Shade Me

by Jennifer Brown

  She waved me off, leafing through some papers and then heading to her office.

  I waited until she sat at her desk, then slipped over, grabbed the keys off the hook on the file cabinet, and hurried out.

  It was another hour before she left the office, toddling on impossibly high heels toward a parking garage nearby. I watched from my car, slouched low in the seat, so she didn’t see me.

  I waited until the same SUV I’d seen at their house pulled out of the parking garage, and then got out of my car and ran across the street toward the nondescript office door, carrying the keys in my hand.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew it was in Vanessa’s office. I let myself in, using my phone flashlight instead of turning on the overhead light, just in case.

  Unlike Brigitte’s desk, Vanessa’s was carefully organized, her keepsakes dusted and placed just so. The only paperwork on her desk were scraps filled with addresses and phone numbers, no names, nothing identifying. Just jumbles of oranges and pinks and blues and greens that made it hard for me to concentrate. I opened a desk drawer and found a cache of pens. Another desk drawer was completely empty. And a third was locked. Undoubtedly where she kept her Molly.

  No photos of her family. Nothing that indicated she had a daughter in the hospital, or even a daughter at all. It was like a showroom office—the look of habitation without actual habitation.

  There was a closet on the other side of the room, and in a last-ditch effort to find something, I went to it. It yawned open, a black chasm, and when I shone my light into it, I found a wardrobe of skimpy clothes, the kind that I was wearing right now. Some fetish costumes. A ton of shoes. And . . .

  I paused, my light freezing on something black and smooth, tucked behind a pair of patent-leather boots. A locked box.

  I reached inside and grabbed it, kneeling, and shone the light on it. Of course, it was locked, but this was an easy lock to break. I used a shoe to pry the lock open.

  Inside were papers. Lease agreement for the address of the service, paid in cash. Bank account papers, written in a different language.

  And, at the bottom, two birth certificates. I picked up the top one and studied it in the light of my phone.

  Peyton Harlow Hollis. I ran my fingers over the raised seal and studied the details of her birth, immediately going back to the day Dad had brought home Mom’s death certificate.

  Can I have a copy? I’d asked him.

  Why?

  I’d run my fingers over the raised seal, just as I was doing now. Because it’s the only way I’ll know it’s real, I’d said.

  He’d never given me one. And it turned out I didn’t need it anyway. The reality of Mom’s death was proven to me over and over again, every time I needed her and she wasn’t there.

  I dropped Peyton’s certificate back in the box and kept going. Beneath her certificate was Dru’s. It looked the same. But something about them was off. Something about the font didn’t match all the way through.

  I dug through the box some more and found out why. There, beneath credit card statements from 2006, were two more birth certificates for Dru and Peyton. Only these had been doctored.

  The names of the parents had been whited out.

  21

  ON MONDAY MORNING, I waited for Luna outside the side doors of the school, which were just across from where most of the sophomores parked, but also just happened to be a secluded place where the smokers could light up a quick one before diving into their stressful school day. I stood with my back pressed against the wall, the threads on my jacket catching against the rough brick. I didn’t like brick—it reminded me of shame, and sometimes anger. I cupped a lit cigarette in my palm by my side, every so often stealing a drag.

  There was a deep gouge in the toe of one of my Chucks from rolling around on the gravel with Gibson Talley, and there was a cut under my right eye from where Stefan’s fist had met it. My entire cheek was tender and swollen, and the back of my head ached where the little runt had grabbed my hair. Even the palm of my right hand felt sore from gripping the knife so tightly. And I was terrified that someone at Hollywood Dreams would notice that all four of Peyton’s and Dru’s birth certificates had been removed.

  It had been a rough few days.

  Sophomores poured from their cars and streamed into the school, most of them chattering in that annoying sophomore way, without even noticing me standing there. I didn’t care. I was there for one person and one person only.

