Everything

Here is part one of a short story I am working on called "Everything."  

Let me know what you think. I haven’t written part two yet, but if you like part one, hopefully I can finish it up soon. 

For readers 18 + for mature content 

We’re sitting in my car, Pete and me.  It’s my car, but I’m in the passenger seat, left leg tucked up under the right one at the knee, my calf-length black dress fanned out over the number four shape my legs make.  I’ve taken off my six-inch black heels and shoved them up under the dashboard in the floor; they were killing me.  Pete sits in the driver’s seat, hands resting gently on the wheel, though we’re not going anywhere.  Not yet.  We’re waiting.  

“Are you sure this is where we’re supposed to wait?” I ask, chewing on my fourth finger nail.  We are parked in a small parking lot behind the theater, and we are the only ones.  Behind us looms the back of the giant dark theater, quiet from this spot, and in front of us is a little bit of green shoulder before the landscape gives way into a very steep long hill down to the street below.  There are a few trees, but not enough to hide the view of the city street below, faintly honking with impatient cars.  

“Well, I don’t know,” Pete said, glancing around with a slight uneasiness in his voice.  ”This is where she told me to wait, as far as I know.”  

We’re waiting for Marie Penn, the starring actress of tonight’s performance.  Pete took me to the premiere of The Shape of Things as a sort of gift; he has been taking me to a lot of performances and fancy events to show me off to the upper tier in the heirarchy of the theatrical world.  ”We need to get you connected,” he told me.  ”I’ll introduce you to the right people; we’ll find you something.”  I’m twenty-four, I live in a hole of an apartment and can only afford to pay rent every other month, so my boyfriend Henry helps me out in between.  I’m certainly what you could consider a starving artist; I use whatever chump change I have left over from my bartending job at Audrey’s Winery to pay for cheap acting classes at Downtown Ritz, a small community theater owned and run by Pete Glazer, the man sitting in the car with me.  

“The show was incredible, didn’t you think?”  Pete says.  

“Mmm,” I murmur, a small smile pinching my cheeks.  ”Incredible.”  

“You’ll meet Marie soon.  I’ve told her about you.”  

I feel my hands clam up cold.  ”You have?”  

“Oh yeah, I told her how great you were in last spring’s West Side Story.  I said I’d never seen such a moving Anita.”  

My cheeks are warm now.  ”Oh wow.  Thank you.”  I’m beginning to feel very excited and also nervous about meeting Marie.  Not only did she just blow my mind as Evelyn in one of my all-time favorite plays, but she also knows me as “such a moving Anita.”  Something big could happen here.  Perhaps by next year I’ll be lighting up the stage here at the Corman, no longer reduced to the drab peeling walls of Downtown Ritz’ black-box.  I could be making money to act, rather than spending it.  My whole body feels warm.  

I roll down my passenger window and pull a cigarette out of my purse.  I reach around in my glove box until I find my hot pink Zippo.  I lean out the window to light my cigarette and then relax back in my seat, right hand propped up in the window to let the stream of smoke from my cigarette float out into the thick night air of summer.  ”You want one?”  I ask Pete, pointing to the pack of cigarettes.  

“No thanks,” Pete chuckles.  ”I don’t smoke anymore.  You know, when I was a kid, everyone smoked.  Just about everybody!  My mother, who is an extremely straight-laced, tight-lipped woman, religious in every sense of the word, used to light up pretty much every hour, right there in our house.  People don’t smoke near as much as they used to, which is good.  It’s so terrible for your lungs.  AND your singing voice.”  His tone changes to a slightly teasing one.  ”You should quit, Anita.”  

“I know, I know,” I say, smiling and rolling my eyes.  ”I will.”  I take another long drag from the cigarette and let the warm smoke settle in my nose and chest for a moment before I release it with a long, tingly exhale.  I flick the end of the cigarette out the window and notice that another car has pulled up beside us.  It’s a long wine-colored car, and it’s sitting two parking spaces over to the right of us.  I never even heard it roll up.  A brown-haired man, overweight and clean-shaven, between forty-five and fifty, sits in the driver’s seat of the wine-colored car.  He’s alone.  He’s looking at me, so I nod cordially at him and take another drag of my cigarette.  

“You know,” Pete goes on, looking straight forward, “my brother used to smoke too.  Funny thing was, he was so much better at smoking weed than tobacco.”  He cracks up at this like it’s the most amusing thing in the world.  I conjure up a polite giggle.  ”I mean, smoking cigarettes he would get all choked up and gaggy, but he could smoke the strongest weed around for hours and be cool as a cucumber.”  

