It sucked—not just because I was exhausted or because I’d gotten in trouble—but because my memories were starting to come back, one by one, snippets that floated in here and there, leaving me disoriented.
I’d be trying to spar with Dad and I’d suddenly remember that Lauren’s dad hit her when she got bad grades—that’s why she was such an A-plus superstar. I’d seen the bruises that covered her torso one day when we were changing for PE. She tried to keep them covered up, but her spandex tank top accidentally came off when she pulled her shirt over her head. A couple of days later, I started training her. After a few weeks, Lauren was able to stand up to her father. He cornered her in the living room one night, fist raised and his lips curled in a snarl. Two kicks and one knee to the groin later and he smashed to the floor, knocking over a chair and breaking the coffee table. He needed five stitches on his forehead, and his right arm was in a splint for six weeks.
He never punched her again.
Then, when Kyle was lunging at me, spinning kicks and feigning jabs, I remembered how Stephanie had approached me, how she had confided that being big and strong didn’t mean people never picked on you. Even though she stood six feet tall, her older siblings always teased her, doing things like locking her out of the house when her parents went out of town, or writing curse words on her face with a marker if she fell asleep on the sofa. It was hard to teach her, since we weren’t matched in size, and it took longer than I expected, but after a few months she was able to stand up to the ringleader—her oldest brother, who was six-foot-five and weighed 220 pounds. Once she put him in his place, none of the others ever bothered her again.
At that point, I had enough trainees to start my own team. Within a few weeks, we became the Swan Girls, all of us with chips on our shoulders and something to prove. We were each either assigned a patron or chosen by one, and then were invited into the Gold Level. From the beginning, we had something none of the other teams had—grace, strength, and speed—and between us, we had a variety of weights, so we could challenge any of the other girl teams. It wasn’t long before we rose to the top, becoming a crowd favorite. Everybody knew our stage names and as soon as one of us stepped onstage, the chanting would start.
It was amazing and addictive.
But I didn’t remember how or why I got involved in fighting until we got back from the gym on Saturday night and Dad closed his study door, retreating from all of us, even from Mom.
His absence triggered something deep inside me.
I remembered one of the last times he left on a short-term mission and how empty the house felt when he walked out the door. Mom had her typical night shift at Methodist and Kyle was spending the night at a friend’s house. Then Dylan texted me, asking if I wanted to go to one of the local skate parks, and I said yes. I didn’t notice how sketchy the crowd was that night. All I saw was Dylan, how he crouched on his board, then dropped down the ramp and sped past me.
So I was caught off guard when a group of five girls wearing gang colors followed me into the bathroom. Maybe it was initiation night. Or maybe it was just time to pick on The Girl Wearing Pink in a world that dressed in black. I don’t remember exactly what happened, their punches and kicks came so fast. I think I may have screamed. Not that it stopped them.
But it did bring Dylan into the bathroom.
There was a stand-off for a fraction of a second. Testosterone snapped through the small space, my blood dripped on the tile floor, and my reflection watched from the stainless steel mirror.
“Leave her alone,” he said, his voice a low growl.
“Or what?” one of the girls asked. She flicked out a switchblade. Her friends laughed.
“Or your parents will be getting phone calls from the hospital. They’ll be needing someone to identify you.”
A shiver ran through me.
Dylan looked bigger, stronger than ever before.
The other girls noticed it, too. The girl who had been holding me down let go.
“My boyfriend’ll slice you up,” the girl with the blade threatened.
Dylan took a step closer. “Then he’ll be in the hospital, too.”
She tackled him then, the idiot. With two lightning moves, he knocked the switchblade out of her hand and pinned her to the ground, his foot on her back. Another girl jumped him and he grabbed her, twisting her arm behind her so she couldn’t move. He didn’t hurt any of them, maybe because they were girls and there are some rules you’re not supposed to break.
But I knew he could have put every one of them in the emergency room.
They knew it, too.
One by one they all backed out of the bathroom, wary. I worried that when we came out, they’d be waiting with a gang of boys at their side.
The park was empty, lights out, only a few cars left in the parking lot. They’d all run away.
Dylan stayed with me that night, making sure I was okay and that I didn’t have any serious injuries. I fell asleep curled next to him on the sofa and woke up with his arm around me.
I’d never felt that safe with anyone before. Except my dad. But he wasn’t around when this happened and I resented him for it. Too much.
On top of the resentment, there was fear inside me that kept surfacing when I didn’t expect it. Just walking into a public restroom gave me a panic attack. I couldn’t tell my mom, and I wasn’t about to tell Kyle. They’d both freak out. Mom would’ve made me go see a counselor, but what good would that do? Counseling wouldn’t protect me if I was jumped again.
Dylan noticed the change in me. “I can teach you how to defend yourself,” he’d said.
“But there were five of them,” I argued.
“Part of defending yourself is always being aware of what’s going on around you.” He paused. “But I can teach you what to do if you ever have to protect yourself again. In a way, it’s a lot like ballet. You’d pick it up quick.”
