Trunk Trick

My name is Steve, I'm twenty-three, and I work nights at a locksmith dispatch call center. That's me. The intro is complete, no big deal.

The shift starts at ten. By ten fifteen I've already read every email twice. The trailer we work out of used to have six people in it. Now it's me and the hum of the space heater and whoever calls in drunk because they locked their keys in their car outside a bar.

Everybody left, is the thing. Mel got a real job in March. Jules moved to be with her boyfriend. Even Nigel, who swore he'd die at that desk, quit in May for a warehouse gig that pays more. So it's just me, twenty-three years old, answering calls from people having the worst night of their week.

Debbie runs the place. She's twenty-nine, been training me on actual locksmith work for two years now, off and on. She says I have good hands. I like hearing that. It's the only compliment I get most weeks.

So yeah, I've had a lot of time to think. And here's what I've been thinking about lately: money. Specifically, making some.

I saw this video online a couple months back. Some guy dressed in his girlfriend's clothes, doing a little transformation thing, posted it behind a paywall. Made bank, apparently. People eat that stuff up. And I kept looking at it and thinking, huh. I have a girlfriend. She has clothes. She's a magician's assistant, so her clothes are not normal clothes. They're sequins and fishnets and a top hat situation.

I'm not saying I'm proud of the plan. I'm saying I've got three hundred bucks in savings and a phone with a decent camera.

Tricia and I have been dating eight months. We met at our friend Kayla's twenty-first birthday party, back when she was twenty-one and I was twenty-two and I still thought the call center was temporary. Tricia's twenty-two now. She's been working with this magician, Aldous, for seven months. He's like sixty and wears too many rings. She says he's a professional. She says it defensively, which tells me everything.

Anyway. That was my headspace at 11:40 on a Thursday when my phone lit up with her name.

"Steve. Oh my god, are you at work? Okay, listen, the tent collapsed."

"The tent."

"The main tent! The big one! The wind picked up and the whole thing just came down like a, I don't know, like a wet napkin. Nobody's hurt, everybody's fine, but the backstage stuff is wrecked. Steve, my trunk."

She does this thing where she says my name twice when she's panicking. It works every time.

"Is the trunk wrecked?"

"That's the thing! There's a beam on top of it and I can't get it off by myself and the lock is jammed or bent or something. You're learning locks. You're literally learning locks right now. Can you come? Please? I'll owe you."

"You don't owe me. Yeah, I'll come. Let me tell Debbie."

I poked my head into Debbie's office corner and gave her the short version. Tent collapse, girlfriend's props, might be a while.

"Take the van," she said. "Client keys stay in the lockbox, right?"

"Right."

"Text me when you're heading back. And Steve? Don't break anything trying to fix it."

"Would I do that?"

She gave me a look and went back to her screen. I grabbed the van keys.

The festival grounds were a mess. Flashlights everywhere, crew guys hauling poles, one guy on a ladder swearing at a guy below him. Tricia had texted me where to go, the back lot by the storage bins, and I picked my way through the wreckage until I saw her.

"Hey. Oh thank god." She hugged me fast and then pointed. "That's it. That's the beam situation."

Her trunk was half under a fallen pole, lid cracked but holding. Old brass lock, the kind Aldous apparently thinks is theatrical. Tricia had already hauled most of the light stuff clear.

"Okay," I said, crouching down. "Let's see what we're dealing with."

It took me about twenty minutes. The beam wasn't as heavy as it looked, I just had to lever it right. The hinge on the lid was bent, that was the real problem, and the lock had taken a knock. I got it open with a shim and some patience, feeling kind of great about myself the whole time.

"Steve, you're a genius."

"I know a guy. He's me."

She laughed and went off toward the main tent to help with the salvage there. "Don't touch my makeup, it's organized," she called over her shoulder.

And then it was just me and the open trunk.

Guys. I have to be honest about the moment, even though it makes me look bad. The lid was up and her stuff was all right there. The sequined dress, red, short, the one she wears for the finale. The heels. A little makeup bag spilled on its side, brushes everywhere. A wig. It was all lit up by one work light like somebody staged it.

I looked at it for maybe four seconds before the plan came back and sat down in my lap.

Nobody around. Camera in my pocket. A locked backstage area, and hey, I know about locks now. I could film the transformation right here, on real festival grounds, in a real magician's trunk. That's content. That's like, premium content. My three hundred dollars could become six hundred, could become actual rent money.

The scheme solidified, is what I'd call it. It went from a someday idea to a tonight thing, right there in the wrecked backstage.

I did the responsible parts first. I want that documented. I texted Debbie: gonna be later, trunk repair is more of a project than I thought. She sent back a thumbs up and the word "fine." I sorted Tricia's loose props into a tidy pile so it'd look like I'd been working. Then I found the side door to the backstage area, the one with the busted bolt, and locked it from the inside with the little sliding latch. Privacy secured. Very professional.

Then I picked up the red dress.

It's weird how normal it felt. That's the part I wasn't ready for. I stepped into it and pulled it up and it fit, kind of, tight across the chest and loose at the waist because Tricia's built different than me, but it fit. The sequins caught the work light and threw little dots all over the bins. I turned my phone camera on, propped it against a prop crate, hit record.

"Okay, so," I said to the lens, feeling dumb immediately. "So this is kind of a thing I'm trying."

I got the heels on. That was harder. I wobbled around like a baby deer for a minute until I found my balance, and then, okay, I kind of liked it. The height. The click on the concrete. I did a little walk for the camera, back and forth past the crate, sequins flashing.

Then the wig. Dark red, longer than I expected. I got it situated mostly right and looked at myself in the mirror panel inside the trunk lid, and I mean this sincerely: not bad. Not bad at all. Somebody could pay money for this. Somebody probably would.

I was reaching for the makeup bag, one heel still on, one off, wig slightly crooked, when the latch rattled.

Not rattled. Lifted. The door swung open.

"Hey, I found the canopy clips, they were under the..." Tricia stopped.

She stood in the doorway holding a stack of canopy clips. I stood in the middle of her wrecked backstage in her dress, one shoe on, one shoe in my hand, wig askew, phone very visibly recording on a crate.

Nobody said anything for a solid three seconds. It felt like a year.

Then she said, "Is that my finale dress?"

"Tricia. Hey. So."

"That's my finale dress."

"Yeah. It is. It's, uh, it's your finale dress."

Her face did this thing. First it went hard, and I braced for the yelling, the real yelling, the kind I've only heard her do once when Aldous made her do the sword trick with no rehearsal. Then something cracked in the middle of the hard look and she made a noise that might've been a laugh or might've been a cough.

Then she laughed. Fully. Doubled over, canopy clips clattering to the ground.

"Oh my god," she wheezed. "The walk. I watched you do the walk."

"That was for the camera."

"There was a camera?"