Shade Me

by Jennifer Brown

  I gulped, imagining them bent over the spilled ashtray, hoping I hadn’t left anything else. I patted my pockets. Shit, shit, shit. The penknife.

  “Where did this come from?” I heard.

  I sprang into action, racing across the room in the dark. My feet got tangled in a heap of dirty clothes and I tumbled, hands splayed out in front of me, right into a dresser. Something leaning against the dresser scraped slowly along the wall and then landed with the soft clang of guitar strings being jarred.

  “Dude, did you hear that?” one of the voices said, and then there were footsteps coming down the hall, the hallway light blinking on and nearly blinding me.

  A voice, loud, commanding. “Whoever the fuck you are, if I find you, I’ll kill you.”

  I didn’t have time to think. I got to my feet and lunged for the comforter. I tore it away, revealing a door. Blindly, panicked, I clawed at the lock. I flipped it up, flung open the door, slammed it closed behind me, and climbed the balcony fence.

  No time to think. No time to plan. Just act.

  The balcony seemed a lot higher from up here than it did from the ground. But as I heard the door yank open behind me, I dropped to the other side of the fence, dangling by my hands for only a few seconds before closing my eyes and letting go.

  I hit the ground with a jarring thud, my teeth clacking together, my ankles creaking with a distant pain. The momentum rolled me backward over my shoulder, and I found my feet again.

  “Hey! Who the hell?” I heard, but I didn’t dare look up. I just ran so hard for the parking lot my chest felt like it was going to burst.

  I threw myself into my car and jammed it into gear, seeing Gibson Talley and another guy running down the sidewalk toward me, their angry, shouting faces growing smaller in my rearview mirror as I roared away.

  10

  PEYTON LOOKED MUCH smaller and frailer without Dru sitting next to her. Her face was so pale, so swollen. She looked like a dying person.

  The flowers and balloons had grown overnight as well. Now they were the first thing you noticed when you came into the room. I caught an orderly leaving with a cartful of greenery as I was coming in, my ankle nagging me with every step.

  He grinned, shrugged one shoulder. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “Too many.”

  I remembered my mom’s funeral. There’d been flowers. What had seemed like so, so many of them. Enough that my dad had to enlist the gardener to pawn some off on friends and family. I don’t want them here, I remembered him saying, his voice ragged, a sweating glass of whiskey in his hand. That smell is depressing as hell.

  But even though there’d been a ton of flowers at Mom’s funeral, there hadn’t been as many as were in Peyton’s room right now. How many would there be when Peyton died? If, Nikki, if! I tried to correct myself. I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the crimson to make it easier to believe.

  I walked around the room, idly checking the cards poking out of the flowers. Where were these people? Where were Abby and Sutton and the Drama Club? Where was Mr. Benecio, the Choral Group instructor? Where were her grandparents? Luna? The hordes of gorgeous guys always falling over themselves to be with her?

  I pulled a card out of a vase filled with black daisies. Where in the hell did someone find black daisies?

  The card read, Vee.

  Vee. The singularly named bass guitarist for Viral Fanfare.

  I turned it over, looking for more. A kind note. A get-well wish. Something. Anything. But that was it. Vee.

  Where were you, Vee? Where was the rest of the band?

  Black daisies. A hell of a strange choice.

  I put the card back into the flowers and continued looking through the rest of them. None of them meant anything to me. My mind kept going back to Vee. Mint green. Sharp edges. Vee.

  Finally, I went over to Peyton and stared down at her for a moment. Somehow she’d figured out that we shared this very important thing. Somehow she’d gotten my number. She’d tried to call it. She’d left me clues. I knew this with everything I had. But I still felt like I was invading her personal space by being in here.

  “Hey,” I said softly. I moved her hair off her tattoo. “I live in color, too. How did you know?”

  I sat down next to her, where Dru had been sitting the day before, and picked up her hand. I turned over her arm, searching for more tattoos. Nothing. Just the scratches and bruises from being beaten. I looked at her other arm. Nothing.

  “So what am I supposed to do next?” I asked. “I think I’m onto something, but I’m not sure how to get proof. I don’t suppose you have any other clues to give me.”