  Just when it seemed like Luna wouldn’t show, her mystic-brown Mercedes screeched into the lot and squealed into a parking space. A sixteenth birthday gift from Daddy, no doubt. Or maybe a hush gift. I’ll buy you a Mercedes, darling, and you don’t tell the world about our little family business, okay?

  Luna got out of the car, giggling and talking over two of her friends, who had also piled out of the car. They moved slowly, as if they were heading to a social gathering rather than school. I watched as other girls, standing by their ordinary cars or getting off the school bus, stood and watched her. Luna was the next Peyton Hollis. The next reigning royalty of her high school class. All hail Queen Hollis the Second.

  Only, unlike Peyton, whose coolness was her popularity, Luna was aggressively unlikable to those she didn’t care for. There was something almost reptilian about the way she moved through her world. Something sideways about the way her eyes worked, as if she was always looking over her shoulder, over your shoulder. As if she was always on the make. Predatory. Something about her made me think of the rough grayish green of crocodiles, the cold scaly gunmetal of snakes.

  They reached the alcove, a little hurricane of decibel-shattering snark, one of them pulling open the door without so much as a nod toward me. Luna’s two friends slipped through, and Luna started to follow. I pushed away from the wall.

  “Hey, Rainbow,” I said. She didn’t hear me, so I repeated myself, louder. “Hey, Rainbow.”

  Luna turned, the smile on her face changing to a look of bemused surprise. She seemed to take me in slowly, as if she knew she’d seen me somewhere before but couldn’t quite place who I was. Then it dawned on her. “Excuse me?” she asked, all well-bred innocence and politeness. “What did you say?”

  “That’s who you are, right? Rainbow?” I didn’t return her smile. “Well, the second Rainbow, anyway.”

  She seemed torn by the gravitational pull of her friends, who had now turned and were waiting for her a few steps down the hallway.

  “I’ll see you in class,” she told the girls, waving them on. She let the door close. She dropped all pretense of giggly sophomore as she faced me full-on. “Who told you?”

  “Who said anyone had to?” I said.

  She clenched her teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s not what Stefan says,” I said. She narrowed her eyes, and I could almost see her turning over my words in her head, trying to suss out if I really knew what I was talking about or if I was bluffing. “What do you want?” she asked. “Money, is that it? Predictable. I don’t have any on me now, but I can get some.” She had the gall to look weary of the process. “How much do you want?”

  “I’m not after your money. Not everyone works like that, Luna. And you know exactly what I want. I want to know who hurt Peyton.”

  She touched her fingertips to her chest, her eyes opening wide and innocent. “And you think I know?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re a terrible actress. Stefan told me a lot of things. I can sink you and your entire family with a single phone call. First, I’ll tell Mommy that you’re the one who’s been stealing drugs from her office and selling them right under her nose. She’ll love that. And then I’ll talk to my friend Detective Chris Martinez at the police department. I’ll let him know all about the family business, and dear old Daddy’s favorite pastime, which appears to be paying barely of-age girls for sex. Wow, won’t that change the way the world looks at him when the media gets ahold of it? I know all
about you, Luna. You’ve been doubling as Peyton, selling drugs as her, meeting up with clients as her. I just don’t know why. What were you setting her up for? And I don’t know what it has to do with her lying in a hospital bed clinging to life right now. But I promise you I will figure it out.”

  “You don’t have any proof of anything,” she said. “You’re just a jealous, delusional girl, out to extort a rich family, who, by the way, is grieving their daughter’s assault. We will make sure everyone knows that. What do you think the media will do to you, after you stalked and terrorized Peyton’s sister?”

  I nodded thoughtfully, flipped my cigarette to the ground, and stepped on it. I let the last drag flow through my nostrils. Luna was a lot of things, but grieving didn’t really strike me as one of them. Neither did terrorized. If Luna wasn’t off-putting enough on her own, her lack of concern for Peyton made her downright ugly. “If you want to risk it . . .” I started to walk toward the parking lot.

