Don't eat the sugar-free gummy bears on a roadtrip
aka Book 7 and more...
I have a LOT going on right now in April, which means you’re hearing plenty from me.
As you know from my earlier emails, the first Random series boxed set, featuring Books 1-3, is only 0.99 this month. Get it now if you haven’t already.
You also know you can go straight on to the second boxed set in the series, featuring books 4-6.
Well now - there’s one more boxed set, featuring books 7-9 (after that, you have books 10 and 11).
And it involves sugar-free gummy bears and why you are opening a portal to hell if you eat too many.
Let’s go back a few years. I’m writing Random Acts of Love (Book 6 in the Random series), when I suddenly have yet another opportunity to offer an all-new book in a Brenda Novak-organized boxed set to raise funds for juvenile diabetes.
I say yes.
I decide to write Maggie and Frown’s story. There was no Maggie and Frown story at that point. But suddenly, as I was writing Book 6, I realized I had to write what would before Book 7 in the series - simultaneously.
I wrote two books in 10 weeks, start to finish, fully edited. I crashed afterwards, but I have to confess that 1) being able to have a running joke about sugar-free gummy bears cross over from Book 6 to Book 7 was hilariously fun and 2) Random Acts of LA is one of my favorites.
Yeah, yeah, we’re not supposed to have favorite books, but every author does. Maggie and Frown don’t get as much attention as I think they should.
Here’s Chapter 3 to give you a sense of the book:
Tyler (aka Frown)
I have woken up in a lot of messes in my life. Lived in my car for long stretches. Couch surfed. Slept on floors. In beds with women so drunk and passed out we didn’t have sex. Woke up once tucked between the cement foundation of the Boston Public Library and a thicket of bushes.
I’ve also been rolled a few times. Wallet, money, instruments stolen by street kids, by homeless dudes, by anyone who saw me as weaker and able to be rolled. Doesn’t happen often. Three times, now that I think about it.
Make that four now.
The light streaming in through the broken blinds didn’t make sense. What time was it? I’d set my alarm to go off at eight, and the light felt... off. Too sunny to be that early. I fumbled for my phone in my back pocket.
No phone.
Huh. It must have fallen out. I looked around the room and nearly &^%$ my pants.
It was empty, except for the nasty mattress I was currently standing on, my hands in my hair, pulling hard as the layers hit me.
Phone—gone.
Bass—gone.
Guitar—gone.
Backpack—gone.
Wallet—gone.
I leapt off the bed and bounded out of the room, heart slamming against my chest like Sam with a tambourine. The five-room apartment took thirty seconds to check.
Johnny—&^%$ing gone.
“$#@!!” I screamed, as if it would help. Like words ever make a difference. A frantic search of the apartment showed that nothing but my &^%t was gone. Then again, nothing but my *&^t was worth anything on the streets.
Johnny’d said he’d manage somehow. Oh, yeah. He was right about that.
My fist punched the cheap, hollow door before I could even think to do it. Like it had a mind of its own. I pulled back after the second hit, a voice deep inside telling me to stop.
It sounded like my mom.
Red, burning pain lit up my knuckles. It distracted me. I ran back to my room, flipping the mattress. Carpet beetles ran amok, walking in drunken paths toward the edges of the room. I ripped at the cord for the blinds, pulling them up, looking out the filthy window. A line of mildew dotted the edge, like lace trim on a dress hem.
Johnny’s piece of &^%t car was gone.
My bleeding hand raked through my hair again. The rough sandpaper of my three-day beard scratched like it was judging me as I washed my face with my palm.
Think think think.
He’d &^%ing cleaned me out.
How hard had I slept? Stupid. Stupid *&^%ing Tyler. How could I have slept like that? Trusted Johnny like that? Hold on. He’d never stolen from me before. Okay, he’d filched candy out of my Halloween bag when we were kids, but that didn’t count. The little ^%$#wad stole my bass. My guitar. My wallet, my phone my—oh, God.
I sprinted to the bathroom and flipped the toilet seat up so hard it cracked, slammed back down, and I puked all over the broken white porcelain. Over and over until there was nothing left.
Until I was hollow. Gutted. Empty.
Completely void.