  I stared at her face for so long, I almost could have talked myself into believing that I saw it move. But of course it didn’t. The steady drip of the IV into her lifeless arm told me that much.

  A nurse bustled into the room. She jumped, surprised.

  “Oh! I wasn’t expecting to find anyone here,” she said, placing her hand over her heart. “Other than Peyton, I mean.”

  “Just me,” I said.

  “Well, that’s okay. I’m sure any company is appreciated. I’ll be right out of your way.” She checked the IV bag.

  “Do you still have the clothes she was wearing when they brought her in?” I asked. “I can take them home for her,” I added sheepishly, to keep from sounding as creepy as I was afraid I did.

  The nurse hesitated, seemed to think about it, and then shook her head. “They gave everything to the police. But honestly, all she had on her were her keys and a phone, and they gave those to her family. Who would have ever thought our Jane Doe would turn out to be Bill Hollis’s daughter? Crazy, huh?”

  She moved to Peyton, picked up her wrist, and counted her pulse. “Just goes to show your mama was right.”

  I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  She smiled warmly, checking various tubes and machines swiftly and expertly, as if she could do it in her sleep. “You know how your mom always said to wear clean underwear because you never knew if you were going to get into an accident?”

  I shook my head sourly. “My mom died when I was a little kid.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. That’s terrible.” She wrote something on a pad she kept in the front pocket of her scrubs. “Well, my mama always said it, and she was right. You never know what’s going to happen to you when you wake up in the morning.”

  Not true. Peyton knew what was going to happen to her.

  Fear Is Golden.

  “Has she had any other visitors? I mean, besides her family?”

  “Well, I only work the day shift, so I don’t know what happens when I’m gone at night. She has a lot of kids come in after school, but they usually only stay for a few minutes.”

  “You see anyone with spikes running through her ears? Lip piercing? Dreads?”

  The nurse thought about it, and then brightened. “I think I know who you’re talking about. The girl who brought the black flowers. She wasn’t here very long, either.” She took a couple of steps toward me and leaned in. “Between you and me, she was a strange one, that girl. She asked if I knew whether Peyton had a will for her intellectual property. Isn’t that a weird thing for a young person to ask?”

  Not if that young person is trying to kill Peyton, I thought, remembering the conversation I’d heard in Gibson’s apartment. All those songs will go with her. Was that what this whole thing was about? Was this a fight over song lyrics?

  The nurse checked some other monitors and then straightened the blankets, tucking them under Peyton’s ankles. She stopped, patted Peyton’s foot through the blanket.

  “Poor thing. So young and pretty. You related? You look a little like her.” She swirled her fingers in front of her face. “It’s the nose.”

  “No. I’m just a friend,” I said, and then, realizing that the only Hollis I’d ever really spoken to was Dru, and that we’d so much more than spoken, added, “Of the family.” I felt myself blush and wanted to pluck my own tongue out and burn it.

/>   “Well, you must be a good friend.”

  “Have the police been around much?”

  “Just the one. The one with the brown hair. Was just here this morning, in fact. This girl sure is surrounded with lookers, isn’t she?” She squeezed Peyton’s toe, patted her foot again, and then turned to leave. “Should be motivation for her to come back to us, huh?”

  So Martinez had come here first, ready to arrest a man at his sister’s deathbed. Nice. What kind of asshole did that? I didn’t care what he looked like—he was clearly a heartless honor-and-glory type who didn’t care about tact and feelings one bit.

  I sat by myself for a while after the nurse left but then decided that I wasn’t going to solve anything by sitting here. I checked the clock on my phone. There were still two hours of school left.

  And I needed to see someone there.

  “I’ll be back,” I said to Peyton. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure this out.” I stared at her a moment longer, willing her to open her eyes. Wishing that she would answer me. Just tell me . . . why me?

  I left, thinking it was weird how I felt closer to her somehow. Nothing had changed. Not really. I wasn’t the close relationship type, at all. Plus, we were still in totally separate worlds. We had nothing in common. And we’d never spoken. Not directly.

