Lost Ones

by Nicole French

  Just the thought makes me see red again.

  “She’s not there.” Quinn’s voice sounds far away through the receiver, but I can still hear the fear there. “Nico, she’s not there.”

  “Meet me here,” I say. “Now.”

  Twenty minutes later, Quinn, Shama, and Jamie, all of Layla’s roommates and so-called best friends, let me into their suite. I bust through the door, dump my bags in their living room, and then jog around the bedrooms. It’s exactly as I thought: no Layla.

  I return to the living room, where all of the girls are just sitting there, lounging on the couch and at their kitchen table, watching me with strange expressions while I bounce around their apartment like a fuckin’ pinball.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I demand from Quinn when I finally stop looking around. “Why are you just sitting there? Aren’t you supposed to be her best friend?”

  “Isn’t she supposed to be mine?” Quinn retorts as she stands up from the couch, her face red and angry. “You haven’t been around this year. It’s been one fucking thing after another with that girl. She keeps falling apart and expecting us to pick up the pieces. I’m sorry, but I didn’t come here to be her fucking social worker! I have my own shit to take care of!”

  I swear in Spanish and yank off my hat. “And you?” I ask the others. “You think it’s okay to just sit here. Where do you think she is, huh?”

  I know I’m acting crazy. She could be anywhere. She could be at the gym, a bookstore. Maybe she went out for coffee. But something in my gut tells me otherwise. I know Layla. She knew I was coming. She wouldn’t just disappear like this for hours. Something is very, very wrong.

  I scoop my jacket off the sofa. “If she’s been falling apart, maybe it’s because she knew she didn’t have a real support system to help her deal with all this shit. Maybe it’s because in the end, she knew her friends didn’t really have her back.”

  I’m just about to go when Shama speaks up. “Where are you going?”

  I turn around. “Look, if there’s any chance at all that motherfucker knows you called the police, my best bet is that she’s with him. If they didn’t file charges, he could get her to recant her statement. You follow me?”

  As the realization of what I’m talking about dawns on their faces, Shama and then Jamie both stand up and grab their coats off the back of the chairs.

  “Are you coming?” Shama asks Quinn.

  But Quinn just looks away. “I can’t do this anymore with her,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I’m done.”

  They stare at her for a second, like they’re not sure they actually heard her correctly. Shama gives Quinn a dirty look as she crosses the room to join me.

  “That’s messed up, Quinn,” she says as she grabs her keys off the table. “Seriously. That’s messed. Up.”

  Jamie follows, looking more uncertain. But then they turn to me.

  “Let’s go get her,” Shama says. And without another look at their roommate, we leave.

  ~

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Layla

  “Get inside.”

  “No.”

  “Layla!” Giancarlo hustles me out of the cab, keeping his steel grip around my arm while he pays the cab driver and then tows me toward his building. I look up and down the street, hoping that someone––anyone––will recognize me, but for once there aren’t even any people around at this time of day. Go figure. The one time I need the eight million people in this city to show up, and no one’s around.

  “Please,” I say as Giancarlo unlocks the door. Like a scared rabbit, I don’t dare run––he’d catch up to me in a second, and on my twisted ankle, I wouldn’t get far anyway. “What do you want? My friends will know I’m gone soon.”

  He gives me a black, disdainful look as he unlocks the door; then he drags me through the lobby and up the stairs to his apartment. Every step hurts.

  “You really think they’ll come here for you?” he snarls. “After everything that happened?”

  I open my mouth to answer, but he’s right. He’s been there every time I was upset, every time Quinn or someone else turned away. I haven’t been the easiest person to be around this past year––I know that. And somehow, in the last six months, Giancarlo positioned himself as the only person I could turn to when things were hard. When everything seemed to hurt, he was there, even if sometimes he seemed to make it hurt a little more.

  “I still don’t understand,” I mutter after the heavy door of the apartment bangs shut.

  Giancarlo whirls around, his black shirt flapping with the motion.

  “You think you can just walk out on me like that?” he demands. “You think you can call the fucking police, and I won’t find out about it?”