I slammed my back against the stained wall by the sink and banged my head over and over against the wallboard, the dull thud of my brain smacking against my skull really soothing. Sometimes pain gets you through a situation you wouldn’t ever think you could survive.
The pain can be the only anchor to keep you in this world.
I don’t know how long I sat there, being empty. When you have nothing, when you are nothing, it’s not like you account for the time.
You just are.
And after a while, there isn’t even a you.
Slowly, my eyes took in my ink. The colors. The thick, black lines that separated one section from another. The contours, the shading, the careful attention to detail. My tats brought me back, deliberately, like they had a process. A plan.
A mission.
That voice? It suddenly said, You can do this.
I could? What the ^%$# could I do? What this could I do? No money. No ID. No bass. Not even a %$#@ing beat-up guitar.
No Dad.
No brother.
No love.
I don’t cry. For the record—I don’t cry. Didn’t cry when Mom died when I was eleven. Didn’t cry when Dad came back and took over for us, his first question about how to find the local Social Security office so he could apply for our survivors’ benefits. Didn’t cry when he started bringing weird guys home and one of them—
I don’t cry.
You can do this.
The voice sounded like Darla this time.
Elbows on my knees, I looked up. No light in the bathroom, so the only way I could see was from the shine of sunlight through the open door. The toilet paper roll was empty. The room reeked of my bile. My mind felt like cotton candy mixed with beer.
My mouth tasted like that, too.
A plan. I needed to take all the details in my head and turn them into puzzle pieces. Make the pieces fit.
No money. No phone. No ID. No instruments.
What do you do?
Think think think.
You start at the bank. I had four hundred bucks in a saving account you couldn’t access with my debit card. Even if Johnny blew through the checking account, he couldn’t get that.
Unless he beat me to the bank.
Five minutes later I reeked of puke and sweat, my body running on adrenaline to the local credit union where I’d just sprinted, three long city blocks past junkies and wh0res and perfectly fine moms pushing baby strollers and happy dads with kids in baseball caps.
I stopped in front of the bank’s door. If this was going to work, I could look like this. A few deep breaths, some stretches to look like I’d run on purpose. The grim reset button inside me being pushed. The steady decline from being wired to being calm.
Cool.
My goal is to look like a guy coming in to take money out of his account like it was no big deal. Like any other day.
Like a person you don’t need to ask for ID because he’s just so... okay.
That whole expectations thing is a game. Do what people expect of you and when you’re actually lying, you can get away with so much more.
“Hello?” the teller chirped. I remembered her. Sort of. Her face. She’d worked here for a while. “Is that Tyler? Haven’t seen you in months.”
I smiled. Her face brightened.
See? We’re on our way.
“Yeah, Linda.” Thank God for name tags. “How’s it going?”
“You out for a run?” Her eyes raked over me. So that’s how it was. I gave her my best flirt face and tried not to freak out on the inside as seventeen different pieces of me all screamed in the jail of my ribcage.
Just let the calm, cool, flirty dude take charge and it’ll be all right.
“I am. You work out, too, I see,” I said. She glowed.
I picked the right words for once.
“How can I help you?” she asked in a low, suggestive voice.
“I need to take out some money from my account.” I grabbed a withdrawal slip and scribbled the number from memory. I wrote three hundred fifty dollars. Needed to leave some or she’d ask too many questions.
Stay in the range of safe. Too many standard deviations from the mean and you draw attention.
As I slid the slip under the glass counter her fingers touched mine. Lingered. “Nice ink,” she said. “Who did the flowers?”
I looked down. Flowers. That’s right.
“Oh, you know.” Deflect. “You got any tats?” I made myself give her an obvious once-over. Any other situation and I’d find her &^%$able, but right now my c0ck hung in my pants like a loose seatbelt.
She leaned in, giving me two eyefuls of creamy cleavage. “I do, but... I can’t show it here.”
“Really?”
Linda pulled back and looked at my withdrawal slip. She opened her cash drawer as her eyes went to her computer screen.
Please let this work. Please let this work. Pleezeletdiswork. The words became a chant in my head, all meshed into one ball of sound. Like static.
She keyed in some numbers, then a machine clicked. Shuffling sounds. A stack of bills appeared in the drawer. She grabbed my hand, hard, and pulled it under the glass barrier. A ballpoint pen pressed into my flesh.
