But now they had to contend with the fact that Devon, the guy who was helping with the building and carpentry work, had probably bailed on them. She had to admit she wasn’t exactly surprised. He was the kind of guy who yelled at waiters and waitresses just for the power trip and ran over stray cats for fun. They’d only been together for two months—and at this point the only reason she hadn’t called it quits was that he’d been helping remake Laser Tex into their own nightclub. But for the last week he’d been ditching them, not showing up when he’d said he would, and then showing up when they weren’t there, only to call them up to yell about how he was the only one doing any work around the place. “You gotta ditch him,” Jaxon and Miles had told her. Now, Jaxon was saying, “Can you dump that motherfucker already?”
“Done,” she said. She already had her phone out and was texting him. Just a short one: “We done”. It was so cold that even she felt a little cooler.
“Was that really that hard?” asked Jaxon, teasing her again.
She pretended not to notice that he was teasing her. He’d always teased her, ever since the first time they met, as kids, outside the library. She was reading a book, the new girl in the neighborhood, waiting for her mother to finish buying groceries from the bodega. He was kicking a can around with his brother. They were, in her words, “Gross”, as her mother liked to remind her, though she couldn’t remember what they’d been doing to make her think that. Miles and Jaxon were two years older than she was, so while they went to the same schools and played in the same neighborhoods and hung around the same pools during the summer, they weren’t exactly friends growing up. If anything, she still remembered running after Jaxon, screaming with fury at the top of her lungs when she found that he’d decapitated her Barbie dolls.
They grew up and moved away on the periphery of each other’s consciousness. She had dreams of moving to Europe and making something with her art, and she was living small while saving up the money to make it happen. So she was slightly annoyed when her mother called her and said she was getting remarried—weddings were expensive—but it was just a small affair, friends-and-family only, capped with a backyard barbecue that was the hallmark of Philadelphia social life. Nothing big, nothing fancy, just a good time.
It was strange—when she met the groom she knew that he was Jaxon and Miles’s father but for some reason the fact didn’t click until they were all sitting around on the porch, drinking lemonade and iced tea and waiting for the barbecue to get going. They were lounging next to the shed, with their respective (now-ex-) girlfriends when she saw them, and her heart skipped a beat—they’d grown up. In retrospect that shouldn’t have been the surprise that it was, but she still remembered them as the lanky, pimpled guys who had funny laughs and the weirdest hair who stole her Barbie heads. Seeing them at the wedding, as men, their bodies having grown into their height, their faces unblemished, and their hair neatly trimmed, had really knocked her perspective on these guys sideways. She’d been a bit apprehensive about approaching them, but in the end Miles had seen her first and waved her over. “I guess you’re our sister now,” he’d said. There were empty beer bottles lying around—Miles and Jaxon were just tipsy enough to have no shame saying, “That’s too bad—I always thought you were cute.”
Then over Christmas Laser Tex had been burned down, accidentally, by a crew of graffiti artists who for some reason decided that it was a good idea to use a lighter around their cans of spray paint. It was Miles who smelled a good deal in the making and somehow conned—she maintained it was a con, but “charmed” was the word he preferred using—Jaxon and Cerise into ponying up for equal shares to make the “biggest, trendiest club around.”
Thank God for YouTube—that was all she could think, now, as she used the sander to carefully smooth the edges so that they would just fit together. Her mornings now consisted of taking notes while watching YouTube clips of how to assemble furniture, and then following those directions in the afternoon. She wondered, now, what it was about Miles that she’d agreed to this insanity.
“Where the hell is Miles?” she grumbled. Finally. The panels fit together smoothly. Now it was just a matter of glue screws, some wood-putty, a day to let everything set, and a new stain—or, in other words, when the real work began.
“Ask and you shall receive.” Miles came in, wheeling in a box that was as high as he was tall. He was virtually identical to Jaxon, but there was an air of assurance and seriousness about him that invited people to trust him. She’d always liked him better of the two, even though Jaxon was the funnier one.
“Oh my God, did you get it?” Cerise asked, her annoyance forgotten in the excitement of seeing the box.