  Before I can respond, he grabs my hand again and starts dragging me toward his bedroom. I pull away, but his grip is too strong, and my ankle gives. I hop behind him, my bad foot dragging on the dusty wood floors, until he swings me into his room and slams the door behind us.

  “H-how did you know?” I ask as I shuffle backward until the bed hits my knees, forcing me to sit.

  Giancarlo paces the room like a panther, a trapped cat. He pushes his broad hands through his thick black hair over and over again, though pieces of it still fall forward.

  “How did I know?” he asks, as if to himself. “How did I know?”

  He stops mid-pace and turns to me. “They knocked on my door late last night. Asked me questions for two hours. Why am I here? Where are my papers? Do I know you?”

  He takes steps toward me, and I scramble onto the bed, ignoring the pain lancing through my ankle.

  “Do you know what they do if I have a record?” Giancarlo demands, eyes widened and crazed, his normally near-perfect grammar disappearing into his accent. “I lose my visa! I go back to Buenos Aires! Back to my father, my family, all in shame!”

  My chin trembles as I try to remain calm.

  “You have to call them,” he continues. “You need to go to the police. Tell them it was a lie. They won’t do anything to you––you’re a citizen. Me, they might kick out of the country! Tell them it was a mistake, a lover’s quarrel went wrong, that you shouldn’t have called them.”

  “B-but it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel,” I whisper. “You tried to choke me.”

  Giancarlo’s eyes darken.

  “You really want me to be angry, don’t you?” he asks, his voice tripping over itself, rippling with anger. “You are trying to make me lose control, eh?”

  “I-I’m not trying to do anything,” I say. “And I’m–I was never going to press charges, okay? My roommates called the cops, Giancarlo. I just wanted to leave. That’s all.”

  “You want to leave?” he asks, quirking his head, like the concept just occurred to him. “You want to leave me?”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded. I don’t know if he’s on something again, or if this is just part of his personality, a part that might have been lurking there the whole time. He was always possessive, and at times I thought I liked it. But right now…he’s just acting unhinged. And it scares me even more.

  “P-please,” I say, cowering against the wall at the back of the bed. “Just let me go, okay? You can keep whatever’s here. You can––I won’t bother you again. No police.”

  “She wants to go,” Giancarlo mutters, more to himself than to me. He takes a step backward, then another until he’s halfway out the door. “She wants to go.”

  When he’s out of sight, I slump against the wall, but my heart speeds up. His footsteps scramble erratically down the hall, and I listen with dread as a drawer opens and closes in the kitchen, and his footsteps track closer.

  “Do you see?!” he cries as he rushes back in the room, knife in hand, maybe the same knife he used to corner me in the Square.

  I stare at it, bug-eyed as I scrambled back on the bed. “W-what are you doing? Giancarlo, what are you doing with that?”

  Arm trembling, he points the knife straight at me
, then turns it back and cuts into the skin of his other wrist. A thick line of blood wells immediately, and when he pulls the knife away, it drips onto the carpet.

  “This is what you do to me!” he shouts, arm shaking as blood seeps down his forearm. “You kill me! You rip me to shreds, just like this knife!”

  “What––oh my God, stop!” I yelp, as he moves to pierce his skin again. “What are you doing?”

  “We are for each other––you don’t run from me! If you try to leave, this is your fault. I will do it, I will! Because you are mine!”

  “No, I’m NOT!” I’m crammed against the wall, ignoring the pain throbbing through my leg, terrified out of my wits, but the words escape regardless.

  Giancarlo stares at me, like he can’t believe what he just heard. For a second I wonder if this is just a bad dream, if maybe I’m still back at my room, asleep in my bed, waiting for Nico to arrive. But then his long arm snakes across the mattress, grabs hold of my bad ankle, and yanks.

  “Get OFF!” I shriek, writhing like an animal even as pain sears.

  “Quiet!” he roars, as he tackles me back down.

  Blood drips onto my clothes from his open wound, smears against the white of my t-shirt as I fight him off. But even with his arm cut open, he’s still much stronger than me as he wrenches my legs open and covers me with his body. I’m all too conscious of the knife pressing into the mattress by my head even while I twist under his weight.

