Small Change

  Small Change

  Small Change #1

  Roan Parrish

  MONSTER PRESS

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Ginger

  Interlude 1: Christopher

  Chapter 2: Ginger

  Interlude 2: Christopher

  Chapter 3: Ginger

  Interlude 3: Christopher

  Chapter 4: Ginger

  Interlude 4: Christopher

  Chapter 5: Ginger

  Interlude 5: Christopher

  Chapter 6: Ginger

  Interlude 6: Christopher

  Chapter 7: Ginger

  Interlude 7: Christopher

  Chapter 8: Ginger

  Interlude 8: Christopher

  Chapter 9: Ginger

  Interlude 9: Christopher

  Chapter 10: Ginger

  Interlude 10: Christopher

  Chapter 11: Ginger

  Interlude 11: Christopher

  Chapter 12: Ginger

  Interlude 12: Christopher

  Chapter 13: Ginger

  Interlude 13: Christopher

  Chapter 14: Ginger

  Interlude 14: Christopher

  Chapter 15: Ginger

  Interlude 15: Christopher

  Chapter 16: Ginger

  Interlude 16: Christopher

  Chapter 17: Ginger

  Interlude 17: Christopher

  Chapter 18: Ginger

  Chapter 19: Ginger

  Chapter 20: Ginger

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Preview: In the Middle of Somewhere

  Sample Chapters

  Acknowledgments

  About Roan Parrish

  Also By Roan Parrish

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Roan Parrish

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Edited by Julia Ganis, JuliaEdits.com

  Cover design by Natasha Snow

  First edition, June 2017

  To the ghost crew.

  Chapter 1

  They fell in love with me in a matter of hours, as I drove into them, deeper and more permanent than any lover. Some of them relaxed into it. Others fought the whole way down. Some drifted gently on it and others drowned quickly. However they took it, they carried a piece of me with them forever, and I rarely saw them again.

  My needle slid across skin, leaving a line as pure and smooth as when I used a paintbrush. Jack was heavily tattooed, a lot of it by me, and he knew how to give himself over to the needle, muscle and tendon relaxing beneath the skin so there was no tension, just a lightly freckled canvas and the blue lines of my stencil to guide my hand. Trained as a doctor and now a curator at the Mütter Museum, Jack was having me slowly cover his remaining skin with tattoos of the skeletal structure.

  It was my favorite kind of work—realistic black and gray, so detailed that I could fall into a kind of trance; a meditation of breath and blood and flesh. Lose myself inside the twists and curls of a line and resurface inches of skin and hours later.

  Jack and I had shared a peaceful coexistence, my hand and my needle the only points of connection between us. As excited as I was about this tattoo, though, I was glad to be nearly done with it. The long day revealed itself in the twinge of my right calf muscle from working the pedal, and the tightness in my low back and shoulders from leaning over. My hand was cramping and my eyes were crossing from so many hours of close-up work. The shop clock was blurry until my eyes slowly switched to long-distance.

  I’d been tattooing for almost ten hours with only brief breaks to eat, switch clients, and run to the bathroom, so it was no wonder I was feeling it.

  It had become my habit more and more often in the month since Daniel left.

  Daniel was the best friend I’d ever had. Almost a brother. We reminded each other to do things like eat and sleep and set bills to auto-pay so our electricity didn’t get turned off. (Hey, that one was totally him.)

  I still couldn’t quite believe he was gone. I was happy for him. I really was. He’d gotten a great job in Michigan after years of working incredibly hard in grad school.

  But goddamn, it sucked to be without him. Ever since he’d left, I’d felt at sea, always about to reach for something I kept forgetting wasn’t there anymore.

  “Damn, man,” Jack said, as we looked in the mirror at the shoulder joint I’d just inked. Standing, he towered over me, and I looked quickly away from my reflection. My dark curls were wild around my pale face, the shadows under my eyes an unwelcome reminder that my schedule lately had been extreme. Jack’s long fingers traced the air, hovering over his clavicle, acromion, humerus. “You’re making the rest of my ink look bad, Ginger.”

