by M. O’Keefe
What do you know from high? I asked her, because if there was a straight in this world, it was her.
What don’t I know? she wrote.
I laughed before I got a look at her face, her mouth all twisted like she’d eaten something bitter.
You’re not joking?
Not joking.
I wanted to ask her a bunch of questions about her mom and where she came from and how she got to St. Joke’s, but one thing she’d made clear in the last few weeks—she didn’t talk about that shit. Ever.
You sleeping okay? I wrote, and she jerked back, looked at me sideways.
I’m sorry, I wrote. I heard you last night.
My mom used to give me these pills to help me sleep, she wrote. I haven’t had them in a while. I can get bad dreams.
The page was full and I reached forward to turn it but she jerked it out of the way and it fell to the floor, the notebook splitting open on a page with a drawing on it. We both bent to grab it and bonked heads at the same time.
We groaned and laughed, holding our heads where we’d hit each other, and the notebook lay open between us.
“Did you draw that?” I asked her in a whisper. The whole page from end to end was an underwater scene with all these fish hidden in seaweed, and when I looked carefully, there was a squid, and when I looked again, it was gone.
“Yeah,” she whispered and grabbed it off the floor, closing it so I couldn’t see the picture anymore. “I was just fooling around.”
I put my hand over the notebook, my fingers touching the fleshy part of her palm.
She turned my hand over, revealing the ripple of the cuts from her first night at St. Joke’s. The cut near my thumb that kept opening no matter how hard I tried to help it heal.
“Do they still hurt?” she whispered.
I shook my head, unable to speak, my throat like a straw I could not suck any air through.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I felt my body get so hot so fast I thought I was going to combust right there.
She touched one of the scars, her finger tracing it from one side of my palm to the other. I closed my eyes in the ecstatic fucking pain of it. I could die, I thought. Right now.
I shifted to keep my books in my lap so she couldn’t see my hard-on.
Embarrassed, I wanted to jerk back, but I didn’t. I left my hand there. My skin touching hers.
And she left her hand there, her skin touching mine.
The address in Santa Barbara was on a road along a high ridge above the town. Through the trees I could see the city, all lit up in its grid pattern, and the dark ocean beyond it, broken up only by the oil rigs off the coast.
The houses were built into the ridge, thick trees behind each house to provide privacy from the road. But the houses that I could see, they were mansions. Big fucking mansions.
And the numbering made no sense.
“Where is 1137,” I breathed, peering over the steering wheel as I slowed down to a crawl. “Where the hell?”
I turned a slight curve, and the house in front of me was lit up. Every window was illuminated, and cars were parked on the road and filling the big driveway. I could hear the music from the house inside my car.
Pest sat up and looked out the window.
Pest loved a party, and with me around she didn’t get to go to many. All those people to pet her, all that food dropped on the floor. Dog’s paradise.
“Sorry, girl,” I told her. “You can’t come with me.”
She gave me her best suck it, my human look.
I parked in front of the driveway, boxing in about three other BMWs.
“Here we go,” I murmured. I tied my tie, looking at myself in the rearview mirror to confirm I’d made a total hash of it, and I slipped my new ID in my pocket.
When I opened the car door, the music coming from the house was so loud, the bass turned up so high I could feel it in my chest, battling with the pound of my heartbeat. I could hear the roar of voices, too.
This wasn’t just any kind of party. That much was clear.
The front door was surrounded by potted trees, and there were two security cameras trained on me. I ignored both of them and knocked.
I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured acting like I knew what I was doing would at least get me in the door. I hoped. I’d make it up as I went.
The door opened, and a giant man with a severely broken nose and no neck stood staring at me.
Bodyguard. Clearly.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Driver,” I said.
“Can I see some ID?”
I gave him the card Carissa had made for me.
“Who called you?” he asked and I blanked. “Did her mother call you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, operating purely on gut instinct. “She did.” I had no clue who she was. I wanted to ask if she was Beth. But I’d give myself away.
The bodyguard’s eyebrows lifted. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Well good fucking luck to you,” he said with a dry, bitter laugh. “I’d have her assistant go find her, but Beth got shit canned earlier. And I’m not leaving this door. You’re gonna have to find her yourself.”
“Beth?” I said, too sharp ’cause the guy narrowed his eyes at me. “She’s the one who ordered the car.”
“That makes more sense. She might be getting her stuff. I don’t know.” He jerked his thumb back into the party. “Go ahead and take a look around.”
Oh fuck. Was it possible it was going to be this easy? Pick up Beth and take her to Arizona?
He stood aside and let me pass, and I waded into the wall of people that made up the party. There was a lot of skin. A lot of pretty. The smell of sex and dope thick in the air. There was a song thumping through the house, and I kind of knew it. Mostly didn’t.
I kept hearing the name Jada, and I felt like I should know who that was. But I didn’t.
As I got out of earshot of the bodyguard at the door, I turned to the closest soberest person I could find. Not an easy feat as just about everyone was heavy-lidded and wasted. All these people out of control like this made me nervous.