  She grabbed my sleeve. “Fine. I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it.” She had a maniacal look about her—feverish, desperate. “Yes, I’ve been taking the Molly and selling it to my clients. But it’s not like my mother is missing it, and she’s the one who got them hooked in the first place. I was trying to help Peyton. She wanted out. I thought I could get her fired if our mother found out she was stealing.” She bared her teeth. “But it never got to that point, because of what happened to her. As for who beat up Peyton . . . Dru did it.” I must have looked shocked, because she picked up steam, nodding. She held her fingers to her ear as if she were holding a phone. “Hello, tips hotline?” she said in a squeaky voice thickly laced with an East Coast accent, sounding nothing at all like Luna Fairchild. “That girl who got beat up in the school parking lot? I overheard a guy telling someone that she was his sister, and that he beat her up. Yeah, he said he wanted to kill her, but it didn’t work and he was worried he was gonna get caught. Yeah, I don’t know why, but you should check him out.” She pretended to hang up the phone, a smug look on her face.

  “You set Dru up?” I asked. “Why?”

  “No, I turned him in. There’s a difference,” she said. “He did it. He found out about the escort service, and he was so pissed he wanted her out. He thought she was the one selling Vanessa’s precious Molly, which is actually his good buddy Rigo’s precious Molly. He found out she was sleeping with turds like fat Stefan. So he went after her. Dru is vindictive and dangerous, Nikki, and you need to stay away. I would have warned you right up front, but you got all up in our business and messed up everything.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. But the truth was, at this point, I had no clue who to believe.

  “Why would I lie?” She flipped her hair over one shoulder, haughty, daring. “He’s my brother.”

  “Half brother,” I reminded her.

  “Aw, it’s cute how well you know the family tree,” she said, giving a sweet smile, her eyes narrowed in a glare. Again, I was reminded of something reptilian.

  “What is that even supposed to mean?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. But you may want to be careful about how far up in our family tree you climb. You may not like what branches will hit you right in the face.”

  “Is that a threat?” I felt my fists clench and stuffed them into my jacket pockets to keep myself from ripping out all her hair right there in the sophomore parking lot.

  She stepped right up to me, so close I could smell wintergreen gum on her breath. “Sister, that’s a promise,” she said. “You’re going to want to leave me alone.” She turned and pulled open the door, then sashayed into the school without so much as a look back.

  I had come into this meeting certain that I would have the upper hand. Certain that I would be able to tell her what I knew, and that she would buckle. Instead, she’d fed me a mouthful of bullshit about Dru and turned the tables around to threaten me. Not at all what I’d expected.

  Luna Fairchild wasn’t the delicate little innocent she made herself out to be.

  Luna Fairchild was scary.

  I decided that I wasn’t going to walk through the same hallway that she just had. One, it was full of obnoxious sophomores, but two, I didn’t want Luna to have the impression that I was going to follow her anywhere. I hoped that despite her threats and bravado, she was maybe the tiniest bit intimidated by me. That she was thinking Nikki Kill was scary.

  I walked through the grass toward the front of the building, where the buses dropped off and the doorway bottlenecked with kids who didn’t want to go inside. I wished I could stay back at the side doors and sneak another cigarette, but there wasn’t time. I needed to get to class.

  The first four hours of school were pretty much torture. My eyes swam with colors every time I entered a room, most of them bringing back to mind something to do with Peyton’s attack. Turquoise: Luna’s pinkie charm. Glitzy cherrybomb: Rainbow. Soft orange: SOS. Crimson, crimson, crimson. I was completely lost from having skipped so much, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  Mrs. Lee called me to her desk during study hall, where I was busy rubbing my temples miserably, my eyes squeezed shut against the world.

  I approached her desk in a slump.

  “Everything okay?” she whispered. A kid in the front row looked up, and then quickly down again, but I could tell from the cast of his eyes that he was just trying to look like he wasn’t listening. I recognized him as someone I’d seen in Peyton’s orbit.