  But she’d spoken to me through that photo, hadn’t she? She’d talked to me through her tattoo.

  We’d communicated in color—the most intimate way I knew how.

  I got into my car and headed out of the parking lot, concentrating on what would be the quickest route that would get me to school. I was so focused, I almost didn’t see the beat-up car parked two slots down from mine.

  Or the man standing next to it, smoking a cigarette, the smoke wafting up in curlicues around the tattoo on his jaw. Curlicues that popped into rusty starbursts.

  But he noticed me. He peered at me as I crept by, never losing eye contact, never looking away. He had an angry crease in the center of his forehead. His lips were set in a tight line. We locked eyes, and my skin crawled with goose bumps.

  It was Gibson Talley.

  I dropped my gaze and punched the gas pedal, watching in the rearview mirror to see if he would follow me. He didn’t, but the uneasy feeling that had washed over me wouldn’t let go. Bumpy gray and black, bumpy gray and black. Was he there for Peyton, or had he followed me from his apartment?

  Either answer wasn’t a good one.

  11

  I KNEW RIGHT where Vee’s locker was. Everyone knew where Vee’s locker was. It was the battle site of a longtime war between Vee and the custodian, the door scrubbed to bare metal where it had been tagged with Vee’s Sharpie about a thousand times over. Angry bumper stickers had been half scraped off, flyers for grunge bands pasted on and ripped down. It was a disaster area, which was just the way Vee liked it.

  I sort of knew Vee a little bit. She’d been in my family and consumer sciences class in junior high. It was one of the few classes that I did okay in, because I didn’t have to read to sew a pair of mittens (a stupid-ass project for a bunch of California kids, by the way) or to open a can of biscuits or diaper a fake baby. I could zone out in there. One of the few places.

  Vee was who Peyton would be without her rich Hollywood parents and their celebrity-studded parties. Punk, without the posh. Even back then, Vee had a troublemaker side to her. She was forever sabotaging her own cookies just to watch the teacher’s lips pucker in disgust during the taste test. Her mitten boasted an obscene middle finger. Occasionally, she would catch my eye while she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and we would laugh together. Which didn’t exactly make us friends, but it was probably as close to friends as Vee or I ever get.

  Vee played bass guitar. She had biceps to beat most of the boys in our school. And she had the rattiest, nastiest-looking dreadlocks I’d ever seen, with feathers and shit hanging out of them. She was so crazy she was cool. And when she hooked up with Viral Fanfare, she got even cooler. But untouchable cool, like Peyton. Only Vee was about a million times more unlikable than Peyton. Nobody envied Vee; they feared her.

  She loped to her locker about ten seconds before the tardy bell rang, clearly in no hurry to get to the next period, which I knew was PE because I normally had health at the same time.

  “Hey,” she said, flicking her eyes to me. I was leaning against the locker next to hers—the only two people left in the hallway.

  “Hey,” I answered.

  She opened the door—22, 3, 19, black-and-white checkered, purple, mauve—and a bunch of papers fell out. She bent to retrieve them, wadded them up, and crammed them back on the shelf. The inside of her locker smelled like smoke and pork chops. She shoved a book on top of the papers, crammed her messenger bag into the bottom of the locker, then slammed the door shut and crossed her arms, leveling me with her stare. “What? You lost?”

  Probably half the kids at our school would have pissed themselves if Vee were standing in front of them looking the way she was looking at me, but I wasn’t half the kids at our school. She didn’t scare me. I could identify girls like her a mile away. She was all talk and no action. One chokehold and I would have her pounding the floor for mercy.

  And her attitude irritated me. It had been a long enough day without dealing with her crap.

  “Peyton Hollis, that’s what,” I said.

  She blinked, recovered quickly. “What about her?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You know exactly what about her. Someone beat the shit out of her, and I think you might know who.”

  “I might know who?” She snickered derisively. “Someone’s been watching too many cop shows. Why would I know who’d want to turn Peyton into a high-dollar smear on parking lot pavement?” She started to walk down the hall, but I followed her. “I’ve been done with that bitch for a while now.”