She bit her lower lip as she wrote her number on the pad of my hand.
“I get off at three,” she whispered, “if you want to get off, too. I’ll show you my tat and you can show me... everything you got.”
I swallowed. The money was right there. Just had to keep up the act for thirty more seconds. C’mon Tyler. You got this. You got this.
She had to see how fake I was from the look in my eyes, right? Didn’t she? How could I feel so deeply inside me and have people not sense it? Not see it. Not even know it was there?
I looked at her and smiled, focusing on a spot between her eyes. If I looked directly at her I was &^%$ing freaked she’d figure me out.
“Sounds good.” She slid the money to me, still holding my hand. I picked up the bills like they were a beating heart and tucked them in my pocket. Linda let go of me. It took everything not to exhale loudly.
“I’ll see you?” she asked, eyebrows up, questioning. Flushed cheeks and a sly, almost-evil grin rounded out her look.
“Sure.”
“Have a nice day,” she said in a neutral voice as another teller walked behind her.
“You too,” I called back as I walked out, face frozen in a smile.
I made it outside and around the corner before I puked again. Some poor insurance agent’s building got the remains of my stomach in their cluster of pansies. Sorry, dude.
I straightened up and took a deep breath. Looked around. No one saw me.
And I had three hundred and fifty bucks to get me through this. Thank &^%$ing God.
I wasn’t quite so empty anymore.
Maggie
The knock at the door wasn’t that unusual. Mom was gone, Lena was at the office working again, and in our little subdivision kids were constantly selling stuff in school fundraisers.
Except kids don’t stand at nearly six feet and have tattoos the color of candy all over them. And they don’t start conversations with, “You got a car and a guitar I can borrow?”
“Excuse me?”
“Darla call you yet?’
“Excuse me? Tyler, what the hell are you doing at my house here in St. Louis?” My hinky meter went from zero to Oh Holy &^%k. I’d never had a stalker before, but I’d worked with plenty of women on campus who had, plus after my r@pe I’d been followed by news camera crews and frat boys who thought—
“Chill. It’s cool.” He kept his voice low. Too low. “I live here.”
“You do not live here.”
“I mean I live in St. Louis.”
“Get out!”
“Did Darla call you?”
“No.”
“Your phone off?”
“What? What? What are you talking about? Why are you asking me questions about my phone and Darla and Tyler Gilvrey what in the *&^%ing hell are you doing outside my mom and dad’s house?”
I pulled back, imagining myself at a distance from this. My therapists had recommended that when I faced massive fear. Imagine you’re at a distance, giving advice. I could feel the plume of terror threatening to overtake me, and if he made one move toward me, I’d—
And then he did. One simple step toward me was all it took. Instinct flooded my veins and I pulled one foot up, twisted my hip and kicked him with my leg at a perfect right angle, my flat, bare sole hitting him square on in the nuts.
I didn’t know a guy could scream like that.
Mrs. Wilmer from next door shrieked as Tyler folded in half and fell backward off the two-step front stoop. Her little Labradoodle, a mocha-colored puffball with pink and purple ribbons above its ears, began barking furiously and shot across the yard.
“Margaret! Margaret! Is this man hurting you?” Mrs. Wilmer called out. She had been watering her flower bed with a hose and a watering sprayer and came over, still holding it. If she was four-foot-eight I’d be surprised, and she probably weighed less than most backpacks at my college. Her bangs were cut straight across and about a half-inch from her hairline. She wore giant glasses that looked like something from a 1980s sitcom, and she normally walked with a walker.
That woman fairly sprinted to my aid.
I felt like one of those spin art canvases, my inner world twirling and splattering into patterns that would later be beautiful and enchanting but right now were just smears and chaos.
Her dog... what was its name?... jumped right on Tyler’s leg and sank its fangs into his calf.
Who knew Tyler could hit notes that high?
“Help! God, ow, help!” he shouted, hitting three octaves at once, rolling on the ground.
Mrs. Wilmer turned purple with rage. “You can’t hurt Margaret! How dare you!”
Tyler answered by shaking the leg the dog was biting.
“And now you want to hurt my little Attila! Sic ‘em, Attila! That’s right. Protect Mommy and Margaret!”