  “The rest of your ink is bad,” I said, and winked at him in the mirror.

  Once I’d cleaned him up and wrapped his fresh tattoo, he handed me a roll of bills. “Month after next probably, okay? Or maybe three.”

  “Absolutely. Just shoot me a text and I’ll get Lindsey to put it in the book. Scapula next?”

  It would connect the shoulder piece I’d just done to the vertebrae I’d first inked along his spine.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He nodded, eyes dreamy like he was already envisioning it. “Scapula.”

  I locked the door behind him and collapsed in my own tattoo chair, massaging the shaved half of my head, over the spot where my migraines usually started, and forcing my eyes to focus on the details at mid-distance so my vision could recalibrate. The black vinyl couches near the door, where people sat and browsed our portfolios, had been cracked from years of use before I ever started working here, but the black and white subway tile looked clean and sharp.

  Marcus Dade’s station was closest to the door, and above it was the poster of a dragon. It was a cheapo, poster-store fantasy print, like you might see in a dorm room. Marcus had razored out the bottom half, and replaced it with a map of Philadelphia, so it looked like the dragon’s claws were poised to take out the City Hall clock tower, Center City sprawling beneath its outstretched wings, about to be immolated from the fire it was breathing. Marcus had painted the details slightly overlapping, so it looked like one piece, and he’d framed it in a large, gaudy gold frame he’d found at the thrift store down the street.

  Morgan Jax, our piercer, had the station across from mine, and it was framed by a semicircle of the phases of the moon: crescent at the bottom left, waxing to full at the apex, and waning to crescent at the bottom right. They were each slightly tinted in pinks, purples, and teals, so the effect was early-nineties woo chic. Which was pretty apt. Then, in the center of the wall, beneath the full moon, was a black velvet painting of a howling wolf in a glittery frame, with a word bubble coming out of its gaping maw that said, NO.

  The wall behind my own station had a kind of creeping collage that I added to whenever I found something that caught my eye. It began with a glittery ruby slipper that I found on the front stoop of the shop one night, and had grown from there. My own Magic Garden, a smaller version of the mosaic and glass maze up South Street.

  I must’ve dozed off for a minute, because I woke to the sounds of Morgan and Marcus coming through from the back room. I rubbed my eyes and stars burst behind my eyelids. “Shit, you guys are still here?”

  Their eyes darted to each other. Classic guilt.

  “What? What did you do? Oh jeez, Morgan, you didn’t try and cook again, did you?”

  I sniffed the air suspiciously. Morgan was convinced she was a great cook, and sometimes, instead of bringing lefto
vers for lunch or dinner, or ordering take-out like a normal person, she’d plug in a hot plate she’d found in the back storage room and concoct noxious stir-fries. The hot plate must’ve been there since before Raul, the previous owner, opened up shop, and I was borderline convinced that someday she was going to burn down the whole building. But mostly I was just glad she kept the windows open while she cooked.

  Morgan’s eyes flashed. “You should be so lucky that I cooked for you, Miss Ice Cream For Breakfast and on a first-name basis with every delivery person in the neighborhood.”

  “At least they don’t poison me,” I muttered, plucking at the threads in the shredded knee of my jeans.

  “What was that?” Morgan cupped her hand with its bright blue nails around her ear, leaning toward me.

  “Ummm,” I said, “I appreciate the unique combination of qualities that make you my beloved friend and coworker?”

  “Yeah, I thought that’s what I heard.”

  We flashed grins at each other, and then I started the automatic movements of cleaning my station—dumping the used needle sharps, gloves, globs of Vaseline, and wads of paper towel bloomed with ink and blood in the waste bin, disinfecting the chair, my stool, and the floor around us, and replacing my inks.