All this skin made me nervous.
The sex.
And I hated that it made me nervous.
“Hey, man,” I asked a boy who didn’t look old enough to be holding that drink in his hand. “You know where Beth is?”
“Who’s Beth?”
“Jada’s assistant?” That was a stab in the dark.
The kid shrugged and went back to his conversation. The living room opened up to a huge kitchen filled with more people. Beyond the wall of sliding glass doors was a pool and a deck. Also full of people.
There was so much skin. Girls in bikinis and skirts. Short shorts that looked like bikini bottoms. None of the guys were wearing shirts. Like…none of them.
I tried not to stare, but it just seemed to be everywhere I looked.
So much skin touching other skin. There were couples making out on couches and against walls. One woman was grinding up on another woman against the sliding glass door. In the pool two men were doing something under the water. I didn’t know what, but their faces told a pretty raunchy story.
My heart rate went up; my blood thumped in my veins. I didn’t know where to look or how to move through this crowd. There was sweat crawling down my back.
I felt like a sixteen-year-old walking into an orgy.
“What’s wrong with you, man?” a guy asked when he caught me staring at the girl he was with. She’d taken off her shirt, and her tan lines, the paleness of her breasts against the darkness of her shoulders and arms…
“Sorry,” I muttered.
I glanced at my watch. The half hour I’d carved out for this side trip by speeding my way down Highway 1 was mostly gone. I needed to find Beth, figure out what I was supposed to pick up and get the fuck out of here so I could hit my window.
“Excuse me,” I asked another person, a woman th
is time, mixing drinks in a blender. She wore a bright green bikini and a pair of sunglasses despite the lack of sun outside.
“Do you know where Beth is?”
“That buzzkill is gone! And good riddance!” She laughed and turned on the blender. The lid wasn’t on, and she got splattered with margarita. She and her friends dissolved into laughter.
I kept asking, making my way back farther into the house where the crowd got sparser. The hallway leading to the bedrooms was not nearly as crowded.
“I’m looking for Beth,” I said to just about everyone I passed. “Have you seen her?”
A rather harried-looking bald man finally had an answer for me. “Yeah, she was back in the guest room packing up her stuff not too long ago. She said she wasn’t leaving until she had a chance to talk to Jada.”
Guest bedroom. Excellent.
I shouldered my way down the hall, opening closed doors as I went and shutting them quickly when I found them empty or full of people fooling around.
The third door I opened was empty, but the light by the bed was on and the door on the far side of the bed was open. There was a suitcase on the bed, a heap of clothes sitting in it.
“Beth?” I said. “You here?” I walked around the bed and looked into the en suite. Nothing. Empty.
Shit.
In the hall there was only one more door I hadn’t opened. When I tried it, it was locked.
I knocked, rapping my fist against the wood pretty hard so I could be heard above the sounds of the party. The door opened, and a pretty black woman, with swollen eyes from crying, stood there.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“The driver,” I said. “Who are you?”
The girl shook her head, fresh tears in her eyes. “I used to be her assistant—”
“You’re Beth?”
“Yeah,” she breathed. “She fired me, but I’m not leaving as long as these jerks are here!”
“We heard that!” someone yelled from inside the room.
I pushed open the door, confused as I’d ever been. Because while this pretty woman might be Beth, she was not my Beth.
You don’t have a Beth, asshole.
“Did her mom send you?” Beth asked.
“No,” I answered. In my world moms weren’t really a thing.
We were standing in the small foyer of a giant master bedroom and I could hear voices beyond the corner so I just kept walking, determined to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to be doing.
The scene on the king-size bed took a second to process. A woman, who appeared already passed out, long dark hair falling over her face, her skirt pushed up above her waist, revealing a pair of black lace panties, was getting an injection in her thigh from a man in a suit. Two other people, a man and a woman, lay sprawled across the bed, watching.
“I told you not to do that!” Beth cried as she rushed past me toward the man in the suit. “She’s had enough.” As a junkyard dog she was pretty sad. I mean, Pest would have done a better job of barking that man away than she did.
“It’s done,” the man said, dropping a spent vial and a syringe into a bag on the bedside table. He stood up and peeled off a pair of latex gloves. “And you…” he said, looking at Beth with supreme disdain, “have been fired.”
“‘Yeah, Beth,” the man on the bed slurred while slowing easing across the bed to lie spooned with the unconscious woman. “You’ve been fired.”
The guy on the bed ran his hand over the unconscious woman’s ass.
“Don’t touch her,” I snapped, my voice crackling through the room, drawing everyone’s attention to me. I didn’t like watching passed-out women getting pawed. It was vile. This whole fucking scene was vile.
And as a junkyard dog, I was completely effective.
“Who are you?” the man who’d had the syringe asked. Fuck, if he was a doctor, he should have that license yanked and fast.
“I’m the driver,” I said like I was God. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jada’s personal physician, and we didn’t order a car,” he said and glanced over at the stoned couple. “Did we?”
“Her mother probably,” the woman on the bed sneered, giving Beth an evil eye.