Tyler rolled on the ground like he was on fire, then shifted one leg under his hips, starting to stand.
Mrs. Wilmer shot him in the face with the hose sprayer.
And he went down. Boom.
“Ah, %$#k, Maggie, help me,” he moaned.
“He said the ‘f’ word! How obscene!” Mrs. Wilmer said to me, enraged. Her eyes bulged and her browned teeth were bared at Tyler in an odd symmetry with her little dog. “Margaret, go get one of those portable telephones and call the fuzz!”
“The... what?” I squeaked.
“We need to get the fuzz out here to arrest this mugger!”
“No police!” Tyler groaned.
“See! He’s going to stand up and kidnap us and do unspeakable things!”
I looked down at the ground. Mrs. Wilmer still had the hose focused on Tyler, and Attila wasn’t letting go of his leg. My crotch kick left the guy folded in half. With the colorful arm tattoos he looked like something out of a Garden Club display.
“Call Darla! Call Charlotte,” he groaned. “They’ll tell you why I’m here.”
“Who are Darla and Charlotte, young man?” Mrs. Wilmer bent down and sprayed him in the eyes. “Women you’ve kidnapped and sold off to bad men? You can’t pull one over on us!”
Attila released Tyler and shimmied up his body, licking his face.
Pure adrenaline raced through me, but I took a few steps backward. Phone. Where was the phone?
Mrs. Wilmer mistook my uncertainty for fear. “I’ve got him, Margaret. Don’t worry. Between me and my little honey bunny Attila, we’ll keep you safe.”
Tyler let out a sound of outraged pain.
It wasn’t my safety I was worried about any more.
I sprinted into the kitchen and grabbed my phone and turned it back on. It had run out of power, and I’d been charging it all morning, and—
Seventeen messages?
Oh, &^%t.
I ran back to the front yard before Mrs. Wilmer went and got her six cats and made them try to eat Tyler, too.
“You’re calling 911?” she asked, eyebrows raised. I could only imagine how many replays this story would get for the next year at her bridge club. And at the local church she attended. And everywhere in town but social media.
“No, Mrs. Wilmer. Just checking to see if Tyler’s telling the truth.”
“You know this criminal?”
All I could do was nod.
“Quit waterboarding me, you old bat!” Tyler sputtered, the water choking him.
“You apologize for that remark, young man! I am not an old bat. What a nasty thing to say!”
“And making your dog bite me while you torture me with a hose isn’t nasty?”
“I’m a good Christian woman!” she protested. “I am never nasty!”
“Jesus %$#@ing Christ,” Tyler said.
“You cannot take the name of the Lord in vain like that!” She pointed the hose at him. “Apologize to God or I’ll...”
“What?” he shrieked. I had one eye on my row of messages and one on him. It was a treat to see him so... emotional. So fired up. So—anything other than droll and dry and contained.
Tyler was one big bundle of muscled schadenfreude right now.
Messages. A ton of them. Most from Darla. Something about Tyler needing help getting to L.A. by Monday night. Then a stream of them from Charlotte.
“Does he have a partner hiding in your house? Are you being kidnapped, Margaret?” hollered Mrs. Wilmer. “Please shout if you are!” followed by growling sounds, then Tyler whimpering.
Oh, boy.
By the time I got back to the front stoop with the phone, Tyler was standing. He was crumpled a bit from my kick, and rubbing his bitten calf. He was soaking wet and while I should have felt pity or empathy or anger or something any decent human being would feel, all I noticed was how his wet t-shirt molded to what appeared to be an eight pack of abs.
Oh, my.
Mrs. Wilmer adjusted her glasses, then switched the hose into her left hand as Attila seamlessly leaped into her right arm and nestled in, panting at me like she expected a treat.
“Good dog,” I muttered.
Tyler mumbled a single-word obscenity.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Wilmer,” I explained.
“Glad someone is,” Tyler interrupted.
“Shut up, Frown.”
He did.
My phone buzzed. A call. I slid the phone open and caught Charlotte.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.
I surveyed the scene. “Do you really want to know?”
“Is Frown there?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Did he...what’s going on?”