  I packed my tattoo machine away in its box. Jonathan, my mentor, had given it to me when I started working here, though over the years I’d made my own adjustments. Etched above the grip, in gothic font, it read Tattoo Bitch, the nickname that had started as a joke between Jonathan and me, but had stuck.

  Morgan and Marcus were still standing there when I looked up.

  “Christ, out with it,” I said when they exchanged another guilty look. I picked at my chipped black nail polish as they squirmed.

  “Look, Ginger, you know we’re both thrilled at all the extra work recently.”

  Not long after Daniel left town, G Philly, the queer section of Philly Mag, had done a feature on the shop, naming Small Change the most queer-friendly shop in Philly, in addition to being the only one that was female-owned. It had driven a wave of new clients our way. The added business was much needed, since money had been a real problem for the past year. Now there was more money coming in, but we were all exhausting ourselves trying to cover the business.

  “But babe, we were short-staffed before. Now…” Marcus trailed off, opening his arms to the shop around us, which was still trashed. We hadn’t had time to tidy things up between clients the way we usually would. “Lindsey says we’re booked solid. We’ve got waiting list clients. It’s too much.”

  His voice was gentle, like always. But he was right.

  I’d been reveling in the distraction that so much work brought, but my friends were just as swamped as I was. And, unlike me, they weren’t trying to distract themselves from the fact that their best friend in the whole world had left town, taking with him a piece of what made Philly feel like home, his absence a constant reminder of how good it had felt to have a partner in crime. And how lonely it felt not to have that anymore.

  “You’re right, I know. I need to get on hiring someone. It’s hard right now because I’ve been spending every minute I’m not here working on my stuff for Malik’s show. But I’ll pull some portfolios, okay? I’ve got a bunch in my inbox.”

  “Look, boo,” Morgan said. “Thing is? Paul called today. He’s floating right now and thought maybe he could set up here for a bit.”

  “Paul,” I said flatly, my fingers plucking at the tangle of silver chains at my neck.

  “His color work is great, he tattoos fast, and he likes to do all that gonzo new-school shit that you and Marcus both hate.”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow and nodded at the truth of that.

  “Paul,” I repeated. “Paul my douchebag ex who roams the planet today only because I am merciful and disinclined toward prison, Paul?”

  Marcus bit his lip, but Morgan soldiered on.

  “If we could just get him in until you found someone permanent. A month or two, maybe. I know he isn’t the best, but…”

  That was an understatement of epic proportion. I’d started sleeping with Paul after an exchange of not uncharming banter at a prom-themed birthday party for a mutual friend. Roles were played, prom Queens and Kings were agreed upon, Carrie jokes were made, fictional virginities were lost, rollicking good times were had by all. It became a semi-regular thing and turned into us casually dating, and I’d thought things were going pretty well. After about a month, though, Paul vanished as suddenly and unsatisfyingly as those fabled prom-night virginities.

  After two weeks, when I finally sent him a text to see what was up, he began a precision campaign of gaslighting, dismantling our relationship by claiming we were never really together, that he’d found me needy, and that he’d never really been into the sex we’d been having. I knew he was bullshitting me. He’d been the one to bring up dating in the first place. He’d contacted me far more than I’d contacted him. And the sex…well, he’d seemed pretty into it. Regardless, it had made me feel pathetic. Angry, and sad, and—when I learned he’d shared his complaints with a number of our mutual friends—humiliated.

  Humiliated not just because of the fallout, but at the memory of how I’d actually thought—even if just for a moment—that we could have something real. I’d felt like a fool.

  “Isn’t the best,” I echoed. “Dude, he’s the fucking worst. Okay, yes, he’s a great tattooer. Yes, he’s fast. Yes, to all of it. But he is a slime human being and I will not—not—have him working here. The end.”