I glance out my window again and notice that the man in the wine-colored car has not moved.  He is still gazing at me with a bemused look on his face.  I am washed over with a creepy feeling that he is somehow looking at me unaware that I can see him too.  I picture him slowly slipping his pants down to his knees, all the while gazing at me, and then pleasuring himself right there in the front seat still looking at me.  I shake this image out of my head and take in another puff from my cigarette.  As I tap it out the window, I turn to Pete and ask, “Do you see that guy over there?  He just keeps…staring at us.”  I don’t say staring at me, because somehow that sounds more paranoid in my head.  But yes, he is staring directly at me, and it’s obvious; here we are sitting in a parked car, a graying fifty-ish professor type and a young blonde with luscious, wide lips.  Yes, it makes sense that he’s looking at me.  

Pete looks over at the wine-colored car with a drawn expression.  He clearly hasn’t noticed it there until now.  ”Huh,” says Pete.  ”He does look mighty curious.  You stay here and I’m gonna go see if he needs something.”  

I stay put while Pete gets out and shuts the door behind him.  I hear the crunch of gravel behind me as he’s walking around our car.  I take another drag from the cigarette and gaze up at the stars.  It’s a nice night, not too hot but plenty warm.  The sky is clear and there are plenty of stars visible from our spot on this hill.  I vaguely notice Pete and the man in the wine-colored car interacting.  I don’t pay much attention; I feel much more at ease now that Pete is handling the situation.  I mean, it was probably overreacting to feel slightly scared by the man’s gaze.  He is probably just a lonely gentleman who likes to look at pretty things.  It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been ogled by strange men.  I just need to relax and enjoy my cigarette and the stars.  I prop both legs up on the dashboard and lean my seat back a little so I have a better view of the night sky.  

Pete gets back in the car.  He looks like a young boy who has just peed his pants.  ”What did he want?”  I ask.  Suddenly my door is flung open and my right elbow, which was resting on the edge of the open window, plummets to my side.  ”What’s going on?” I shriek.  The man from the wine-colored car wrenches me out of my car by my right arm.  My cigarette flutters to the ground.  I try to grip onto the doorframe of the car and scramble back inside, but the strange man is quite strong.  ”Let go of me!” I bite, but of course his grip only grows stronger at that.  ”Pete, what the hell?!” I scream.  Pete is still sitting there, staring at his hands in his lap and not moving a muscle, as I am thrown onto the grassy shoulder just in front of our cars.  

I get back on my feet immediately, but the strange man kicks me in the knee, and the sharp pain sends me right back down.  ”You too,” the strange man says to Pete.  ”You get out here too.  Need to keep an eye on you, in case you try to pull something stupid.”  As gruff as the man is clearly trying to sound, there is a noticeable wavering to his voice.  I am pretty sure he has never done this before, whatever “this” is.  

Pete stumbles out of the car and plods over to where I am sitting in pain on the ground.  ”You’re an asshole,” I yell up at him.  I would never have dared call Pete an asshole before; he has been my teacher, mentor, and something like a friend.  Of course, I never thought he would sell me out to a crazy man, either.  ”What does he want, money?”  

Pete’s face is ashen, and he doesn’t say anything, only looks at the ground.  The other man barks at him to sit down on the ground with me, so he does.  ”Listen up,” the man says, rocking back and forth from toes to heels, his hands jiggling nervously inside his pants pockets.  ”We can do this the easy way, or the hard way…”  

“You’re an asshole!”  I scream up at him.  I realize I am crying and wonder how long I have been doing so.  My hands are shaking.  

The man reaches down and smacks me across the right cheek with an open palm.  It stings, but I whip my head right back towards him and spit in his face.  I instantly wish I had not done that, no matter how amateur a criminal the man seems to be.  I can see the lines in his wide, greasy face, shiny with sweat, only inches from my face.  His brown eyes grow darker.  He suddenly pulls out a pistol from his pocket, and now its face is level with mine too.  Oh shit.  ”Alright, so you wanna go straight to the hard way, do ya?!”  

Suddenly I am all tears and sweat and whimpering sounds.  My quivering voice is sputtering things against my will.  As a reflex, I suppose, I can hear myself shouting, “Alright, alright, whatever you want!  I’ll do whatever you want!  What do you want me to do?”  Pete might as well have disappeared.  I sense that he is still on the ground with me, three feet or so away, but he is not making a sound, not even to breathe.  

With the shiny black eye of the pistol still glaring at me, shaking a little in his grasp, the owner of the wine-colored car says, “Everything.”  A hesitant smile hangs on his face.  ”I want you to do everything.”  


- Lindsay