Free And Other Stories by Emma Bull

sea and hair the
color of the darkest night. She’s naked. Street would like that if
her smile wasn’t so annoying. She says, “Time to wake up,
trickster.”
    He sits up fast, thinking
something’s terribly wrong if he has a visitor in his hideaway, but
at least the smug walker from his dream will be gone.
    Only she’s not. She’s in his room.
Or, to be precise, she’s in a storage room at the back of the
Dupree Building that’s full of cartons of Hi-John’s Good Luck Lawn
and Garden Spray. She’s wearing a blood-red jacket and purple jeans
and low gray boots, and her head has been shaved and her skin is
only as dark as a plum, but her smile is at least as annoying in
reality as it was in the dream. She looks remarkably familiar for
someone he’s never seen. Maybe it’s just that her smile reminds him
of someone, but he can’t remember who. He wants to say something
clever. What falls from his lips is, “Hunh?”
    Her smile gets even more annoying.
“Yes.  You were always loveliest in the morning.”
    He blinks three times. She refuses
to disappear like the dream, so he says, “Wha—  Who’re
you?
    She shakes her head. “Now, that’d
be telling, wouldn’t it?”
    He wants to get out of his sleeping
bag because he doesn’t like looking up at her. But when he found
this room, he arranged the cardboard boxes so six formed a bed and
two made a table and four made a chair with a back and a footstool.
His clothes are on top of the remaining stacks across the room.
“What do you want?”
    “And that’d be
telling, too.”
    He frowns, then sees that this poor
girl is trying to play the player. He grins and stretches. “What’d
you call me?”
    Her smile falters. She says, “All
right.  You get one.  Trickster.”
    His grin is so wide he has to crank
it down for fear of hurting his face. “Well, now and then, I
s’pose.” He points at his clothes. “I’m putting those on.” He
points at the door. “A lady would wait outside.”
    She points at the window. “While a
two-bit grifter takes the back door? My thought is not.”
    He stands and tries not to shiver
as he walks across the cold concrete floor. “O ye of little
trust.”
    She taps the side of her head. “O
me of much smart.”
    He tugs on gray silk boxers, but
leaves his socks off because there’s no way to put them on without
the annoying girl seeing the holes in the heels. “They call me
Street.”
    “Unless they’re
looking for a light-fingered fool or a punk to run a cheap-ass
scam. Then they ask for Trickster.”
    “And when they ask
for you?”
    She hesitates, then shrugs and
says, “Oh.”
    “Mystery
woman.”
    She smiles. “That, too.”
    “Oh!” He has to
laugh. “They call you O!”
    “Now I’ve given you
two.”
    He nods. “O’Riley. Odegaard. Oprah.
Eau Claire. Open Sesame. Oh, what a pain.”
    O shakes her head. “Wasting time,
T.”
    Street frowns as he buttons up a
black guayabara. “So, O, how’d you find—” Her smile makes him hear
himself, and he gets the grin back to say in time with her, “That’d
be telling, wouldn’t it?” He puts one leg into his tan chinos. “You
didn’t tell the cops—”
    “Of course
not.”
    He pauses with the chinos half on.
“You’re all right, O.  Y’know, if you snuck in hoping for some
quality time with a fine young fellow like myself—”
    “I told Bossman
Sevenday.”
    With one leg halfway into the
chinos, Street looks at her instead of what he’s doing and falls,
landing hard on his hands. “What the—” As she laughs, he pushes
himself up, jerks up his pants, and glares at her. “Why would
you—”
    “Things’ve been too
easy, T. You need some spice in your life.”
    He yanks his belt tight, grabs a
turquoise silk jacket, and steps into dark red loafers. “What’d I
ever do to you?”
    She smiles cooly.
    He gives her a mocking smile in
return and says, “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
    O nods. “They’ll be here in two
minutes.