  “Ginge—”

  “Nope. End of intervention. I don’t pull rank often, but this is my damn shop. It’s my home and you guys are like my family—my much-less-fucked-up-than-my-actual-family family—and I’m not poisoning my favorite place with someone who makes me feel like shit! I won’t do it, I’m sorry. Even if I have to tattoo some new-school abominations on kids with more stiff-brimmed snapbacks than brains.”

  “I told you,” Marcus muttered under his breath.

  Morgan sighed and perched on the counter. “Okay,” she said finally. “You’re right. Sorry.”

  Morgan was aggressive and blunt and sometimes offensive as hell, but goddamn I loved that girl. The second she knew she was wrong she apologized, no bravado and no bullshit. Hiring her had been one of the best decisions I’d made. She hadn’t had much by way of a portfolio since she’d been piercing out of her house for five years while working full-time as a manicurist. But her work references were glowing and when she called five of her friends who lived nearby and asked them to come down so I could look at their piercings, I was amused enough to wait and see.

  The piercings themselves had been impeccable but I’d responded to Morgan’s way with clients even more, and I’d hired her on a trial basis that we both knew would become permanent. Of course, Morgan’s assurances were because of some planet squaring some other planet and the conjunction of a moon in a certain house…but whatever works, right?

  Morgan and I had recognized each other right away. You could just tell when you met another person whose thick skin had been forged in the fire of difference. I’d been teased and dismissed for not being pretty, for not dressing like I wanted people to think I was pretty, for being outspoken, for not taking shit. In other words, called a bitch or a dyke or a freak at school and instead of changing, squared my shoulders and rejected their premises.

  Morgan grew up beautiful, black, and female in a neighborhood that valued her beauty more than anything else about her. She’d been called a bitch too, for not agreeing, and for not capitulating to the certain kind of power her beauty could’ve gotten her. Her success, first with manicuring, and then with piercing, had spelled independence for her, and we’d bonded over how fiercely we both needed it.

  “Sorry, Ginge,” Marcus echoed.

  Marcus was as considerate as Morgan was blunt, and now he looked even guiltier. He was turning his phone over and over in his pocket, which he always did when he was late calling home
.

  Marcus and his partner Selene lived outside town in a beautiful converted barn that Selene had inherited. They’d been talking about fostering kids. Maybe even setting up the barn as a space for queer kids who weren’t safe in the system. Marcus thought maybe, as a trans man, he could be a resource for some of the kids for whom the threat and impermanence of the system didn’t provide the time or privacy to process their identities.

  But now Marcus had been working way more than usual and I hadn’t heard him mention it in weeks. In fact, had I talked to either of them about anything non-work-related in the last week? Or had I been too exhausted to ask, too eager to be absorbed by tattooing so I could forget my own problems?

  “No,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been a speed demon lately and I didn’t think about the pressure it was putting on you guys. I am seriously gonna get on it. I have four or five people who’ve emailed me over the last six months asking about spots. I’ll look at them this week. I promise.”

  Their relief was clear and they both hugged me on their way out.

  Though my apartment was right upstairs, I sank back down in my tattoo chair and looked around at the shop.

  At thirty-four, I’d been tattooing longer than not; at this shop longer than I’d lived in my parents’ house. I’d grown up here. Watched dozens of other artists come and go, watched businesses move into the neighborhood, thrive, and die. Watched South Street change and stay the same. It had been the one constant in my life. I’d started working here after finishing my mentorship with Jonathan. He and Raul had known each other for years, so he’d vouched for me even though I was just a kid.

  When I’d started hanging around Jonathan’s shop, ten blocks away, at fourteen, he’d told me to leave in no uncertain terms. When I kept coming back, he ignored me for a few months. When I made friends with one of his younger artists because we went to all the same shows, and he introduced me, Jonathan rolled his eyes but let me hang around. It had been nearly a year of inching closer and closer, fascinated by everything that went on in the shop, until one day he gave in. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to a messy station in the back. “Clean it up,” he said. “Clean them all up. And then we’ll talk.”