd never done before. I got up. I followed her.

Not because I wanted anything. Not because I had a plan. I just wanted to see where she went. I wanted to know what a girl like that did at midnight on a Tuesday. I wanted to understand.

She walked up the stairs and out onto the street. It was raining, a fine mist that hung in the air like smoke. She didn't put up a hood. She didn't hurry. She walked like she had all the time in the world, her boots splashing through puddles, her coat trailing behind her. I stayed half a block back, my hands in my pockets, my heart beating faster than it should have.

She turned down an alley. I hesitated. Alleys in this city were not places you followed strangers. But I followed her anyway.

She was standing at the end of the alley, in front of a door. A plain door, black, no sign, no number. She had her hand on the knob. She hadn't opened it yet. She was just standing there, her back to me, her head bowed.

"You can come out now," she said.

Her voice was low. Not loud. But it carried. It cut through the rain and the traffic and the hum of the city like a knife.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe.

"I know you're there," she said. "You've been following me since the subway. Maybe longer. Maybe since Delancey."

She turned around. The rain had plastered her hair to her face, and she pushed it back with one hand, and her eyes found me in the dark like they'd been looking for me all along.

"You're not very good at this," she said.

I stepped out of the shadows. I didn't know what to say. I never knew what to say. That was always my problem.

"I'm not following you," I said. A lie. A stupid lie.

She smiled that same smile, the one with the chipped tooth. "Okay," she said. "Then why are you here?"

I didn't have an answer. Not one that made sense. So I told the truth.

"I don't know," I said. "I just wanted to see where you were going."

She looked at me for a long time. The rain fell. The city hummed. Somewhere, a car alarm went off, and nobody cared.

"Alright," she said. She opened the door. Warm light spilled out, and music, something slow and sad, a violin maybe. "You coming in or what?"

I should have said no. I should have turned around and gone home and forgotten about her. But I didn't. I walked toward her, and she watched me the whole way, and when I reached the door, she stepped aside to let me through.

The room inside was small and crowded. People I didn't know. Candles. The smell of incense and sweat. A girl with blue hair was painting on a canvas the size of a door. A guy with tattoos on his face was playing a guitar with only three strings. Nobody looked at me. Nobody cared.

The goth girl closed the door behind us. The rain stopped. The city disappeared.

"I'm Mara," she said.

I told her my name. She nodded like she already knew.

And that was the beginning. Not of anything good. Not of anything I could have predicted. But the beginning.