“She kicked me in the crotch and her neighbor’s little yappyass dog bit my leg and I got waterboarded!” Tyler screamed, his face red with rage and body taut with fury. “Tell Darla I never signed up for this %$#t!”
Charlotte went silent. I said, “That’s about right.”
“What?” Charlotte gasped.
“Why are you and Darla calling me and texting me?”
“Because Tyler needs help getting to L.A. for a Tuesday concert, and you’re his only hope.”
“What the hell is he doing here? Is he stalking me?”
“In your fucking dreams,” he said under his breath. “I don’t stalk chicks who try to remove my balls with their toenails.”
Charlotte sighed. “He’s from St. Louis. You didn’t know that?”
“No. What part?”
“What part what? Isn’t he there? Ask him.”
I turned to him. “What part of St. Louis are you from?”
“Why the %$#k does that matter?” he snapped.
I just cocked an eyebrow and played his silence game. I waited. And waited.
He muttered the name of a neighborhood that was constantly in the news for crime.
Mrs. Wilmer pointed at him. “I knew it! No good comes from that neighborhood.”
My turn to step in. “Thank you for your kind assistance, Mrs. Wilmer.”
“Kind,” Tyler snorted.
“But I’m fine now. Really. Tyler is a friend of mine from Massachusetts,” I said to her. “Where I work.”
The poor old woman’s shocked face made me feel awful suddenly. “He’s your friend? Why didn’t you say so, Margaret! I would never have treated a friend of yours so poorly, even if he is,”—sniff—“from that part of the city.”
Tyler turned a new shade of purple.
“Come on in,” I said to him as Charlotte chattered on the phone. “Let’s sort this mess out.”
Tyler
I stood in the foyer of her really nice house in shock, dripping all over white tile. The house smelled like cinnamon and lavender and freshly-baked cookies. While Charlotte explained whatever Maggie needed to hear, I was a %$#@ing wreck. Between getting a kick in the nuts that made any female MMA fighter look like a wimp, having ^%$king Cujo the poodle bite me like I was a chew toy, and some old lady who thought her watering hose was an AK-47, I was done with this day.
Done &^%$ing done.
L.A. wasn’t worth it.
Nothing was worth it, least of all multi-colored muppet head over there, with her feet of steel. Holy &^%k. Those were some powerful quads behind that kick.
So why did my mind flit over to thinking about other ways those thighs could... oh, ^%$k.
She murmured and gasped on the phone with Charlotte. Protested and argued. I knew she was going to hate everything Charlotte and Darla said. Who wouldn’t be pis$ed to have a person they despised show up at their door needing a favor?
Unannounced, too. At least I wasn’t penniless. Thank God for small favors and savings accounts you can’t drain with a debit card.
But three hundred and fifty bucks was probably what they paid for a month of gardening services here. To these people, I was dog &^%$. The old bat next door made that clear. Guy from my part of town?
Bad news.
I was bad news, and from the sounds of the argument Maggie was having on the phone with Charlotte, she agreed with Cujo next door.
Bite me.
Maggie got off the phone and moved slowly, reaching for a cookie on a plate. Then she put the cookie in her mouth, picked up the plate, and walked from the open kitchen to the foyer.
She held the plate out toward me.
“Want one?”
I gaped in disbelief. “Antibiotic cream and dry clothes are what I need. Not something out of a Pillsbury commercial.”
She made a face of mock horror. “They’re made from scratch!”
I just glared.
“And you need a ride to L.A.” She chewed, never taking her eyes off me.
“Not sure about that now.”
She frowned. “You don’t need a ride to L.A.?”
I snagged a cookie and shoved it in my mouth, chewing like I was eating straw. Rage, fury, embarrassment, and shock all coursed through me. My blood was a soup of those &^%t emotions we all work so hard to push down. It pumped and pumped through me in a loop, like all that crap would never leave my body.
Maybe that was true. Maybe it was always there and I was fooling myself thinking I could escape it.
But making a stupid, impulsive decision not to go to L.A. wouldn’t help, either.
“No. I do.”
“You do need a ride? Can’t you take a flight?”
“No ID.”
She nodded slowly. Those glowing eyes looked at me like something out of a Pixar movie. “And you can’t take a train, either?”
“Too slow, plus—they sometimes check ID.”
