Lost Girl

Chapter Twelve: The Grandmother

The rest of the day passed more or less without incident. Eve stayed in the nurse's office for the rest of first period, and then went to her second class. She hoped Rocky would be there, but no such luck. Ali was there, but she wasn't much of a force without Martina and, more important, Lilly around to give her support and direction. Still, the blonde girl did manage to trip Eve on the way out of the class, and Eve didn't feel like bracing the three of them together later in the day so she ditched the rest of her school classes. It was theoretically difficult to do that since the school was designed to be fairly impregnable, but Eve also knew that several of the emergency exit alarms no longer worked. So leaving was just a matter of walking out the right door.

She spent most of the day at a record store about a mile from the school. The proprietor, a huge Samoan dude whose real name no one seemed to know but who went by the moniker Griffin, was a cool guy who let her work for him sometimes, slipping her a few bucks under the table when she needed it to buy some clothes or re-up the minutes on her phone.

He also understood that sometimes a girl just needed to hide out. He was low-key about making people buy stuff, too. That probably meant he would go out of business soon, but in the meantime she could spend a few hours browsing cool old vinyls of Sex Pistols and Velvet Underground and even a few faded Bowies that she didn't know existed.

Eventually, though, the day started to wane and Eve knew she had to get going.

She traded insults with Griffin for a few minutes, but even he seemed to recognize that she was only doing it as a way of avoiding something else. "You got somewhere you gotta be, little lady?" he finally asked.

"Who's a lady?" she spat.

He laughed, a belly laughed that made the tattoos on the sides of his neck wiggle. "Got me, little lady," he said.

Eve left. She walked a few blocks. Not far enough for her liking. The place she had to go was too close to the bad part of town. Too close to where Eve and her mother lived.

She stood outside the place for a while, staring at it. It was basically a huge featureless block, squat and gray and ugly on the corner of a busy street. There were too few windows, and too many graffiti tags. The whole place reeked of hopelessness, the kind of structure that hadn't fallen into disrepair and disrepute but rather had been built with them in mind.

Finally, she squared her shoulders and walked in through the double glass doors at the front. They weren't locked, though they should have been. The building lobby smelled antiseptic at least, but the ammoniac atmosphere was marred by dim and flickering fluorescent lights that bounced strange shadows off tile that Eve figured probably hadn't seen a good day since the sixties. The space screamed "full-time care for low, low rates" in a way that had an almost physical weight; Eve could feel her shoulders slumping as she walked in.

The lobby had a reception area with a male nurse and a log book that Eve knew visitors were supposed to sign. The nurse barely looked up from reading his Michael Crichton novel, and Eve could see that the last person to sign the log book had done so the year before.

She walked past the reception desk and around a corner to a pair of scuffed steel doors. Eve hit a button beside them and a moment later a grinding sound announced the elevator's arrival. A bell dinged and the doors slid open – the right door opened noticeably slower than the left, as though the elevator had itself suffered a stroke – and she got in.

The elevator was large enough to fit a hospital gurney and a few doctors, but it always made Eve feel vaguely claustrophobic. She didn't know if that was because of where she was going, or because of the décor. Like the rest of the building, the elevator looked like a refugee from a Brady Bunch episode, all barfy orange and lime green. Still, Eve thought it was likely that the color scheme was less offensive than the fact that this puke-painted coffin of an elevator brought her ever closer to something that she preferred not to think about.