The Kingmaker

He’s the only person here I’ve never seen before. I walk over and take the empty spot beside him.

“’Scuse me?” I ask, resting my back against the wall and pulling one knee up while I wait for him to clarify.

“Stars.” He gestures to one side of his eye. “And stripes. On your face. Is that on purpose?”

Sharp. Observant. He does attend Berkeley. Stands to reason.

“I never claimed to be subtle,” I say with a tight smile.

“Yeah, I picked up on the not-subtle part at the protest,” he says with a straight face, but with eyes twinkling the tiniest bit.

I don’t feel like discussing my complex relationship with this nation’s forefathers and their twisted definition of “we the people.” I settle for the simpler answer to his question. “The stars are for my second name,” I tell him.

“Second name?”

“A medicine man came through our reservation when I was a little girl, and gave me my second name: Girl Who Chases Stars.”

“Wow. That’s some name.”

“Tell ya a little secret.” I lean closer. “I think it may have been rigged.”

“Rigged?”

“When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. Well, at first I wanted to be a clown.”

“Obviously. Who didn’t?”

“You, too?”

“No, they’re creepy as fuck. What a weird kid you were.”

“This we can all agree on.” I laugh, surprised that I can laugh in a jail cell having this strange conversation with a guy I met not much more than an hour ago. “So around five or so, I decided I’d be an astronaut instead. Everyone knew it, so maybe the medicine man was simply giving the people what they wanted, so to speak. Chicken, egg. Ear

th, moon.”

“So if Girl Who Chases Stars is your second name, what’s your first?”

“Lennix. With an ‘i’ because I know you’re thinking ‘o.’”

“Lennix.” He rolls the syllables around on his tongue, and something about the way he seems to test the name, taste it, sends a shiver down my spine. I’ve never been around a guy like him before. Correction. A man. The guys at school leave me cold—cold and uninterested and unimpressed. This guy? Warm, interested. Way impressed.

I’m distracted when the cell door opens and a woman teeters in on skyscraper heels. Her blue wig is longer than her dress, which I’m sure was a cocktail napkin in another life. I think I’ve seen her a few times on the rez and in town, too. She’s Native, and I bet if you sandblasted her makeup off, she’d be quite pretty.

The cell door bangs closed behind her and she scowls, her gaze roaming the crowded cell and stopping on Berkeley. A smile creeps over her lips and she takes the empty-ish spot on his other side, bumping his neighbor over with one curvy hip to make room for herself.

She drags her eyes over all the things I noticed right away—his lean muscles, strong chest, and dark hair. When he stares back at her, letting her look her fill, I want to rip that blue wig off her head and stomp on it.

Real mature.

“Well, well, well,” she drawls, licking her glossy red lips. “Ain’t you something?”

To Berkeley’s credit, his eyes never drop to the breasts bulging at the deep slit of the microscopic dress’s neckline. He looks at her unblinkingly, almost as if waiting for her to go on.

“Didn’t expect to find the likes of you in here,” she says. “Must be my lucky night.”

She reaches up toward his face, but he catches her wrist before she touches him. Her long talon-like nails hang inches from his jaw. With what looks like some gentleness, he pushes her hand back and drops it.

“Oh, it’s like that?” she demands, the dark eyes hard and glassy like pebbles. “Your loss. I could do it like you never had it before.”