Waylaid by Ed Lin Read Free Book Online Page A

for the candy or cigarette machine. But I still had to sit there.
    I was trapped at the hotel, watching people older than me having fun. Fun that was supposed to be mine. I was the kid. Instead, I was just another employee at the hotel. I wanted to be a customer and get that air conditioning, get those girls, get some fun.
    That hotel owned us. Reopening the burger stand just meant adding another room and more chores to our prison.
    A local woman named Nancy helped with the cleaning on Sundays in the summer when the Bennys checked out and nearly all of the hotel’s rooms had to be straightened up. Nancy would start working at around 11 a.m., which was check-out time, and finish around seven. For lunch, she’d sit on the bed in one of the dirty rooms, eat a Snickers bar, and watch the second half of a half-hour sitcom.
    Nancy wore rubber gloves when she picked up used condoms and joints. She disposed of the pornography more discretely than my mom, but I fished it back out of the garbage at night when she was gone. Her long hair was the color of paint on a broken-down barn, and it shook from side to side as she scrubbed or vacuumed. Nancy worked hard for the $30 we paid her for the day, and she also got tips. She was only 40, but her face was badly wrinkled. Her husband walking out on her had left permanent marks.
    Nancy talked incessantly, but she only had three themes — loneliness, love, and her daughter Anne-Marie.
    â€œAh, Jim and I got married too young, you know? You try and fight so hard to be an adult, and when you get there, everybody’s trying to claw their way back. But an older man can always get a younger woman and get halfway back, so you’re lucky you’re a boy, kid. Just like Jim. Ah, if you’re a girl, you’ve only got the television, and you keep it on because when you turn it off, you see your reflection in the black screen.”
    â€œAh, these kids, all the drinking and sex, I like to see kids having fun. I think it’s okay, stay young, hold on to your dreams. Don’t let other people tell you what to do. Ah, you’re too young to know love. This room, this is what young love smells like.”
    â€œAh, I always tell Anne-Marie it’s okay to be confused. Sometimes the only way to find yourself is when you’re confused. You’ve got to turn off all the voices in your head one by one until you find that last one that’s your own. You have to experience everything before you can make decisions. Experience is more important than education, Einstein said that. See, you thought I was stupid. The secretaries from the principal’s office keep calling me about Anne-Marie and ask me why I can’t control her. I tell them, ‘Hey, look how far high school got you!’ Ah, you’ve got to climb every mountain.”
    One day, when I was helping Nancy wring out a pile of beer-soaked sheets in the driveway, she said Anne-Marie was going to work at the burger stand with me.
    Anne-Marie was her right name, but my mother always called her “Annie-Marie.” She was 16 and was going to drop out of high school as soon as it was legally possible. Until then, she was cutting altogether. I’d only seen her a few times when she’d come to drop off and pick up Nancy on Sundays, but seeing the silhouette of her upper torso behind the tinted glass of her car made my skin feel hot and prickly, even when I was standing in the shade.
    I would stare at the little charms on the bracelet Anne-Marie wore on her left ankle when she stepped from the car. She would lean over on the open door and flip her shades up into her dark red hair. The door and tinted glass would block out most of her body, except for a space from the wound-down window that framed her belly button in a rectangle.
    She wasn’t prettier than Lee Anderson, but she was sexier because she knew how to move her tits and ass. There was no way she was a