Skin (44 Chapters #1)

by B. B. Easton

  Bobby scowled and said, “Fuck no. That piece of shit no-call-no-showed on me. If you hear from him you tell that asshole I’m docking his pay for all the time I spent rescheduling his clients.”

  I had to read Bobby’s lips. Everything after the word no had been drowned out by the sound of blood thrumming in my ears. Knight wasn’t there. He hadn’t even called. I missed payday and now Knight and Tony were both missing.

  I nodded at the person making the words that I could no longer hear and slowly backed away until my hand found the door handle. As soon as the warm, stagnant, almost-summer air hit my lungs, I bolted. I ran around the side of the building to the entrance of the parking lot, but my legs didn’t stop.

  They carried me past the parking lot, away from the shops and bars, and into the wooded, surrounding neighborhood, full of crumbling bungalows and old Victorians. When my lungs began to burn from trying to extract oxygen from that viscous air, I slowed to a walk, but I still couldn’t fight the force propelling me forward.

  I’m sure I looked like any other teenaged junkie on the streets of Little Five Points. Pale. Emaciated. Running from something too painful to face. Chasing something too painful to give up.

  Then, just as suddenly as I’d started running, I stopped. When I looked up I realized that I was standing at the entrance of the path that led to the junkyard fence. My feet had carried me back to the scene of the crime.

  How fucking cliché.

  Emotionally drained, physically exhausted, and excruciatingly hungry, I slumped against a tree next to the fence and thought about the night that everything went to shit.

  Maybe this is karma, I thought. Maybe the universe is taking away the people I love to punish me for what happened here.

  I deserved it. I had been more concerned about my boyfriend breaking up with me than I had been about the innocent man whose brains had been splattered all over the ground on the other side of that fence. I was more devastated about August taking his own life than I was about the one Knight had taken just a few feet away from where I stood. I was the only person who could have brought his killer to justice, but I’d let him go free without a second thought. The guilt I felt over not feeling guilty enough gnawed away at my empty stomach.

  My mind conjured image after image from that night like some kind of macabre slide show. The fence, the dog, the Cadillac, the baseball bat, the man, the shotgun, the sounds, oh God, the sounds, the running, the running, the running, the alley, the blood.

  Struggling to stay in the present, I shook my head and tried to find something to focus on, something real. My eyes drifted over to where the Cadillac had been. The one we thrashed. The one we cuddled on. The one I hid behind while Knight killed its owner. It wasn’t there.

  My surprise over the Cadillac’s disappearance lasted only a second or two before being replaced with cold, paralyzing dread when I realized what had been parked in its place.

  No. Fuck no. That’s impossible.

  I stared at my phone, clutched in hands that I didn’t even know were shaking, and waited for my brain to access the instructions for how to make a call. When I finally figured it out, the sound of Juliet’s voice on the other end felt like a lifeline, tethering me to reality.

  “Have you heard from Tony yet?” I blurted out.

  “No.”

  Juliet’s tone was a lot less pissed off and a lot more concerned than it had been earlier. She began spiraling about What if something happened to him? and What if he got hurt? and The baby is due any day now, but I wasn’t listening. How could I access my ears when I wasn’t even in my body? My consciousness was sitting on a tree branch overhead, staring down at a faded red blood stain marking Knight’s first kill and a faded red 1980 Corvette, possibly marking his second.

  “BB?”

  …

  “BB!”

  “What? I’m sorry. I…”

  “What if he got in a car accident?!”

  “I…I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. Can I come over?”

  “Yes. Please. Now. All I’ve been doing is calling Tony’s phone nonstop.”

  I told her I’d be there soon and robotically ended the call, never once taking my eyes off the faded red Corvette on the other side of the fence. As I stood there—unmoving, unfeeling, unblinking, unbelieving—I heard something melodic in the distance struggling to cut through the thick mid-May air.

  It was the sound of a phone ringing, no louder than a whisper, and it was coming from inside Tony’s car.

