Stella Maris is the sequel to my recently published novel What the Hell Ever Happened to Yuri Rozhenko?, available now on Amazon.com.

In this scene, Skye ventures to her boyfriend’s basement gym which he shares with his roommate Lee.

     Skye picked up the ten pound hand weights. She knew if Jason were there he would make her pick up the fifteen pounders.
     She did a few gratuitous repetitions with the hand weights while eyeing the punching bag. She spotted a few boxing gloves in a plastic crate near the bag.
     She stopped her repetitions when she heard the basement door open. Someone was walking down the steps.
     A thin woman wearing a tank top and shorts walked in. She had frizzy and bobbed black hair. Her nose and lips were thin, but her eyes were wide and dark. She was quite thin, but she was also muscular, her sinewy arms and legs practically rippling at the slightest movement.
     “Oh, hey,” said Skye awkwardly.
     “You must be Skye,” said the sinewy woman.
     “My infamy precedes me.”
     “Jason told me he showed you the workout room. He said he was gonna send you down here on your own sometime.”
     “He left me a note after I fell back asleep.”
     “You late for work?”
     “Nah. I ain’t workin’ ’til later. You’re Lee, right?”
     “Yep.” Lee walked over to the punching bag and started going through one of the equipment crates.
     “Jason pointed out your equipment to me.”
     Lee stood up and grabbed her breasts. “Oh, he did, did he?”
     “Your exercise equipment you dork!”
     Lee picked up her boxing gloves. “I’m one of those exercise twelve steppers. That’s one way some of us deal with sobriety.”
     “Yeah, Jason said that. Is that really a thing?”
     “You go to a bootcamp and you see a lot of white collar professionals sweatin’ it out, and then there’s someone in the back covered in skull tattoos with scars on their neck. That’s almost always a twelve stepper.”
     “I’m trying to imagine one of my exes working out in the gym.”
     “Hard to imagine?” asked Lee as she put on some workout gloves.
     “This junky I used to go out with when I was a full-on speed freak got himself cleaned up. At least as far as I know.”
     “He in twelve step?”
     “That’s what I heard. He don’t need to work out though. He was always super skinny.”
     Lee steadied the punching bag and gave it a couple of quick punches. “Why don’t you look him up? Maybe he is working out.” Lee gave the bag another one-two. “Or maybe he’s fat now.”
     Skye shook her head. “I tried like hell to find that son of a bitch. I just ended up feelin’ like a fool for killin’ myself looking for an ex.”
     Lee hit the bag a few more times. “Were you havin’ some sorta existential crisis at the time?”
     “Well, I had just lost my job, which forced me to drop out of college.” Skye turned around and picked up a kettlebell.
     “That’ll do it. I lost track of most of my crew from the old days.”
     “Tell me about it. People keep harassing me about my old gang leader Casey, like I know where the fuck to find her.”
     Lee lowered her hands and turned away from the punching bag. “You were in the Crusties?”
     Skye’s eyes brightened in surprise. “Yeah, one of the original members.”
     “So you know Casey.”
     “Fuckin’ a I do. She was my best friend back in high school.” Skye narrowed her eyes at Lee. “Do I know you from somewhere? We must a’ run into each other at some point.”
     “Fuck, I got into a fight with Casey at a Cockney Rejects show, about five thousand fucking years ago.”
     “Yeah? How’d that go?”
     “Shit, I only landed one punch before they broke us up. She got in one shot on me too. Clocked me on the side of my head. That fuckin’ bitch had my ear ringin’.”
     Skye narrowed her eyes and took a good long look at Lee. “Okay, hang on. Didn’t you used to go by another name?”
     Lee lowered her gloved hands and glanced at Skye. “Yeah.”
     “And you used to dye your hair all kindsa fucked up colors, like pink and bright green.”
     Lee stared straight ahead and punched the bag a few more times.
     “Fuck me, you used to be Scather, right?” said Skye.
     Lee kept punching the bag. “I don’t care for that name anymore.”
     “Shit, you still have to use it some times though, right? I mean, no one ever got a civilian name outta you back in the day.”
     Lee kept punching the bag. The pops got louder.
     “You’re pretty ripped,” said Skye. “You do construction too?”
     “Naw. I mean, Jason got me a couple of quick gigs haulin’ stuff around a couple a sites, but mostly I do dog walking and cat sitting.”
     Skye gripped the kettlebell and did a few repetitions. “Is this a sign of getting old?”
     “Whatcha mean?”
     “Working out. It seems kinda mid-life crisis.”
     “Sure.” Lee sat down on the weight bench. “I used to be a drunk brawler, back in the day. Then I started learning how to really fight.”
     “What? Martial arts?”
     “Fuck no. Boxing.”
     “No shit?”