“What happened to your stuff? Your wallet?”
“Got rolled.”
“Mugged?”
I nodded.
“Damn. That sucks.”
“I also got crotch kicked by a chick who looks like something from a Pokemon episode. It’s been a %$#t day. You giving me a ride or not?”
Her face morphed into a WTF? expression. “Say ‘pretty please.’”
“What?”
“Ask me nicely.”
I just stared at her. That should work. Most people couldn’t stand being stared at for long periods of time. They always cracked. My calf throbbed where the dog bit me and goosebumps started to form on my arms from being wet and cold, but I locked eyes with her and didn’t move.
Pretty soon I could barely breathe. Layer after layer of time and space peeled back as I saw Maggie. Watched her glowing blue eyes twitch, saw how the muscles of her mouth stored some words she wasn’t saying. Our breath became the only sound in the room. It filled my ears, like the tide coming in.
“Don’t you need to go home and pack?” she finally asked.
That’s a normal question, right? Except nothing about this &^%$ed up mess was normal. Nothing about my *&^%ed up home was normal. Nothing about my family was normal. I didn’t really have it in me to answer the question. I stayed silent.
“Well? Tyler? Frown? Hello? When someone asks you a question, the decent human thing to do is give an answer.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have an answer?”
“I don’t have a home.”
“You’re homeless?”
I thought back on what the apartment looked like after Johnny tossed it. I could answer her question in lots of ways. They all spun around in my head like confetti in a blender. None of them paused long enough for me to see the words.
It was easier to say what she assumed.
“Something like that.”
Alarm filled her eyes. %$#@. That was the wrong answer.
“I have an apartment. Live there with my dad,” I said quickly. Let’s leave Johnny out of this. Too complicated.
The fear receded. You tell people what they want to hear and they mostly leave you alone. Except I couldn’t have Maggie leave me alone right now.
I needed her.
I hated needing people.
“Then why did you say you don’t have a home?”
I looked around her house, this nice suburban two-story colonial along the edge of the city. No one I knew lived in a house like this except Joe and Trevor and Liam. It was like another world. This was a home. Where I lived with my dad and Johnny?
That was just a warehouse for fleshbags.
“I don’t know,” I said. And it was true. I didn’t. No answer came out. Just the cloud of confetti.
Her eyes narrowed. “You say that a lot.”
“There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know.”
She went to open her mouth and ask another question. Normally, I walk away from people when they do this. The questions felt like bullets. But this time, I asked one.
“Why’s your hair half purple?”
She reached up and touched it like she was suddenly remembering it was there. “Oh, this?” One corner of her mouth tipped up. “I was just...” Something in her smile faded. “I was just upset.”
“You dye your hair when you’re upset?”
She shrugged. “Sure. Beats getting high or cutting myself.”
My eyebrows shot up. Man, she just jumped the shark, huh? “You do that &^%$?”
She shook her head then looked at me, steadily, eyes rolling. “No. That’s the point. I dye my hair instead of doing that %$#t. Weren’t you listening?”
“It’s hard to figure out which of the thousands of words that come out of your mouth I’m supposed to pay attention to.”
She gave me a hard look.
“All of them, Frown. All of them.”
Read the rest at Random Acts of LA. <3
Another Random Boxed Set to Binge Read
The third boxed set in Julia Kent's New York Times and USA Today bestselling series takes he band in a whole new direction, as their bass player recovers from injuries involving a bizarre machinery malfunction and a gerbil, Christmas hijinks include Darla being in jail, and the band goes to Vegas.
'nuff said.
But not 'nuff read!
Books 7, 8 and 9 in the long-running series are in this boxed set for your reading enjoyment as Random Acts of Crazy adds a substitute bass player (Frown), roadtrip madness ensues, and in the end it's all about friendship, love, and - of course -
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Including Mavis the Chicken.
The Random Series Boxed Set, Vol. 3, includes the books:
Random Acts of LA (formerly published under the title Random on Tour: Los Angeles)
Random Acts of Christmas (formerly published under the title Merry Random Christmas)
Random Acts of Vegas (formerly published under the title Random on Tour: Las Vegas)
Random Series Audio
Don’t forget - the first 7 books in my Random series are available on audio:
I love Maggie and Frown 💖