  I ran. As fast as my empty stomach, lack of sleep, and steel covered toes would carry me, I ran. I found my way back to the parking lot using the route Knight and I had taken so many weeks ago, and once I was safely inside Lisa’s Grand Prix I slammed the door, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and screamed.

  When I stopped screaming the passenger door opened and someone got in. I blinked and tried to swallow down my panic as a thousand long black braids—and one very big belly—filled the passenger seat.

  Juliet? How the fu—

  I looked around and noticed that I wasn’t in the parking lot anymore. I was idling in Juliet’s driveway. The confusion I felt was the same as when I’d taken crank or acid or ecstasy—like time and space just suddenly decided they weren’t going to play by their old rules anymore. I could blink and lose an hour or I could have an entire conversation in a minute. But I wasn’t on drugs.

  So this is what a mental breakdown feels like, I thought. Interesting.

  I looked at my friend through eyes that felt like they belonged to someone else. Like I was in that movie Being John Malkovich, and I was inside a stranger’s body, observing her life with detached curiosity.

  Oh look. That must be BB’s best friend. Hmm…She looks really pregnant. I wonder why she’s wearing a bathrobe. And crying. Maybe because there’s blood on the bathrobe. She’s looking at BB, and her mouth is moving. She must be telling her about the blood. She seems scared. Now she’s twisting her face up and breathing hard like somebody just stomped on her foot. BB should take her to the hospital. I wonder if I can make BB’s body do that.

  The interior of the car might as well have been the cockpit of an alien spaceship. Okay, let’s see…that’s a steering wheel. And BB’s hands are on it. Good. Those are the pedals down there, and that stick thingie—that needs to move, I think. BB, if you can hear me, move the stick thing down to the R. You did it! Now put your foot on the other pedal and press gently. Good girl!

  While I managed to get Lisa’s car to Juliet’s house practically by teleportation, the trip to the hospital felt like it took two weeks. I was trying to drive a body and car at the same time—neither of which were very user friendly—while somewhere in the back of my mind I tried and failed to process the situation in my passenger seat.

  There was a girl there. Making loud noises. She was hurting. Yes. She needed help. I would get her help. I would make BB’s body make the car go to the place where she would get help.

  “Just turn in here!”

  Words. I heard her words.

  I looked at Juliet as she pointed out the windshield, and my hands naturally turned the steering wheel in that direction. I looked back at my hands in disbelief. They were working on their own again!

  I pulled Lisa’s car into the first empty parking spot I saw, and smiled when my hands automatically put the stick thingie into the P position and shut off the ignition.

  My passenger door opened, but Juliet didn’t get out. She had her feet on the pavement, but she was still sitting, grasping the door opening and doing that breathing thing she did when she was hurting.

  I got out of the car and ran over to her. The bright red spot on her white robe had gotten bigger, but that didn’t bother me. The face she was making bothered me. I didn’t like to see her in pain.

  Juliet held her hand out for me to help her up. “I can walk. The contractions aren’t that close together yet. I might be able to make it inside before the next one.”
r />   The people inside asked her a lot of questions. They called her mom at work. They called Tony, who, of course, didn’t answer. They put Juliet in a gown, in a bed, in a room. They hooked her up to machines and computers and said, “Not yet,” when she asked for something to make the pain go away.

  Then they left us alone.

  And I could see that Juliet was leaving too. Going where I was. Going somewhere that hurt less.

  Our bodies were in that room, but our selves were locked out. Looking in through the window.

  I didn’t want Juliet to be alone. I thought about August. When he was hurting at Tony’s party—I wasn’t there for him. I left him alone. Maybe if I hadn’t been so selfish—so absorbed in my own feelings and my own drama—he would still be alive.

  He.

  Alive.

  The baby!

  My consciousness slammed back into my body and I looked at Juliet, who was cringing and clutching the sides of the bed in the throes of another contraction. I wrapped my hand around hers and shushed her and used my other hand to push the wet hair off her sweaty face, like my mom would have done.

