She lifts the needle, wipes the line, checks her work. The koi is coming together. Orange and red, scales rendered in tight detail, the tail curving around the inside of my forearm toward my wrist. It’s going to be beautiful. Everything Vanessa does is beautiful, even when she’s being a pain in the ass about my diet.
“Seeing anyone?” she asks.
“No.”
“That was fast.”
“It’s a fast answer.”
“It’s a defensive answer.” She goes back to the outline. “I’m just asking. You’ve been in a weird mood.”
“I’m always in a weird mood. That’s my personality.”
“Your personality is guarded and deliberate. Weird is different.” She switches to a finer needle for the detail work on the scales. “Weird means something changed.”
Nothing changed. A girl started coming to the bar. A twenty-two-year-old with clean sneakers and a cookie campaign and a laugh that carries. That’s not a change.
“Nothing changed,” I say.
“Okay.” Vanessa says okay the way some people say bullshit, with the same number of syllables and none of the effort. She lets it go because Vanessa lets things go when she’s working. The needle is the priority. Everything else can wait.
My phone buzzes on the counter next to the ink caps. I don’t move because Vanessa’s needle is on my skin and movingis a sin in this chair. I glance sideways. Screen up. Message from Zoe.
just discovered bad brains. my neighbors hate me. worth it.
I look at the ceiling.
“You’re smiling,” Vanessa says.
“I’m grimacing. The needle hurts.”
“That’s not a grimace.” But she doesn’t push. She goes back to the koi and I go back to not moving and the text sits on my phone screen, glowing, until the display times out and goes dark.
Bad Brains. She found Bad Brains on her own. I didn’t tell her about them. I told her about the Ramones and Patti Smith and the Clash and the lineage of punk from New York to London to D.C. to California, and she went home and followed the thread to D.C. and found Bad Brains, which means she’s not just listening to what I hand her. She’s digging.
“Can I take a break?” I ask.
“In ten minutes. I’m finishing this section.”
I wait ten minutes. Vanessa lifts the needle, wipes the area, wraps my arm in plastic. I pick up my phone.
I should not text her back. There’s no reason to text her back. She’s a regular at the bar. I don’t text my regulars. I don’t even have most of my regulars’ numbers. She gave me hers and I saved it because not saving it would have been a deliberate act, a decision to delete, and that felt like more effort than just letting the contact sit in my phone like any other contact.
I text her back.
bad brains is sacred ground. if you play “banned in dc” loud enough the building should legally become a venue.
I put the phone down. Vanessa is cleaning her station, rearranging ink caps, doing the between-sections reset she does every time we take a break.
“Customer?” she asks.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of a customer?”
“She comes to the bar. She’s new.” I look at my arm under the plastic. The koi is half-finished, the scales shimmering under the wrap, red and orange fading into the outline where Vanessa hasn’t filled yet. “She’s young.”
“How young?”