     Lee lowered her hands and looked at Skye. “I know you’re an expert at barroom brawling.”
     “Me? Fuck. I haven’t been in a real fight in years.”
     Lee stood up. “Please. Some of the most fucked up punks I knew were scared of you.”
     “That’s what Casey told me a couple a’ years ago. I find it kinda hard to believe though.”
     “I remember the Sam the Flake story, how you beat him down at the On Broadway when he was livin’ up to his name. That fight is what set everyone off.”
     “It wasn’t like he was a tough guy. I mean, he could hold his own but he wasn’t no Casey or Crash.”
     “Yeah, but you fucked his shit up. No one really knew you until then.”
     Skye put down the kettlebell and looked around the basement gym. “That ain’t me. I don’t usually like hurting people.”
     Lee stepped back and pressed her boxing gloves together. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Sam.”
     “That’s okay. He’s the one person I did hurt that doesn’t haunt me.”
     “He deserved that beat down then, I guess.”
     “Hell yeah he did. I ain’t sorry for that one.”
     Lee steadied the punching bag. “You weren’t the only one with a rep. People were more fucked up about Casey.”
     “She’s bigger than me, and just as good if not better than me at brawling.”
     Lee looked at Skye. “Naw, it wasn’t that. It’s because Casey was such a spaz. People knew she was a lot more likely to go off than you. She got drunker than you, and she had a shittier temper. That’s why people were really wary of her.”
     “It trips me out to think that people thought I was the responsible one.”
     “I was there when Casey clocked that room for cream bitch in the donut shop.”
     “Oh God, that fuck up. I can’t even remember her name anymore. We just kept callin’ her ‘Room for Cream’.”
     “I beat up that stupid room for cream asshole a half dozen times at least,” Lee punched the bag for emphasis. “She couldn’t fight for shit, but she kept startin’ fights.”
     “You never crossed wires with Casey again?”
     “Shit, Casey didn’t even remember me. She was too drunk when we had our lame ass fight. She always forgot my name.”
     Skye shook her head. “There were always too many people in the scene. Casey said they should’ve put out punk cards, like baseball cards, so we could keep everyone straight.”
     “It’s like those times when someone you totally don’t fuckin’ remember comes up to you and there all ‘Hey Scather! What the fuck?’ and you’re all ‘Oh, hey, hi,’ and you can’t remember who the hell they are at all, even though it’s obvious they remember you.”
     “Oh god, I hate that shit.”
     “Still happens to me now and then.”
     “So about your old name…”
     Lee lowered her gloves. “I fuckin’ hate it. I want people to call me Lee because that’s my name, but there are five thousand punks out there who only know me as Scather, so I can’t get people to remember me or connect the dots unless I bring up that fucked up name.”
     “It’s just a name. I mean, fuckin’ a’, I know so many people who had up monikers. I’ve known Triple T for more than a decade now and fuck if I can remember what her real name is.”
     “I think it’s like Beth or somethin’?”
     “You really want to run away from that name?”
     “I totally fuckin’ want to, even though I probably never can.”
     Skye picked up some hand weights. “I’ll call you Lee. I’ll only bring up Scather if I have to.”
    “If you want anyone to know who the hell you’re talkin’ about you will have to mention it.” Lee turned to Skye. “You never got a nickname?”
     “In high school. I owned my own car. Most of my friends back then had licenses to drive, but they had to beg their parents to borrow a car, which they almost never got. I had a big ass fucked up Lincoln Continental that my grandparents gave me so I never had to ask. My nickname back then was ‘Can I have a ride?’”
    “I know the type. Fuckin’ leeches pretending to be your friends,” said Lee as she hit the bag extra hard. “Do them fifty thousand fuckin’ favors and then they act like you’re an asshole if you ask them to do one little fuckin’ thing.”
     “You don’t have to tell me. I used to be a drug dealer too.”
     Lee stopped punching the bag and looked at Skye. “Gotta couple a names up there, don’tcha?” said Lee as she tapped her forehead with her boxing glove.
     “I know a few people I wouldn’t mind hurting. I mean, if they wanted to make up for it I might let ’em. But I spend most of my time wondering how they would feel if I gave them a broken collarbone.”
     Lee started punching the bag again with quick jabs. “That grind can wear you out if you let it.”
     “I let it. Because I don’t want to be that sucker again. I don’t want to forgive and forget just so they can use me again or fuck me over again or ask me to keep doin’ them favors. I want to burn about it. I want to keep some a that long slow seethe so I don’t let those fuckers suck the life outta me again.”
     “Sure. I get that.” Lee stepped back from the punching bag. Her hair was starting to wilt and her arms were glistening with sweat. “If you do find Casey, tell her I want a rematch.”
     Skye rolled her eyes at Lee. “Yeah. If I find her I won’t be tellin’ her that.”