Free Age of Consent by Marti Leimbach

tracking the air above the ocean’s swells and surf. They were fast; they were flying. He was smiling now, singing along to a tune on the radio. He didn’t care how fast they went; he was hunting. He was about to get his money. It was waiting for him there by the big bright sign.
    —
    SHE’D LEFT THE key in the room, so they had to get the manager’s keys to get inside. She followed Craig through a glass door with a strap of bells attached, then into a little square room lit from above by strips of humming, cold light. He rang a bell on the desk and called out “Hey, anyone here?” loud enough so if you were there you’d come running. That, or hide.
    The countertop had neat piles of leaflets, a rubber plant, and a desk calendar with curled corners and a photograph of the motel on it. The night manager, or whoever he was, must have still been around because he’d left half a cup of coffee in a blue enamel mug, and a coffee pot roasting dry on an electric ring above the filing cabinet.
    “You ever seen so deserted a place as this?” Craig said, thwacking the bell with his palm. “Hey, anyone here?!”
    There were fishing rods in one corner, a trash can, an old sign. Craig called again and still no reply.
    “What the fuck is the matter with this place,” he said. He stamped his foot, banged the bell with his fist, called out again. The hum from the fluorescent ceiling lights annoyed him. “Someone shut that damned tube off,” he said, as though to the staff. He took a broom from its place by the door, tossed it up and grabbed the brush end. He whacked it on the light fixture so that it blinked and swayed before resuming its noise. Now he grew red with impatience, paced the length of the counter, slapped the top of it, sounded the bell over and over again before finally throwing it against a wall. Then he went over to the bells tacked on the door and shook them like he was trying to get a coconut out of a tree.
    “Hey!” he shouted. He was wearing the bicentennial ball cap. His untucked T-shirt billowed over his front, where a loose swatch of leather from his belt wagged with his steps. “Hey! I need some attention here!”
    His voice boomed toward the back of the room where there were some closets and an exit door. Nothing happened. He flipped up a section of the counter that allowed him through to the manager’s area, then opened cupboards until, at last, he found where the keys were stored on pegs. The one he wanted wasn’t there and he searched the rack then looked on the desk, yanked open a drawer and swept his hand through, scattering paper clips, an ink pad, a calculator. A log of staples fell to the floor and broke into sections he then stepped on, turning abruptly when the phone began to ring. “You gonna answer that?” he said to Bobbie, sarcastically. The white light flashed on one of the extensions and the phone rang and rang. They both looked at it. “This is all your fault,” he told her. “Making us come back.”
    Then he told her to get out, go back to the car and wait there.
    She left him in the motel office and stepped into the night, wishing she were home already. Her house had a screened porch and she’d used paper clips to fix some extra mesh over the holes in the screen so bugs could not get through. She would sleep out there on nights like this, lying on a little camp bed beside a long section of screen, watching the moon through the trees. It was what she’d done the night before, quietly drifting into sleep in the silky warmth of the night. She had woken at dawn, feeling part of the trees and woods around her, part of the songbirds and squirrels and night animals.
    She could still hear Craig calling for the manager. She had eight hours until she had to be at the bus stop for school and she’d better have washed her hair. It was sticky and stiff, hanging in her eyes. Sleep would be good, too. There had been times recently when she nodded off in class and the teachers behaved as