“Well, that’s a problem,” the doctor said.
“Her mother is better than you,” Beth said. “And someone needs to know what you’re doing to her before she ends up like Michael Jackson.”
“Jesus, you are overdramatic,” the woman on the bed sighed, rolling her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t get lost.
“Jada!’” the doctor said, bending down to the passed-out woman. He gave her a hard shove. “Jada!” he yelled in her ear.
“Hey!” I snapped, stepping toward the doctor. Frankly, if he was a legit doctor, I’d eat my fake driver badge. “Don’t manhandle her like that.”
“Jada!” he yelled again, smacking her.
I shoved the doctor back, getting between him and the woman on the bed. This wasn’t my current mission, but there was no way I could just stand back and let this shit happen.
“Touch her again and I’ll break your hand.”
The doctor held up his hands. “No need to get excited.”
“Beth?” I said. “Do the cops need to be called?”
The room was silent. Still. Like this was a line that had never been crossed. Or mentioned. But they all knew it was there.
In my opinion the cops needed to be called yesterday.
“Beth!” I snapped.
“Y-yes,” Beth said. “The cops need to be called.”
“Do that, then.” I didn’t take my eyes off the “doctor.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said in a quiet voice, running a hand over his tie, and I knew a nervous tell when I saw it.
“Is that supposed to scare me?” I asked. “Like I’m the criminal here?”
“Jada,” the doctor said, like he was smarter than me and he was doing me a favor by explaining himself, “is in a highly fragile state. She’s suffering from depression and exhaustion. She’s an insomniac who is experiencing manic episodes. I was called in because her friends are scared she’ll take her life.”
“Those friends?” I asked, jerking my thumb back at the couple on the bed. They were preoccupied with the powder in lines on the bedside table.
“You know something, I’m calling the cops,” the doctor said, backing up another step. “You broke in here.”
“I was let in.” This guy was not going to be calling any fucking cops. “But go ahead. I’m sure those two won’t mind. Just let them finish that coke they’re hoovering.”
“You’re threatening me. You’re threatening Jada—”
“Who are you kidding, John?” a slow, rough voice said from the bed. “It’s bad for all of us if you call the cops.”
“Jada!"
I turned to see the dark-haired woman on the bed sitting up. Her clothes were dishevelled, twisted on her body. Her breast was nearly revealed through the neck hole; her skirt was still hiked up around her waist. She fumbled with the clothes, but then stopped like it was just too hard.
Her hair was not all black, it had green, blue, purple and pink highlights. It was beautiful, like an oil spill. Well, like a beautiful oil spill. She pushed her long hair off her face, and I nearly died. Right there. Cardiac arrest.
It was Beth sitting there.
My Beth.
8
Tommy
Instinct kicked in, and I stepped back. Looked away.
I had to get out of that room. I had to turn around and walk right out of this place. Away from her. Away from what she needed.
Beth. And she needed help.
I wasn’t that guy anymore, the kid trying to take care of everyone and fucking it up. I didn’t have the strength for that. The will.
I wasn’t that kid, and I couldn’t save anyone. I’d barely saved myself.
Least of all Beth.
I tried that already.
F
uck you, Bates, I thought.
I took another step back. Another. I’d go down for the cop-killing crime. Fine. I’d been resigned to jail a long time ago.
“Who are you?” she said. And I knew without looking that she was talking to me. The rough rasp of her voice forced my feet to a stop on the thick carpet. I remembered that voice. I didn’t want to, but I did.
Because it still sounded like my life. Gritty and raw. Rough and dark.
It sounded like the happiest three months of my life.
Beth.
I closed my eyes.
I was a shit hero; I knew that. But somehow I could never stop myself from trying.
When I opened my eyes and looked at her it was an act of will not to see her as the girl in pigtails I’d loved so hard. I had to actively not remember her. Not pull out all those memories and attach them to her, like ornaments off a Christmas tree.
Her eyes when she looked at me had no recognition. I was a stranger to her. It wasn’t a surprise considering the state she was in, and our past wasn’t something that needed to be talked about here. But I found myself wanting to answer her.
I’m Tommy. Remember? When we were kids? I was your friend. Or maybe you were mine. Or maybe I imagined all that. But we knew each other. We did.
And that’s what Bates was counting on. That was the trap he’d laid for me. Why he knew I’d make good on my promise.
Because I’d loved this girl once. And failing her was my great regret.
“The driver,” I said in a quiet voice. She kept looking at me, and I crouched down so she could see me better. The freckles were still there, those beautiful constellations, that one-of-a-kind artwork. My fingers twitched with the urge to touch them, connect them across her chin and neck. The one at the top of her lip.
That one had been my favorite. I studied it. Tasted it.
Her amber gaze made tracks all over my face, and I waited, my breath half held for her to recognize me. To see in the man I’d become, the boy I’d been.
“Do I know you?” she asked, stoned and confused.
“No,” I lied. Or maybe it was the truth. I couldn’t say.
“Did you call a driver, Jada?” the “doctor” asked.