  “Yeah. Fine,” I lied.

  She tilted her head to the side, scrutinizing me. “You sure? You look like you’re in pain over there. Do you need to see the nurse?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She pointed to her computer screen, which was now dark, in sleep mode. “I was noticing that you’re having some attendance issues.”

  Nice. She didn’t notice when I wasn’t here, but the minute the freak was back, she suddenly wanted to get all up in my life. “Sorry.”

  “You know, Nikki,” she said, lowering her voice, “study hall is a gift to someone on academic probation. I want you to succeed. But there’s only so much I can do. I can’t help you graduate if you don’t show up.”

  “I know,” I said, mostly tuning her out.

  She leaned over so her temple was in the palm of her hand, her elbow propped up on her desk—the universal teacher I-care pose. I wanted to throw up. “I’ve heard that your friend Peyton was in a pretty bad accident,” she said.

  I gaped at her. “My friend?” I asked. “Where did you hear that?”

  She looked confused by the question. “I may be a teacher, but I do know some things. Have you been spending a lot of time at the hospital?”

  “I have homework to finish,” I said, turning away.

  “I think it’s really loyal of you to be by your friend’s side,” she said at my back.

  I noticed that several faces were pointed toward me now. And the ones that weren’t were trying to look like they weren’t listening, just like the boy in the front row was doing. I whirled to face her, and then positioned myself so I was talking to the whole class. “Look, I never met Peyton Hollis before the attack, and any of you who hung out with her already knew that. So I don’t know why all of a sudden everyone is talking about me, but I can assure you there is nothing to talk about. Okay?”

  “Not what Vee says,” a girl in the back murmured.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, craning my neck to look at her. I didn’t know her, but recognized her as one of Viral Fanfare’s many groupies.

  She at least had the decency to look embarrassed about being overheard. “Just that I heard you jumped the Viral Fanfare guitarist and beat the crap out of him with a tire iron.”

  I laughed incredulously. “A tire iron? Is that what he’s telling people?”

  “All right, everyone, we should be working,” Mrs. Lee said.

  The class shuffled uncomfortably and bent their faces to their books. I made my way back to my desk, feeling much b
etter now that I knew I clearly no longer had Gibson Talley to worry about. He was definitely afraid of me and embarrassed about what I could do to him. I would have almost felt bad for the guy if he hadn’t jumped me first. A tire iron. Ha.

  I slid into my desk, feeling pretty proud of myself, and got comfortable. I shut my eyes and reopened them, thinking maybe I could get into reading a little, with that much, at least, off my mind. But as soon as I opened my eyes again, the cheerleader across the aisle leaned over toward me. Her face was split in a giddy smile.

  “So, is it true?” she asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “Are you really dating Dru Hollis? You know, he dated my older sister for a couple of weeks. He is so hot. I never thought he would go for someone younger than him. According to my sister, he likes real women.” She leaned back and crossed her legs, her posture so filled with self-importance it sickened me. Everyone wanting a piece of Hollis to rub off on them. And Luna so happy to provide it.

  Fortunately, the bell rang, and I didn’t have to answer her. I gathered my things and blew out of class before anyone else, cruising through the mostly empty halls before the classroom doors had even been opened.

  I had fifth-period lunch shift.

  Just enough time to get to the hospital and back.

  Jones intercepted me halfway across the parking lot.

  “Going out for lunch?” he called as he cut through the line of cars to get to me.

  “Yep.”

  “Want some company? I could go for some pizza.”

  I kept walking, digging my keys out of my jacket pocket at the same time. “I don’t want pizza.”

  “I’ll eat a burger,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry about all those things I said the other day. I was being territorial. Let me make it up to you. Where are you going?”

  I sighed. “Jones. Don’t make me tell you where I’m going.”

  His face fell, and then hardened. “Right,” he said. “Have fun, then.” He walked briskly away from the car, and for a fraction of a second, I felt bad.