Once Dylan began teaching me how to fight, my fears started to melt away.
And, no matter what, I still liked, no, I loved, fighting.
But the feeling that I was invincible was gone.
It had disappeared on that night I went missing.
Chapter Thirty-One
Monday came, a horizon of beautiful, blue sky and warm spring breezes. Today, some kids from school would be getting up early to dash off to the ocean where they’d walk on water via surfboards. Others would be writing last-minute term papers while their parents drove them to school. Still others would be smiling at family members and upperclassmen who had been regularly tormenting them, making them feel like they weren’t good enough, like they would never measure up.
I wasn’t sure which category I fit into anymore.
Was I the leader of the Swan Team or was I a Lost Girl, desperately trying to remember my past?
I downed a glass of juice, clutched a slice of toast between my teeth and headed out of the kitchen, walking toward the garage and my car and freedom. But I didn’t get far before Dad stopped me in the hallway. I didn’t lift my head to look at him. I just stared at the floor while he handed me my phone.
“Keep this with you, got it?” he asked, his tone deep and serious. It was the voice he used that meant Do This Or Else. In other words, it was a voice he rarely used with me and it brought a flush of red to my cheeks.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, still not brave enough to look him in the eyes.
“Come on, we’re gonna be late!” Kyle called from the garage.
I resented my little brother right now. He lived in a free zone, untouched by our punishment this weekend because it hadn’t been his fault. Just like a typical teenage boy, he was more concerned about his latest Spartan Op score than whether I was still mad at him.
I walked past Dad, that slice of toast still hanging from the corner of my mouth, my backpack slung over one shoulder. It was a long walk down the hallway, knowing he was watching me. The muscles in my back tensed up and they didn’t relax until long after Kyle and I pulled
into the student parking lot. I drove past those flowering cherry trees, fighting the urge to slam my car into one of them, taking it down, shaking those petals off the limbs until the tree was barren and dead.
Which was about how I felt right now.
Kyle and I hadn’t said much to each other during the ride, not until he got out and reached into the backseat for his knapsack. “See ya,” he grumbled, left hand grabbing for the straps, while his right hand cradled an open can of Red Bull.
Then everything happened at once.
His backpack flew open—as usual, there was way too much junk crammed inside—and stuff started spilling out all over my car. Spiral notebooks, Milky Way wrappers, a pack of Orbit gum, a pocketknife, three textbooks. He cursed and started grabbing everything as fast as possible. I swung around to help him, picking up papers and pens from the floor, but at the same time his half-full can of Red Bull spilled on my shirt.
“Shit!” I said, all my anger seething to the surface as I glanced down at the spreading stain. “Thanks a lot, jerk!”
“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of it—”
“You can find your own way home after school today, smart-ass.”
“Whatever.”
“And I can’t believe you told Dad I was teaching you how to fight—”
“You know what? You suck!” He got out of the car and stood up, glaring at me through narrowed eyes. Then he huffed his chest out and left his school books scattered all over my car and headed toward the school building, his whole body angry, shoulders hunched in, torso leaning into a jog-run, fists clenched.
I cursed, loud and long, and then slammed my fist against my steering wheel, inadvertently making the horn blast. Almost like it had been synchronized, a pack of sophomores all turned at the same time and gave me a weird look. “Get out of here,” I growled at them through the open door. They started to run away, right as a gust of warm air blew a handful of cherry blossoms into the car.
I blinked. No longer able to fight their haunting fragrance. Or the spinning white petals.
“Hey, girl,” a voice from the past called to me. “Over here.”
I blinked again.
The gorgeous spring day faded away as a memory came over me. Stronger than any I’d had so far, it consumed me, it was so real—
...
I was walking to my car, head down, still mad because the past few days had sucked, royally, totally. So much I could barely breathe. I’d lost my team, my friends, and my boyfriend, almost within a matter of hours. Even going to school had become a major effort. There should have been somebody standing outside the school doors today, handing out awards to all of us who wanted to be anywhere but here. I’d have a gold star tattooed on my forehead right now.
She called to me again.
“Come on,” she said, leaning toward me. She sat in a white Mazda hatchback, her long, dark hair catching in the breeze, those bright pink strands fading because she hadn’t dyed her hair recently. I left my car behind and walked in her direction, toward where she parked at the curb, her car rumbling beneath those Japanese cherry trees.
It looked like a postcard, one of those perfect shots that could lure vacationers to come visit Southern California. A pretty girl sitting in a white car beneath blossoming trees, mountains in the background.
“What’s up, Nicole?” I called. She wasn’t part of my problem. If anything, she was the solution. Nicole Hernandez and I had met back when we were both in Silver Level. At that point, neither one of us had a team yet and we used to spar together—back before I became Odette of the Swan Girls and she became Taffy of Pink Candi. Once we both got our own teams we vowed to never, ever compete against each other, so we rarely attended raves on the same nights.