Jaxon and Cerise gathered around. Miles grinned and cut open the tape with his pocketknife. It was one of those things that everybody, including Cerise, always teased him about—“Yo man, this is Philly, ain’t no Boy Scouts here”—but little blade came in surprisingly handy at the weirdest times, and she caught the little smirk of triumph he gave her (See?) and she rolled her eyes back at him (All right, all right). As the sign emerged she felt a shiver run down her spine—for the first time since they signed the mortgage for the property the enormity of what they were trying to do hit her. Shit be real. The sign was big, bold, the typeface one of the brush-script fonts but still regular enough so as to be easy to read: The Azure Code. It came with a bunch of individual letters, numbers, and symbols so they could advertise specials and what-not.
“Sweet,” said Jaxon, holding his hands up for high-fives all around. They obliged.
“Well, let’s set it down here,” said Miles, carefully sliding the box and dolly between a two stacks of chairs, so that it couldn’t fall over. “Come on, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Let me guess, Devon bailed again?”
“I’m five bucks richer,” said Jaxon.
Miles sighed. He’d seen this coming, too. “Well, least he ditched after putting up the support beams,” he said, taking off his jacket. It was spring, but this year had warmed up quickly, and the building had the odd tendency to hold in heat. “Cerise, can you handle the flooring, too?”
She rolled her eyes at him, but when he opened his mouth she joined him and Jaxon in saying, “All for one, one for all.” It was probably silly to quote the Three Musketeers but it got them through the hard parts, which was al that really mattered.
***
Two weeks later it was opening day.
Her arms and her back were aching and sore but she had to admit that three months of working with power tools and heaving lifting had toned her body better than anything she’d ever done at the gym. She was waiting the bar on opening night, wearing a silver-sequined spaghetti-strapped tank top and a short tight skirt. She’d debated wearing stilettos, but in the end decided to go with her stripper heels—a pair of heavy, sturdy platform heels that professional strippers used—because they were comfortable but made her look damn sexy. She’d almost forgotten that she had a body to show off, what with all of the hard labor that she’d been doing. And now, looking in the mirror, she was pleasantly surprised to see that all of her curves were still there, and then some.
It was all about the sexy tonight, and as she dusted her self with body glitter and painted her lips she had to admit it was an exciting change from being in old t-shirts and torn jeans all the time. Just a touch, she thought, as she put her hair up in a messy up-do. Not too much. The goal was to be attractive but not overtly sexual—to look hot enough to get the men’s libidos up but not hot enough to make their girlfriends jealous. She brushed on a little mascara and stepped back from the mirror, pleased with the effects.
Miles and Jaxon almost didn’t recognize her when she showed up to help them open the club. “Damn—you sure you Cerise?” asked Jaxon, as he helped her out of her car. “I ain’t never seen her look this fine before.”
“You sayin’ she ain’t fine?” Miles asked, punching his brother lightly in the arm. “Where yo’ manners?” Jaxon scowled. They were wearing tight-fitting black t-shirts and pants and work-boots; their jobs for the night were to manage the lights and sound and bounce the place if needed—and judging from the size of the crowd that was already gathering, it would very much be needed.
“Come on, guys,” she said, as she opened the back door. “Let’s show these people what a good time is really like.”
All nightclub openings were relatively big events—Philadelphia had its share of them and people were always looking for something new, exciting, edgier than the last one. But for its size, the Azure Code opening was huge: the crowd had been gathering for more than an hour before the opening time and by the time they opened the doors they were ready to party. Miles had flown in a Dutch DJ—their selling point was “sophistication”—and as soon as the crowd entered he began laying down beats that got even Miles to shake his fine, fine ass on the dance floor (he may have been her stepbrother, but that didn’t mean that she was blind). The drinks orders started coming almost right away—brightly-colored spritzers and, along with Jaxon, but even they managed to have a good time—and their tips ballooned when she, just drunk enough to think that this was a good idea but not drunk enough to fall off, got up on the bar to dance, shaking her body in sync to be beats. The DJ seemed to be timing his tracks to her, and the dollar bills kept raining down.