  “Something’s wrong, BB! There’s not supposed to be this much blood! Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on? Why won’t they give me an epidural yet? Where is the doctor?”

  I leaned over the bed railing and moved my hands to her tight swollen belly. I stared at it, concentrating on the little boy inside who needed to come out. Then I did the only thing I could think of—what my mom used to do to calm me down when I was little—I sang “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, softly.

  When the song was over, Juliet’s hands appeared next to mine on her belly. I looked up at her and saw an unfamiliar wisdom looking back at me. Something ancient was stirring. Women had been doing this since the dawn of time—since before there were Lamaze classes and What to Expect books—and we could do it too.

  “BB, I want to push.”

  The ancient voice inside me shouted No!

  “Not yet,” I said, gripping her hand and pushing the call button on the bed rail at the same time. A woman’s voice answered through the adjacent speaker, asking how she could help us. No sooner had I uttered the words, “She wants to push,” than a nurse appeared between Juliet’s legs and told her she still had two more centimeters to go.

  “If you push now,” she explained, “you could damage the baby’s head. I’m going to send the anesthesiologist up to give you that epidural now. That should help reduce your urge to push while you finish dilating.”

  Fifteen minutes later Juliet was completely numb from the waist down and smiling like a drunkard when her mom walked in. I was hoping for Tony, but I’d take what I could get.

  Juliet’s mom was a moody bitch who was known to slap her kids across the face whenever they mouthed off to her (which was pretty often in Juliet’s case), but she and I got along fine. I think she thought I was a good influence on her daughter, and maybe I was, hard as that was to believe. After all, Juliet was the one who introduced me to cigarettes, booze, boys, and now…to babies.

  When the nurse came back a little while later, she stuck her entire fist inside of my friend and announced that she was ready to start pushing. Since Juliet couldn’t feel her legs, the nurse instructed Mrs. Iha and I to each hoist up one of Juliet’s thighs and keep them pulled apart to help her push.

  From that vantage point I. Could. See. Everything.

  It was horrifying. The body fluids. The smells. The tearing. The agonizing, never-ending cycle of pushing and breathing and chewing on ice chips.

  Just when I was beginning to think it would never end, the doctor—an older man with white hair and a face that suggested he had better things to do—took out what looked like a pair of pruning shears and fucking CUT A SLIT in Juliet’s already ravaged vagina. Out popped her blue and purple baby boy one push later, and while the nurses cleaned him up, Dr. Disinterested stitched her back up with a needle and thread.

  Fuck. All. This.

  Nope. Nay. Never.

  Not my vagina.

  Not on my watch.

  Because of the bleeding and the baby’s distress, the nurses said they would have to run some tests on him before they could hand him over. As soon as they left Juliet fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and her mom excused herself to go make some phone calls.

  Once again, it was just me and Jules in that little room, but everything had changed. She looked so different. Older. Sweatier. Wiser. Wearier. Juliet had turned into a mom before my very eyes.

  “Excuse me,” one of the nurses poked her head back into the room. “Oh, she’s sleeping. You don’t happen to know the baby’s name, do you? I need to write it on his bracelet and paperwork.”

  Shit.

  “Juliet,” I whispered, gently shaking her awake. “Juliet, they need a name for the baby.” Her face fell before she’d even opened her eyes, and her chin began to wobble.

  “Tony,” she whispered, looking absolutely heartbroken.

  “You want to name the baby Tony?” I asked, forcing back my own tears.

  Oh, God. Tony.

  “We were going to name him Anthony Junior—but now…” Her eyes, filled with tears, looked to mine. “He didn’t come, BB. He didn’t even come. How could he? He missed it! I can’t name the baby after him! He didn’t even come!”

  But I knew the truth. I knew that Tony didn’t show up because something bad had happened. Something really, really bad. And now Juliet’s baby didn’t have a name, and might not even have a father. And it was all my fault.