  “Not true. I saw the black daisies,” I said. “I know they came from you. What’s going on? Did she do something to Viral Fanfare?”

  She whirled around on me, the sleeves of the flannel shirt she had tied around her waist smacking me in the knees. “And this is your business, why?”

  I ignored her question and fired back one of my own. “Gibson Talley?”

  She threw her hands in the air. “What about him?”

  “‘You won’t win this,’” I recited. “Sound familiar? He said that on her Facebook page. What wasn’t she going to win? What did she do to him? Was it about the songs? Or were they something more than bandmates?”

  She smirked and shook her head as it dawned on her what I was saying. “You don’t have a clue,” she said, and started walking again. “But you would be wise to stay out of it. Gibson Talley is not somebody you want to piss off.”

  “Answer my questions. I saw him at the hospital. Why is he after her?” I touched the back of her arm and she wheeled on me, smacking my hand away angrily. Instinctively, I curled it into a fist, shifting my weight back onto my right leg, fight-ready.

  “He is not ‘after her,’ and if that’s what she’s telling people, she’s lying. You need to leave this alone. It has nothing to do with you. And nothing to do with Peyton’s current problem.”

  “Problem? It’s not a broken fingernail. She’s not telling anyone anything, because she’s barely hanging on. But I guess you knew that, since you sent black flowers. Classy, by the way.”

  She grinned, her entire body tensed. “Why are you bothering me about this, anyway? Haven’t they already arrested someone? I heard it on the radio on my way here. Oh yeah, it’s Dru. I also heard you been hanging around the hospital a lot, so you probably already know all about Dru Hollis’s legal problems. He letting you pretend you’re screwing for love?” When I didn’t answer, her grin widened. “Aw, a happy romantic couple. How cute.” She poked a finger in my face, all of a sudden serious. “You need to find a new hobby. And leave me and Gibson Talley alone.”

  This time when she walked away, I simply watched her go, my fists clenc
hed at my sides, my shoulders tensed. Her vile words washed over me. I wanted to chase her down, rip her backward by her hair, and side-kick her to the face. I wanted to show her how wrong she was about me, about Dru, about all of it. But the worst part was I wasn’t sure how much she was actually right about. I knew she was right about one thing, though—Dru was in jail. And I wasn’t sure yet what exactly that meant.

  “I don’t screw for love,” I yelled.

  She turned. She was still smiling. “Just so you know, Nancy Drew, we have a song called ‘Black Daisy.’ Peyton wrote it two years ago. It was my favorite. I special ordered the flowers. I thought it would be a nice touch. Would make her smile when she wakes up. Mystery solved. Seriously, you should stay in the clubhouse with all the other little kiddies playing Clue.” She walked backward a few more steps, wiggling her fingers at me in a good-bye gesture. “Tell Dru I said hi.”

  She turned and was gone. I paced back toward her locker, then screamed and punched it, leaving a dent right in the middle of a piece of a bumper sticker, the only letters still visible—ass. A teacher poked her head out of her classroom.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You should get to class, then. The bell has rung,” the teacher said.

  I turned toward Vee’s locker and started spinning the dial. “I know. I’ve just got to get my book,” I said.

  The teacher gave me a disapproving look, and then, after a pause, said, “Do it quickly,” and went back into her room.

  I rolled my eyes at the space where she’d just been and started to walk away. But black-and-white checkered, purple, mauve flashed in the back of my head. Checkered, purple, mauve.

  I turned back to Vee’s locker. She would absolutely kill me if she knew I was even thinking what I was thinking.

  But somebody was hiding something. Maybe it was Dru, maybe it was Gibson, maybe it was Vee. Maybe it was Peyton herself. All I knew was I was too far into it to just give up now.

  I turned the dial a few times, and then went to checkered, purple, mauve—22, 3, 19—and pulled open Vee’s locker. Those same few papers dropped to the floor, but I didn’t bother to pick them up. Looking over my shoulder, I quickly opened Vee’s messenger bag. Hesitating for only a second, I lifted her laptop out of her bag, tucked it under my arm, shut her locker door, and walked out of the school.