Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,15

the reproachful tone of his voice, as if I’ve done something shameful and I don’t even know what it is.

This is not the Doug I came here to find.

The Doug I came here to find is an artist who’s been running razzle!dazzle!space for years, who knew Sukey back in the day, who will lead me through the white door to the echoey gallery and hand me a stack of canvases wrapped in brown paper that he just happened to find in the storeroom the week before.

This Doug lets a loud fart rip and says, “It’s about goddamn time.”

We shuffle down the street together, Doug with his crutches and me with my bike. I feel agonizingly conspicuous, like the sole, towering twelve-year-old at a day camp overrun by seven-year-olds. I can feel people looking at me, wondering what I’m doing here, what I’m doing with him. He has some kind of rash on his neck, the mottled purple-blue of uncooked sausage. As we walk, he talks nonstop.

“They’re closing down the building, and I can’t hold on to her stuff no more. We’ve all gotta move out by the middle of July. I say it’s horseshit.”

He cracks his Coors Light and takes a swig. I smell the warm, watery beer and struggle to keep my voice conversational.

“Are you from razzle!dazzle!space?”

“Razzle what?”

I try again: “How did you know Sukey?”

Doug swallows his beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “We were neighbors, eh. She was down the hall from me.”

The knot in my chest unclenches. Sukey’s art studio. It all makes sense. But why would he wait five years to call? And why does he have stuff that belonged to her, anyway? Didn’t Mom and Dad clear out her studio themselves?

Questions flit around the corners of my mind, but I bat them away. Stop being such a Lukas, I tell myself.

“Are you an artist too?” I babble, eager to make the pieces fit together.

“Whassat?”

“Sukey said there were lots of other artists in the building.”

“She did, eh?” Doug chuckles, a rusty sound like a pair of scissors left out in the rain. “Good old Sukey. What a kid.”

Doug jerks his chin at the brick building to our right. “This is the one. I saw you down there with your bike the other night, eh, but you ran off before I could come down and meet ya.”

We’re back at the intersection of Columbia and East Pender, across from MONEY FOOD ENTERPRISES, standing in front of that creepy hotel. Doug lifts a veiny hand and points at one of the windows on the fourth floor.

“Sukey-girl lived in that one. Four-oh-nine.”

He takes another swig of beer and eyes my bicycle.

“Don’t you got a boyfriend with a truck or something, honey? You won’t get much home on the back of that thing.”

I hardly hear him. The window Doug pointed at is a jagged spiderweb of splintered glass. There’s something pushed up against it, a mattress or a piece of furniture, blocking the room from view. As I gaze at it, my elation at finding Sukey’s studio turns into a cold lump at the pit of my stomach.

This can’t be right.

Sukey wouldn’t have lived here. Not in this building. Not down the hall from someone like Doug. And especially not behind that evil-looking window, four stories up from a piss-smelling sidewalk where even the pigeons look strung out.

I look back at Doug.

“Where’d you get my number?”

Doug turns his oversized eyes on me and lowers his beer.

“Looked it up in the phone book. Guess I shouldn’t have bothered, eh?”

We stare each other down. I have the same swimmy feeling in my guts as I get before a piano recital. That trapped feeling, when there’s still technically time to run away, slip out the back door, but at the same time I know I’ve come too far and invested too much to back out.

“She really lived here?” I say.

“Right here.”

It occurs to me that Sukey might have moved here because it was the only place she could afford. Struggling artists always live in cheap places: drafty garrets, crumbling country estates, pay-by-the-week hotels in the Downtown Eastside. . . . But by the looks of the decaying humanoids slumped in the doorway of the Imperial Hotel, there hasn’t been any art happening here in a long, long time.

I cast another glance at Sukey’s window. “Can I come back in a few weeks?”

In a few weeks, Mom and Dad can deal with this. In a few weeks, I won’t even