  His hands fumble over my body, looking for something to hold on to––skin, clothes, thighs, breasts. I don’t know what he wants; I’m not even sure he knows what he wants.

  “Please!” I beg, my voice throttled by the sobs twisting my throat. I’ve never felt so many emotions at the same time––terror, rage, confusion. “Don’t do this, Giancarlo. Please don’t.”

  “Why, so you can run to the cops again? Tell them I’m nothing but a dirty criminal, just like all the other putos around here?! Do you know what they’ll do to me? I’ll be finished, deported like a dirty criminal!”

  His glasses slide down his long nose as he spits out the last words. I continue to struggle against him, pushing with all my might even as he reaches around my neck with his bloodied hand and wraps my hair around his fist. He yanks my head still, forcing me to look at him.

  “Kiss me,” he orders. “Do it.”

  “STOP!” I shriek as loudly as I can.

  His palm hits my cheek with a loud crack, and the pain burns down my face.

  “Shut up!” he roars.

  But I don’t stay quiet. I can’t. I should be terrified into submission; my flight reflex would normally kick in by now. But something in me comes apart, like a spring door busted open. My anger flies like a spray of water from a broken hose––angry, loud, but ultimately useless.

  “Stop!” I shout, again and again. But my cries only earn me harder and heavier blows. I don’t stop either. I just keep shouting, keep crying. It’s the only thing I can do.

  ~

  Nico

  “That one, right?” Shama says as the cab pulls down West 144th.

  I nod. Yeah, this is the right building, the same place where Flaco’s lived for the last ten years. Jamie looks around with big eyes in a way that tells me the girl probably hasn’t ever ventured above Eighty-Fifth Street.

  “Jesus,” she whispers. “She lives here?”

  “No,” I snap as I hand some money to the cabbie. Jesus, between the cab from La Guardia and the one up here, I just dropped close to a hundred dollars today, but it’s honestly the last thing on my mind. “She lives with you, right?”

  Jamie and Shama shrug, which tells me just how absent Layla has been from their lives lately. They’re hurt, and I get it. But it also tells me how abusive this asshole has really been. Isolation is one of the first things shitheads like this do. I’ve seen it with Maggie over and over again.

  We pile onto the curb and find Gabe standing there, skinny arms crossed over his chest.

  “Hey,” he says.

  He gives Jamie a clear look up and down. She blushes. I roll my eyes. Looks like my little brother’s been learning some moves in college, but they’re not exactly subtle.

  “Yo!” I snap my fingers in front of his face. “Not why we’re here, Casanova. Put it back in your pants.”

  Gabe swallows. “Sorry, sorry. Yeah. Um. A guy coming out said he was in Apartment 3F. Says everyone knows where the Clark Kent-lookin’ motherfucker lives with Nico Soltero’s old girl.”

  It’s not his fault, but the way he says that so matter-of-factly pisses me off even more. It must show all over my face, because Shama and Jamie both take a step back.

  “Anyway…” Gabe says with a wide-eyed look as I swallow my anger. “Apparently the place used to get raided all the time because the old tenant dealt, but rumor has it the apartment is still on the same lease. It’s a front for something.”

  I exhale roughly through my nose. I knew this dude was bad news. Ten to one the sketchy fuckin’ run to Hunt’s Point had something to do with the old tenant and whoever actually has their name on the lease. This is no place for Layla, as naive as she can be.

  “Ev-everything okay?” Jamie asks.

  I gulp down my anger. Save it for Evita.

  “Fine,” I say as I walk up to the buzzer and press Flaco’s button. The buzzer goes off, and the door clicks open. I turn to everyone else. “Let’s go.”

  We’re quiet as we trudge up the two flights of stairs, even when we run into Flaco on the first floor, rubbing his hands together as I approach.

  “You look way too excited,” I tell him.

  “Man, you ain’t even know,” he says eagerly. “I been waiting months to kick this motherfucker’s ass.”

