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PROLOGUE
Most eleven-year-olds didn’t get set up on blind dates by their grandmothers.
And if they did, I’d bet the setting for those dates wasn’t a coffee shop inside a fancy casino and resort on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
But here I was, sipping my vanilla frappe and tapping my foot on the rung of the stool in time with the muzak playing on a loop through the café’s speakers as I waited for my date to arrive.
My grandmother, or “Miss Barb,” as she insisted anyone who wasn’t family call her—which was everyone but me—had knocked on the adjoining door of our hotel rooms early this morning and said I needed to be at Caffeina at 11:00 a.m. to meet “someone special.” She’d been out the door and hurrying to her own date with the slot machines before I had a chance to ask any questions, left with only a lingering cloud of her rose-and-jasmine perfume for company.
I didn’t expect her to show up to supervise, and even if she did, she’d probably be late.
Time meant nothing to gamblers. Dad said that casinos made it impossible to tell what time of day it was on purpose to make people confused and gamble more. I thought he was right, because Grandmother gambled a lot.
“Casino time” might’ve been the reason that I loved breakfast food so much. I would happily eat waffles or the awesome eggs Benedict the buffet served for every meal, which was good, because breakfast when we stayed here could be anywhere between 5:00 a.m. and noon and dinner at 7:00 p.m. or even 2:00 a.m. if Grandmother lost track of time.
I blew out a slow breath and checked the time on my Hannah Montana watch.
11:15 a.m.
I guessed blind dates could be at any time too.
I slid my plastic cup in the ring of water it had left on the glass high top, wondering how much longer I should wait before continuing with my day of adventuring. My friend AJ was probably already in the arcade, playing Arctic Thunder, getting angrier and angrier as he tried to get the number-one spot on the scoreboard. I smiled to myself, happy that I hadn’t told him who the player “LL” was when he’d complained about the mystery person who kept first place.
Good luck beating my score, buddy.
To ease my guilt at holding that secret, I’d worn my new watch today. It’d been a birthday present from him when Grandmother brought me to Fortuna for my birthday in September. I’d never seen Hannah Montana, but I wanted him to know I still appreciated the gift even though all I’d wanted was for him to come to my birthday dinner so I wouldn’t be alone.
He said limo rides to McDonalds were not cool.
I kind of agreed, but I was also too scared to ask Grandmother to cancel it. And at the time, I hadn’t realized that she wasn’t planning on riding along. An interesting story about how I spent my eleventh birthday. If I ever had anyone to tell it to.
I’d probably leave out the parts about the crying.
It was Thanksgiving break, and I was glad Dad would be here in a few days. As he’d bundled me into Grandmother’s SUV, he said he would try to get off work early enough to make it here by Tuesday night, but I doubted it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stayed and worked as long as he could. The night before I left with Grandmother to drive to the Coast, I’d overheard him complaining about Grandmother on the phone. I stood in the hallway and listened until I heard him say “meddling bitch” and then, sounding even angrier, something much worse that I wouldn’t let myself remember.
I’d decided I probably shouldn’t hear the rest and went to my room.
“There’s our little lady!” exclaimed a familiar voice.
I swiveled in my stool and watched as Mr. Desmond, Grandmother’s casino host, entered the coffee shop, guiding a boy around my age in front of him with his hand on his back.
“Daaaaad,” the kid whined. He had wavy blonde hair that flipped up at the ends. It was so long that he kept tossing his head to the side to keep it out of his eyes. His neck must hurt at the end of the day. “Can’t I just stay in your office and play cards or watch the security monitors?” he asked with a slight Cajun accent, fidgeting with the bracelets on his wrist.
I only knew what a Cajun accent sounded like because I may have ordered season one of True Blood on the hotel room’s TV last night. I’d only got halfway into the first episode before I chickened out and went back to watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
I spent a lot of time watching shows and movies on the hotel TV, even though most of them were old, or at least too old for me. I hoped Grandmother wouldn’t look at the pay-per-view bill too closely when we checked out on Sunday.
Mr. Dez sighed as he moved his hand to the boy’s shoulder and looked at me. “This is my son, Cody. He’s staying with me for the rest of the week, and Miss Barb and I got to talkin’ and thought you two might want to keep each other company.”
“So embarrassing,” Cody muttered under his breath.
I sucked my lips together, because yeah. It was a little embarrassing.
I’d “aged out” of the casino daycare, Fountain of Youth, or “Fortuna University” since the last time I was here on my birthday. Maybe Grandmother was actually worried about me being alone this week, and that’s why she’d set this up.
AJ was my only friend here, but he was a couple of years older. When school was out, he mostly hung out with his school friends, but I’d usually see him at least a couple of times.
I’d known AJ forever, since we were babies. His mom and dad both worked at Fortuna, and we used to play at FU—which is what the regulars here called the daycare. Before he aged out, AJ had basically been the leader of the FU regulars—the kids who lived on the Coast full time and whose parents worked here. Vacationers weren’t allowed to play with the regulars when AJ had been in charge. He said it was because they cried too much.