None of my other friends knew about her—not Lauren or Dylan or Zoe. Nicole was my secret friend, the person I talked to about everything. I even told her how bad I’d felt about ditching Molly. I cared way too much about my best friend to drag her into my dark, dangerous world of raves and drugs and fighting.
“You’ll never guess what I got,” Nicole said with a devilish gleam in her dark eyes.
I hoped she wouldn’t say E or weed, because I wasn’t in the mood to get high.
Long fingers snapped a pair of tickets against her steering wheel. So fast I couldn’t even tell what they were. I leaned in her window and grabbed them away from her. Heavy black cardstock and glittering silver letters.
Platinum Level tickets.
I pulled in a long breath.
“It’s frigging real?” I asked. My knees actually felt weak for a half-second. “There really is a Platinum Level?”
“It’s real, all right. But we gotta leave. Like, now. Get in, girl.”
I ran around her car and jumped in, slamming my knapsack into the backseat.
“This level’s different, really different. Check it out.” She handed me a computer printout to read as she drove away. I had a momentary snap of conscience as I realized I was ditching my little brother. He’d have to find another way home today. Then I remembered all the times I’d waited for him after school and he hadn’t bothered to tell me he was going to a friend’s house to play video games.
I scanned the paper. It contained a list of instructions for the event.
“It starts in an hour?” I asked, glancing at the map. “Can we get there in time?”
“Watch me. I’ve got mad driving skills.” She laughed, a deep, throaty sound that made me laugh, too.
“And what’s this?” I pointed at the page. “The only rules are there are no rules? Is that scary or exciting?”
She shrugged as we zipped onto the freeway, buzzing from one lane to another. “Maybe a little bit of both?” she said.
We had to get down to a sketchy neighborhood in Rosemead, somewhere off the 10, so Nicole and I focused our attention on the road, her slipping into tiny slots that opened up between speeding cars and me pointing out any open spaces I saw. It took about forty-five minutes before we were chugging along the 10, then swinging off an exit. Neither one of us had been down in this area before, a narrow industrial park wedged between Temple City, El Monte, and Rosemead, where most of the buildings were colored by graffiti and gang signs. We passed abandoned gas stations with broken windows, a drive-in theater, tiny stucco houses with bars on the windows, and strip malls where all the signs were written in Korean.
I read her the address again and we slowed to a stop, both of us staring at a building up ahead. A row of square windows was placed high up on cement walls. Smokestacks jutted out of the roof, and a big black and white sign said Hall For Rent. It was a large building, but there was no rave here, no thumping music. Only a few thick-waisted, heavily muscled men in white tank tops standing outside let you know this building was even open.
“You sure this is the right place?” I asked, looking at the paper again, a strange feeling twisting in my gut. All the other raves we’d been to had been crowded with thousands of people my age. That whole safety-in-numbers thing was ringing in my ears.
“Yup,” she answered quickly, pulling her keys from the ignition.
“How’d you get these tickets and this printout?” I asked as we climbed out of her car.
“Found a manila envelope with my name on it in my mailbox this morning.”
We walked toward the building, but that sense of something being wrong wouldn’t go away. “But nobody at Phase Two knows our names or addresses. Isn’t that part of the rules? Only stage names, so we can be anonymous.”
She laughed. “How hard would it be to ask someone we hang out with what our real names are?”
“But they could get kicked out for doing that—”
She shook her head, tossing a grin to the guys who surrounded the building. One of them smiled back and opened the front door for us. “It wasn’t that hard for us when we were checking out Alexis, Shelby, Lacy, and Janie, back when we were putting our teams together.”
“True
.”
“Besides, nobody would get kicked out if the guy who runs the show was the one asking the questions. Like that announcer guy with the Brooklyn accent.”
I accepted her reasoning, a sliver of excitement charging through me as we walked down a long, narrow hallway. The building’s interior was even more shabby and deteriorated than the exterior. Maybe this was an element all the rave locations had in common, something that had always been hidden because we only saw them at night, when the walls were smattered with colored lights and the floors were covered with dancing people.
“This is what we’ve wanted from Day One, girl,” Nicole breathed as we approached a pair of double doors. Loud cheering rumbled from the other side, something about it sounding different than all the Phase Two events. “To make it to the top. And since I got two tickets, we finally get to go, both of us. We never had to break the rules or fight each other. We kept it clean.” She smiled an honest grin, the kind only a true friend could give you. She was the kind of friend you’d want to keep for your whole life, all the way through high school and college and even after you both had families, still getting together for birthdays and still calling each other in the middle of the night if something went wrong.
Next to Molly, she was the closest friend I’d ever had, and we held hands as we walked through that door, a blinding light shining down on us that washed away everything on the other side.
.
I sank back in my car seat, the memory of Nicole fading away, the parking lot and the school building coming back into focus. My brother’s books and gum wrappers lay scattered about on the backseat, my shirt still sticky and damp from Red Bull. An echo of the school bell hung in the air, heralding the beginning of yet another day at Lincoln High.
That was the last time I ever saw Nicole and it was the same night I went missing.
Lost Girls Page 18