  “You really think she’s here?” Gabe asks as he jogs behind us.

  I shrug. I hope to God she is––I haven’t thought yet about what I’ll do if I don’t find her here. But I don’t have to answer, because as soon as we get to the third floor, I hear a scream through one of the doors––it’s muffled, but I’d know it anywhere.

  “Layla,” I breathe and run the rest of the way to the apartment.

  The door is actually unlocked––the stupid motherfucker must still be high, because he brought a girl here against her will and didn’t even think to lock the goddamn door.

  But I barely have time to take in this shithole of a place––the ugly stained carpet, the faded leather couch that looks like it’s seen its fair share of parties. The dinge that lines the crown molding, the popcorn texture of the walls, the rim of dust settled over the furniture. I barely have time to notice any of it, because I’m only one step in when Layla screams again.

  “Get off me!”

  I sprint down the short hallway to a closed bedroom door, which I hit with the full force of my shoulder, using my body like a battering ram. It flies open, and inside is Layla on her back on the bed, legs kicking wildly under the force of tall man who’s doing his fucking best to hold her down. The grayish, peach-colored sheets are tinged with blood––it’s everywhere, including all over my girl. Fear locks my muscles until I realize that the blood isn’t hers. It’s his, gushing from a nasty cut on his arm.

  “What the fuck…” Gabe’s voice trails off behind me, and Flaco clicks his tongue, but I barely hear them. Layla screams again, and instinct takes over.

  “GET THE FUCK OFF HER!” I roar, taking exactly three steps to where I can grab the man off Layla and spin him around.

  It takes me two more steps to shove him against the window hard enough to crack the glass. A half-second more to get a good grip of his shirt and look at his snarling face. Then my hand pulls back, like it’s caught on a spring, and I let it all go.

  My fist hits his face with a sickening, yet satisfying crunch as bone meets bone. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but my hands haven’t forgotten the feel. His face contorts, and blood gushes from his nose almost immediately––good, I broke it. That knife-edge nose is going to ha
ve a nice crooked line from now on, and he’ll know it came from me.

  I land another hard punch to his gut, and just as he’s keeling over, the breath knocked fully out of him, another uppercut to the bottom of his jaw. He slumps against the wall, but I don’t stop. The rage––that rage that almost ruined me when I was a kid, that tossed me in a youth jail for two years and probably would have landed me in a real one if it hadn’t been for some luck––is taking over.

  But if it’s her frenzied shriek that awakens the monster inside, it’s her terrified whisper that calms me down.

  “Nico?”

  My fist hangs in mid-air, ready to take the next punch. To his kidney. His stomach. Maybe his face again, although I can’t afford to break my hand a week before I start the academy. But her voice––small, afraid, but still unbearably fucking sweet––holds me still. Maybe it saves me too.

  Evita––because the fuck if he gets the dignity of a real name now––is only half-conscious as blood still pours out his nose and the rest of him wilts against the peeling paint. Most of the blood on Layla was his, I realize––he’s got a nasty cut on his arm that’s still seeping down his wrist and dripping on the carpet. I release my hold on his collar, and he sinks down to the floor, gasping for breath. When I turn around, Layla is standing in the doorway, held up by Shama and Jamie, who is also staring at me with her mouth hanging open. Layla’s hurt––she limps on one foot, and I exhale, resisting the urge to finish the job. He hurt her. He hurt my––he hurt Layla.

  “Nico,” she says again, pulling out of the wave that’s threatening to break all over again. She reaches a hand toward me. “Please. Please, I just want to go.”

  “Nico,” Gabe says as he approaches. “We gotta get her out of here.”

  Flaco sits down on the bed. “Don’t worry, mano. I’ll take care of this. Fuckface here ain’t goin’ nowhere ’til you get back.”

  I nod, slowly back away from Evita’s slumped form. My entire body is vibrating. “Okay. Okay.”

  “Hold on. They can’t leave like that.”

  Shama leaves Layla and rummages around Jack Rabbit’s closet. He might be lying on the floor, but I’m still not going to call this motherfucker by his name.