  “I’ll name him for you.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I just needed to fix something for her. Anything. “I’m really good with names! I can do it!”

  Juliet wiped her eyes with the edge of the bed sheet and nodded, too angry and heartbroken and traumatized and drugged up to do anything else. “As long as you don’t name him after some asshole, then go for it.”

  The nurse who had asked about the baby’s name opened the door the rest of the way and pushed in a rolling basinet. “Take your time with the name, ma’am. We don’t technically need it until you discharge. He had a rough start, but his vitals are all within normal limits now.”

  She reached in and handed Juliet a little man. He was wrapped tightly in a white blanket with blue stripes and had a head full of black hair.

  She told us his length and weight, time of birth, etcetera, etcetera, but I was too focused on the little face peeking out from inside that blanket to pay attention. He was awake. And he was looking at his mama.

  I didn’t know newborn babies could be so alert. I didn’t even know they could open their eyes. I thought they were like puppies, all mushy and blind. But not this one. He was so tiny. And beautiful. And when the nurse handed him to my friend, and I saw her face change from devastated to elated, I knew that that little boy was going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to her.

  Juliet finally had someone who would love her the right way—unconditionally and for the rest of his life.

  And that’s when the name came to me.

  “How about Romeo?”

  “Romeo?” Juliet looked down at the handsome baby in her arms and smiled. “Romeo Jude.” She snaked one arm around my waist and rested her head on my hip, while we both gazed down at little Romeo Jude Iha. “It’s perfect.”

  I squeezed her back, but the lump in my throat was threatening to choke me. No, it was choking me. I couldn’t breathe. The room started to tilt on its axis and I could feel the walls starting to close in on me.

  Oh no. Not here. Not now.

  “I’m, just, I’m gonna go to the bathroom…” I remember releasing Juliet and turning to walk toward the bathroom, but the tunnel vision narrowed to blackness before I could get there.

  When I woke up I was in Juliet’s bed. Or at least what I thought was her bed. I sat up and looked around in confusion. Where was Juliet? Where was the baby? Why was I still there if they were gone? Was the baby okay?

  I thre
w the covers off and went to leave, but a sharp pain in the crook of my arm prevented me from getting very far. I looked down to find an IV line sticking out of my elbow and a hospital gown covering my body.

  “What the—”

  A hand touched my back just as a voice began to speak from somewhere behind me, “Shh…lie back down, baby. You need to rest a little bit longer.”

  The voice belonged to my mother. I snapped my head over to the other side of the bed where my mom was sitting in a chair smiling at me anxiously.

  “What happened?”

  “A nurse called me and said you fainted and hit your head. I came up here as fast as I could. They let me into your room, but I haven’t gotten to talk to anyone yet. Did you fall at work? How did you get here, honey?”

  Work! Shit! I still needed to return Lisa’s car.

  I groaned.

  “I left work early. I was here with Juliet and her mom…because—”

  A nurse whom I hadn’t met yet burst into the room wearing light blue scrubs and a scowl. She looked older than my mom—her short hair was mostly gray—and she spoke to her as if she were sitting in the principal’s office, not a hospital room. No pleasantries. No nothing.

  “Your daughter is suffering from complications of anorexia nervosa, Mrs. Bradley. She weighs ninety-one pounds, which is roughly thirty pounds underweight for her height. As a result, her blood pressure and body temperature are dangerously low. We strongly encourage you to schedule an appointment with our nutritionist and behavioral health specialist before you leave. Brooke is severely malnourished and dehydrated and will not be discharged until she has had enough fluids to urinate.”

  Who the fuck did that lady think she was? She didn’t know me. She couldn’t just come in there and say some upsetting shit like that to my mom. I stared back at Nurse Bitchface, but she acted like I wasn’t even there. She was too busy looking at my mom as if she were the scum of the earth, and I didn’t fucking appreciate it.

  I turned to look at the other side of the bed, where my mom was sitting. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth was slightly agape.